12Always Growing!Making Your Passion Happen

Congratulations! You have just completed a remarkable inner journey. You are returning home with new insight, self-knowledge, and growth. You’ve journeyed deep into your psyche to get to this point and should feel proud of your accomplishment.

In the course of this inner adventure, you have thoroughly explored your life, discovered what it is that you deeply believe, made changes in outdated beliefs, and crafted new visions of how you want your life to look. In all likelihood, some of these visions have already started to manifest; many more will in the near future. Your growing edges are enlivened and bursting with vitality and potential.

Now you will need to integrate this highly charged potential into your daily life so that it can come to fruition. To do this, a structure for working with your affirmations and visualizations and support system must be put in place. Let’s start by looking at how to work with your affirmations and visualizations over time.

Guidelines for Applying Your Affirmations and Visualizations

NOURISH THEM DAILY

The affirmations and visualizations you have created are potent mental seeds that need nourishment in order to grow. The way you nourish them is through your daily attention. You can do this in as little as five minutes a day. The key is not quantity of time, but quality of time. You need to be present when you are saying your affirmations and visualizing. Be attentive to any mental weeds or limiting beliefs that crop up in your mental garden. If you notice a limiting belief, use one of your mental clearing tools to remove it. If you find that it is too deeply rooted, back up one step on your growing edge.

The purpose of this time devoted to your affirmations and visualizations is to come to deeply believe that your visions will manifest. It is this deep belief that allows these mental seeds to germinate and come to fruition. The time you spend each day watering these seeds creates and energizes this belief.

FIND A NICHE

To make sure your mental seeds get nourished daily, you need to set up a specific time and place to cultivate them. You are establishing a new habit in your life. To make sure it becomes established, you have to apply your will and plan for it. If you remember that the reason you are taking these five minutes for yourself is to bring the things that are most important to you into your life, you won’t have any problem staying motivated. It takes about a month of doing your affirmations and visualizations every day to turn this activity into a habit.

A good time to do your affirmations and visualizations is when you first wake up. You are fresh, and you can energize your day with them. Another good time is just before you go to bed. This allows you to take them into the dream state with you. Another time people find appropriate is while exercising. The state of mental alertness and physical vitality generates high-quality mental energy for them.

You need to choose a time that works best for you and then be consistent in doing it. Commit to one time of day for thirty days and see how it feels. Experiment until you find the right niche. Write down here or in your journal the time you have chosen:

CREATE A PERSONAL FORM

There are many different ways that you can work with your affirmations and visualizations. So find a form that motivates you.

The most common form is to read your affirmation silently from your journal and then visualize your image. Allow it to sink in and impregnate your consciousness. It helps to have your mind reasonably quiet. Taking a few deep breaths will help do this. If you have a meditation practice, do your affirmation and visualization work after you have meditated and are quiet. Stay with the affirmation and visualization until you feel they have sunk in. Sometimes this takes a few seconds, sometimes a minute or more. Other forms that you might enjoy include:

• Writing out each affirmation one or more times and repeating it as you are writing.

• Recording it with music in the background and a space for you to repeat it.

• Having an inspiring piece of music in the background as you are affirming and visualizing.

• Singing your affirmation.

• Having an artist draw your visualizations.

• Putting your affirmations in strategic locations, such as on the refrigerator, in your checkbook, on your computer screen, by your running shoes.

• Saying self-esteem affirmations in front of a mirror.

• Physically enacting your affirmation or visualization through a special movement or dance.

• Creating your visualization in clay or some other form of sculpture.

• Painting or drawing your visualization each day.

• Programming reminders into your electronic schedule.

There is no one form to use. It is completely up to your creativity and what works best for you. Do choose one form and commit to using it for at least two weeks. This is enough time to see if it’s the right form for you. If it’s not, choose another one. Experiment some more. Keep tinkering with the form until you find the one that best suits your temperament. You may discover that a variety of forms is appropriate. For now, the key is to become familiar enough with a particular form to know if it’s right for you. Write down here or in your journal the next action step you plan to take in creating a form:

HOW MANY TO WORK WITH AT ONE TIME?

As with the other guidelines, there is no hard-and-fast rule. How many affirmations and visualizations you choose to work with is a function of the psychic intensity of your growth issues. If you are going through major changes, you may want to work actively with only two or three and have the others simmering on the back burner. Most people like to at least be paying attention to all the vital parts of their lives, even if they are working dynamically with only their most crucial growing edges. You may also find that you have a very important growth issue that requires more than one affirmation.

Generally speaking, if you don’t have any all-consuming growth issues, you should be able to work with seven or eight affirmations and visualizations without a strain.

REGULAR UPKEEP

Because you are creating affirmations and visualizations that are addressing your growing edges, you will inevitably outgrow them. This is not only to be expected, but desired. It’s a statement that says you are growing and your affirmations are working.

How do we know when we have outgrown our current affirmations and visualizations? The most obvious way is when we look around and notice that we have accomplished whatever it is we are affirming and visualizing. This is easily discerned if we are dealing with physically demonstrable issues, such as money, work, or our bodies. However, psychological, emotional, and spiritual changes we are attempting to bring about are more subtle.

In this domain, boredom is an excellent way to identify that change has taken place. If saying your affirmation starts to feel like tedious drudgery, something has changed. To respond to this change, you may need to adjust a word or phrase in your affirmation, change your visualization, or approach the growth issue from another angle. The essential thing is to be attentive to your internal response and make changes in the affirmation, visualization, or growth issue accordingly.

Sometimes when we have been working on an issue and have achieved what we desired, we continue to hold on simply because we have grown accustomed to having the issue in our life. To minimize this, try setting time aside twice a year to do a major overhaul of your growing edges. We find spring and fall to be good times to do this. Without looking at your present affirmations and visualizations, ask yourself, “What are my next growing edges?” They may come out being the same, but often you will find that you have grown beyond those edges and it’s time to move on. If this is the case, celebrate the harvest and plant new seeds.

ATTENTIVENESS TO YOUR THOUGHTS DURING THE DAY

A daily practice of working with your affirmations and visualizations energizes your visions on a regular basis. Along with this more formal time, it’s important to be aware of your thoughts throughout the day. Are you thinking about your visions as if they’re successful? Are you seeing images of your visions as fully manifested? When you talk to others about your visions, do you describe them in positive terms? How you think and talk during the day is very significant. It either reinforces or negates the more formal work you are doing.

You don’t need to burden yourself by affirming or visualizing all day, but you do need to be attentive to your thoughts. If you find yourself with a limiting belief, simply notice it and substitute your affirmation for it. If a fear comes up, notice it and turn it around. If you are thinking about your vision in the future tense, bring it into the present tense.

Moment by moment, we create our reality. You are now endowed with self-awareness and have the ability to step out of a thought and change it. You have done the hard work of acquiring the self-awareness to notice what you are thinking. Changing the thought is the easy work. It is a reward for the in-depth self-discovery you have done up to this point.

Designing a Personal Growth Support System

It’s now time to design an ongoing structure to support you in taking all the personal growth work you have done so far and establishing it firmly in your life.

The daily stresses of life tend to wear us down if we don’t have anything to buoy us up again. In spite of our best efforts to maintain our growth, that vital spark that keeps us on our growing edges often flickers. To keep our spark glowing, we need regular inspiration and renewal. The purpose of a personal growth support system is to provide the ongoing inspiration and renewal to enable you to sustain your growth over time. It may include some or all of the following components:

SUPPORT TEAM

These are people who support you in some clearly defined way. This team might include a life coach to help you focus on the important visions and goals you have now set for your life, a financial advisor to help you achieve your financial goals, a mentor to help you advance in your career, a bodyworker to help deal with physical stress, a trainer to help you strengthen your body, and a spiritual counselor with whom you can share your spiritual life.

These relationships don’t just happen. They require you to recognize their importance and add these people to your life. They are your quality-of-life support system.

1. Take some time now and decide who should make up your support team. First, write down the categories of people. If you know particular people who can fill these roles, write their names next to each category. If you have done some of this work in other chapters, refer back to that part of your journal and place their names here.

2. Once you have listed the categories and the people, write down your next action step for each category. For example, let’s say you want to begin working with a financial advisor. The action step might be “Next week I start asking friends if they know of any financial advisors they trust.” Make your action steps as specific and concrete as possible.

PEER SUPPORT GROUP

A peer support group is dedicated to growth around a particular issue or to growth in general. Issue support groups might focus on relationships, professional development, spiritual development, and so on. More general support groups are dedicated to any of the growth issues you are working on in your life. One of the more common forms is as a women’s or men’s support group.

After Empowerment Workshops, support groups are often formed by those participants who would like to use the empowerment method to keep their growing edges alive. If you know other people who have read this book, you might want to form such a group. This can also be done with one other person as a buddy support system. A good format is to meet monthly, share your most important growing edges with one another, and ask for support.

What kind of peer support group would you like to create for yourself? A couples group, a men’s group, a women’s group, an empowerment support group? Research to see if there is an existing group you might join. More often than not, you will have to start your own group. Your next action step might then be to call or e-mail the people you know who would like to be part of a personal growth support group and ask them if they’re interested. Write down the next action step you will take to bring this about.

Putting It All Together

CHOOSE A HOME FOR YOUR AFFIRMATIONS AND VISUALIZATIONS

At this point, your affirmations and visualizations are scattered throughout this book or your journal. To facilitate working with them on a daily basis, go back through your journal or this book and put them all in one place. The last few pages of your journal may work well for this. If you don’t have a journal handy, we have left space below.

When you have placed all these mental seeds in one location, take a few moments to review the work you have done. Celebrate your accomplishment. Acknowledge yourself for the commitment you have made to your growth and well-being. Acknowledge yourself for taking time to examine your life and for how you want to create it. Recognize this moment for the significance of what it represents— you, as an empowered person, forging your own destiny! In the space below gather all the mental seeds (leave the Personal Power space blank for now).

Affirmations and Visualizations	Personal Power
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USE YOUR PERSONAL POWER TO SUSTAIN YOUR GROWTH

It’s time to draw on the sources of personal power that you cultivated in Chapter 3—those that provide you with the ability to sustain your growth over time. The seven sources of personal power are:

• Commitment

• Discipline

• Support system

• Inner guidance

• Lightness

• Love

• Finding your own truth

Go back over the affirmations and visualizations you have just listed. Next to each one, write down which sources of personal power will help you to manifest it. For example, you might decide that for your body vision to manifest, you need discipline and commitment; for your relationship vision, you need love; for work, finding your own truth; and for money, you need lightness. When you have done this, you will have a sense of what sources of personal power you need to cultivate further.

You may discover that a pattern emerges, that the same sources of personal power are needed for all or most of your affirmations. This is a very important indicator. It tells you how necessary it is to bring that source of personal power into your life.

To create a fulfilling life, you need personal power. You create personal power in the same way you create anything else—by focusing your mental attention on it. Take time each day to cultivate the particular sources of personal power you need to sustain your growth.

Now go back to the rooms in your guided visualization at the end of Chapter 3 and spruce up or redesign those that represent the sources of power you want to cultivate. If a particular room needs to be redesigned, take the time now to make the room exactly the way you want it. Make the room as enjoyable as possible. Then write out or draw this visualization next to the space that contains your affirmations and visualizations. Each day, start your affirmation and visualization work by visiting the personal power rooms you are cultivating. This will establish the right atmosphere for manifesting your visions.

You have journeyed long and learned much. As you apply what you’ve learned over the next few months and years, be aware that the journey is the destination. We experience the momentary satisfaction of manifesting what we have envisioned and celebrate the wonder of it. And then we ask ourselves, “What’s next?” and the journey continues. That is the essence of life’s adventure—enjoy it!