Meditations On Being

Tag: affirmations

  • Permission to Prosper: Affirmations That Undermine Self-Limiting Beliefs

    Permission to Prosper: Affirmations That Undermine Self-Limiting Beliefs

    The things you think really matter. Your thoughts create your reality.

    Talk to yourself negatively and you attract negativity. Talk to yourself positively and you begin to attract abundance.

    The following is an affirmation exercise to rewire negative beliefs around self-worth. Repeat these out loud if you wish, making sure to take a deep breath between each statement. I’m including a link to my guided version if you prefer to follow along with audio.

    • I am valuable.
    • I have valuable contributions to make.
    • I am unique.
    • I am worthy of love.
    • My value is not determined by achievement.
    • I am worthy by right of birth.
    • I deserve—and will receive—abundance.
    • There is enough abundance for everyone.
    • Receiving abundance does not deprive anyone else.

    After you’ve said each of these lines out loud, check in with yourself to see if you really believed each statement. If you don’t believe one of the affirmations, ask yourself why. What is preventing you from believing it? This investigation will highlight negative beliefs that you can let go of.

    If you find yourself unable to let go of a negative belief, spiritual teacher Bashar teaches that as soon as you investigate a belief and it appears nonsensical, you let it go. If you do not let go of a negative belief upon inspection, there is another unexamined negative belief underlying it. Keep investigating until you find the root of the negativity and all those beliefs will disappear.

    Let’s take one of the negative beliefs I uprooted using this exercise. When I wrote these affirmations, I was thinking about how I feel about my performance at my day job and realized that I didn’t believe I was good at it. I tend to only value myself when I’m over-achieving. If I’m not currently setting records or receiving high praise from my peers and superiors, I tend to think I’m not doing well and am therefore bad at my job. This belief has plagued me for decades, and initially I believed it served me well, so I didn’t want to uproot it. The desire to be the best has propelled me to achieve a lot, including a PhD. I had to dig deeper to notice that there were two beliefs coupled together here that should not be. Once I examined them, one was obviously nonsensical. Belief 1: I like to try to be the best. We want to keep this belief because I like the feeling of being the best, and I like to strive for more. Belief 2: If I’m not the best, I am not worthy. It is nonsensical to believe I’m only worthy if I’m exceeding expectations. Exceeding expectations can’t be the norm. Accomplishing the rare is by definition…rare.

    Annoyingly, I had already concluded this kind of logic was nonsensical in other people and other situations, but until I examined it at play in myself, I held onto the self-limiting belief. Take, for instance, the lowest-ranked professional athlete in any given sport. They may not be competing as well as their peers, but you bet your ass they could destroy you at their sport or, to reframe in the positive, teach you a lot about it.

    Self-limiting beliefs like mine can have real consequences. Undervaluing your work can prevent you from advocating for yourself, which can lead to missed opportunities and promotions. And each missed opportunity reinforces the old story, making it harder to see your true worth.

    I hope these affirmations help you to identify and squash your own nonsensical self-limiting beliefs you’re holding onto. You can also add your own statements as appropriate to address whatever you struggle with. Make this practice your own and you will surely benefit.

  • Parallel‑Universe Parenting: How I Tried to Visualize One More Hour of Sleep

    Parallel‑Universe Parenting: How I Tried to Visualize One More Hour of Sleep

    Manifestation is the practice of deliberately shaping your outer circumstances by directing your thoughts. Your emotions and expectations cause outcomes in the real world that match those emotions and expectations. Whenever I used to say something like “I’ll never be able to [fill-in-the-blank],” my mom always responded, “Not with that attitude!” It turns out she was correct! Moms are always right, though maybe only because we believe it to be true and hence manifest it.

    There are many books and teachings available on manifestation, but one that resonates strongly with me is the manifestation formula taught by a channeled entity named Bashar. Bashar is a highly evolved spiritual being who has been channeled by a man named Darryl Anka since the 1980s. Bashar offers a simple formula for how to manifest anything you desire. Though the formula is simple to state, I find that it’s not necessarily easy to implement.

    As published on his website the 7-step formula is as follows:

    1. Visualize what you want
    2. Be intensely excited about what you are visualizing
    3. Believe what you desire is possible to manifest
    4. Accept your belief and your ability to manifest it as being true
    5. Want and intend are different. You must have the intention to manifest your desire
    6. Act and behave like your desire has already manifested
    7. Detach from the outcome. You have to be intense in your desire without any expectation that it manifests.

    I’ve been trying to implement this recently, but I’ve run into a wrinkle that I’m trying to work through. My son is almost two years old. He sleeps in the same room as my wife and me, and recently he has been waking up too early in the morning. The last few days he’s been waking up around 5 a.m., and I know he needs more sleep, but he seems unable to fall back to sleep.

    I’ve been manifesting more sleep for my son, and the technique works until intrusive thoughts have undone it and woken him up. In the same way that absolute belief can manifest reality, any kind of doubt immediately undercuts it because you cannot have absolute belief coupled with doubt.

    I visualized a parallel universe where he did not wake up at 5 a.m.-where he slept peacefully until 6 a.m. This is one of the visualization methods that I have found to be most effective – believing that there is a parallel universe where everything else is identical except the thing you want to happen is happening. For me, this conjures a feeling of absolute certainty that it is happening and guarantees that steps 2-6 are followed.

    This was the easy part this morning. At the exact second I conjured this image, my son stopped moving. He lay calmly and started to fall asleep. My thoughts changed our reality. But a few minutes later, I had intrusive thoughts that my manifestation was working, but what if it stopped? Suddenly he started to move around again. I again pictured a parallel universe where he slept peacefully and woke up well rested. I calmed down and focused on my breath in order to avoid accidentally manifesting him awake. It worked again for a few minutes until the second I thought about how it was going and feared I was going to wake him up, at which point he immediately stirred.

    I once again visualized my son sleeping and when it worked, the intuition to try something new came to me. I tried placing my belief in an impenetrable box where I would be unable to undercut it by thinking the opposite. I reasoned this should work because if belief manifests outcomes in the real world, why shouldn’t it also work in my mind? Why can’t I form an impenetrable barrier around the thing I desire that prevents me from undercutting my original intent? Unfortunately, by the point this occurred to me, my son was truly ready to wake up. I also have to respect that his own body and free will set limits on what I can manifest in this context. My goal was to nudge him to sleep when it was still natural for him, not to force it when he’s genuinely done resting.

    I know that constantly checking whether my manifestation is working is breaking Bashar’s Step 7, but these are intrusive thoughts. The second I think “Hey it’s working, he’s been asleep” is the second that it stops working because that thought was coupled with the fear that it would stop working. It reminds me of the old internet mind-trap called “The Game.”  You’re always playing and the only rule is that if you think about The Game, you immediately lose and have to announce to everyone that you lost the game, causing those who hear you to lose as well.

    I will continue to play around with manifestations and securing them in an impenetrable box so that if the manifestation does not happen as I imagined, at least I know that it’s not because I let intrusive thoughts undercut it. Have you tried manifesting using the alternate universe method? Give it a shot and see how it goes for you!