Have you tried using affirmations in your life?

Perhaps you tried repeating, “I am healed,” or “I am confident,” at the guidance of a coach or self-help book. Maybe you echoed statements like, “I am creative,” to get yourself out of writer’s block, or told yourself “I am wealthy” as an attempt to increase your financial security.

If that worked for you, great! But if you didn’t find success with that approach, you’re not alone. 

Most people don’t know that affirmations can backfire. The good news? There’s a simple change you can make to replace your limiting beliefs with empowering perceptions.

The Problem with Affirmations

We can run into problems when our affirmations take the form of statement, such as “I am beautiful.” Often, our subconscious minds have been heavily programmed, through societal or familial repetition, to reject that belief.

For example, women have been collectively brainwashed by the coercive propaganda of the beauty industry. Powerful marketing forces, backed by billions of advertising dollars, have programed our minds to see our natural bodies as inadequate, embarrassing, or broken. These beliefs were implanted in our minds as children, often from our families and the media.

In this case, a woman’s subconscious mind is programmed with the belief, “I am not beautiful.” If she repeats the statement “I am beautiful,” it can trigger and automatic denial response. She has so deeply internalized the opposite negative belief that her subconscious responds, “False!” just like Dwight Schrute in the TV show The Office.

Similar denial responses can arise from other affirmations, depending on your unique upbringing and socialization. For example, a person who grew up with a narcissistic parent may have been told as a child, “You aren’t good enough, look at how your peers are more successful than you.” 

As a result, their subconscious mind might believe: “I will never measure up to my peers.” In this situation, their subconscious mind might strongly resist the affirmation: “I am as good as my peers.”

Using Afformations Instead of Affirmations

What’s the solution? Turn your affirmation into an afformation, or positive question.

Whereas statements can elicit resistance, questions invite the subconscious to entertain new possibilities. Instead of rejecting a new belief, your subconscious starts to look for evidence that the question may be true.

3 Steps to create Effective afformations:

1. Frame it as a “Why is it that…” or “What if…” question. Let’s consider the previous example: thinness as a means to feel confident, sexual, or connected. Two afformations might be: “Why is it that I feel so sexually comfortable in my body?” Or, “What if I embody next-level confidence in my career?”
2. Identify the underlying emotional experience you want. For example, if you’ve been using the affirmation, “I am thin,” consider the emotional experience do you want to achieve. Is it confidence in your career? Permission to be sexual? A sense of belonging? Work that into your afformation.
3. Repeat the afformation three times, morning and night, while looking in the mirror. Louise Hay, who popularized affirmations and the self-help genre, calls this “mirror work.” I also recommend using a dry erase pen to write your afformation on your mirrors, or write it on sticky notes where you will see it regularly.

Afformations and Flower Essences

As a Body Connection Coach, I help my clients re-wire unhealthy beliefs that keep them stuck in patterns of self-sabotage, self-doubt, and self-repression. In order to achieve profound change in a short-amount of time, I address the energetic, subconscious, and spiritual levels of healing.

I incorporate tools like life coaching, hypnotherapy, and EFT (or Tapping). One of the most powerful tools I use, however, are the flower essences at my company Floral Song.

Flower essences (which are not essential oils) work on an energetic level to release trapped emotions and limiting beliefs. They help my clients make positive changes and healthy habits that would otherwise take years to achieve with mindset work alone. Even lifelong problems with self-sabotage and negative emotions can be profoundly shifted within a month.

Each Floral Song Flower Essences comes with its own afformation. Repeating this afformation helps the subconscious mind integrate the energetic, emotional shifts facilitated by the essence. 

GENTLE GRACE FLOWER ESSENCE

When it comes to releasing limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging patterns, I use the Gentle Grace™ Flower Essence with my clients.

Do you feel like you’re not making enough progress in health habits, self-growth, or career achievement. On the surface, you might feel frustrated but underneath, you’re disappointed with yourself.

As we approach the New Year, many people feel haunted by past resolutions that didn’t stick. Instead of repeating the pattern of failed resolutions, what if you instead addressed the limiting belief that created that pattern in the first place?

Gentle Grace™ shifts emotional patterns related to not feeling like enough. It provides energetic support to nurture healthy behaviors with tenderness and self-compassion. You’ll notice kinder internal dialogue that helps new habits stick.

Click here to get Gentle Grace Flower Essence. Using it, you’ll feel more self-acceptance and enoughness within a week.

Have you used affirmations or afformations in your healing journey?