Is That What You Really Want?

By Rev. Debra Redman

The most frustrating thing for anyone practicing affirmations, particularly people who are new to the concepts of the Law of Attraction, is when they are doing everything “right” and “nothing” appears to be happening. You were told to be really clear about what you want to attract. Visualization of every detail you can think of is the way to get exactly what you want. In the popular movie The Secret, prosperity gurus told of how they achieved their wealth, happiness, and success by visualizing the material things they wanted or needed. Visualize, Visualize, Visualize. Then tell the Universe when you want to it appear. Write about what you want to have happen. Say it out loud. Ask others to visualize with you and say it out loud. This is how an affirmation is constructed. Indeed, what people are being taught is what the New Thought movement calls affirmative prayer.

So, if you are doing all of the steps outlined above, where’s the new car? Where’s the money? Where’s the trip to paradise? Where’s the new significant other or the healthy relationship? Has it arrived? Has every affirmation been answered? Maybe one or two? Maybe none? Why didn’t you get everything you affirmed like the Law of Attraction is supposed to do and the way you were told it would? Why do affirmations work sometimes for most people and not at all for other people? What are denials and why would you use them? How do you use affirmations and denials so that they work for you? When do you know if either has worked in your life? Where do you begin looking for answers when you can’t seem to manifest anything according to the way you’ve been taught by the prosperity teachers you’ve read or the workshops you’ve attended?

The Secret did one big disservice to the masses who embraced the concepts from the movie and the book. The people who contributed their stories and philosophies left out the main ingredient necessary to make the entire formula work. They made it sound like all you needed was an intellectual thought generated in your mind in order to manifest material wealth and happiness. Affirm that there is happiness in your life even though everything is really going to hell in a hand basket in your life. Affirm that you can pay all your bills on time even with a negative balance in your checking account. Most people will tell you that they gave up on doing affirmations when life got hard because obviously the affirmations didn’t work or the money and happiness would be here. This is the wrong time to give up on the process, but we all do it.

The Law of Attraction is one of nine Universal Laws that are immutable. Universal Laws are considered the highest Truth by which we all live and function as humans on this earth, in this lifetime. So, what part of the equation to in the Law of Attraction did The Secret leave out? Feeling. They left out feeling and emotion. Thought plus feeling equals manifestation is the entire Law of Attraction equation. The Secret primarily said thought equals manifestation.

As you move into new levels of spiritual awareness, you naturally wish to start taking advantage of the Truth of Universal Law. However, this is not an automatically easy thing to do. As you begin to die to the old ways that no longer serve you, you are continually confronted with the subconscious and conscious belief systems that hold you back from manifesting positive, helpful, abundant, prosperous events in your life. You need to be able to acknowledge these blocks, beginning with Trust and Faith.

Trust and Faith are developed as you do your internal work of releasing tribal belief systems that keep you from believing that you are capable of manifesting anything that is in your Highest Good. However, when an affirmation involves a team of people and particular circumstances to be in place, it can appear that an affirmation is not being answered. Universal Consciousness is working for you at all times to help you. The timing of when, how, and where your affirmation is usually out of your control.

When this happens, the manifestation of what you asked for may not look, act, or appear to be what you asked to be delivered. How to tell when an affirmation is being answered is tricky sometimes. This article explores these aspects of affirmations and what appears to be its opposite, denials.

Faith and Trust: Subconscious vs. Conscious

What is the difference between trust and faith? An example would be a statement such as “I may not trust what is going on but I have faith that the Universe will take care of me.” Subconsciously, you have faith that things will turn out fine, even though you may not trust the appearances of the situation. As Mark Twain so aptly said, “Faith is believing what you know ain't so.” What you know ain’t so is the conscious reality of Trust. You may have Faith that the rent money will appear on time, but you don’t trust the circumstances as they appear now that the money will be there. Subconscious thoughts are stronger than conscious thoughts. Seventeenth century French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal summed it up nicely when he said, “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.” Faith is ultimately a feeling, an intuition, that when cultivated, guides your life even when it appears that you are being foolish and distrusting.

The Power of Tribal Belief Systems

Affirming often magnifies your conscious feeling that you don’t have what you are affirming. The more you affirm you do have whatever it is, the more you fight the feeling that you know you don’t really have it. You may have Faith and Trust, but you also have something else to deal with – your tribal belief systems. If you don’t heal and shed the old entrenched belief systems, they continue to rule your life even when they no longer serve you. The prime examples of tribal belief systems which usually interfere with manifestation fall under the categories of Self-concepts, Guilt, and Tradition.

Self-concepts include self-worth, self-respect, and self-confidence. Also included is a sense of your Highest Self working with you to help you determine what you wish to affirm and/or deny in your life. A sense of Oneness with the All That Is becomes real when you allow your Higher Self to guide through your intuition and feelings.

Chapter Thirteen of A Course in Miracles is a treatise on guilt. ACIM 13:I:8, verse 6, says “Guilt, then, is a way of holding past and future in your mind to ensure the ego’s continuity.” Continuing to explain how survival of the ego is the purpose of Guilt, “The ego teaches you to attack yourself because you are guilty, and this must increase the guilt, for guilt is the result of attack.” (paragraph 11, verse 1). As long as you hold onto Guilt, you cannot remember that you are God and One with All.

Believing that you are separate from All That Is is a habit. Habits become known as Traditions. Traditions are nothing more than habits that became ingrained in a tribe. As the tribe performed the same processes over and over again, some of them came to be worshiped and idolized, regardless of whether the habit was healthy and beneficial to the tribe. When you, as one member of the tribe, recognize that the Tradition no longer works, at least for you, the fight is on to keep you performing the habit. Your internal work is to identify and eradicate the traditions and habits that no longer serve you. Breaking free of the tribe will be necessary to be successful unless the tribe is ready to support your efforts.

You Are Not In Charge

You are not in charge of the how, when, who, what and where of your manifestation. You have two responsibilities when it comes to getting what you want from your affirmations and denials. The first is to be responsible for your reactions to the things the Universe does to set up the circumstances required to answer your prayer. The second responsibility is to recognize when your prayer has been answered. When an affirmation (or prayer) is answered, it just may not look the way you thought it was going to look. Sometimes our affirmations are the source of our chaos.

When your affirmations involve other people and a specific set of conditions, the universe has to shake things up to make that answer come true. For example, let’s say that you ask for a pony but you live in an apartment in the city. There are no stables in your vicinity and at the moment you have no access to horses. One day you find that you no longer have your city job and that you have to move to the country. If you are aware of how the circumstances are manifesting, you may think this is the Universe answering your prayer. You are moving to the country. There are horses in the country. You begin taking riding lessons at the local barn only to find out that you are highly allergic to horses! There goes your prayer! It got answered but only so that you can find out that it isn’t what you really wanted or that it isn’t in your Highest Good after all. You may walk away thinking that your affirmation was not answered. However, one day you interview with a new company called “Pony Express” and it turns out to be your dream job.

Your prayer was answered. The Universe provided you with the conditions needed to find out that you don’t really want to own a horse but you can enjoy them differently and you were set up to get the next Right and Perfect career and living opportunity. That’s a win-win situation! The only thing that prevents it from being an answered prayer is your reaction to the circumstances that occurred along the way.

Intelligence Blocks Feelings

The one thing that will keep your prayer from being answered is your mind. If you decide to resent being forced to move out to the country rather than react with a feeling of inquisitiveness, wonder and openness, you may not allow the information that you moved within five miles of a riding stable to enter your consciousness. You could drive by that barn every day for a year and not know it was there. The Universe doesn’t answer your prayer until you open up your reactions to allow for all possibilities. Your mind, where your intellect is found, is another stumbling block to getting your affirmations manifested.

Intelligence and intellectual knowledge of a thing do not help you manifest the larger affirmations you have for yourself. Intelligence relies too much on logic, rational thought, and concrete proof. It denies the power of feeling. Feeling is the gas in the Law of Attraction equation. This is where denials may be very useful to you. Begin to loosen the reins of Intellect by denying the power of the mind to keep you from using your intuition.

Divine Timing Sucks!

No matter how much you try to affirm your way out of it, you have to accept that your Highest Good is unfolding and accept that sometimes what you want does not fit into the Universe’s greater life plan for you and that is beyond your conscious understanding.

With all of this knowledge, you learn to understand that there is a higher consciousness that moves through you and, while you have free will, there are things that are simply out of your control. Sometimes you activate and align and seem to make things happen. Other times you can only stand still and be in the quiet moments, knowing that your highest good is being revealed to you in due time. It’s during those times that you are most likely to say Divine Timing sucks!

When you create and activate an affirmation, you want it to manifest immediately, if not sooner. Unfortunately, this is a result of Western society’s belief in immediate gratification. The old wisdom of “Good things are worth waiting for” is worth remembering while you learn how to allow Right and Perfect circumstances, conditions, and energies to coalesce into your Highest Good. If an affirmation really only involves yourself, then you may realize instant manifestation. However, most affirmations ultimately do involve energies outside yourself as well as a readiness to accept the gifts you have asked to be delivered.

Sometimes Divine Timing is perfect and you aren’t ready to receive what you thought you wanted. The nice part about this missed opportunity is the knowing that the Universe will try again and keep trying as long as that affirmation still serves you. When you release the intellect’s hold on feeling, become more flexible in your reactions, and learn to recognize the signs of a prayer being answered, you tell the Universe you are ready to receive all the Gifts that are waiting for you. This is the only way you get any influence over when the Universe delivers. You can influence, but you don’t get to make the decisions.

Denials Are Coping Mechanisms

In the meantime, while you are waiting for the affirmations you ordered to manifest, you get to cope with life as it is. The reality of your current situation may range from being merely uncomfortable to downright horrible. When you are in those times of despair, chaos, or stress, an affirmation isn’t going to magically change the situation. When used at these times, affirmations seem to simply magnify the reality of your uncomfortable situation. At these times, the appearance of Chaos, Change, Stress and Fear seem like very real entities that take over your mind, body and spirit.

Affirmations, no matter how often they are repeated, are not going to manifest to change the bad situation into a good one when you believe that Chaos, Change, Stress, and Fear have power over you. Denials do not seek to change the situation as it is. Denials do have the ability to change how you react to the negativity surrounding you. When you deny the power of an empty bank account to keep you from believing you have abundance and prosperity in your life, you open the Universal door to possibilities. Deny the power of another person’s negativity to make you believe that you are not capable, worthy, or honored as a human being and you begin the process of opening up to your own personal power.

Eventually, denials help put you on the road to healing your tribal belief systems so that you can begin constructively and successfully using affirmations. Denials help you have positive reactions to events that would normally have caused a negative reaction from you. The day you recognize that you responded differently to a particular situation than you would have previously, you will know that your denial worked.

Affirmations and Denials Take Practice

Repeating affirmations and denials over and over again aren’t going to get them manifested any sooner. However, there is power in saying your affirmations and denials as meditative mantras. Meditation helps you achieve the feeling that your prayers are being answered. When that happens, you can move through the day with calmness and peacefulness that keeps your intuition open to the signs the Universe sends to you. The Universe is constantly signaling to you that It’s working on your requests. It takes practice to know how to read the clues.

The manifestation of your affirmations and denials is your birthright. No one can take that away from you except you. Every day you must practice staying in a place of feeling and intuition. The intellect will be there as a tool to help you make sense of the signs. The feelings and intuition are going to help you recognize them. Striking this balance of mind, emotion, and intuition takes practice. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been on the spiritual path. Every day is a new day with its own unique set of challenges, energies, and possibilities.

Some days you’ll get it and Trust and Faith will seem natural. Other days, you’ll think you’ve completely lost it. Regardless of what appears to be Chaos, Change, Stress and Fear, your Faith is going to keep you going even when you don’t Trust what is going on around you. Bravely dumping the old belief systems that no longer serve you opens your ability to start creating and activating affirmations and denials that are in your Highest Good. Knowing how to read the signs takes practice. So, keep your physical and spiritual eyes open and your head up. Relax those hands on the reins, cowboy. Sit up and relax so that you can enjoy the ride.

Footnotes:
1. Quotes researched and copied from www.famous-quotes.com.
2. (1992) A Course In Miracles. Foundation for Inner Peace, Chapter 13, Section I. ISBN 0-9606388-9-X.