When Affirmations Don’t Work
Greetings beloved being of love and light. Affirmations are regularly used by many who embark on the spiritual awakening journey. Affirmations are positive statements about yourself that you repeat, and eventually, these affirmations become programming in your mind. The desire to use affirmations comes from the fact that we have all been negatively programmed by our society, and our programming determines the type of life we experience. Therefore, by positively reprogramming our minds, we can set ourselves free from the controls of society and create better lives for ourselves.
Affirmations are therefore an important tool to use at the beginning of your spiritual awakening journey. In particular, when you become aware of negative thoughts or emotions arising within you, such as the fear of not having enough money to survive, you can use an affirmation to switch your state of being to something more positive, e.g. “All my needs are always met, even before I know what they are”. By not giving energy to the negative thoughts, and by giving energy to positive thoughts instead, you no longer experience negative emotions, and you start creating a better life for yourself as you gradually realise that your mind creates your reality, and you are never, and have never been, a victim.
However, there comes a point when you realise that you are still searching for something that these affirmations are not giving you. You realise that you cannot experience true, permanent, unconditional happiness just by repeating “I am happy” all the time. And you cannot truly, permanently, and unconditionally love yourself just by repeating “I love myself”. This is because for you to experience true peace, love and joy, you must remember who you truly are. This means you must know who you are beyond your body and mind. When you use affirmations, you are still associating with your mind. Every belief within your mind, whether positive or negative, is another layer of programming that obscures you from who you really are. Affirmations don’t DEprogram you; they REprogram you. The issue is that you are still programmed.
Beliefs take you away from truths. You only believe in something when you don’t know the truth. And when you believe in something, you prevent yourself from searching for the actual truth because you think you have already found it. So in order to know who you truly are, you must drop all beliefs of who you are, including the positive ones like “I am beautiful” and “I am wealthy”. Each label, even if it is positive, is a layer of disguise. All labels must be dropped, and this idea of an ‘I’ must be dropped as well, in order to remember who you truly are. That is why you will never hear a truly enlightened person say “I am enlightened”.
To go beyond the mind, you must observe it. Observe the negative beliefs and thoughts, and observe the desire to create positive beliefs and thoughts. When you observe, you detach yourself from whatever you are observing. If you are able to observe your mind, then you must be separate from it. When you bring awareness to your mind like this, you will find that the voice in you head gradually disappears. Then, you can turn the observation towards yourself and explore who this ‘you’ is that has been observing the mind. Who is this you that is beyond all the positive and negative thoughts? Who is this you that is there when the voice in your head is not?
When you eventually do discover the answer to these questions, you will be so overcome with love and joy that you will know that you have found what you have always been looking for. At that point, you will realise that you are neither wealthy nor poor, beautiful or ugly, healthy or sick, intelligent or stupid, interesting or boring, as all of these labels were just illusions that you were indulging in. From that point onwards, it is the Divine, rather than your ego, that uses your mind as a tool to create what it wants.
Thank you for reading. If you’d like to find out about our spiritual retreats, you can find more information here.