Have You Given Up on Affirmations? (Part 2)

Our minds are a very powerful tool, for either good or bad!

You know how if you tell yourself not to think about something, you just end up thinking about it more?! If you don’t want to think about something that’s making you uncomfortable, you have to give your brain something else to do! So shift your thoughts to something that makes you feel good!

In the same way, if you’re trying to manifest something new for yourself that your mind is saying isn’t possible (because there’s no evidence or experience for it to draw on for proof of the possibility), you can’t just tell yourself that it’s possible and expect it to work. The head chatter will still be there. Instead, you need to acknowledge to your brain that yes, in the past that may have been the case, but that now you’re creating a new paradigm.

In the book Law of Attraction they use the example of getting a cold during the flu season. Let’s say you usually get the cold or flu every year and this year you want it to be different. Merely saying “I want to remain healthy” is usually not sufficient because your belief or your experience has been different than your desire to remain well.

Abraham suggests using the following process instead to bridge your belief.

You can make statements like:

“This is usually the time of the year that I get the flu. I don’t want to get the flu this year. I hope I don’t get the flu this year. It seems like everyone gets it. That may be an exaggeration. Everyone doesn’t get the flu. In fact, there have been flu seasons when I didn’t get the flu. I don’t always get the flu.”

Then progress to the following:

“It’s possible that this flu season could come and go without touching me at all. I like the idea of being healthy! Those past experiences came before I realized that I can control my experience. It isn’t necessary for me to experience the flu this year. It isn’t necessary for me to experience anything that I don’t want.”

Do you get the idea? Acknowledge to your brain that yes, this is how things were, but this is how it could be and gradually progressing to this is how it’s going to be this time. The brain starts to let go because it’s being satisfied that you’re acknowledging what it’s telling you. It’s kind of like having this open dialogue with another part of you, some sort of an alter ego!

If it helps, maybe you can think of having the conversation with the old you vs. the new you. Acknowledge the old you, the way things have been in the past, and paint a picture of the way you want to see it. The old you feels satisfied that it’s being heard and acknowledged and the new you is happy because it’s being heard and acknowledged as well.

Let’s say your business is in a little bit of a slump and you’re trying to manifest more money or clients. The conversation might look like this:

“I don’t have nearly enough clients. I don’t know how I’m going to pay the bills this month. I acknowledge that I’ve had a couple of bad weeks. I know it seems like my business has slowed, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It hasn’t always been that way. In fact last month I was flooded with new clients. Clients came to me with ease. I was like a magnet. I can see that happening again. Clients are beginning to come from out of nowhere. I’m a magnet for the right clients who need what I have to offer. I repel those who are not ready for me and attract those who are ready and eager to pay for what I have to offer.”

Do you see what we did there? As you do that, it’s important to not only visualize it happening, but imagine what that will feel like, in real time.

Now, going back to our lesson here… the more frequent the thoughts of what you want to manifest, (and the stronger the feelings that go along with it), outweigh your doubts about whether or not it can really happen, the more quickly you will create what you want in your life.

Note that this process does require that you be specific and clear about what you want to manifest, and you have to have strong feelings of what that will feel like. If you can’t imagine what it will feel like since you haven’t been there before, then try to associate a feeling from someone you admire that you believe has acquired what you want to manifest for yourself.

I am hosting a women’s retreat on October 12th here in San Diego called “Transform & Thrive! Your Money. Your Self. Your Life.”, and one of the workshops will allow you to play with this concept in more detail and get feedback. You can get more details on my Events page. Stay tuned for the announcement of enrollment!

Have You Given Up on Affirmations? (Part 1)

Have you given up on using affirmations to manifest what you want to create in your life? I know I did for a while. I had used them with huge success for many years, and then it seemed like all of a sudden they “quit working”. Looking back I realize that in the past I would “power” my way through them, putting a lot of energy and action into it and “working really hard” to make things happen. What I’ve come to understand is that the energy on our planet has shifted and now it is a time of learning to trust and allow vs. feeling like we have to do everything on our own. We are being taught to harness the power available to us to manifest what we want with our forgotten tool set: our emotional vibration and our creative imagination.

It’s fun to play with this on a small scale. For example, I recently hosted a Summer Solstice and Super Moon Celebration. The event was hosted on a very busy stretch of beach in San Diego called Torrey Pines State Beach and finding a parking space for free can be quite a challenge. A few of the attendees followed my instructions and visualized a parking space becoming available to them as they arrived and were pleasantly surprised to find that it actually worked!

I have used this technique for garnering a parking space for a number of years and I too am always ecstatic when it works! I have expanded this to manifesting other things, like getting the best table with a view at my favorite restaurant, to more complex things in my life.

It struck me though that the reason I am so confident that it works is because I have done it so often with success. In the beginning I was skeptical and not so confident! But the more often I tried it, and had it work, the more confidence and belief I had in the power of the technique. But when I try it on something that I haven’t experienced before, or if what I’m trying to manifest is really big and outside of my comfort level, it’s a little harder to trust that it will still work.

There are three major components to this process: the first, visualizing what it is you want; the second, expecting it to happen; and third, imagining what it will feel like when it actually occurs. And I can even add a fourth to that list which is expressing gratitude when it does happen.

So using the parking space as an example, when I arrive at my destination I’m expecting there to be an open space! I’m already imagining how good I’m going to feel that I’ve gotten my space right up front and that the “magic” has worked once again. If I don’t see my space immediately, I’ll drive around asking (usually out loud) “Okay, so where’s my spot? Where’s my parking place?”. Some days I forget to put in my request before I leave the house and sometimes my belief that it will work again today is not as strong as my doubt.

If your belief in your ability to manifest outweighs your disbelief, even a little bit, you can still create it, it just might take a little bit longer. The more your belief in the process outweighs your doubt, the more quickly you can manifest what you want.

It’s much easier to manifest something you’ve experienced in the past; you’ve done it before and you know what it feels like to actually achieve it. If your goal is to manifest $100,000 a year and you’ve managed to do that in the past, you have a confidence you can repeat the process again. You’ve done it, you’ve experienced it, you know what it felt like and you know that the process is repeatable.

Let’s say you want to expand your reach and create a million dollars a year for yourself. If you’ve never experienced having that kind of money it can be pretty hard to imagine what that feels like and how you’re ever going to get there. That’s when the doubt in the process can outweigh your ability to believe that you can create that for yourself.

So how do you get from here to there?

In the teachings of Abraham, in the book Law of Attraction, he talks about a process where you can bridge the gap. It’s basically a way of fooling your mind into accepting that you can get from here to there with a very simple process. When we get down to it we really are just talking about the limitations of our mind.

In my next post we’ll explore this easy to use process to help you bridge the gap to creating what you want in your life.