Be willing to take the first step, no matter how small it is. Concentrate on the fact that you are willing to learn. Absolute miracles will happen.
Affirmations Do Work
Now that we understand a little bit more about how powerful our thoughts and words are, we have to retrain our thinking and speaking into positive patterns if we are going to get beneficial results. Are you willing to change your self-talk into positive affirmations? Remember, every time you think a thought, and every time you speak a word, you are saying an affirmation.
An affirmation is a beginning point. It opens the way to change. In essence you are saying to your subconscious mind, “I am taking responsibility. I am aware that there is something I can do to change.” When I talk about doing affirmations, I mean to consciously choose sentences or words that will either help to eliminate something from your life or help to create something new in your life, and you do this in a positive way. If you say, “I don’t want to be sick anymore,” the subconscious mind hears sick more. You have to tell it clearly what you do want. That is, say: 7 am feeling wonderfully well. I radiate good health.”
The subconscious mind is very straightforward. It has no strategy or designs. What it hears is what it does. If you say, “I hate this car,” it doesn’t give you a wonderful new car, because it doesn’t know what you want. Even if you get a new car, you will probably hate it soon, because that is what you have been saying about it. The subconscious only hears, hate this car. You need to clearly declare your desires in a positive way, as in: 7 have a beautiful new car that suits all my needs.”
If there is something in your life that you really dislike, I have found one of the quickest ways to release it is to bless it with love. “I bless you with love and I release you and let you go.” This works for people, situations, objects, and living quarters. You could even try it on a habit you would like to be free of and see what happens. I had one man who said, “I bless you with love and release you from my life,” to every cigarette he smoked. After a few days his desire for smoking was considerably less and in a few weeks the habit was gone.
You Deserve Good
Think for a moment. What is it you really want right now? What is it you want today in your life? Think about it, and then say, “I accept for myself _____________ (whatever it is you want). This is where I find that most of us get stuck.
The bottom line is the belief that we don’t deserve to have what we want. Our personal power lies in the way we perceive our deservability. Our not deserving comes from childhood messages. Again, we don’t have to feel that we cannot change because of these messages. Often times, people will come up to me and say, “Louise, affirmations don’t work.” It really has nothing to do with the affirmations; it is the fact that we don’t believe we deserve the good.
The way to find out if you believe that you deserve something is to say an affirmation and notice the thoughts that come up as you say it. Then write them down, because when you see them on paper, they will be very clear to you. The only thing that keeps you from deserving, or loving yourself, or whatever, is someone else’s belief or opinion that you have accepted as truth.
When we don’t believe that we deserve good, we will knock the pinnings out from under ourselves, which we can do in a variety of ways. We can create chaos, we can lose things, we can hurt ourselves, or have physical problems like falling, or have accidents. We have to start believing that we deserve all the good that life has to offer.
In order to reprogram the false or negative belief, what would be the first thought that you would need to begin to create this new “whatever” in your life? What would be the building block or the foundation that you would need to stand on? What would be the sort of thing that you would need to know for yourself? To believe? To accept? Some good thoughts to start with would be:
• “I am worthwhile.”
• “I am deserving.”
• “I love myself.”
• “I allow myself to be fulfilled.”
These concepts form the very basis of beliefs on which you can build. Do your affirmations on top of these building blocks to create what you want.
Whenever I speak somewhere, somebody will come up at the end of the lecture or will write me a letter and tell me that he or she has had a healing take place while he or she was in the room. Sometimes it’s very minor, and sometimes it’s quite dramatic. A woman came up to me recently and told me that she had a lump in her breast, and it literally disappeared during the lecture. She heard something, and she decided to let something go. This is a good example of how powerful we are. When we are not ready to let something go, when we really want to hold on to something because it is serving us in some way, it doesn’t matter what we do, it probably won’t work. However, when we are ready to let it go, as this woman was, it’s amazing how the smallest circumstance can help us release it.
If you still have a habit that you haven’t released, ask yourself how it serves you. What do you get out of it? If you can’t get an answer, ask in a different way. “If I no longer had this habit, what would happen?” Very often the answer is, “My life would be better.” It comes back to the fact that we believe we don’t deserve a better life in some way.
Ordering from the Cosmic Kitchen
When you first say an affirmation, it may not seem true. But remember, affirmations are like planting seeds in the ground. When you put a seed in the ground, you don’t get a full-grown plant the next day. We need to be patient during the growing season. As you continue to say the affirmation, either you will be ready to release whatever you don’t want, and the affirmation will become true; or it will open a new avenue to you. Or, you may get a brilliant brainstorm, or a friend may call you and say, “Have you ever tried this?” You will be led to the next step that will help you.
Keep your affirmations in the present tense. You can sing them and make a jingle out of them so they repeat over and over in your head. Remember that you cannot affect a specific person’s actions with your affirmations. To affirm that “John is now in love with me,” is a form of manipulation, and it is trying to have control over another persons’ life. It will usually have a boomerang effect on you. You will become very unhappy when you don’t get what you want. You can say, “I am now loved by a wonderful man who is,” and list the qualities you want in the relationship. That way you allow the Power within you to bring to you the perfect person to fill that bill, who may possibly be John.
You don’t know what another person’s spiritual lesson is, and you don’t have a right to interfere in their life process. You certainly wouldn’t want someone else doing it to you. If someone is ill, bless them and send them love and peace, don’t demand that they get well.
I like to think of doing affirmations as placing our order in the cosmic kitchen. If you go to a restaurant and the waiter or waitress comes and takes your order, you don’t follow them into the kitchen to see if the chef got the order or how he is going to prepare the food. You sit and drink your water or coffee or tea or you talk to your friend, and maybe eat your roll. You assume that your food is being prepared and will be out when it is ready. It’s the same when we begin to do affirmations.
When we put our order into the cosmic kitchen, the great chef, our Higher Power, is working on it. So you go on with your life and know it is being taken care of. It’s on order. It’s happening. Now if the food comes out and it isn’t what you ordered, and if you have self-esteem, you will send it back. If not, you will eat it. You also have a right to do that with the cosmic kitchen. If you don’t get exactly what you want, you can say, “No, that’s not quite it; this is what I want.” Perhaps, you weren’t clear in your ordering.
The idea here, too, is to let go. At the end of my treatments and meditations, I use the words, And so it is. It is a way of saying, “Higher Power, it’s in your hands now, I release it to you.” Spiritual mind treatment, which is taught by the Science of Mind, is very effective. You can obtain more information about it through your local Religious Science Church or through books by Ernest Holmes.
Reprogramming the Subconscious Mind
The thoughts we think accumulate, and when we are unaware, the old thought resurfaces. When we are reprogramming our minds, it is normal and natural that we go a little forward, we come a little back, and we go a little forward again. It is part of practicing. I don’t think there is any new skill that you can learn absolutely 100 percent in the first 20 minutes.
Do you remember when you first learned how to use a computer, how frustrating it was? It took practice. You had to learn how it worked, to learn its laws and systems. I called my first computer my Magic Lady, for when I mastered her rules she did indeed deliver what seemed like magic to me. Yet, while I was learning, the way she would teach me I was off track or going in the wrong direction, was to devour pages of work that I would then have to do over again. Out of all the mistakes, I learned how to flow with the system.
To flow with the system of Life, you want to become aware that your subconscious mind is like a computer—garbage in, garbage out. If you put negative thoughts in, then negative experiences come out. Yes, it takes time and practice to learn the new ways of thinking. Be patient with yourself. When you are learning something new, and the old pattern returns, are you going to say, “Oh, I didn’t learn anything?” Or are you going to say, “Okay, that’s all right, come on, let’s do it again the new way.”
Or, say you cleared an issue and think you’ll never have to deal with it again. How do you know if you’ve really worked it through unless you test yourself? So, you bring up the old situation one more time and watch how you react. If you jump right back into the old way of reacting to it, then you know you haven’t really learned that particular lesson, and you need to do more work on it. That’s all it means. You have to realize it’s a little test to see how far you’ve come. If you begin to repeat your affirmations, the new statements of truth about yourself, you give yourself an opportunity to react differently. Whether it’s a health problem, a financial one, or a relationship difficulty, if you react in a new way to the situation, then you’re on your way to having another issue handled, and you can move on to other areas.
Remember, too, that we work on layers at a time. You can reach a plateau and think, “I’ve done it!” And then some old issue resurfaces and you injure yourself, or get sick, and you don’t get better for some time. Look to see what the underlying beliefs are. It may mean you have some more work to do because you are going to the next deeper layer.
Don’t feel that you are not good enough, because something you have worked to clear comes up again. When I discovered that I was not a bad person because once again I was facing an old issue, it became much easier for me to keep going. I learned to say to myself, “Louise, you are doing very well. Look how far you have come. You just need more practice. And I love you.”
I believe each one of us decides to incarnate upon this planet at particular points in time and space. We have chosen to come here to learn a particular lesson that will advance us on our spiritual, evolutionary pathway.
One of the ways to allow the process of life to unfold for you in a positive, healthy way is to declare your own personal truths. Choose to move away from the limiting beliefs that have been denying you the benefits you so desire. Declare that your negative thought patterns will be erased from your mind. Let go of your fears and burdens. For a long time now, I have been believing the following ideas, and they have worked for me:
• “Everything I need to know is revealed to me.”
• “Everything I need comes to me in the perfect time-space sequence.”
• “Life is a joy and filled with love.”
• “I am loving and lovable and loved.”
• “I am healthy and filled with energy.”
• “I prosper wherever I turn.”
• “I am willing to change and to grow,” and
• “All is well in my world.”
I have learned that we don’t always stay positive 100 percent of the time, and I include myself in this knowledge. As much as possible, I see life as a wonderful joyous experience. I believe that I am safe. I have made it a personal law for me.
I believe that everything I need to know is revealed to me, so I need to keep my eyes and ears open. When I had cancer, I remember thinking that a foot reflexologist would be very helpful for me. One evening I went to a lecture of some sort. Usually I sit in the front row because I like being close to the speaker; however that night I was compelled to sit in the back row. Right after I sat down, a foot reflexologist sat next to me. We began to talk and I learned that he even made house calls. I didn’t have to look for him, he came to me.
I also believe that whatever I need comes to me in the perfect time-space sequence. When something goes wrong in my life, I immediately start to think, “All is well, it’s okay, I know that this is all right. It’s a lesson, an experience, and I’ll pass through it. There is something here that is for my highest good. All is well. Just breathe. It’s okay.” I do the best I can to calm myself, so I can think rationally about whatever is going on, and, of course, I do work through everything. It may take a little time, but sometimes, things that seem to be great disasters really turn out to be quite good in the end, or at least, not the disasters that they seemed to be in the beginning. Every event is a learning experience.
I do a lot of positive self-talk, morning, noon and night. I come from a loving space of the heart, and I practice loving myself and others as much as I possibly can. My love expands all the time. What I do today is much more than what I was doing six months or a year ago. I know a year from now my consciousness and my heart will have expanded, and I’ll be doing more. I know that what I believe about myself becomes true for me, so I choose to believe wonderful things about myself. There was a time when I didn’t, so I know I have grown, and I continue to work on myself.
I also believe in meditation. To me, meditation is when we sit down and turn off our inner dialogue long enough to hear our own wisdom. When I meditate, I usually close my eyes, take a deep breath and ask: ‘What is it I need to know?’ I sit and listen. I might also ask, ‘What is it I need to learn?’ or ‘What is the lesson in this?’ Sometimes, we think we’re supposed to fix everything in our lives, and maybe we’re really only supposed to learn something from the situation.
When I first began to meditate, I had violent headaches the first three weeks. Meditation was so unfamiliar and against all my usual inner programming. Nevertheless, I hung in there, and the headaches eventually disappeared.
If you are constantly coming up with a tremendous amount of negativity when you meditate, it may mean that it needs to come up, and when you quiet yourself, it starts to flow to the surface. Simply see the negativity being released. Try not to fight it. Allow it to continue as long as it needs to.
If you fall asleep when you meditate, that’s all right. Let the body do what it needs to do, it will balance out in time.
Reprogramming your negative beliefs is very powerful. A good way to do it is by making a tape with your own voice saying your affirmations. Play it as you go to sleep. It will have a great deal of value for you because you will be listening to your own voice. An even more powerful tape would be your mother’s voice telling you how wonderful you are and how much she loves you. Once you have the tape, it’s good to relax the body before you begin reprogramming. Some people like to start from the tips of their toes and move up to the top of their head, tensing and relaxing. However you do it, release the tension. Let the emotions go. Get to a state of openness and receptivity. The more relaxed you are, the easier it is to receive the new information. Remember, you are always in charge, and you are always safe.
It is wonderful to listen to tapes or read self-awareness books, and do your affirmations. But, what are you doing for the other 23 hours and 30 minutes of the day? You see, that is what really matters. If you sit down and meditate and then get up and rush to work and scream at someone, that counts, too. Meditation and affirmations are wonderful, yet the other times are just as important.
Treat Doubt as a Friendly Reminder
I am often asked questions about whether people are doing affirmations correctly or whether they are even working. I’d like you to think of doubt a little differently than you may have been. I believe that the subconscious mind resides in the solar plexus area of the body, where you carry those gut feelings. When something sudden happens don’t you immediately get a strong feeling in your gut? It is where you take everything in and store it.
Ever since we were little children, every message we have received, everything we have done, all the experiences we have had, all that we have said, have all gone into the filing cabinet right there in the solar plexus area. I like to think that there are little messengers in there, and when we think thoughts or have experiences, the messages go in, and the messengers file them in the appropriate files. For many of us we have been building up files labeled: I’m not good enough. I’ll never make it. I don’t do it right. We have gotten absolutely buried under these files. Suddenly we do affirmations such as: I’m wonderful and I love myself. The messengers pick them up and say, “What’s this??? Where does it go? We’ve never seen this one before!”
So the messengers call Doubt. “Doubt! Come over here and see what’s going on.” So Doubt picks up the message and asks the conscious mind, “What’s this? You have always been saying these other things.” On a conscious level we can react in two ways. We can say, “Oh you’re right, I’m terrible. I’m no good. I’m sorry. That’s not the right message,” and go back to our old ways. Or we can say to Doubt, “That was the old message. I have no need for it now. This is the new message.” Tell Doubt to start a new file because there will be lots of these loving messages coming through from now on. Learn to treat doubt as a friend, not the enemy, and thank it for questioning you.
It doesn’t matter what you do in this world. It doesn’t matter if you are a bank president or a dishwasher, a housewife or a sailor. You have wisdom inside of you that is connected to Universal Truth. When you are willing to look within and ask a simple question such as, “What is this experience trying to teach me?” and if you are willing to listen, then you will have the answer. Most of us are so busy running around creating the soap opera and drama we call our lives that we don’t hear anything.
Don’t give your power over to other people’s pictures of right and wrong. They only have power over us when we give our power to them. Groups of people give their power over to others. It happens in a lot of cultures. Women in our culture give their power to men. They say things like, “My husband won’t allow me to.” Well that’s certainly giving your power away. If you believe it, you box yourself into a place where you can’t do anything unless you are given permission by another person. The more open-minded you are, the more you learn, and the more you can grow and change.
A woman once shared with me that when she got married she was very unassertive because that was the way she was brought up. It took years for her to realize that her conditioning kept her locked in a corner. She blamed everyone—her husband and her in-laws—for her problems. Eventually, she divorced her husband, however, she still blamed him for so many things that were not right in her life. It took her ten years to relearn her patterns and to take her power back. In hindsight, she realized that she was responsible for not speaking up and for not standing up for herself—not her husband or her in-laws. They were there to reflect back to her what she felt inside—a sense of powerlessness.
Don’t give your power away based on what you read either. I remember years ago I read some articles in a well known magazine and I happened to know something about each subject described in the articles. In my opinion, the information was totally erroneous. The magazine lost all credibility for me, and I didn’t read it again for many years. You are the authority in your life, so don’t think that because something is in print that it’s always the truth.
Inspirational speaker Terry Cole-Whittaker wrote a wonderful book called What You Think Of Me Is None Of My Business. It’s true. What you think of me is none of my business—it’s your business. In the end, what you think of me is going out from you in vibrations and will come back.
When we have illumination, when we become conscious of what we are doing, we can begin to change our lives. Life is really here for you. You need only ask. Tell life what you want, and then allow the good to happen.