Dear Ones –

The question of manifestation is a complex one. Lately we have encountered confusion about the place of affirmations in the process of manifesting things as you want them to be. There are many ways to work the process of manifestation, and eventually we will cover them all, or mostly. Anyway, today we are writing on the art of the affirmation.

Affirmations were very popular for a while a few decades back, and lately seem to be springing into action once again. The thing we wonder about affirmations is, why don’t they work very well? And since they do not, why do people want to use them? There is a kind of affirmation that does work, and we will get to that in a moment. But the kinds that don’t work are legion, as you may have noted. No real harm done there, but a lot of unnecessary discouragement and feeling bad about oneself has often ensued, and we would like to discourage that kind of thing (discourage discouragement, as it were).

Just because your affirmations haven’t worked, it doesn’t mean you are wrong or bad. It probably just means you dislike being lied to. It may have opened something of a breach of trust with yourself, if you are telling yourself things you just can’t believe, eg “I am young and thin and good-looking” if in fact the opposite is true. You may even be having trouble with, “I love and accept myself exactly as I am” unless you support it with some EFT or other tapping kind of device. (Programming yourself through energy medicine is a different topic. May or may not get to it in some fashion, some day.) If you have been trying to convince yourself through affirmations of things that aren’t quite true and you don’t in fact believe, you might want to stop it and start fresh.

Maybe look yourself in the eye (use a mirror) and apologize for unwittingly pulling your own leg. Tell yourself you are trying to learn how to make your life and the world a better place, and maybe ask for a bit of forgiveness for your egregious breach of etiquette. Because, you see, very few people appreciate a lie. Maybe some of you some of the time would rather not know what is true about a person or a situation or a job. You might want to pretend everything is OK and so you put your fingers in your ears and sing la la la I can’t hear you. That is different than trying to tell yourself the blatant lie that things are exactly how you want them to be and couldn’t possibly be finer. Nobody, deep down in their hearts, believes this. It can never really be true. Everything could always be finer, just like everything could always be worse. What you are actually saying to yourself in these instances is that you reject reality and don’t believe you even have the power to cope, should things not turn out to your liking.

Well, you can see how difficult a mind set this might put you in. After weeks or months or years of being told things must be perfect, evidence to the contrary, or else, a person’s spirit might just give up the ghost. Nobody really wants that trophy just for showing up. Mostly they want to earn it or have fallen down in the trying. Do you see? We are not saying don’t give yourself a pep talk. We are saying tell yourself the truth as it is, uncolored by criticism or rosy tinted lens, and see where that gets you. Instead of saying, “I date wonderful people who love me and want to be with me” why not say, “I am dissatisfied with my love life, and I am going to figure out why and then do something about it!” You see? One of these statements brings a dreamy, squishy, mushy mucky quality to your life, and one brings a fierce, clear, warrior-hearted activating principle into the mix. Which one is which, for you? What does each phrase feel like in your body if you say it out loud? (Go ahead, try it. We can wait.)

Nobody’s life is ever all worked out to perfection. There’s no point in trying to make yours behave in a way that it naturally never will. There is especially no point in trying to convince your inner heart of that which you know to be untrue. That just increases the profits of the ice cream manufacturers (when you sit home alone feeling miserable and trying to feel comfort. And yes, ice cream has its place. But it is no substitute for truth.).

So, try to focus your mantra on the truth – this job sucks and I feel powerless to change it right this minute, but I will look for and avail myself of opportunities to change something about it if I possibly can! – and you will be surprised at how energizing it is, how much more deeply you trust yourself as a result, and hmmmm, maybe even how your life begins to improve…