Sour Echoes: Why the Law of Attraction Isn't Working for You

Life is a concert hall and we are the singers.

Whether we are actually trained vocalists or not, each of us embodies a unique song, and we are charged with standing on the stage of the concert hall of life and singing it, no matter how much noise is around us. Unfortunately, the most distracting noise sometimes comes from our own minds.

Reflections and Echoes

When you speak or sing in a contained space, you will hear your voice reflected back to you in the form of reverberations and/or echoes. Reverberations (or reverb as we call it in the recording studio) are random, blended repetitions of a sound occurring within 0.1 seconds after the sound is made.

Reverb is comprised of all the sound waves immediately generated by the initial sound as it bounces off nearby surfaces. To prevent this barrage of sound from causing confusion, your brain does a special trick. It picks up and processes reverberations before your conscious perception does, blending the reverb with the original sound and then telling you that it all came from the same source point. Reverb is the reason why you sound so smooth when you sing in the shower.

In contrast, an echo (or delay in the recording studio) is a distinct repetition of a sound occurring more than 0.1 seconds after the sound is made. This is when you can hear a mimic of the original sound come back after a noticeable delay, such as the sound of a shout bouncing off of a distant canyon wall. In a sense, an echo allows us to travel back in time and hear a sound that happened in the past.

If you speak or sing in a fairly “live” room with good acoustics, you will hear your voice coming back to you from multiple directions, sometimes long after you have stopped making sound. Since you cannot hear the true tone of your voice while you are phonating, these sound reflections give you a more accurate picture of your acoustic fingerprint.

In a particularly live room - one with acoustics that create thick, long-lasting reverb and echoes - things get confusing and we can begin to question our voice.

Why Is Everything So Confusing?

So, what do reverb and echoes have to do with the law of attraction?

I invite you to think of your “life reverb” as the reflections of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs in the immediate past; such as how you felt when you stubbed your toe getting out of bed this morning, or the pleasant feeling of walking out into the sunshine on your lunch break.

Also, I invite you to think of your “life echoes” as the reflections of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs in the more distant past, such as your worrying about money for the last six months, or your feelings of being loved and adored by your grandparents since early childhood.

The concert hall of life is an incredibly live room. All around us, we hear a cacophony of reverberations and echoes of melodies we've sung in the past. And, because we're human, we sometimes sing “sour notes”. This is a natural part of life, a way for us to experience contrast and to learn how to stay focused on our intentions. However, hearing that sour note echoed back to us long after the original offense can cause us to tailspin into confusion and self-doubt.

If we don't like what we are hearing, we can become caught up in fighting and fixing these reflections. We hear an echo of a bothersome tune we once sang and think we need to eradicate it. We throw modalities and techniques at the echo. We cry about it in workshops and write long-winded rants about it on social media. What we don't realize is that an echo has no power unless we amplify it by singing along.

While an echo can give you an accurate picture of the vibrations of your past, this acoustic residue is of no consequence in the now. Trying to fight an echo is like punching a cloud, and we become the prisoners in Plato's cave allegory, forever battling shadows we can never defeat.

How Can I Get the Law of Attraction to Work for Me?

If you want to live in harmony, stay in tune with it.

While it only takes a few hours or days to begin hearing harmonious “life reverb”, the “life echoes” take a little longer to die down and match up with our current tune. We need to be patient when changing our beliefs and ways of thinking and have faith that if we stay focused on our tune, the delay effect will soon catch up and we will experience harmony.

Ask yourself, what tune am I humming right now? Get quiet, take a look around and listen within. If you notice something showing up in your life that is in contrast with your intentions, recognize it as an echo of a sour note from the past.

As the sole star and director of the show of your life, you must keep your focus on what you wish to create. Live your true song in each moment. And just as importantly, remember to allow the echoes and reverberations of yesterday's sour notes to simply fade away.

Try this Harmonizing Affirmation:

“I now disregard the dissonant echoes and reverberations from my past thoughts, beliefs and expectations. I now harmonize only with my truth.”

Reverb is an effect, not a cause. Echoes are residue, not real time. The cause is, was, and always will be your voice, your vibration, right here and now. Make it beautiful.