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This post originally appeared on the Intent.com blog on August 30, 2013
“Affirmations? Yeah, whatever… I don’t do that new age B.S.! That’s only good for weak people with no self-confidence! The people I train don’t need that crap!”
I actually heard these words from one of my fitness mentors I look up to. His huge resistance to the idea of affirmations was kind of shocking to me. I, for one, believe in “that stuff”. Does that mean I am weak? Is it all a scam to make us feel better about life? Am I just a hippie dreamer?
In my free-spirited late teens, I read two books that really shaped me. One of them was The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy. Murphy spoke about the power of our thoughts and how they influence what we manifest in our lives:
There is a miraculous curative force in your subconscious that can heal the troubled mind and the broken heart. It can open the prison door of the mind and liberate you. It can free you from all kind of physical and material bondage.
The other book was You Can Heal Your Life by the remarkable Louise Hay. Hay’s philosophy is similar to Murphy’s. In the book she described using positive affirmations to eliminate self-defeating thoughts: “What you choose to think about yourself and about life becomes true for you. And we have unlimited choices about what we can think.” According to Hay, an affirmation is anything we say or think, therefore all of our self-talk is a stream of affirmations. In order to change your life, you must pay attention to your thoughts and choose empowering ones. By choosing thoughts that make you feel good and stating a desirable intention as a daily practice, you are retraining your brain how to think and speak and you are reprogramming your beautiful subconscious mind.
Affirmations are the seeds of your dreams that you plant for later harvesting. By writing your dreams down and affirming them in ink, or vocalizing them out loud, you bring them into the physical realm and one step closer to manifesting. If you say a lie over and over again, won’t you start believing it? If telling a lie can affect you like that, why not tell a good “lie” – one that has the potential to change your life for the better?
Many times when I’ve gone back to read what seemed originally to be “impossible” affirmations, I actually found they had manifested in my life. Who cares if it seems weird and too “outside the norm”? Who wants to be normal anyways? Popular thinking usually turns out to be average thinking. Galileo Galilei was sentenced to spend rest of his life in prison for his ideas. He vocally supported the Copernican hypothesis that the earth is not the center of the solar system, but one of many planets revolving around the sun. Three centuries later he was called the “father of modern science” by Einstein.
When researching this subject, you will find that in this day and age, science is backing “new age” thinking more than ever before.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the tidy, objective, mechanistic view of the world began to fall apart…scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the “atom” itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there…And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation. – John Assaraf & Murray Smith (The Answer)
Quantum physics nowadays include theories like parallel universes. It’s no longer science fiction that the power of our thoughts affect physical objects and create new realities. No longer are we in an age where meditation sounds “funny.” Today’s science backs up the positive sweeping impact of quieting one’s brain waves into lower frequencies. People are opening up to possibilities in the realm of the unknown.
The ancients knew that space is not empty; it is the origin and memory of all things that exist and have ever existed…[This insight] is now being rediscovered at the cutting edge of the sciences [and is emerging] as a main pillar of the scientific world’s picture of the twenty-first century. This will profoundly change our concept of ourselves and of the world. – Dr. Ervin Laszlo (as quoted in The Answer)
When I train my clients, my rule is: no negative self-talk. “It’s too hard”, “no way can I do it” are being thrown out the window in the first session. I know for a fact that the body reacts to what you tell it. What you affirm feeds your future blueprint. One of my favorite clients once said “OMG, I am so bad at lunges”. So I told her: “Let’s change your self-talk about lunges. I think it would serve you better to instead say that I am getting better and better”. She looked at me frazzled and really forced it out uncomfortably, saying: “I am getting better and better.” Guess what? She did get better and better, AS SHE WAS SAYING IT! She started listening to – and modifying – her self-talk outside of our training sessions and consequently improved on achieving other personal goals.
But affirmations are not enough! If you look at your dirty laundry and say all day long “My laundry is getting cleaner and smells great” nothing will happen… You have to take action. Say you can do it, then do it! Just like saying I am getting better and better, while lunging. Affirmations will put you in the mindset to take action. They will keep you focused on your goals and desires. They will keep your unconscious mind open to all great opportunities around you. Previously you may not have noticed your self-talk if you were not attuned to it; but now that you are aware of its power, you will know to leverage it for positive action.
