Posts Tagged ‘Actions’

Read Affirmative Actions – Part 1

How Do Affirmations Really Work?
Affirmations should be viewed as a tool, and not a bandage or a simple optimistic declaration to make your wish come true. No one has a genie, unless you are staring at the bottom of a tequila bottle. For affirmations to truly work, there is a considerable amount to be done before the utterance of an affirmation will even begin to take shape.

If affirmations are seeds to be planted in your heart and mind, then you must wait for them to sprout and flourish. However, the most critical step people ignore is on the type of land you are planting these seeds.

Many proponents of affirmations suggest by simply repetitiously proclaiming your desires, they will not only manifest, but also replace the negative thoughts.

This is where I take issue.

The negative thoughts are the reasons you have not actualized your desires. Throwing fresh seeds on top of old, dried, unfruitful seeds will never yield success. By casting about positive seeds indiscriminately into your untended mental landscape is will only lead to frustration…because your affirmations aren’t working.

If you are saying affirmations to bring about a life change, are you planting these seeds on fertile soil or a plot of land dominated by weeds? If you have a yard full of weeds and trash, but you want a lawn manicured like of a golf course, how would you go about achieving this? Would you through grass seeds on the lot of littered land?

No, you would first clear any litter, dig up the weeds, possibly add new soil, wait for the rain to moisten the soil, then scatter the seeds. Once this is done you must continually water and nurture this land, carefully tending to it until you see the promise of sprouting.

Once the grass has full grown in, you will prune and nurture the lawn, to maintain it and realize its ultimate beauty.

This is likened to the process of planting the seeds of positive affirmations.

You cannot even grasps seeds of love with a heart full of hate, let alone plant those seeds in your mind. You cannot plant seeds of prosperity in a mindset of deprivation. You cannot plant seeds of leadership in a resistant mind.

You must first begin the clear your minds of the negative thoughts that stand in the way of you getting what you want. Because in essence, if your heart and mind was truly ready for what your affirmation calls for, it would have already flourished, so there is a reason why it hasn’t flourished.

You cannot claim to be a bestselling author if you are too afraid to approach the page, avoid criticism, or carry the load of many rejections.

You cannot claim a husband and children if you are afraid of relationships, have not released the injuries of past loves, or have not dared to explore what love really means.

Nor can you become a leader in your spiritual community if you are not upright in your beliefs, open to the spiritual conflicts with yourself and others, and are not ready to lead yourself.

Your heart and mind must be open in order to receive the manifestations of your affirmations.

I used to think affirmations and “dream boards” were a crock of shit.

While I always dreamt big and encouraged others to do the same, I thought you could only get the things you wanted by good, old-fashioned hard work. Just reciting your wants or looking at a homemade collage was wasted time you could’ve been actually working towards your dream.

Now after my illness, I have been converted to world of affirmations. But just because I now believe in affirmations, doesn’t mean I think they will work for everyone. They simply will not.

I’m not trying to be a dream-crusher, but a realist. Many people don’t realize that there is a process to be pursued before the utterance of an affirmation or a glimpse of a dream board will actually manifest.

What is an Affirmation?
According to Dictionary.com, an affirmation is the assertion that something exists or is true.

I like to think of them as the positive seeds we plant in our hearts and minds with the intent of flourishing dreams. These could be dreams about anything; our careers, family lives, spiritual growth…

The most common repetitive mantras I’ve heard take the following form:

“I am successful in everything I do.
“I want to be a bestselling author.”
“I feel happy, healthy, and must remain positive.”
“I want to be married and have children.”
“I will be rich because I attract only prosperity.”
“I want to be a pillar and inspiration to my community.”
“I have a fulfilling life.”

Saying these words to yourself can be calming and motivating when daunted by our hectic daily lives. This is the reason we clamor to these words during our tough moments, as we inhale and exhale to soothe our emotions in the midst of chaos.

While in recovery, I repeated words of encouragement and optimistic forethought as I struggled to learn how to walk again. I made a decision to use my mind as a motivating force through my recovery. But let’s be honest, it only works up to a certain point.

What an Affirmation is Not…
Just by saying, “I will walk again,” wasn’t enough for me to get out of my wheelchair and walk a mile. It took a lot of pain, determination, and hard work. And these were just not physical challenges, but emotional and mental as well.

Coming to terms with the fact that I could not do something I have been able to do with ease for 30 years was emotionally painful. Something so simple, I have taken for granted, was stripped away from me. I had to allow myself to grieve this loss before I could attempt to regain it.

An affirmation is not a magic pill, despite what many self-help gurus exclaim. Saying a few words to get us through a tough day or a rough patch in our lives is simply throwing those words out aimlessly and hoping for the best. If this is your approach, you have a better chance of winning the lottery, than actualizing your affirmation.

Affirmations will not change your negative thinking to positive, nor will it change the undesirable elements in your life to desirables.

As with anything worthwhile, time and patience is required.

Read Affirmative Actions – Part 2

The first few pages can make or break a book. These pages set the tone. These pages harbor the hook. These pages are what will entice a reader. And these pages determine if an editor will read the rest of your work.

Perhaps this performance pressure is the reason so many writers never make it pass the first few pages. So they contemplate, draft, reconsider, delete, draft again, edit, reedit only to start all over again. This obsessive finessing of words actually becomes an excuse not to forge ahead.

If you can’t move beyond these first pages, how are you ever going to get to the last pages?

I have long suffered from Obsessive Rewriting Disorder, especially in the beginning of my longer projects. While I am still seeking therapy for this writing condition, I did receive some form of counsel on how to move beyond the beginning pages from an article entitled “Into The Unforeseen” by Rivka Galchen in the June 2011 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

In her article, Galchen interviewed the notable Argentinian author Cesar Aira. Now I must admit, this was the first time I even heard of Cesar Aira, but I was intrigued to learn he has written countless novels, as well as translated even more works of English-language bestsellers for the Spanish speaking world, often unattributed. Basically, his corpus is so extensive, it puts the most severely afflicted hypergraphic to shame.

Even though his literature is foreign to me, I was able to easily translate his writing methods. Aira only writes for one hour a day, by hand. That’s it. Also, he doesn’t hard edit his work. Sound impossible, or at least improbable? My thoughts exactly, but according to Galchen, Aira approaches his work organically and creatively.

“Aira writes slowly, carefully, and every day. Once he has done his day’s work, he will not abandon or change it. Come Tuesday, whatever was written on Monday is irrevocable, and he must figure out a way forward. The way forward tends to involve following the logic of what’s already on the page while also incorporating whatever, by chance, intrudes upon reality that day—a chatty waitress, the writings of Leibniz, a dwarf, a passing wondering about the phases of the moon. Aira writes without a plan, into the unforeseen.

“… To write in this way is to cede some control to the medium, and also to chance, which shifts one along the spectrum, from writer as creator toward, say, writer as explorer. One hope underlying this method is that a book has a chance to be more interesting than the person who produced it. At the end one can always go back and shorten x and enhance y and pretend that some other thought never occurred.”

While in the end, editing is needed, but it’s not needed in the beginning and the middle. This method forces you to preserve what was written yesterday and forge ahead based on those words. This allows you to focus on what you will write, rather than what you did write.

Going back is easy, but going forward is the hard part.