Affirmation = yes or no?
The main ideas from the chapter are:
The Importance of Affirmations: Affirmations are positive statements that can boost self-confidence and inner strength, help overcome fear and shyness, and support goal achievement.
Positive effects: Repeating positive phrases such as „I am strong“ can improve self-esteem and help cope with challenges.
Risks and challenges: Affirmations can be ineffective or harmful if they are unrealistic or if they are not backed up with concrete actions. They can also gloss over negative feelings or problems.
Manipulation: Affirmations can be used to manipulate others, which can lead to broken relationships and loss of trust.
Reality and Affirmations: Affirmations should not be an escape from reality, but should be supported by concrete actions and honest acknowledgement and resolution of negative feelings and problems.
Personal experience: The author shares his own experiences with affirmations and stresses the importance of honesty and concrete steps to achieve goals.
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Affirmations are said to be one of the most important aspects of human existence. Affirmation means expressing positive attitudes towards yourself, your environment and the world around you. It can relate to different areas of life such as health, love, career or personal development. Affirmations can be formulated as sentences, words or thoughts that empower us and support us in our endeavors. Yes, they are actually modern repetitive prayers of the „Our Father“ type – and it is perhaps obvious from the introduction what I am going for in this chapter = exactly that, it is the power of feeling, experiencing or conversely mindlessly repeating „nonsense“ that I either don’t understand or „don’t believe“ 😉
But affirmations can also be a very powerful tool for achieving goals and improving life. When we repeat positive thoughts and phrases to ourselves, such as „I am strong“ or „I have value“, we can help improve our self-esteem and strengthen our inner strength. Affirmations can also help overcome fear and shyness, and strengthen our ability to cope with challenges. They then function as a kind of reminder of reality or of my clearly stated goal.
However, affirmations can also be problematic. If we repeat meaningless or unrealistic phrases to ourselves, such as „I am the most beautiful in the world,“ we can get into trouble. These phrases cannot help us if they do not correspond to reality. Moreover, if we repeat positive phrases to ourselves without doing anything concrete for our development, we can fall into the trap of a false sense of achievement. It is important to remember that affirmations must be backed up by concrete actions that move us forward.
Another problem with affirmations is that they can be misused to gloss over negative feelings or problems. If we try to convince ourselves that everything is fine when in fact we have problems, we can get ourselves into even more trouble. Affirmations should be used to strengthen our ability to solve problems, not to help us ignore them. We talked about rose-colored or black glasses at the beginning of this book = well, if we use affirmations as a coating over rust or just those rose-colored glasses, it’s obvious what that will lead to, isn’t it? Respectively, it will lead to either nothing or nothing „good“ for our perception… As we already know, the key is instead to acknowledge and describe all those negations/ugly/blocks as honestly as possible = and most importantly then to resolve/clean/unblock them!
Last but not least, affirmations can be used to manipulate others. If we try to convince others that we are something that we are not, we can hurt not only ourselves but also those around us. Manipulative affirmations can lead to broken relationships and loss of trust because others may feel that we are insincere or untrustworthy. Repeating what has been written before = we can sugarcoat everything, but never feelings! 😉
You really need to realize in depth that affirmations are basically a „rolling negations“ program! Pretty similar to positive thinking. Affirmations are also an escape from reality, the present, in a way. Perhaps a better expression of the same, it’s a kind of positive program, an application that tries to roll over negations – it can be done, but it’s tedious. I’m telling myself I have something I don’t have, that I already have it. That’s why it’s so important to understand the difference from setting a goal, an intention, and from talking yourself into something, or heaven forbid, fooling yourself into something…
Maybe I’m going a bit too much with the skin on, but that’s also the principle of my writing 🙂 below I will describe exactly my gradually developing affirmations, which I subsequently backed away from basically for the reasons written above, and I dare say that the thoughtful reader who has gotten this far in their reading will not scoff/mock, but will instead understand what led me to them and equally what led me subsequently away from them 😉
My affirmations in the full/maximum version looked like this:
„Okay, so I’m living; I’m living our matrix, our Sims, I’m playing our GTA. I’m living in the arms of a friendly, loving, lovable universe, space.
There’s nothing out there. Everything is my mental image. A hologram. There are no boogeymen out there, there’s nothing out there!
There is no objective reality. What we call reality is a super position of mental images of subjective universes.
I’m the master of my universe, so act like it! Empower the decision, the intention. Deep peace (I used to add deep inner peace).
Everything that happens to you, you make yourself, you attract. That’s why you can change it too. And it doesn’t happen based on what you think, it happens based on how you feel.
Why do you deal with it? Why does it stress you out? Why are you afraid of it? Why do you worry about it? Give yourself this amazing freedom, don’t worry about anything, don’t be afraid of anything, don’t stress about anything! It’s all up to the universe and the processes, live in love and abundance!
You concentrate on your feelings, your experiencing – the how, leave it to the universe.
I don’t expect anything, I have no expectations and I leave it to the universe and accept it as it is.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Leave it all to the universe, to the feelings, to the hologram, to the processes, to the law of attraction.
It’s all a hologram, I’m a sliver of a hologram.
The stillness means you’re in the present, there’s no program running, no app.
I live a perfectly happy life. You want to be happy? Then be! Be happy now! And not just yet!
I’m complete in myself. And I love myself. I have only myself and the universe. The universe communicates with me in a wonderful way. Gently, tenderly – listen to it.
I have the perfect mission. I am a master of words. I am ideally successful. I am ideally popular. I am ideally famous. I am ideally loved. I have the ideal job. I have an ideal partner.
It only exists now, so observe and rejoice.
I’m ideally rich, I live in ideal abundance. And I have everything I want from the cosmic catalogue.“
Today, I’m just reminding myself (and trying to deeply understand/imagine/feel/realize) = I live an ideally happy life… Yes, really – nothing more 🙂
And an addendum from practice = sometimes I find a better goal than „I have an ideal relationship with or to“, because it may be that I don’t want to have any relationship with this or that, so „I have ideally resolved“ is better…