Your mind is like a garden.

If you do not deliberately plant flowers and tend carefully, weeds will grow without any encouragement at all.  

-Brian Tracy

Positive affirmations work. Sometimes. When it does not work, it is because our thoughts are not aligned with our feelings. I may want to believe that “I love myself” and  “I deserve happiness.” But somewhere inside, as I say it, a monster (I don’t know who put it there)  says, “bullshit” and cancels out my affirmation. Just like that.

But you gotta fake it til you make it.

You just can’t walk around telling awful lies about yourself, to yourself, that you suck. That the other person’s happiness is more important than yours. That prosperity is just not in your cards. That you aren’t smart or beautiful enough. So it’s best to stop telling the story.

Truth is, you are incredible, lovable, beautiful, unique and deserve to be happy. It just may not feel true. Until it does, there is a technique that I believe is more effective than repeating affirmations that get canceled out by inner monsters. Until “I love myself” can roll off the tongue without the “bullshit” that follows, add something else that your monster doesn’t know what to do with.

Adding can be easier than subtracting. 

For instance, some find it easier to add healthy foods into their diets than to subtract the bad ones. Focus on the healthy foods you added long enough, and the healthy habits can prevail as the cravings for junk food diminish. When the focus is on subtracting the junk food, the urge persists and eventually wins.

Similarly, if positive affirmations are difficult because you resists them, then use the same addition technique by repeating words that inherently seeds Self love and fearlessness, only you don’t fully know that it does. Because it’s not in your native tongue. Which is good, cause then your ego can’t go into full sabotoge mode. It can tell you to stop, but it can’t shut you down with the “bullshit.” 

Chant.

Any time your story comes up, immediately replace it with any of these three (there are many, many others, but 3’s a good start, right?):

• Sat Nam 
• Ek Ong Kar Sat Gur Prasad, Sat Gur Prasad, Ek Ong Kar 
• Raa Raa Raa Raa Maa Maa Maa Maa, Rama Rama Sa Ta Na Ma 

Try it. Repeat often. See what happens. Here is how it sounds like on repeat. So you’ve got this story going on in your head that sounds a little bit like blame, shame or justification, and you say, 

As I was writing this blog, I received a sweet phone call from a friend who stopped by this morning. He said, “This morning, I woke up very early with wonderful thoughts on my mind. And my navigation went to where my thoughts were going...”

That’s really how it works.