DO YOU KNOW THIS ABOUT THE LAW OF ATTRACTION?

Image by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

Negative vs. Positive Focus: What Does It Really Mean?

You’ve probably heard enough about the Law of Attraction to have a basic idea of how it works. You are also likely to have heard it expressed as “like attracts like,” “your thoughts create your reality,” “you get more of what you focus on,” etc.

Things are never that straight-forward, of course. How you experience the Law of Attraction can be influenced by your relationship with other Universal Laws, such as the Law of Cause and Effect, the Law of Correspondence, and so forth, among countless other factors. I don’t plan to go deep into the Universal laws here, however (if you’d like to delve a bit deeper, I recommend Doreen Virtue’s Divine Magic book). I do want to share that my personal experience with focusing and attracting has revealed more nuances than I used to be familiar with or aware of.

In relation to the Law of Attraction, I always believed the polarity of your focus mattered most; that is to say, whether you focus on the negative or the positive, more of the same happens. Here’s what I discovered the hard way: By merely observing that something unwanted isn’t happening anymore, even if with a positive and grateful attitude, I can bring it right back into my awareness and, consequently, my reality.

For example: Whenever I happen to notice (and feel happy and grateful about) the fact that a noisy neighbor who plays loud music hasn’t been doing it in a while, sure enough, withing days I’ll hear their loud bass again. Or whenever I’m glad that I got better at instinctively choosing a fast lane at the grocery store, instead of the one that will take the longest, I end up by getting stuck in the old pattern of choosing the slowest lane again.

Another recent example: A few months ago, I noticed an ant trail right around the front door of our home. Although these small black ants have kept mostly to the outside, after a while quite a few of them started coming inside the house. Whenever I gathered up the “ant proof” cat food and water plates around the house to wash and refill in the morning, I’d find several ants crawling in and around them. Because I try to avoid killing other living beings who are just trying to survive (yes, even roaches), I’d painstakingly and carefully chase them with a piece of paper towel until they’d grab on to it, and then place them outside; quite a time-consuming task, especially as part of my already busy and cumbersome morning routine.

Having an ant invasion can cause issues other than just inconvenience, so I needed to find a solution. Someone suggested placing liquid ant poison by the ant trail, but I didn’t want to destroy all the outdoor ants and their nest (and potentially harm a Siamese/Manx stray cat who decided to live in our front porch, but won’t come in the house). Some food items supposedly repel ants, such as cucumber peels, coffee beans, vinegar, etc; but they might attract other animals and possibly also harm them.

Not sure what to do, I decided to ask the Universe for help to solve the issue by maybe redirecting the ants, keeping them from invading our home, or something else along those lines. Then I let it go (as you’re supposed to do). Several weeks after my request for help, I suddenly realized that I was barely seeing any ants inside the house anymore; their numbers had also decreased drastically by our front door. I had the following thought: “Wow, that really worked; no more ants in the house and less ants outside! Thanks, Universe, for keeping the ants at bay!”

Of course, by the next day I started seeing more ants inside the house again, which served as a reminder of this aspect of the Law of Attraction and provided the inspiration for this blog article. The funniest thing is that, for the first time ever, I even found a small ant inside a picture frame by the front door (see my enclosed photo)! Talk about literally “framing” that thought for me… FYI, I dismantled the frame and was able to free the ant, placing it outside, alive and well, where a few of its other siblings trailed on.

It’s likely that I have some underlying fear of bringing the unwanted back, in spite of my “positive and grateful attitude.” Or, perhaps, my belief in how the LOA works also helps bring about this kind of outcome; however, examples such as these happened quite a few times before I connected the dots and formed that belief… The chicken or the egg?

Whichever the case, it seems that the more precise you are with your language, focus, intention, visualization, etc, and the further you’re able to truly let go, without fear of the unwanted not going away or returning, the better the results, and the less setbacks you’re likely to have to deal with.

By the same token, when using self-hypnotic suggestions, affirmations, mantras, etc, it’s always more effective to state them in the positive (the results we want to achieve), rather than the negative (what we want to change); especially since the subconscious mind usually doesn’t recognize negatives. It also works best to use the present tense, as if what you aim for is already happening, rather than something you plan to achieve in the future.

Example: Rather than saying “I won’t smoke anymore,” it’s much more effective to state: “I am smoke-free.”

Hope you find this tip useful!

Do you have an experience to share about getting good results with affirmations and mantras or manifesting through the Law of Attraction? If so, please share!

Gisele Marasca-Vargas; 07/22/25

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Magnet image by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash