How affirmations work, when to use them, and why they sometimes make you feel worse + guided meditation

The Healing Sanctuary
The Podcast

Welcome to this week's episode of the free edition of ​The Healing Sanctuary! Today, we're talking about affirmations, how they work, and why they sometimes don't work (and even make you feel worse!)

Affirmations are words that carry high vibrations. When these vibrations interact with our energy, they either vibrate in harmony with us or against us. This will cause our own energy to accelerate in the direction it's currently going in.

In order to understand how affirmations work (and why they sometimes don't), we need to understand how our brains process thoughts. We're going to get a brief overview of this, discuss how our thoughts work WITH or AGAINST affirmations, and then we'll do a meditation with affirmations for self-love, confidence, and self-worth.

If you are NOT in a space where affirmations help you, and they are making you feel worse right now, then you'll want to checkout my course on the power of meditation and visualization. It will help you right where you are, and it will teach you things about healing and your own self that you probably have never heard before. Get this course HERE.
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These public episodes are provided as a service to all who are on a healing journey, in need of some support, and in the process of awakening to their powerful inner self. You can find the private, members only version of The Healing Sanctuary here!

The Healing Sanctuary: Meditation & Empowerment · How affirmations work, when to use them, and why they sometimes make you feel worse + Meditation

Below, you will find a transcript of this episode (it's based on my notes and is not an exact replica of the episode). If you know someone who would benefit from this talk, please share it! You can find me on all the podcast apps, including Spotify and iTunes, under The Healing Sanctuary. These podcast episodes are free resources for anyone who needs it, and separate from my membership service.

The Healing Sanctuary: September 6th, 2022
How affirmations work, when to use them, and why they sometimes make you feel worse + Guided meditation w/ affirmations

Hello and welcome to The Healing Sanctuary. I’m your host Melissa Field. This week, I’m talking about affirmations, how they work, and why they aren’t always something we want to use. If you’ve ever felt worse or irritated or agitated while trying to use affirmations, I’m going to talk about why that happens, and what you would want to use instead when you’re in that space, which by the way, is a common feeling and one I’ve experienced a lot.

After our brief discussion, we’re going to have a 10 minute meditation with some affirmations for self-love, confidence, and self-worth. This meditation was included in my private membership this week, and if you enjoy the meditation you can download it and over 100 other ones by becoming a member, which I’ll tell you more about at the end of the episode.

To talk about how affirmations work, and why they sometimes don’t work at all, we need to talk briefly about how thoughts form in your brain. If you listened to my episode on intrusive and negative self-talk, then this will be a brief recap of some stuff we covered there.

When you think a thought, neurons in your brain fire together. These neurons will then fire and wire with similar thoughts, creating what is known as a neuron cluster. The more you think certain thoughts, the stronger and bigger a neuron cluster becomes. Your brain runs on electricity, and because electricity takes energy, it defaults to the neuron clusters that are the biggest or the most dominant in order to save energy.

So let’s say you’ve repeatedly thought to yourself, “I am a capable person.” As you go about your day, and you encounter obstacles in your work or your life, your brain flows its energy through the filter of your most dominant thoughts. When you’re facing a work challenge, your brain does not default to, “I can’t do it. I’m not good enough. I’m just going to get fired,” but rather, it goes to the neuron cluster that is running your dominant narrative or thought pattern, which is “I am a capable person”.  And in this cluster are all the similar thoughts, which leads you to conclude, “I can do this. I can find solutions. I can figure this out because I know what I’m doing.” And then of course these thoughts fire with the original thought, “I am a capable person,” and this neuron cluster gets stronger and your faith in yourself builds and the momentum goes on and on in this way.

This, in part, is how affirmations help us. They affirm to us things that help our energy flow in productive and positive ways. And as you may be guessing, if this is not your dominant way of thinking, affirmations will not flow with your thoughts, but AGAINST them, and this resistance is what makes them feel so out of alignment and wrong when we’re not ready for them.

If you do not have positive thoughts, and you have never once thought, I’m capable, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, and this is not your fault. How negative inner stories develop was covered fully in the episode on negative self-talk, and I just want you to know for now,  people do not have positive self-talk because they are more worthy or somehow better than you. All they had were different experiences that caused their neurons to fire together in a different way. That’s it. The only difference between you and a person who feels good about themselves is some tiny electrical pulses in the brain firing in different patterns.

As you can see, so much of who you believe you are is thoughts you think over and over, sometimes so often you don’t even realize they’re thoughts. Often times, the seed of a negative thought will be planted in our minds, perhaps by a parent or teacher, someone we trusted to guide our sense of self, and that seed might say something like, “You’re not good enough.” These seeds grow into deep roots, and we sometimes want to change them through affirmations, and when that doesn’t work, we can feel like we’re failing, or even worse, like this is just who we are.

The truth is, when affirmations don’t work, it’s not because they will never work and your thoughts will never change. All it means is your energy is not yet flowing in that direction, and you need to take a few steps before they can be effective.

What are the steps you would take? The first is to just acknowledge where you are and how you feel. A lot of times affirmations don’t work because something inside of us is trying to be seen and heard, and affirmations make that wounded part of us feel more invisible, which makes it shout louder to be heard. So if your affirmations aren’t working, try putting your hands on your heart, closing your eyes, taking some deep breaths and just repeating “I see you and I hear you.” Let yourself be with the part of yourself that’s hurting and give it some love. The love you give yourself when you’re feeling low, critical, and wounded is the seed upon which positive thoughts will grow, and so loving yourself when you’re hurting doesn’t mean you want to stay in that place. It means you are worthy of being loved, seen, and heard no matter what, and that is a powerful foundation upon which to build a new neural network.

So how exactly do affirmations work?

Every thought you think has an energetic vibration to it. Negative thoughts have a low and heavy vibration. Positive thoughts have a high and bright vibration. Things that match the energetic vibration inside of your mind feel natural and harmonious to your sense of self, and it doesn’t matter if that vibration is low or high, of the vibrations match, it feels like it belongs there. This, in essence, is why affirmations can either feel amazing or awful.
Affirmations are words that are, in nature, high vibrating.
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If your dominant thoughts about yourself and life are positive, then affirmations are going to vibrate in harmony with that, and amplify the positive feelings you’re having. It’s like adding fuel to a fire that burns bigger and brighter and jettisons you into an even better place. This is also true if you’re feeling neutral, or moving out of a negative space and starting to lean towards positive. You don’t have to feel fantastic for affirmations to work, you just need to be in the general area.

If your dominant thoughts about yourself and your life are negative, then those affirmations are going to feel like an out of tune musical instrument. It’s similar to a group of musicians playing in one style, and another musician stepping in that’s totally out of synch, out of tune, and out of rhythm with the band. You cannot force these two different sounds to come in harmony. Rather, you have to first turn down the volume of the first band, so that the second one can come in and play its beautiful music on its own.

Once you get to a place where you are either feeling neutral or leaning towards positive, you can use affirmations to carry your energy into a really high vibrating place. You can use them to reinforce positive thoughts so that your dominant thought flow is positive. If you’re in the process of untangling from a negative neural cluster and growing a positive ones, affirmations are like water and sunshine on that positive new neural network. It feeds what you want to grow and helps to root out what you’re moving on from.

 You can also use affirmations to accelerate manifestations and to get in harmony with what you want easier and faster. And you can use them to shift yourself into a higher state of being so you that you can access higher states of consciousness, which can help you to access new perspectives and be more in touch with your intuition.

What affirmations cannot do is change the flow of energy within you. They cannot shift you from negative thoughts to positive ones. All they can do is amplify what you’re already feelings. So if you feel like crap, they will probably end up making you feel worse. And if you feel neutral or good, they will take you into an even better place.

In order to shift your thoughts so that affirmations DO work for you, you want to start by doing what we discussed earlier, which is loving and holding space for yourself right where you are. Give yourself space to feel what you feel.

Along with giving myself space to heal and nourishing myself with self-love, another thing that has really helped me to shift my inner thought system is visualization. Visualization has a powerful way of bypassing what we think we know to be true, and convincing us that something else entirely is true. So for example, if you visualize yourself confident and  happy, your brain will believe that this is real for the duration  of the visualization. This isn’t going to instantly change how you think, but it will begin the process, and with consistent visualizing, you can change your inner mind map in powerful ways. I have a course on my website that talks all about visualization and how it works. It’s donation based, so any amount you donate, even just $1, will get you this course, the guided meditations, and the guided visualizations. That’s at melissa-field.com, or go to the link in my episode notes.

Now that we’ve talked about how affirmations work, how and why they don’t work, and when to use them, we’re going to do a meditation with affirmations. If you’re wondering if this is the right time to do it, or if it’s going to make you feel worse, just start listening. You’ll know pretty quick if this is for you or not. If it’s not for you, then go check out that course I mentioned, Heal your life with meditation and visualization, and start with that. You can find it at melissa-field.com or by connecting with me on IG @meditate_with_Melissa. And if you do want to work with affirmations, find a place to meditate, or just listen wherever you are and let’s get started.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to do these affirmations with me. If you enjoyed this meditation, you can download it and get 100 other meditations and visualizations by becoming a member of my private membership. You’ll also get a new meditation or visualization each week, and these are only available on this membership site. It’s $5 / month to join and you can start with a 1 week free trial. You’ll find that by going to melissa-field.com, by connecting with me on IG @meditate_with_melissa, or by going to the link in my episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode please leave a rating to help others find this podcast. I’ll be back next week with a discussion on personal value and self-worth and how to find it and cultivate. Thank you again and I hope to see you soon!