Tape This to Your Ceiling: And watch the money roll in.Last year I did some work for a Hollywood stylist who never paid me. This has really been irking me the past few weeks, the fact that I am the sort of person someone else deems stiffable. And also I need the money. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough not to forget about.

I’ve been sending this deadbeat fashionista one pathetic email per week, tone carefully calibrated so that he’ll know I am serious, but not so abrasive as to make him mad at me. No threats or anything.

As you know, The Secret doesn’t tolerate negative thinking. The Secret People would probably say I wasn’t getting my money because I was thinking about not getting it, sending out a poor-me vibration instead of an I-am-rich vibration. One Secret Person, Jack Canfield (half the brainpower behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series), says that taping a homemade $100,000 bill to the ceiling above his bed changed his life. He was just barely getting by, but instead of trying to make ends meet, he set what seemed like an unachievable goal (in today’s terms, just enough, after taxes, to pay the rent on a two-bedroom NYC apartment)—he wanted to make $100,000 per year.

He had no idea how he would do it, he just taped that bill to the ceiling and started to visualize. He explains:

So the first thing in the morning I’d look up and there it was, and it would remind me that this was my intention. Then I would close my eyes and visualize having this hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year lifestyle.

I figured, why shouldn’t I try approaching this debt the same way? I won’t think about this guy owing me—I won’t picture his shifty eyes or the gold chains cascading over his skintight wifebeaters—I’ll think about him paying what he owes me. Each night last week as I fell asleep—my twilight time has become visualization hour—I pictured opening my mailbox and seeing his check. (This mailbox visualization technique is espoused by another Secret Person, Lisa Nichols, co-author of Chicken Soup for the African American soul. She claims it can erase debt completely.)

For the first few nights, nothing happened. Then I got my tax return back from my accountant. And lo and behold, my refund from New York State matched the amount this guy owed me. Do you have the chills?

Mailbox or Treasure Trove?: You decide.I hadn’t been expecting a refund, having forgotten how much I’d already paid in taxes during an editing job last summer. The Secret People would say the universe was rewarding me for my positive thinking in the face of the deadbeat fashionista’s IOU. They would smile knowingly, nod their heads, and tell me I’m just one of many. Says Rhonda Byrne, the woman who brought all The Secret People together:

Since the film The Secret was released, we have received hundreds and hundreds of letters from people who have said that since watching the film they have received unexpected checks in the mail…

A game I created that helped shift my feelings about my pile of bills was to pretend that the bills were actually checks. I would jump for joy as I opened them and say, “More money for me! Thank you. Thank you.” I took each bill, imagined it was a check, and then I added a zero to it in my mind to make it even more. I got a notepad and wrote at the top of the page, “I have received,” and then I would list all the amounts of the bills with an added zero. Next to each amount I would write “Thank you,” and feel the feelings of gratitude for receiving it—to the point where I had tears in my eyes. Then I would take each bill, which looked very small compared to what I had received, and I would pay it with gratitude!

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds like a recipe for a lot of overdraft charges, not the attraction of unexpected wealth. And don’t worry, not even this assignment is going to make me so bats**t crazy as to confuse plus and minus signs. But these silly exercises—even the most profane ones, created solely to attract money—have taught me something: That all the pretending and fantasizing I did as a child served a purpose beyond providing simple escape.

Imagining your life as much better than it really is—ridiculously much better (for a child, this means having wings; for an adult, checks)—is exhilarating. It creates a fluttery sense of possibility down in your gut and up in your cheekbones. It makes you realize that—no matter what your beliefs—you cannot predict your own future.

So did I get that tax check because of The Secret? Probably not. What about the fact that the amount matched what I was owed? One could argue that deep down my profoundly developed mathematical sense had calculated what I’d get back from New York State and my subconscious chose to fixate on the money the stylist owed me precisely because it was the same amount.

Maybe that is the real power of The Secret. It encourages you to see positive coincidences in your life as trends, instead of writing them off as flukes. It assigns meaning to the seemingly random. It gives you a new way to think of the tax refund: not as money you were owed, but money you were given. All I know is, I’m going to write off the fashionista’s debt and move on. I have a cable bill to deposit.