Everyday Enlightenment

Since the 1970′s, it’s been common to hear the expression, “I just want to be myself.” Intuitively, we know that most of our manifestation is part of a masquerade, that a lot of what we’re doing and a lot of what we’re saying isn’t powerful. Part of us remembers what it was like to be three or four years old, to be innocently incisive and irrepressibly honest. We are trained out of this honesty in favor of a perspective that places great importance on never disturbing anyone, never hurting anyone’s feelings. A glimmer of civility can be seen in this, but it’s usually accomplished at the price of sacrificing awareness.

Let’s face it, children are great at pushing buttons. Unfortunately, most adults have a low emotional IQ. We identify with our buttons. We don’t know our buttons from us. When someone pushes one of our buttons, we often defend it with our lives. It’s a shame, because having one of your buttons pushed is a great opportunity to discover where you’re not free. We don’t see it as an opportunity for two reasons: we don’t know who we are, and we don’t know how to release.

If you remembered who you really were, would you be snapping at someone because they put your toothbrush in the wrong place? “You know I always put my toothbrush on the right side!” And for this little thing we feel like they don’t respect us anymore. Perhaps they are as bored as you are with the comfortable status quo, and are not-so-consciously trying to return some aliveness to your relationship.

If you remembered who you really were, you would know that you can’t be disrespected. This is a great piece of wisdom from “A Course in Miracles”. “The Son of God can’t suffer.” Who you are is the Son of God. Since you are suffering, you must have made a mistake. You must have created a misperception, and then placed yourself at the effect of that misperception. This is your choice. There is no question that you feel like a victim to the situation. But, there is a difference between a feeling and the truth.

The truth is that which never changes. Who you are is like the sky. Everything that happens to you is like the weather. Weather, like emotions, or life situations, comes and goes, can be mild or severe, and can be beautiful or dreary. Who you really are never changes. As soon as you identify with any weather, you suffer. When you remember who you really are, you see the beauty of the weather for what it is.

For me, the great gift of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “Excuses Be Gone” is the clarification that standard affirmations don’t work. A standard affirmation is one made in a tone of supplication, of trying to get something you don’t have, of trying to be something that you think you are not.

Wayne’s teaching that the best you can do is to emulate Source is perfectly married with this notion. If who you are is Source, then what are you doing pretending that you don’t have something, that you are somehow deficient in who you are? When you affirm something in a tone of supplication or incompleteness, your actions speak louder than words. What you are actually affirming is that you are needy and incomplete. And then we wonder why we keep getting more of the same.

Wayne delivers us to a true affirmation which is, simply, a statement of the truth. With these affirmations, you acknowledge your relationship with Source, and are thus actually affirming something that you truly want, and that the universe would have for you as well.

A feeling of wanting or needing money is one that many people can identify with. A low-level affirmation would go something like, “I want to be wealthy.” What you are actually affirming here is that you are deficient in wealth and that wanting is very important to you. Since you are deficient now, you are setting up an unreachable goal, asking for something in the future. Since you can only have in the present, you will go on wanting indefinitely, and your wanting will intensify.

A higher-level affirmation would go something like, “I have great wealth now.” Notice how this affirmation is immediately more powerful because it puts you in the moment, where all power is. It also makes use of another one of Wayne’s teachings, that you must keep the end in mind, that you must operate as if you have the result now.

But this last affirmation can still be practiced quite selfishly, placing the emphasis on “I”. More powerful affirmations would move closer toward the truth. An affirmation inspired by Hale Dwoskin’s, “The Sedona Method”, might go something like, “I allow myself to have great wealth now.” The amazing thing about “The Sedona Method” is that the simple techniques operate from an assumption of who you really are. The real you is actually impartial. It understands that wealth and poverty are interchangeable. With this affirmation, you are free to be wealthy, but by no means do you have to be wealthy. This helps alleviate any unconscious impulse you may have to create wealth in compensation for some kind of felt deficiency. What’s most important is who you are, not what your manifestation is.

The affirmation from “Excuses Be Gone” is, “I am connected to an unlimited source of abundance.” As with the previous affirmation, this lets go of having to control the outcome. It is a statement of pure fact, from the point of view of Source. It opens the door for complete trust. Who you are is abundance. Do you really need to control exactly what the manifestation of abundance looks like in your life? Can you really even know what it’s supposed to look like? Perhaps the force that powers every molecule in the universe knows a little more about it than you. When you give up control, you are freed to be yourself.