Make a difference

I discovered I was always tensed up because of a subconscious belief structure. This is the very thing that has been affecting the vibrations I have emanated all of my life. I'm in the process of changing this. Do you have concerns regarding the emanations your vibrations contain? Watch this space for more on this issue!

Let’s talk about techniques – part 3

The purpose of positive affirmations is to replace the negative ones that have become a habit for you to say to yourself. I’m assuming you have found that your habitual self-talk (another word for affirmations) is not giving you the life experience you would consciously prefer. So here is how I generate the positive affirmations that would be most effective for me.

Self-love is the most effective force in the world. I’m not talking about narcissism here but instead about really caring for yourself and feeling good about who you are. Psychologists call it self-esteem and readily recognize how damaging the lack of self-esteem is to people today. It is so pervasive that most people look in the mirror and, without thinking, have some self-critical thing to say about themselves almost immediately. It represents the damaged world they live in and feel helpless about escaping from.

Positive affirmations build the ladder to climb up from this sad place by working to rebuild one’s damaged self-esteem. These self-critical self-talks are symptoms of the bad feeling we have come to believe are true about us, not only at this very moment but always. You understand that you may be fat at this moment but it is not logical to believe that this will always be true. Things do change in the future and that is wonderful news because you do not have to beat yourself up about what might be. Not unless you are telling yourself you are fat and implying that this will always be the way you will be. How likely are you to begin dieting tomorrow if you go to sleep telling yourself you are fat (and feeling terrible about it) and wake up in the morning and you are still fat, as if nothing would ever change.

Louise Hay says that we are better off telling ourselves that we are the perfect weight rather than doing the low self-esteem thing of waking up and saying we are fat. Being the perfect weight is very pro-active as well as letting you feel alright about yourself now and in the next day when you wake up. It lets you have the possibility of losing weight because you only have to be the perfect weight, whatever that is, and you get to choose that without have to always feel bad about how you are at this moment.

Technically speaking, my advice is to sit down and make up a list of the things you say to yourself and use it to create your positive affirmations from. So ”I’m too fat/skinny” becomes “I am the perfect weight.” Self-talk like “My life sucks” becomes “life is for me” as well as the things you have as reasons for why you believe your life is so bad which can change from things like “nobody loves/respects me” to “people love/respect me.” Look at the things you so often say to yourself and ask if those things are a part of the way you want to live. If they are not then you have the right to change them to what you do want. Changing them to what you do want is no more harmful than keeping saying to yourself the things you are already saying and it might improve your self-esteem.

Make that list of your self-talk and change it to the positive affirmations that reflect the kind of life you would prefer to lead. You will also want to load it with phrases that are full of self-love and acceptance as well such as: “I love and accept myself the way I am” and “I trust myself” and “I am my best friend.”

I am working on a general guided affirmation product that can be used for quick relief from all that negative self-talk and hope to be able to make it available in the next month. If you would be interested in such a product, leave your name and e-mail address as a comment and I will let you know when it is ready. Until then, keep using these techniques to improve the way you treat yourself!

Let’s talk about techniques – part 2

The rules for making an affirmation are simple. For making a positive one, it must not be negative in any way and it must be in the present tense. All the other types of affirmations you already know because everything you say or think (consciously or unconsciously) is an affirmation.

It is important to understand that affirmations are not exactly true or false – they are merely possibilities. They are the lies we tell ourselves and then behave in accordance with as if they were truth. In some sense they motivate us. For example, a small infant might be told by his mother that he must wait for an adult to help him cross the street and go over to his friend’s house. To make him understand the importance of this, she might try to increase his motivation to do as she says by telling him, “if you go out in the street by yourself a car will hit you and you will be killed.” This is neither a lie nor the truth, just merely a possibility that becomes a motivation factor for our behavior. It is important to understand that affirmations are, in the best sense, merely a possibility that will become a motivation factor for our behavior.

So why do positive affirmations? We do them because one of the usual things we already say to ourselves is not very helpful to us as a motivation factor. An example of this would be, “my life sucks!” That’s the kind of thing we say to ourselves when we experience difficulties and it is the kind of self-talk that doesn’t give you any ambition to make efforts to get what you want in life. Put simply, we do positive affirmations so we can have the courage to keep trying to get what we want out of life. So, in the case of “my life sucks,” we change that to “my life is great/I love and accept myself exactly as I am/the universe supports my ambitions/life is for me/I easily overcome obstacles.” When that is what we are thinking in the morning when we wake up, it is much easier to get out of bed.

The secret to creating a positive affirmation is to listen to what you say to yourself and, if it is something negative, transform it into a more supportive form of self-talk. Mirror work can be a great help in this process. If you stand in front of a mirror, look right in your own eyes and say “I love you,” it might surprise you to find out how much negative stuff is right on the tip of your tongue. In my experience, people have a lot of mixed emotions when confronted with their own image. You might be busy expressing your self-love when you suddenly say, “I need to lose some weight/look at all those wrinkles/my lips are too (thick/thin)/I’m too old/young” and the list just goes on from there.

In the case of “I’m too fat (I need to lose some weight) that might appear to be an accurate assessment. In reality, you would be better off to say “I am the perfect weight.” Both statements are in the present tense which means you can do nothing about them at this particular moment – you are just stuck with this situation for now. Only the latter one lets you feel good about yourself at present.

We tend to believe we must hate what we are at the moment in order to get better in the future but my experience has shown that is not true. I taught college age students at the end of my working career and I quickly saw that if I told them they were stupid and needed a lot of education if they were ever going to get anywhere that, very soon, my students would be poorly motivated and would eventually become resistant to any effort to educate them. On the other hand, if I told them that they were doing well and making good progress, they tended to work hard and do well. So, I asked myself, why are we bad teachers to ourselves with our self-talk? Understanding that we need to be encouraging in order to get good results is the very reason that I am so happy with using positive affirmations and that is exactly the reason why it is better to say to yourself “I am the perfect weight.”

Let’s talk about techniques – part 1

Do you feel like you are on a train that is not always heading where you want it to go? I think many people would agree that is sometimes how it feels. It became so strong a feeling for me that I eventually became desperate to find a way to stop the “Train.” So here is the way I do that.

First understand that when I least expect it I will start thinking something that either scares or immobilizes me. Have you ever experienced that? It was the train I couldn’t get off and it always took me places I didn’t like. I would start to do something I had been planning to do and all of a sudden I would start to see a daydream-like image in my mind that would show me how things would come out badly because of the result of what I was doing. For example, maybe I was making a bird feeder and as I nailed it together I would start to see my cat sitting on a nearby wall and pouncing on the birds as they were lured in to use it. Suddenly I would feel doubtful that I should finish constructing such a nice thing. Or when I went to bed I would suddenly see a mental image of a neighbor with whom I had once argued who was peeking in my window with a malicious look on his face. This would result in making me nervous enough that I would have a great difficulty getting to sleep.

The first thing one must do is to realize that this is just a “story” that the mind has made up to discourage or frighten oneself. Still, of course, the discouraging or frightening image is still there in the mind and I must do something to get rid of it. So next I start saying the Hoʻoponopono litinay that I address to my inner child who I am victimizing with all this made up stuff. I say: “I’m sorry/ please forgive me/ I love you/ thank you” over and over until the discomfort I have created has stopped. Now there is an empty place where there once was a strong feeling. If I do not fill it with an appropriate set of affirmations, the negative sensations will simply return when I let myself relax. So I must say a set of affirmations like(for the bird feeder): I love and accept myself just as I am/ I love improving my environment/ everything I do turns out wonderfully/ I trust the universe/ life is for me/ I trust myself/ I know the birds appreciate the extra food during winter. I keep saying the affirmations until I feel positive, happy and relaxed.

This simple and easy technique is a quick way to stop those-train like thoughts and images that run through our lives, making us uncomfortable, or worse, riddled with self-doubt and negative affirmations to direct our lives down the wrong paths. I use it constantly as these moments pop up and work to dismantle the life I would prefer to live. I am so relieved to finally have a way to disembark from that “train to ruin” that has sabotaged my intentions so frequently and frustrated me for so many years. I hope you find this useful and would love to hear about how you are doing to use this method.

Affirmations

I had a lot of cynical affirmations going on all the time in my head earlier so I didn’t see much use for affirmations at all. I think a lot of people are like I was, in that we often seem to doubt so many things in life. The magic seems to come to an end somewhere in childhood when we learn that our parents are not the ideals we held them to be when we were just babies. Soon after that the list of those who we do not doubt starts to really shrink until finally we become total cynics. We have learned that we are to be doubted somewhere in this period too. That saves us from jumping off buildings and touching things that are burning, of course, because we have learned how vulnerable we are in spite of the fact that we enjoy imagining a character like Superman who only has one weakness. We and everybody else seem to have so many.

The reason I say these thoughts and internal dialogues are affirmations are because everything we say or think is an affirmation as I now understand. I have Louise Hay to thank for helping me to understand about that. Before I learned about that from her I was a tense person who had a lot of trouble sleeping or even relaxing. With affirmations in conjunction with a little Neuro-linguistic Programming and some Ho ‘oponoopono I now enjoy a good night’s sleep and am able to nap and otherwise relax whenever I want.

Rest is important of course, so we must get enough of it to keep our bodies healthy and our minds clear. But what I now realize is that we also need something to believe in again to relieve us from the burden of all this cynicism. I’m not saying that flaws are not real nor am I saying that they should be ignored - they just don’t need to be our focus in life. What we need is “that thing with feathers” the hope that Emily Dickenson so famously refers to with that line so frequently quoted. If I tell myself that we are all flawed it is like saying there is no hope. If I tell myself that “Life is for me” as Louise Hay and others say, then I can look forward to the next moment without any trace of cynical dread.

The implication is that, as I mentioned earlier, I relish a good night’s sleep and the pleasure of waking up refreshed in the morning ready for the day. You have all heard that saying about the condemned man eating a hearty meal. The reason why people say that is because it would be so surprising. If I were about to be executed, I’m not sure I would have much of an appetite and that is precisely the point. If we keep telling ourselves that there is no hope to be found in the moments ahead our appetite, our sleep, and our health finally are the victims of all this condemnation.

Fortunately thoughts that give us no hope are only one kind of thinking. All thoughts are affirmations and we can also affirm hopeful things as an alternative. When I begin to practice doing so, I not only slept better but all things, including my health became better.

I encourage you to begin your process of positive affirmations, if you haven’t started already and, no matter where you are on this process, I wish you all the best – the possibilities not the negativities are now guiding you into a brighter future.

SILENCE

Silence, this is the thing before and after a knock that helps you to pay attention. Silence is what you hear before you fall asleep. Silence is what you hear when your mind is quiet and it is the ability of silence in adding definition to things that is so important. Are you rich in silence or are you poor? I used to be much poorer in it before I started to learn Russian.

Russian is, of course a difficult language. It has a rather complex grammar structure and the sounds it uses for words are mostly produced in a different part of the mouth then the sounds we use for English. But I didn’t start by learning all about those things. I really wanted to imitate the way people learn languages when they are just babies. Instead of the scholastic approach I have taken all my life I wanted the innocence of knowing what words mean just by the way they sound. What I’m trying to explain is that you can’t learn a new language when you are still listening to (and leaning on) the old one.

Also I didn’t know enough of the language to converse freely. So what I found myself doing was simply sitting and listening as people I was with spoke. I think we learn from our childhood educational experience to participate in class discussions so as to make good impressions on our teachers. That also helps learn to better express ourselves in our country’s language. But what I experienced during the years I was learning Russian was the pleasure of listening.

I listened to the sounds people make to form the words and how the words connected all together to tell stories and anecdotes, as well as to express simpler things. Of course there always comes a time when one must use one’s ability to speak because a spoken language is largely a process of appropriate reactions in my experience. But I still remember those hours spent listening with great fondness. Listening is such a peaceful and pleasant activity!

The truth is that one must listen in order to learn and understand. It is a fundamental part of communication that seems to be so often overlooked these days. Simply put, you cannot understand information you do not hear! Listening (quietly) is the only way to actually hear what others are saying.

I recommend you go to this link and listen to Krishnamurti giving this lecture on meditation at San Diego State in 1974: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW96eZsR710

Enjoy and be grateful for it!

We do the same things over and over again and it just seems so hard to break those chains of habit. We struggle to get ahead but just keep doing the same old things again and again. You would think that those chains would weaken over time like their metal equivalent but they just seem to keep getting stronger.

I was doing this Boo Hoo litany to myself just a little while ago and suddenly realized that the reason these chains of habit get stronger is because they renew with every mindless repetition. So what to do? The obvious answer was to take the “mindless” out of that activity cycle.

I’ve been at this for years now and the things that have helped me are the interventions I have learned to do with Neurolinguistic Programming, Hoʻoponopono, the affirmation process of Louise Hay, Joe Vitale, subliminal affirmations, hypnosis, and the many guided meditations that are available today.

Call it a mid-life crisis or whatever but I remember being at that moment in my life when I knew everything had been the same for too long and some stuff was definitely going to have to change. The trouble was, of course, that everything had just become a habit and that was the moment NLP entered my life. The longest journey starts with the first step so where are you at this moment and what has brought you here. Please share some about your journey and your needs.