Life Lessons

Forget Affirmations, Let’s Talk Negations

Also how to not do things in a world that always does

Affirmations and gratitude are all very well and good, but it’s almost like sticking on more leaves on an artichoke. The positive messages will never seep into the heavily protected heart until the tough outer leaves are cut out.

In other food related metaphors, we need to first warm up the water in order to dissolve the honey quicker.

In case you missed another one of my very nuanced metaphors, affirmations are the honey here. Warming up the water is the act of shaking off all the stuff you have cloaked over yourself to prevent the world from getting to you. Those walls you built up high to the skies to ensure you remain un-attacked, unattached.

So affirmations will work, but with the help of negations.

Negations are the retelling of your needs — dictated by your soul, instead of the world.

Cue eye rolls — *WHATEVER does she mean?*

Here’s an example negation journal entry I recently made:

• LET GO of the voice in my head that I should be doing doing doing
• LET GO of the idea that without the doing I am not being
• LET GO of the notion that love only comes to me ‘as a result of’ and not ‘just because’

Quoting from Lisa Precious’s wonderful article, “Were you taught to forget about things that hurt you? We bury our pain and sadness, then attempt to shovel positivity over the top. Eventually, that festering rot within manifests as something else in our body, and we have to deal with it.”

Once we hit school going age, we are full body commanded by the world to start forming our purpose. Bear our weight, provide some value.

The golden ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ arises. We now have the responsibility to a. think for the future and b. learn from our past. And we get stuck in that loop.

I once conducted an exercise — a thought exercise (the only acceptable form of exercise).

I reviewed the thoughts I had during the day and put them into baskets: Basket a (things for the future), Basket b (things for the past), or Basket c (being in the present).

I am sure you can guess what I found.

I am as ordinary as they come — 90% of my thoughts teetered around baskets a and b. So 90% of my thoughts dwelt either anxiously in the past or expectantly in the future.

Imagine your brain being chopped up into three pieces (not really though, just divided).

Now as you are doing a task, let’s say cooking, one third of your brain’s energy is reeling from the injustices that happened to you ten years ago, and one third of your brain is worrying about all the time you are wasting cooking, while you could have been writing a banger article for Medium. Salute to Liberty Forrest for her golden wisdom, always!

And the remaining third is focused on not cutting yourself (Thank God).

Meditation is literally playing mind games with me. It is forcing me to just sit down and be in my energy of the moment. It is showing me how ‘I’ feel without the I. So meta.

Through meditation, I am learning to listen to all the chatter inside me. I am starting to accept (without distress) the freedom of not doing anything my soul doesn’t want to do.

The ability to choose to not do something you don’t want to do, even if it is the slightest whisper of hesitation in my heart (ah the luxury), is a wild art in today’s world of 95% productivity.

It’s the skill of listening to signals of negative thought patterns, the overpopulation of them. And instead of overcoming these thoughts with struggle and control, you aaactually just…listen to them.

If something is inducing anxiety, don’t try to change it with affirmatory messages. Be a benevolent mother. Don’t push it, cold-shoulder it, shame it into non-existence with some overlayed positive messaging.

Just allow it and listen to it. Sometimes those negative thoughts are actually sent to help you avoid a certain path you were not aligned to anyway.

When you have learnt to relax your rigid hold, there will come a time when all threads of consternation are gone. You won’t have to ‘strive to thrive’ so much anymore.

Gradually, there should come a point when you are effortlessly 90% in the present moment. And 10% of your brain will be a minimized tasks tab in the background that you can pop out at any moment you like.

The murkiness will be cleared out. Every new feeling will have its proper place and position in your heart. You can discern immediately what you are feeling. You won’t need fortune-tellers or psychiatrists to help you in the un-distressment process.

You are simply living by your soul’s rules — not what the world is scolding you into becoming.

Just as an FYI, I am definitely not there yet, but in the process. But let me know what it feels like when you get there! I am assuming, life flows magically.

So how to loosen the firm grip you have over your perceived reality? Let go of your incorrect notions. How? MeDiTaTiOn please. Be more now. Be more wow.

Here’s Lisa Precious / Smiley Blue’s article mentioned above:

And Liberty Forrest, Author’s, too:

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