Real Life | 9 May 2009

Being a naturally negative person I make it my business to subscribe to something called ‘Marty Dow’s positive-thought service — We can change the world one thought at a time!’ These are nice little ‘affirmations’ which arrive in my personal email exhorting me to breathe, fill my thoughts with light, visualise myself as a child of God, and so on. The other day a particularly inspiring thought arrived, all about making a conscious decision to think of a world filled with love and hope.

I did the guided meditation which followed, relaxing, letting go of past experiences, releasing the old patterns, becoming open to God’s design for me. The problem was, I then had to deal with the Peugeot garage. I don’t know if Marty Dow, writer and spiritual teacher, author of How to soar above the crisis!, has ever had to deal with the service centre of a London Peugeot dealership. I think she lives in Florida, heading up something called the Institute for Creative Living, so she probably hasn’t had to take a car with a malfunctioning catalytic converter into a repair shop on Stockwell Road.

If she had, her positive-thought service might include something like this: ‘Today I make a conscious decision to think of a world free of little men in overalls droning on about diagnostic charges.’ And her guided meditation would be: ‘I allow myself to relax and visualise all the people in Britain who can’t speak English properly being taught how to pronounce words so they can be understood…’

Of course, I was already in a state by the time I phoned the dealership. My car had broken down on the A3 on precisely the day I paid off the loan from the Alliance and Leicester with which I had bought it.