I write down my affirmations every morning.
This might surprise you, given that I’m the author of The Skeptic’s Inspirational. Don’t “daily affirmations” fall under the “woo woo pseudo-science” category? What is this, Prosperity Gospel Hour?????
Kinda yes and no.
I have so many friends who are on the woo-woo spectrum, smart people whom I respect and love, that I can’t bring myself to denigrate their beliefs just because I don’t share them. To each their own! And, as my friend Lydia and I say a lot to each other as we discuss Tarot and ghosts and spirituality: there is so much in the universe we don’t and possibly cannot understand!
That said, I was taught about affirmations when I was a kid, by a mother desperate to believe in anything that gave her hope of escaping her mental disorders. (Affirmations did not get her where she wanted to be, but Zoloft helped a lot when it finally came out.) So I’ve had a lot of practice with affirmations not doing much of what I wanted.
And before I get called out with “well, clearly you were not doing them hard enough/correctly enough!” I have to say that one of the most toxic traits of the “law of attraction” and all its subsidiaries is the tendency to blame people for their bad circumstances, when 9/10ths of good luck in our modern world is based on where you were born. Don’t shoot the messenger!
But on the other hand, brain science is proving over and over that we have a lot more control over our own brains, including self-perception and perception in general, than was previously assumed. For chemical soup in solid form, brains constantly find ways to amaze scientists, and that’s not nothing.
I first came across “learned happiness” decades ago; I clearly remember standing on a street corner of the Thornton Park neighborhood in Orlando and realizing that not being miserable does not equal happiness. BOOM! What an insight! I mean that sincerely! I was shocked! All that time and energy I was putting into “not being miserable” needed to be spent on “learning to be happier.” But… how?
I did what I normally do: find a rabbit hole and jump down it. It was the early days of the learned happiness/learned optimism research, but there was still enough to literally stun me.
That all led me back to affirmations, of course. While I think we can manifest our reality, I suspect that happens less by bending the laws of physics and more by bending our self-perception into becoming the person who can accomplish those goals.
Still, for the longest time, “positive self-affirmations” were a wash for me. Imagining I’m rich is easy, for one thing; I’m an author, I can imagine a hell of a lot of things. But believing I’m already rich, or healthy, or living on a mountain (my dream!)… not so much.
But I kept at it, because why not? Positive affirmations seemed like the only way to break the chains I believed were locked tight around me.
Then, one day, I had another major realization: I am blessed with extremely good luck.
I always have been. It might not look that way to an outsider, but even in my worst life experiences, I’ve come out the other side relatively intact, psychologically and physically. Battered and bruised and sometimes a little bit broken, for sure, but so much better than the alternative.
My parents dying was a huge tsunami of tragedy, but I got through it by dint of determination and good friends. I still have the grief and PTSD, but I also live a good life.
Whooping cough stole a year of my life and damaged my spine (that’s how hard I coughed) but I walk and dance and do a lot of things I thought I never would again. I have to be more careful with my lungs, but overall, I’m healthy.
Money has always appeared in my darkest hour. Not a lot, but enough.
There are a lot more examples, but you get the point. Turning that insight over (“I’m very damn lucky!”) I figured out that affirmations only work for me if I know they are true.
That, it turns out was the key I needed for that pesky lock. I know that seems counterintuitive but bear with me. The fact that I have bountiful good luck is based on experience; I know it is true. But it is also something I forget easily, drifting down into the doldrums of a bad day or a setback in my plans. The affirmation “I am blessed with extremely good luck!” is not a hopeful proposal to the universe at large; it is a reminder of what I believe to be true at the gut level.
But that’s easy mode. What about… money?
My relationship with money is fraught, and I have suffered many setbacks in life due to my PTSD about it (long story). Doing my taxes sends me into an anxiety meltdown. Checking my bank balance ruins my day, even if there is plenty of money there. Or, at least, those used to be common reactions for me.
The big hangup is that I consider money to be dangerous, and the facts of my life and society at large are proof enough to validate that belief. No amount of repeating “money is my friend!” or “I love money!” helps. Believe me when I tell you I’ve tried dozens of variations on that theme.
Who welcomes danger into their home?
The big breakthrough I had recently is that we welcome danger into our homes all the time, because there are a lot of things that are dangerous but also useful: bleach, cast iron skillets, kitchen knives, rubbing alcohol, soap, laundry detergent, cinnamon… the list is long. In each case, though, the item is only dangerous if misused.
Don’t juggle cast iron skillets, people!!!!
Which is also true of money. Is it dangerous? Maybe not to you, but I have very valid reasons for believing it is. Once I made the connection to “dangerous things can be useful”, my entire perspective shifted. Immediately.
So now my affirmation is “Dangerous things can be useful.” I also threw in “Money = Freedom” because that is also true for me (once I have enough money to my name, my existence will be much more stable and enjoyable).
Perhaps for some people this is too limiting a version of “personal affirmations”, but I’ve found that using a key to unlock the potential of my brain to work FOR me instead of AGAINST me works a lot better than trying to break the chains.
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