If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth. Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.
KABIR
Louise and I are sitting in front of the mirror again, the one in her office at home in San Diego. Today we are exploring the meaning of Life loves you. “Life loves you is a beautiful affirmation,” I say, “but it’s more than just an affirmation.” Louise gives me one of her knowing smiles. “I hope so,” she says. Life loves you offers us a basic philosophy for living. These three words are a signpost that points us to the heart of creation, to our relatedness to each other, and to our true nature. Life loves you shows us who we are and how to live a truly blessed life.
“What does Life loves you mean to you, Louise?” I ask.
“Life loves us all. It doesn’t just love you or me,” she replies.
“So we are all included,” I say.
“Life loves all of us,” she repeats.
“Love must include us all, or else it is not love,” I say.
“Yes, and no one is more special than anyone else,” says Louise.
“We are all equals in the eyes of love,” I say.
“Yes, and no one is left out,” she says.
“No unholy exceptions!” I add.
This may be a new way of thinking to some people, but it is not a new philosophy. Since ancient times, philosophers and poets have observed a basic relatedness we all share. In “Love’s Philosophy,” the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley explores this basic relatedness in a way that is both spiritual and sensuous. It’s one of my favorite love poems. I always recite it at the start of my Loveability program. It begins:
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?
We are made for each other. All of us are included. No unholy exceptions. Mystics and scientists agree that in the deeper reality beyond space and time, we are all members of one body. Albert Einstein referred to the perception of separateness as an “optical delusion.” David Bohm, an American quantum physicist who was one of Einstein’s most famous students, recognized an undivided universe, an implicate wholeness, and a theater of interrelations. We belong to each other.
“Life loves you unconditionally,” says Louise.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Life is not judging you,” she replies most emphatically.
“And life is not criticizing you,” I add.
“No, and life is not testing you. And it’s not trying to make things hard for you,” Louise says.
“When you say you, I assume you mean the soul bird, our Unconditioned Self.”
“Yes, life loves you, the real you,” she says.
“We are loved for who we are, not for what we think we must become,” I say.
“Life loves you now!” Louise emphasizes.
Life loves you is stated in the present tense. It’s not that life loves you only when you are a child, young and innocent. And it’s not that life will love you when or if you change. “Life loves us even when we don’t love ourselves,” says Louise. We both pause to let this awareness sink in. Life loves you feels natural and believable “when” and “if” we love ourselves, but otherwise it seems too good to be true. A passage from A Course in Miracles pops into my head. I share it with Louise.
The universe of love does not stop
because you do not see it,
nor have your closed eyes lost the
ability to see.
Look upon the glory of His creation,
and you will learn what
God has kept for you.
“Let’s talk about the meaning of life,” I say to Louise. “Okay then,” she replies, giving me a quizzical look. I ask her what the word life refers to in Life loves you. She tells me that life refers to whatever created us. She says that life can mean Universe, or Spirit, or Grace, or the Divine, or God. I sense her reluctance to use the word God, and I ask about this. She tells me, “I like to use the word life because life isn’t a religious word.” I understand her reluctance. “What a shame we made a religion out of God,” I say.
“Life loves you is a spiritual philosophy, not a religious philosophy,” says Louise.
“Life is 100 percent nondenominational,” I say.
“Yes,” says Louise, “and life is bigger than all the names of God put together.”
“So, is Life loves you the same as God loves you?” I ask her.
“Yes, but only if God is not a man in the sky watching your genitals, and only if God is unconditional love.”
“Amen,” I say.
Life loves you is a philosophy of love that recognizes love as being spiritual, not just romantic. Like other philosophies, such as mystical Christianity, Sufism, the Kabbalah, and Bhakti yoga, love is bigger than just an emotion or sex. The love in Life loves you refers to the Mind of Creation. Love is the consciousness of the universe. It is empty of personal neurosis and ego psychology. “Love is an infinite intelligence,” says Louise. “It loves all of its creations, and it will guide you and direct you if you will let it.”
“Let’s look at what Life loves you doesn’t mean,” I say to Louise. She gives me another quizzical look. “Well, Life loves you isn’t about getting your own way; it’s about getting out of your way,” she says with a smile. “Life has a plan for each of us. This plan is for our highest good and for the greatest good of everyone. It’s a Universal Plan that is bigger than any ego gratification. It has our highest interests at heart. All we can ever do is let love lead the way.”
“When did you first consider the possibility that life loves you?” I ask.
“Oh, not for the longest time,” Louise replies.
“Did anyone ever say to you, ‘Life loves you,’ while you were growing up?”
“No, not anyone. Certainly not anyone in my family.”
“Did you learn it from someone?” I ask her.
“Not that I remember,” says Louise.
“So how did you discover that life loves you?”
“It must have been when I found my inner ding,” she says.
Listen from Within
Louise and I are at Hay House headquarters in Carlsbad, California. We are about to be filmed for the Hay House World Summit 2014. The cameras are in position. The studio lights are on. Louise is applying some final touches of makeup to my brow. Yes, Louise Hay does my makeup. It’s a tradition of ours. She first offered to do my makeup when we met backstage at the Las Vegas I Can Do It! conference. That was my debut keynote for Hay House, and Louise has been my makeup artist ever since.
“Let’s talk about your inner ding,” I say.
“Oh yes. Ding, ding,” says Louise, who is in a playful mood.
“What is your inner ding?” I ask.
“Well, I feel it right here,” she says, tapping her chest.
“In your heart,” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
“So, what is the inner ding?”
“It’s an inner knowing,” she says.
Louise trusts her inner ding with her life. “It’s my friend,” she tells me. “It’s an inner voice that talks to me. I’ve learned to trust it. It’s right for me.” I’ve interviewed Louise about her inner ding on three occasions. Each time I am struck by how grateful she is for her inner ding. She talks about it with reverence and love. Listening to her inner ding is a daily spiritual practice. “My inner ding is always with me,” she says. “When I listen to my inner ding, I find the answers I need.”
“Where does your inner ding come from?” I ask.
“Everywhere!” says Louise, still being playful.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“My inner ding is how I listen to the big wisdom,” she says.
“Is this like the One Intelligence you refer to in You Can Heal Your Life?” I ask.
“Yes, the One Intelligence that offers guidance to us all,” she says.
“Do we all have an inner ding?” I ask her.
“Every child is born with an inner ding,” Louise assures me.
This was my cue to tell Louise a story. Earlier that day, Hollie, Bo, Christopher, and I had visited the San Diego Botanic Garden, in Encinitas. We walked through a dragon tree grove, climbed up to a tree house (several times), counted butterflies, played by a waterfall, and ran around a grass maze. On our way back to our car, I stopped to look at a bed of orange California poppies. Bo came and stood next to me. “Daddy,” she said, “the thing about love is you’ve got to love plants as much as you love people, and when you can do that, you know what love is.”
“That’s Bo’s inner ding!” says Louise, clapping her hands with joy. One moment Bo is being a girl, and the next, suddenly she’s Tinker Bell, waving her wand, dispensing wisdom like fairy dust. Every parent can testify to his or her child’s inner ding. Children are blessed with a radiant intelligence. Some Buddhists call it mirror-like consciousness because it mirrors the wisdom of the soul. This wisdom has nothing to do with IQ scores, math tables, history tests, or Pythagorean triangles. You don’t learn it; you bring it with you.
We are infused with natural wisdom. Our being is the knowledge of the universe. We each experience it in our own way, and we may call it by another name, such as inner ding, inner teacher, Mister God, Holy Spirit, or divine guidance. We carry the truth within us. In Robert Browning’s poem “Paracelsus” he writes,
Truth is within ourselves, it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception—which is Truth.
Somehow we forget about this truth, but it does not forget about us. Early on, we experience a loss of guidance. The GPS of our soul is in perfect working order, but we act as if it is broken. We learn to depend on the ego and our intellect for navigation. This is good for short journeys, but not for the journey that is our true path. Much of our life is spent trying to recover our inner wisdom—the inner ding. We have a memory of it, and this spurs us on.
“How did you find your inner ding again?” I ask Louise.
“I was a late bloomer,” she says. “I’d bumbled along all through my adult life without any awareness of my inner ding.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I was sitting in a lecture at the Church of Religious Science in New York, and I heard someone say, ‘If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your life.’ Something inside me said, ‘Pay attention to this,’ and I did.”
“Was it your inner ding that said, ‘Pay attention’?” I ask.
“It must have been,” says Louise.
Louise then asks me how I found my inner ding. I tell her the story of how I met my first spiritual mentor when I was 18 years old. His name is Avanti Kumar, and I’ve written about our adventures in several of my books. Avanti was a fellow student at Birmingham City University. He was an urban mystic. He seemed to have a normal life, and yet he wasn’t like anyone I had met before. Avanti introduced me to metaphysics and meditation.
“You are the Buddha, and everyone is waiting for you to remember this,” Avanti told me, during one of our many conversations at our favorite coffee shop. He qualified his statement by explaining that we are all Buddha. The name Buddha is a Sanskrit term for awakened one—someone who remembers his or her unconditioned nature. Avanti taught me that there is a still, small voice inside each of us that is our real voice and that the more willing we are to listen to this voice, the easier it is to hear it.
Like Louise, I have learned to trust this inner voice. I call this voice my Yes. It’s a Yes with a capital Y. I’m pretty sure it’s the same as Louise’s inner ding. I call it my Yes because it is deeply affirming and I feel it has my best interests at heart. It is also constantly supportive and always on hand when I need it. My inner voice feels like a Yes when I experience its presence in my body, my heart, and my thinking. The Yes is what I listen for when I have a decision to make. The Yes helps me recognize and follow the big plan. The Yes is my light on the path.
“My inner ding is life’s way of loving me,” Louise tells me. I feel the same way about my Yes. Louise consults with her inner ding throughout the day. “In the beginning I used to meditate in order to be able to hear my inner ding,” she says. “I found meditation very difficult to begin with. I experienced violent headaches. It was most uncomfortable. I stuck with it, though, and eventually I learned to enjoy meditation. Meditation helped me to listen from within. I found it a big help early on.”
When I ask Louise if she still meditates, she tells me about a great exercise she does. “I don’t meditate daily now. Just occasionally. When I wake up I go to the mirror and say, ‘Tell me what I need to know today.’ And then I listen. It’s by doing this exercise that I learned to trust that everything I need to know will be revealed to me in the perfect space-time sequence.” Louise tells me she often asks the question What would you have me know? when she wants guidance on something specific, such as a health issue, a business decision, or a meeting with someone.
Louise’s brilliant exercise reminds me of a prayer in A Course in Miracles that I call the Guidance Prayer. I have recited it almost every day for the last 20 years. The idea is to be still, make a conscious connection with your inner voice (whatever you call it), and then simply ask:
What would You have me do?
Where would You have me go?
What would You have me say and to whom?
Love Who You Are
“I am a Yes person living in a Yes universe,” says Louise.
“That sounds wonderful,” I tell her. “What do you mean?”
“Life loves us, and this love sustains us and guides us on our adventures. And so the universe is always saying Yes to us.”
“Love is the inner ding!” I exclaim.
“Yes,” says Louise, smiling. “And I am a Yes person because I always follow my inner ding.”
“Why do we resist following our inner ding?” I ask.
“Children don’t hear the word yes enough,” Louise says. “They hear no and don’t and stop that and do as I say. The people who say these things heard the same when they were children.”
The first word most children learn to speak is no, according to research. I was asked to comment on this research for a BBC news show, and I was surprised by the findings. I thought the most common first word would be Mum or Dad. Perhaps not. Other research says children hear the word no up to 400 times a day. Everyone agrees a child needs to hear the word no, but not that much. So maybe no is the most common first word. In the beginning was the word, and the word was no. Our life starts with a no. That’s not much of a start, is it? Imagine if the first word we learned to speak was yes.
“Every child has an inner ding,” says Louise, “but they need to grow up in a loving, positive environment in order to trust this inner voice.” Louise goes on to draw a parallel between healthy children in a family and healthy cells in the body. She refers to Bruce Lipton, the developmental biologist who wrote The Biology of Belief. Lipton has collated a large body of research showing that the health of a cell depends on the environment it exists in. A loving, positive environment creates health; but a fearful, negative environment causes unrest. “Without a loving, positive environment, a child forgets about the inner ding,” says Louise.
Listening to our inner ding is how we learn to love ourselves. It’s how we get the courage to live our truth. When we stop listening to our inner ding, it causes us to reject ourselves. Instead of being true to ourselves—being original, if you like—we try to fit in, to please others, to be normal. But we didn’t come here to be normal! Being normal is not following your joy. At the end of your life, your guardian angel or Saint Peter or whoever isn’t going to ask you, “Were you normal?” They won’t make you take a Normal Test!
“We are constantly invited to be who we are,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. To do this we must honor our inner wisdom. I have an exercise about inner wisdom that I teach in my eight-week happiness program, Be Happy, which is the signature event of my work with The Happiness Project. The exercise is an invitation for everyone in the group to stand up, one by one, and say out loud the following affirmation: I am a wise person.
Affirming I am a wise person may sound simple to you, but not everyone finds it easy. Many students experience palpitations just hearing about the exercise. They get weak in the knees as they stand up to say, “I am a wise person.” They feel strong emotions, and sometimes tears flow. In the review of this exercise, I encourage my students to notice which “self” finds this exercise difficult. Is it the soul bird, the Unconditioned Self; or their self-image?
During one Be Happy program, a man called Alan refused to do this exercise. A senior teacher at a large school in London, he is very capable. Yet when it came to his turn to stand up, he couldn’t speak, and he put out his hand to me as if to say, “No, I can’t.” Alan had been very sociable and had participated fully in the program up until that point. I could see that his outstretched hand was a firm No. He wasn’t ready. And so we moved on. A few days later, I received an e-mail from Alan. Here’s an excerpt from what he wrote:
Dear Robert,
Thank you for the Be Happy program, which I have been enjoying immensely. As you know, last weekend was difficult for me … I was taken by surprise at my response to the [I Am a Wise Person] exercise. Something in me froze. It said, “No.” I couldn’t speak … I am a teacher whose greatest joy is to help young boys and girls find their voice. The irony is not lost on me. This is my invitation to heal and to love myself. I am a 46-year-old man, and it is never too late to be a wise person! I want you to know that I am willing to honor the wisdom that you say is in each of us. “I am a wise person.” “I am a wise person.” “I am a wise person.” I am standing up as I type these words! … Tears are rolling down my cheeks … “I am a wise person.” I know this is only in writing … I ask that the next time we meet you will give me a chance to say out loud—to the whole group—“I am a wise person.” It’s important for me to do this …
Blessings,
Alan
The habit of self-rejection takes control when you play deaf to the wise voice of your true self. You stop listening from within. You override what your body is telling you. You ignore the internal memos from your heart. You don’t listen to the song of the soul bird. You move away from yourself. Do you recognize the face in the mirror? Is it really you? Subtly or not so subtly, we give up on ourselves. We tell ourselves we don’t matter. We stop believing in ourselves, and we stop caring. “Not being conscious of oneself as spirit is despair,” said Søren Kierkegaard.
When you stop following your inner voice, you become estranged from yourself. You forget who you are, and you have no way of knowing what you really want. Like everyone else, you pursue happiness, you chase success, and you look for love, but your loss of inner guidance means you end up looking in the wrong places. You are full of desire, but can you tell the difference between a genuine holy longing and a conditioned response to marketing and advertising? You won’t ever get enough of what you didn’t really want in the first place. Do you know what you really want to say yes to?
“Every time I hear the word should, a bell goes off in my head,” says Louise. When you hear yourself say, “I should do …” or “I should be …” or “I should have …” you need to ask yourself, “Who is saying this?” Is this the voice of your Unconditioned Self? Are you really following your joy? Or is this the voice of your ego? “The more you drop should from your list, the less noise you experience in your head, and the easier it gets to hear your inner ding again,” says Louise.
When we reject ourselves, we are terrified of being rejected by others. If they, too, reject us, there is no one left to love us. We do our best to make ourselves into someone acceptable and loveable. We twist ourselves into shapes that will hopefully please others. We take on roles like helper and martyr and star, in an effort to win love and success. But there’s always a nagging feeling that something is missing. Until you accept yourself—and say yes to who you really are—you will always feel like something is missing from your life.
Saying yes is really about meeting the deepest part of you. It’s about saying yes to your secret beauty, to your soul nature, and to your creativity. This is what you have to be faithful to. This is what loving yourself is all about. This is the real work of your life. The Persian poet Rumi gave the world a poem called “Say Yes Quickly.” He wrote,
Inside you
there’s an artist you
don’t know about …
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
The Sacred Yes
One week before Louise and I were due to start writing Life Loves You, I received an e-mail from the author Sandy Newbigging asking me to write a foreword for his book Mind Calm. I felt honored to be asked, but I thought I didn’t have the time and needed to keep my focus on this book. I e-mailed Sandy to say my answer would have to be no, but somehow I ended up saying yes. It wasn’t an I-should yes, or an I-must yes, or even a be-kind yes. It was a truthful yes. Or what I call my Big Yes—with a capital Y.
Another name for this Yes is my Sacred Yes. I sense this Yes in my belly (gut instinct), I feel it in my heart, and I hear it in my head. When it shows up, I feel like I have almost no choice whether to follow it. This is the “Yes” that simply feels true. To go against it would be inauthentic. I’m so glad I agreed to read Sandy’s book. It is full of rich insights. And there’s one line in particular that has been so helpful for writing Life Loves You. It speaks to me every day. It’s the sort of thing my inner voice would say to me:
Let the loving hand of the universe guide you.
“All I’ve ever done is listen to my inner ding and said yes,” Louise tells me as she reflects on her career as a writer and teacher. “I never meant to write a book. My first book, the little blue book Heal Your Body, was just a list I compiled. Someone suggested I make it into a book. And I said yes. I had no idea how to publish a book, but helping hands appeared along the way. It was just a little adventure.” Little did she realize that her “little adventure” would be a bestseller and the catalyst for a self-help revolution in publishing.
Louise’s story about giving talks follows a similar pattern. “Someone invited me to give a talk and I said yes. I had no idea what I’d say, but as soon as I said yes I felt guided along the way.” First came talks, then workshops, and then the Hayrides. “A few gay men regularly attended my workshops,” Louise recalls. “Then one day I was asked if I’d be willing to start a group for people with AIDS. I said, ‘Yes, let’s get together and see what happens.’” Louise had no idea where the Hayrides would take her. There wasn’t a grand marketing plan. She didn’t target appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Phil Donahue Show. “I followed my heart,” says Louise.
Saying Yes is a willingness to show up. “The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure,” said Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero’s Journey. The Sacred Yes is about the big plan for your life. It’s not about ambition; it’s about purpose. It’s not about profit; it’s about passion. It’s not about self-gain; it’s about service. The Sacred Yes is about being willing to take to the open road, as Walt Whitman described it.
Saying Yes is an act of faith. Sometimes we don’t know why we say yes. We don’t have the full picture; and sometimes we can’t even see the next step. It’s only after we say yes that the next step appears. And it’s only after we say yes that we realize there is help along the way. In the PBS special Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, Bill Moyers interviews Campbell about the need for faith when we follow our purpose. At one point, Moyers asks Campbell if he’s ever had the experience of being “helped by hidden hands” on his own journey. Campbell replies,
All the time. It is miraculous … If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
Saying Yes is having an open mind. The Sacred Yes is about dropping your fear, your unworthiness, your cynicism, your psychology, and allowing your soul to speak to you. The Sacred Yes is a surrender. “Ever since I put my foot on the spiritual pathway, it’s as though I’ve had nothing to do with my life. Life has taken over and it’s led me all the way. I don’t lead. I follow the lead,” Louise tells me.
Saying Yes is a journey, not a goal. You say yes not because you are trying to get somewhere but because it’s what’s in front of you. In You Can Create an Exceptional Life, Louise tells Cheryl Richardson, “So often people ask about how I started Hay House. They want to know every detail from the day I began up to today. My answer is always the same: I answered the phone and opened the mail. I did what was before me.” The journey is the goal.
Saying Yes is being present in your life. When I was 18 years old, I received two letters in the mail on the same day. One was an invitation to study in a three-year program at Birmingham City University; the other was an acceptance letter for a one-year post-graduate course in journalism at the University of Portsmouth. I was young and ambitious. I wanted to take the fast-track course in journalism, but everything in my body, my heart, and my head said yes to the slow boat to Birmingham. This is where I met Avanti Kumar, my first mentor. This is where I began my spiritual path.
I’ve often wondered how my life would have unfolded if I hadn’t followed my Yes to Birmingham. I asked Louise about this once. She said, “Your Yes will always find you, wherever you are.” I love her answer. To me, Louise is saying that following your Yes isn’t about getting somewhere, and it isn’t about making the right decisions. It’s about being present. It’s about being authentic. It’s about being willing to be led. And it’s about looking in the mirror and liking what you see. That’s the journey.
PRACTICE 3: MY AFFIRMATION BOARD
“The oldest, shortest words—yes and no—are those that require the most thought,” the Greek mathematician Pythagoras ostensibly said. Yes and no are woven into the fabric of our daily life. They are the basic mathematics of our psychology. Our thinking is made up of yes and no. These two words are our essential binary code. We speak these words every day. They shape our experience all day long. They are behind every choice we make. They are in every decision we make. Everything is a yes or a no—or a maybe—a little bit of both.
I remember the first time I consciously thought about my relationship to yes and no. I was 26 years old, and I was working for the local health authority in Birmingham, England. I was running a clinic called Stress Busters. The director for public health asked if I would teach a course on assertiveness. The psychologist who had previously taught it was retiring. “Yes,” I said. Not because I knew much about assertiveness. I didn’t. But the subject interested me, and I wanted to learn more.
Early on in my research on assertiveness, I noticed that the main focus was on saying no. I read articles with titles like “How to Say No” and “Saying No with Confidence” and “The Art of Saying No.” I also came across slogans like Just Say No and No means No. Curiously, there was little mention of the word yes. After a few weeks of research, I presented my course, which I called Assertive, I AM. The first lesson was called “The Power of Yes.” I started with yes because I was developing a theory, which was:
The better you are at saying yes, the
better you will be at saying no.
“Most people start with what they don’t want,” says Louise. “They say, ‘I don’t want the relationship I am in,’ or ‘I don’t want the job I’ve got,’ or ‘I don’t want to live where I am living.’” This is a start at least, but it’s not as powerful as putting your attention and energy on what you want to say yes to. Louise warns, “The more we dwell on what we don’t want, the more we get it.” This is a terrible irony, but it’s true. Saying no may signal a fresh start the first time you say it, but you don’t go anywhere until you start to say yes.
Some people sort by the negatives, so to speak. No is the position they take in life. Their first answer to everything is no or at least maybe, but seldom yes. This might be because of their personality type or a reaction to their history. I once had a coaching client called Susan. Our second session was an inquiry into the question What do I want? Susan said, “I can think of lots of things I want to say no to, but that’s not the same as knowing what I want to say yes to, is it?” “No,” I replied. Susan had to be patient with herself. Eventually, the yesses began to flow.
Some people say yes to too many things. Until you know what you really want to say yes to, you will continue to say yes to everything else. This will cause you to experience inner doubt, to be torn between contradictory goals, to get distracted and scattered, to feel compromised, to be exhausted, to get into unhealthy sacrifice, and to give your power away. As you get clearer about the Sacred Yesses of your life, you experience a sense of empowerment and grace that helps you to live a truly blessed life.
This brings us to the third spiritual practice for Life Loves You—a practice we call My Affirmation Board.
An affirmation board is a self-portrait. It’s a presentation of everything you say yes to. The form of your affirmation board is entirely up to you, of course. You might do a collage of hand-drawn images, or pictures cut out of magazines or printed off the Internet. You might prefer to do a written list. Maybe you’d like to do a mind map. Whatever you do, keep it to one page.
You create your affirmation board by listening within. You are listening for your Sacred Yesses. These Sacred Yesses belong to you. They’re not your parents’ yesses or your partner’s, your children’s, or anybody else’s. They‘re not about what you should do with your life; they are about following your joy. They affirm what you love, what you believe in, and what you cherish and value. They are about you living your truth.
Louise and I have noticed that people’s first attempts at creating an affirmation board often focus on having and getting. We encourage you to make sure your Sacred Yesses are more than just a shopping list. You might include developing a quality like courage, gratitude, or forgiveness, for instance. Maybe you want to practice a skill like meditation, yoga, painting, or cooking. Ask yourself, “What do I want to learn?” and “What do I want to experience?” Include your favorite affirmation or a personal mantra, for instance. The key is to express yourself, heart and soul. To focus on being rather than doing.
Louise and I encourage you to give your My Affirmation Board plenty of time. Express yourself. Be creative. Feel free to experiment. It’s not about getting it right. And it’s not about creating something that looks good.
If you want, you can share your board with a coach or a trusted friend. It’s good to get feedback. Maybe they will point out something obvious that you’ve missed. Finally, make sure that your affirmation board is about what you say yes to today, not someday in the future. Remember, this isn’t about chasing happiness; it is about following your joy.
