Toward More Powerful Affirmations
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.