But Aren't Affirmations Just Lying To Myself?
This is a question just about everyone wonders, when beginning with positive affirmations.
After all, you're saying things that (as far as you know) aren't true! Or at least they don’t FEEL true.
Don't worry if saying your new positive affirmations feels like stating a blatant untruth. In the beginning, that's to be expected.
After all, your whole life, you've been affirming something else as true!
Everything Is An Affirmation — Positive, or Negative
The first thing you need to know is that EVERYTHING is an affirmation.
Everything you think, believe, tell yourself, or say is an affirmation... for better or worse.
In other words, whether it's something positive or negative, you're affirming something in yourself, with every repetition of that word, thought, feeling, or whatever.
That does NOT mean what you've believed so far
is true... or more real, or better than your positive affirmation. It just means that you've been telling yourself something different. Something unproductive. Something that’s been blocking you from moving forward in your life.
So of course when you start to change a belief — that is, change
what stories you tell yourself — you're going to disbelieve it for a while. That's natural.
In fact, it's a good sign!
It means that your
positive affirmations are challenging some subconscious programming.
First you must challenge the accepted beliefs. Then gradually you can begin to change them.
The Untruths You’ve Been Living
It’s helpful to realise, too, that most of what you're telling yourself up until now has been untrue — mistaken, false, or even outright lies. And most of them aren't beliefs you've chosen for yourself!
Most of your beliefs and thoughts about yourself and life were programmed into you when you were a child — before the age when you could even question whether you wanted to believe them or not.
And the rest of the limiting beliefs were instilled by trauma and confusion, so they stem from fears rather than reflecting truth.
In other words, your beliefs — at least the ones holding you back — are lies!
You probably don’t fret about those lies, though, because you haven't stopped to think them through. In fact, anything that tells you you're less than divine and a perfect luminous eternal soul on a brief Earth-adventure is not true!
So don’t fret about the “truth” of affirmations.
Just keep going. It takes some time to change beliefs and habitual patterns of thinking.
In the end, you'll realise just how false and limiting that old belief was! And going back to the original belief will feel like a lie.
How Positive Affirmations Are A Spiritual Practice
That is how daily affirmation becomes a spiritual practice.
It liberates you from false ideas about your self and reality. It aligns you with deeper truth.
And it demonstrates your incredible power to affect your world!
Using positive affirmations is not just positive thinking. It's positive thinking times a thousand. It goes beyond just seeing things in a good light.
When you practice daily affirmation, you not only take responsibility for how you see things. You gain power over
what you will actually see around you.
This is one way you become a co-creator of your reality, a partner with the Goddess! It's not only your right to take command of your life, through your thoughts and beliefs and emotions, but it's a sacred obligation!
How Positive Affirmations Are MAGICK
When you start to free yourself of the old programming, the stale beliefs and limiting thoughts that have held you back, your life can’t help but change.
This is the core of magick: the art of changing consciousness at will.
What that means is, when you change yourself, you change your world. This is literally true. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
That requires, however, that you
use them properly.
Affirmations get a bad rap because people don’t use them as a magickal technique, and then they get poor results.
So stick around for the rest of this series, because that’s going to make sure your affirmations are as powerful as they can possibly be!
Check out the article on
How To Use Positive Affirmations to find out how to make them really work for you.
Positive Affirmations, part 3:
11 Rules for How To Use Positive Affirmations
With Brightest Blessings,
erin Dragonsong