Sometimes when we first start using affirmations they can feel foreign. If you’ve ever tried dabbling in affirmations, you might wonder why you would repeat something to yourself that you don’t yet believe is true.
The actual purpose of an affirmation is to take a statement that might not feel real in the world outside of you and to embody it. To actually become the vibration of the thing you are affirming.
When you start paying attention, what you’ll realize is that we are all already affirming things every day with our language, whether we intend to or not. When we say, “I am angry” instead of “I’m feeling anger,” we’re affirming that as our identity rather than an evolving ever shifting reality. So wouldn’t we want to use “I am” statements consciously to claim expansive, creative, loving, or more joyful states of being?
How I fell in love with affirmations…
I first discovered affirmations early on in my Spiritual journey, about 35 years ago. I was in my early days on the path of getting clean and sober, and at the time I was attending Unity Church. They used affirmations there and one they taught us was, “God is the source of my supply.”
I never really understood how to use affirmations until this one week when I was flat broke. I didn’t even have a dollar to my name. I was very new at doing professional Tarot card readings at the time and although I was normally booked up right from the beginning, I had an unusually slow week with a slew of cancellations. So after paying my rent and my bills, I think I had $0.35 in my bank account.
It was just me and my little dog and I had one can of dog food leftover. I remember thinking, “Well, either he’s going to eat or I am.” But I certainly wasn’t going to try eating the dog food, and if you know me even just a little you know the dog would come first! I knew I had to figure something out.
Suddenly I remembered that in Unity church they had told us to affirm that “God is the source of my supply.” So with nothing to lose and literally nowhere else to turn, I decided to try it. I kept saying the affirmation to myself, “God is the source of my supply. God is the source of my supply.” and after saying this to myself for hours, I started to find that I had embodied the message, and my stress melted. I locked in on a sense of mystical trust that didn’t depend on the material evidence being there before I’d believed. I just felt it in every cell of my being. Saying this until it became me worked. (Of course, you can easily replace the word “God” with Source, Spirit, Universe, or whatever you like.)
Before long, I heard a knock on my door. The night before, my neighbors had been up late having a party and to be honest they were pretty noisy and I wasn’t impressed but I had let it go since the affirmation seemed to clean up my feeling state pretty well overall. So I open my door to my neighbor who apologizes for the noise and then tells me she has all of this food leftover and asking me if I would I like it – a huge pan of lasagna and caesar salad. Enough to feed five people. I said I would take all of it!
But the magic didn’t stop there…
Later that day, my phone rang and it was a man I knew from my recovery group who also went to my church. He told me he wanted to do some tithing for someone who had impacted his Spiritual path, and he thought of me.
He said, “I have all of this paint. Are you interested in having me come paint your apartment?” Now I hadn’t affirmed to God that I wanted my apartment painted, but I kid you not, this was something I had been needing to do. I just about fell out of my chair!
I told him, “Yes, but I cannot pay you.” He said that was fine, that was the point of tithing – he wanted to do it for free but asked if I might be able to give him something to eat. Lucky enough, I had plenty of lasagna to share!
That one statement, “God is the source of my supply” changed my life. It opened me up to understanding a whole new relationship with positive affirmations and what it meant to embody the words we speak. It took reaching a place of desperation for me to give affirmations an honest try, but when I did, I was amazed at the chain reaction that was put into action from this practice. As I continued to use them, I became more trusting, more resourceful and more in alignment with the principles and values of the life I wanted to lead.
The positive thinking trap and how to avoid spiritual bypassing
A lot of people actually misunderstand affirmations and how to manifest things in your life using affirmations. Positive thinking and affirmations are not the same. In fact, I’m not really a fan of positive thinking as a concept because it can be a way to escape what really needs to be addressed within you.
Simply thinking positively can be a really slippery slope into Spiritual bypassing – where we just decide we’re going to think that everything is good and dandy when the truth is, we’re hurt, or angry, or struggling. Sometimes we even use it to avoid being accountable for our part in the much needed changes that are required of us in times of great transformation.
There’s a time and place for positive thinking. When you’re aiming for a goal you think is in the highest good of all and you believe staying positive will help you achieve it, that’s great! But there’s a fine line with positive thinking. It should never be used as an escape from doing the difficult work, the self evaluation, and the deeper healing.
Far too often, we use positive thinking as a way to bypass the complexity of our experience. To try and get out of the fact that there are many layers to our experiences and we need to sort through them in order to heal.
How to use positive affirmations to manifest anything you want
That was a headline I saw on an ad the other day. That’s a big promise, right? People ask me about this kind of thing all the time, and I understand why… We’re living in a time of uncertainty and in times of uncertainty, people want magical solutions.
But honestly, this kind of statement is misleading. I do believe in Universal laws like the Law of Attraction, but it’s not as simple as this implies.
We would all love to be able to twiddle our noses and have everything we desire pop up in front of us. But I prefer to move the conversation from acquisition to actualization. Using affirmations won’t magically produce whatever you wish for, but it can help you actualize a better version of yourself.
Affirmations can shift us so we can meet life on life’s terms with more grace and ease. But don’t get stuck in thinking of this tool as a fix all. The truth is, none of the Universal laws are. Working with these laws to manifest what you desire depends on how you apply them and whether your desires are in alignment with what ALL of us need right now.
Right now in the world, we all need help. But we need help for the highest good, not just the individual.
Affirmations can help you realign your energy so you can live in the solution rather than the problem, but you’re responsible for the follow-through.
After you affirm something, you still have to do the work…
Affirming something means we are setting ourselves up to receive it, but also to respond to conditions and take whatever actions we need to move ourselves forward. Can this be instant? Yes, sometimes if everything is aligned. But in reality, you need to be patient and you need to surrender your attachments to a specific outcome.
When you say an affirmation and actually embody the meaning, you begin an unfolding process. The affirmation is like a blueprint for the action that needs to follow.
If you want to be a famous guitar player but you haven’t put the 10,000 hours in, it’s not going to magically happen for you because you affirm it. And even when you do put the work in and you affirm it, you might still not get the exact version of the manifestation you wanted. But you’ll have the satisfaction of feeling the experience of what you desired.
Or if you want to affirm that you are abundant and money is flowing easily to you, you have to begin living in a vibration of abundance. The affirmation starts to impact your body and your mind. You start to feel abundance through experiencing gratitude for everything you do have. And then as the Law of Attraction works, you call more abundance into your life.
Keep in mind that when you want something, it’s the experience you’re hoping that thing will give you – it’s rarely about the actual thing itself.
So if you want to learn how to manifest using affirmations, you have to understand that everything is energy. Your thoughts are energy. And the only way you can move from scarcity to abundance is through your consciousness. Through changing the energy you’re embodying. And you have to accept life on life’s terms too, things you cannot change outside of you, the bigger experience of our common collective that impacts us as well – both, and. This and that is true.
So do affirmations work? They absolutely help us shift.
When you get this shift, weird things start to happen! It feels kind of like magic… but only when you combine it with the follow through!
Using affirmations with intentions…
An intention is a little bit different than a goal. A goal is the linear end point you want to arrive at, while an intention is the experience you want to have. When you set an intention, you start living to experience it immediately – rather than waiting for it to happen.
You can use affirmations together with intentions to manifest the experiences you want to have in your life. And even better, you can do this in flow with the phases of the moon to actually put the support of the Universe behind you!
Each moon cycle is a little different, but in general, the new moon is a really magical time to set intentions and sow seeds for the things you desire to bring to life.
Imagine your intention is like an acorn you plant, and then you tend to. You don’t dig it up to see how it’s doing. You just tend to it. And affirmations are a beautiful way of tending to our intentions.
As human beings, we tend to our intentions by embodying them. By feeling the energy of them and taking the action to support them. Then the affirmation is like the spark that wakes the acorn up and allows the seed to begin growing into a tree.
The affirmation alone isn’t going to bring the desire to life, but it helps you embody it and begin to bring it into being. And then the Universe responds to support you.
I’ve created a really fun guide about Manifesting With the New + Full Moon, which you can use to support you as you set intentions and manifest the things you want. This guide gives you simple rituals for bringing your desires to life with support from the natural cycles of the Universe, and will teach you about how to understand and work with lunar cycles throughout the month. Download the free guide here…
