HigherSelf HowTo: Affirmations!

IAMUniversity.org have a wonderful “New Age” dictionary available online at the link, and defines an affirmation as:

A positive statement that has been specifically worded for the purpose of reprogramming the subconscious mind with positive and Spiritual / Christ / Buddha / Krishna / Moses / Mohammed / Mighty I Am Presence / God / Goddess thoughts. One of the key tools of attitudinal healing and reprogramming our subconscious mind. This is a fundamental tool given that our thoughts create our reality!

Indeed! Our thoughts create reality. We become what we think about. All these good things I easily accept and live, hopefully you do too, because if you don’t you will not enjoy this article! Pretty simple.

Affirmations, are a great and powerful tool, I still use them daily, although my use of them has evolved from when I first started years and years ago. I can recall writing reams and reams of complex statements, things that I longed to change in my inner and outer realities, that I would pore over for a few days and then discard as “useless”. What good is an affirmation, if it doesn’t become reality? Goodness, quite the question, and yet so naïve.

Moving from there I would either create a new list, or drop the idea for some time. I still have some notes around, with affirmations written from years past. The statements themselves were not bad, many were good or of use to anyone in my opinion, yet I was not ready to realize and accept the certain way to tread in order to have them work for me.

Something to remember, especially with children in the Western world, is that we are bombarded, surrounded and made to surrender to the marketing methods of thousands of corporations. In some surveys I have read, the estimate is that the average young child of school going age in North America is exposed to over 10,000 advertising messages a year, with varying estimates as to how many of these are related to food. Somewhere between 3,000 – 6,000 exposures seems to be the consensus, just for food!

That is a staggering and bewildering amount of messages to fight against as a parent. How easy is for little Tyler or Cheryl to remember something you said only once, when McDonalds or other corporations are reinforcing their messages 3, 4 and 5 or more times a day Each?

Consider this information in the light of the affirmations you use. Perhaps you are not exposed to as many messages as a child may be, but none of us can claim to live in any size city or suburb of North America, and not be exposed to marketing messages of many kinds in repeating forms.

So too with affirmations, you need to become your own Marketing Rep and create not only affirmations that have power and potential for you and your-self; but also a better way to deliver them. In order for your affirmations to have a fighting chance against all that marketing hype, you are going to have to take extra steps other than simply repeating them in the morning and evening, unless you’d rather wait 10 years for results. Not me, no thanks.

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In my search for better ways to benefit from the affirmations that I use, I have come up with a few methods that helped me enjoy significantly greater benefits from affirmations:

1. Single Saying. This is a pretty simple approach with the potential for great results for those who commit to it all the way. Basically select the most powerful affirmation, with the most potential for change, that you currently have listed. Write it on a separate piece of paper, then set everything else aside. Put away all those other affirmations lists and don’t go back to them for a while. Now, for the next 31 days, you are simply focusing on this One affirmation. Nothing more.

Make the statement to yourself that you are consciously choosing to do this. Also, state to yourself that you are choosing to repeat this affirmation in every spare moment that you have. Any time your brain has a free space, let this affirmation come to mind, repeat it out loud or in your mind as thought, chew on it, feel it in you, write it down when your bored in a meeting, think about it in the bath or when your cooking. For 31 days exactly, repeat this one affirmation, let it move you, let it become tedious, and exciting at the same time. Do it.

2. Simplify. With the Simplify method, you do exactly that, simplify what you have. Trim your affirmation list down to ~ 3 or 4 affirmations that are 4 – 5 words long each, making them easy to memorize. Practice these many times a day, learn them and remember them at will. Simple statements will work well, like “I love Me”.

Repetition is your best weapon against the Marketing Gods of the large corporations and their marketing machine, whether it be your affirmations or the lessons you teach your kids… repeat, repeat, repeat. Even when you start seeing small results, do not let up. Keep going. You will truly enjoy the fruits of your very own spiritual marketing campaign.

The most important lessons I can offer on affirmations, are that they are a tool which always delivers back to you what you put into it. If you treat it lightly, your results will be few. If you treat it seriously, commit and put in a genuine effort, repeat your affirmations many times a day, week, month; and keep the messages simple, you will have the best opportunity to benefit greatly from this very powerful tool.
I love words, and words have power.

Peace,

-Mikel