Affirmation Basics - Part 2

Your mind is the starting point for change. Change your mind – change your life. In Part I of Affirmations Basics, we said that before you affirm what you do want, you must deny what you do not want. Affirmations and denials are tools for deliberately building your mind. Denials prep your mind for affirmations. They dissolve negative beliefs, thereby creating room in your mind for positive affirmations of abundance. Before we explore what denials are, let us get clear on what denials are not. ***Denials are not a way of focusing on what you do not want. Using denials will not interfere with you attracting what you want. The essence of a denial is its dissolving power. Its very nature will not allow you to hold onto any condition that you do not want. Instead of focusing you upon a specific form, denials withdraw your attention from the belief behind any undesired form. ***Denials are not your excuse to live in denial. They are not a sophisticated form of sticking your head in the sand about the undesired problems in your life. To the casual observer, it may appear that denials are a way of “pretending” that a bad condition does not exist. But the skilled thinker knows that as long as you live in mental contact with any undesirable condition, you recognize its place and therefore give it license to be in your experience. Denials sever mental contact. ***Denials are not applied to physical conditions. All causes are mental. Denials are your opportunity to speak the truth to the false beliefs that stand under the experiences you no longer want. True denial targets negative beliefs, not negative things. Always deny the mental cause. So, what are denials? Denials are like Shout® Stain Remover for the mind. They erase tough mental stains, i.e. the false beliefs in sickness, poverty or limitation. Everything in our lives gets a stain at one point or another that must be cleaned – our homes, our cars, our bodies, our clothes, our offices – nothing is exempt. Neither are our minds exempt. It is the nature of thought to repeat itself. Every time a thought replicates, it grows stronger or weaker depending upon how much attention we give it. We can turn minor troublesome situations into persistent tough mental stains just by giving them too much attention. We call that making mountains out of molehills. Where the attention goes, thereto energy flows. Anyone who has a child or has dealt with children knows this axiom to be 100% true. The behavior you give the most energy to will be the behavior you get the most of in return. Children who discover that acting out draws their parents’ energy more quickly and intensely than behaving respectably, act out. The appearance of any undesirable condition – lack of money, lack of resources, lack of success, chronic illness, anger, resentment, fear, sadness, depression – serves as your indicator that at some point, you gave too much attention to some false belief and turned it into a tough mental stain. And, because all causes are mental, the only way to be free of that unwanted experience is to treat the mind. Get your Shout® (your denials) and work that mental stain out! There are those who would argue that you only need to keep in mind a picture of what you want. That is akin to saying that you can put a badly stained shirt in the washer and expect it to come clean with one wash and no extra effort. Just as tough stains need Shout®, tough mental stains need denials. Every great overcomer has had to address his own tough mental stains and deny them out of the fabric of his mind. Consider the triumph of aviator Amelia Earhart. Born into a world that had a prescribed pattern for women to follow, Earhart had to first overcome her own internal beliefs about what was true for women. There are things in your life that you want to accomplish that go against everything your parents or caregivers have taught you was possible for you. Like Ms. Earhart, you must overcome those internal beliefs you were given. First, deny their reality and then affirm your new truth. Our minds and even our bodies are loaded with persistent mental stains about what is possible for us. In truth, all things are possible. We are capable of anything we can imagine. But, we do not demonstrate all that we imagine because of the persistent mental stains in our minds that mar the grand images of our dreams. Denials erase, cleanse and release from your mind the persistent mental stains that keep you from the life you were meant to live. In the next installment of Affirmations Basics, we will examine more closely when denials are needed and how to create and properly use denials.