Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Three)

Positive affirmations added to meditation can significantly change the equation, and that’s where my personal experience comes into play. An affirmation repeated after 20–30 minutes of meditation is a different animal after one has just spent considerable time reducing mental chatter, sustaining attention, becoming more aware of thoughts, without automatically following them, settling physiological arousal, and entering a state in which one’s attention is unusually concentrated. 

Both can be a very effective combination. It’s probably less as programming the subconscious and more as repeatedly training where my attention and behavior go, creating a fascinating feedback loop. For example let’s say that my affirmation is about becoming more patient (something I’ve been working on). When I meditate, I become calm, I repeat the affirmation while visualizing or emotionally experiencing patience. Now, just a bit later, I encounter an irritating situation.

Previously, the event might have triggered irritation and then automatic reaction, but after months of repetition, If I begin to get the same irritation, I can recognize it and that gives me pause before making a more deliberate choice. I won’t probably not even remember the affirmation consciously and that's a part that can feel almost mysterious, but it might be that the conscious mind doesn't have to be present at every step for a learned pattern to influence behavior. 

Then there’s another ingredient, and that’s emotion, a particularly important element in my case. An affirmation such as “I am becoming more patient” is one thing, but if repeated while I’m in a deeply peaceful state, accompanied by a genuine feeling of appreciation for the people and experiences that shaped me, it may turn into something quite different. 

I’m not merely saying the proposition, but I’m now associating it with a particular internal state that gives me something that through attention, followed by emotion, plus repetition, gets a true change in my behavior. That’s a much more potent learning combination than simply repeating words. 

My meditation/affirmation sequence may be doing several jobs simultaneously, and there is a remarkable circularity where meditation makes the affirmation more receptive. 

My affirmation gives my meditation a direction, while my behavior provides evidence, that evidence strengthens the affirmation and finally, my stronger belief makes subsequent meditation more meaningful. If anything, this explains in part why, after several years, I describe the results as “stunning.” 

Tomorrow we’ll conclude with the limitation I can see in part of my approach...

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Two)

In trying to find out how this synergistic practice has impacted my life, so far, I need to distinguish between the fact “this produced real changes in me” from “there is a mysterious force causing external events to happen.” The first is compatible with what we know about attention, learning, motivation and behavior. The second is a bit esoteric and would require evidence that goes beyond my experience.

What may have happened in my case is that when I arrived in the US, positive thinking that was a big part of personal development techniques, gave me an anchor in which by thinking positively and believing in myself I could pursue my goal while not letting obstacles define what was possible. 

Whether or not every claim made by the positive-thinking movement was justified, that philosophy had a very practical consequence: it affected what I repeatedly paid attention to and what actions seemed in the realm of my possibilities. 

I also had an important advantage as I wasn’t merely reading about positive thinking, but was living in an environment that rewarded initiative and adaptation, so some of those beliefs were reinforced by my direct experience. My struggle to professionally adapt (US corporate life, 

American culture and language) and my steadfast focus, helped me succeed as belief-triggered action engendered results, which reinforced my convictions and helped me tackle more action. The whole process becomes a virtuous circle. This said, an affirmation repeated when one is busy, distracted, skeptical, emotionally agitated, and simply negative or dystopian is essentially a sentence competing with thousands of other thoughts. 

One case in point is Donald Trump who has long cited the late minister Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, as a profound personal and spiritual mentor, saying that he could listen to Peale "all day" and said he was one of the greatest speakers and influences in his life, but some members of the late Peale’s family have distanced themselves from the president, expressing discomfort with how Trump utilized Peale's religious teachings to project a purely materialistic, aggressive and malevolent public image. 

Tomorrow, we’ll try to understand how meditation can mesh with affirmations from positive thinking…

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part One)

When I first came to the US in the 70s, I was impressed with the movement towards “Positive Thinking” that was part and parcel of the business culture, at least that was what I thought, compared to Europe’s built-in pessimism and cynicism. 

Perhaps, it’s after reading “Think and Grow Rich” that I got behind that way of thinking, and I must admit that it did help me adapt to the American way of working, and ultimately brought me success. Fast forward to 2020 when I successfully returned to meditation and after a couple years, I began to meld affirmations linked to my desires and goals with that process.

The results have been stunning since then. Is this a fluke or can it be explained someway? Still, I can’t think I should dismiss it as a bizarre phenomenon. There is a quite plausible psychological explanation for why meditation and affirmations can work in synergy when fused together—and my particular story supports this. 

Still, on the other hand, there’s a very reasonable hypothesis that my practice has changed the probability of certain thoughts, emotional responses and behaviors occurring—and those small changes, repeated thousands of times, have produced surprisingly large differences over several years. 

In the next blog, we’ll dig deeper into what might have really happened through my practice, so make sure to stay with me... 

The end of human customer support?

Those of you who read this blog regularly know how much I can get frustrated with customer service support over the phone. In the US, that kind of service is rarely done domestically, but comes increasingly from the Philippines. 

There, these people mean well and for the most part are grateful to have that job and do the very best they can. 

Depending on their tenure on the job, they know little about what they’re helping callers with and depending on their accent and command of English, they can be hard, yet alone impossible to comprehend so, overall, that’s not a good way to start. 

So, recently, when my call ended up in the Philippines, couldn’t get resolved, needed to be escalated, or depended on someone more qualified to give me a call when they’d be available, I’ve been turning to AI and every time I needed my questions answered or my problem resolved. 

Bottom line, my questions were addressed well beyond my expectations and I got them in writing. So far, it has beat the “human touch”, and with the constant improvements that I’ve observed around AI, I don’t see why this wouldn’t, on the contrary, it’s likely to get even better. 

Now for the bad news; in a not-so-distant future, we can bet that this will be the beginning of the end of these customer support centers staffed with real humans either in the US, in the Philippines, or anywhere else...

Housing as an inflation yardstick?

Often, I wonder how much the cost of lodging weighs into the American CPI and it's not underestimated in view of the meteoric rise of real estate costs. In fact, isn't the seemingly unstoppable cost of lodging the true reflection of our national indebtedness and of the real inflation that's hitting us all? It’s true that the housing and lodging component—called “Shelter” in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)—actually carries a massive weight. 

It accounts for roughly 35% of the total headline CPI and over 42% of Core CPI (which excludes food and energy). Far from being understated in terms of its weight, shelter is by a wide margin the single largest component in the entire CPI basket. However, the reason many just like me feel the CPI fails to capture the "meteoric rise" of real estate comes down to how shelter is measured, rather than its percentage weight. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explicitly treats home ownership as an asset investment, not a consumer expense.

For example, purchasing a $600,000 home and watching its value jump to $800,000 is viewed as capital appreciation (wealth building), not the ongoing cost of living. To measure the cost of shelter services for homeowners without counting the investment side, the BLS uses Owners' Equivalent Rent (OER that’s accounting for ~26.7% of the CPI). 

OER asks homeowners or surveys local markets: "If you were to rent your home today, how much would it rent for?" In this case, the rent of primary residence makes up the remaining ~7.7% of the shelter weight and tracks actual tenant lease prices. Because existing homeowners with fixed-rate 30-year mortgages don't see their monthly principal and interest payment change when home prices skyrocket, the CPI intentionally excludes home sales prices, down payments, and mortgage principal. 

Importantly, the CPI shelter data suffers from a well-known 6- to 12-month lag. The BLS surveys existing rents, but most people sign 12-month leases. When market rents or home prices surge rapidly in real time, it takes a long time for those increases to filter into average active leases captured by the CPI survey. Now as to whether housing cost is a true reflection of inflation and national debt, my point touches on a central theme in monetary economics. 

The relationship between national indebtedness, asset prices, and inflation operates across a few key dynamics: When national debt expands significantly and central banks maintain low interest rates or expand money supply, that liquidity often flows directly into hard assets (real estate, stocks). High home prices are frequently a direct symptom of currency debasement and cheap capital chasing a fixed supply of land and housing. 

Then, when central banks raise interest rates to fight overall consumer inflation, as they’re now doing, borrowing costs shoot up. For housing, this creates a "lock-in effect" where current owners refuse to sell their low-mortgage homes, starving the market of inventory and driving home prices up even further despite higher rates. Is this the "True" inflation I’m alluding to? For anyone trying to buy a first home, enter the rental market, or relocate, housing costs are indeed the primary driver of financial pressure. 

However, for a homeowner who locked in a 3% mortgage years ago, their actual out-of-pocket housing cost remains flat, meaning their personal inflation rate is vastly lower than non-homeowners. In conclusion, housing, while not understated in weight (35% is a massive share of the index), uses a methodology that deliberately insulates the CPI from tracking real estate asset prices directly. 

The result is an index that reflects smooth, lagged shelter consumption rather than the sharp, immediate cost of buying a home in today's market.

Crystal clear add-on sale

Our house is tall enough to require long and heavy ladders to clean its windows on the south facade and the main reason why we now some professional window washers to do the job, it that I no longer have the physical strength to handle a heavy ladder and it scares my wife to death when I’m standing on top of it. 

So every year we ask the same company to do the full outside windows washing job. I still do the entire interior. 

This year, after I paid the bill online, I was asked if I wanted to schedule another wash next quarter assuming that I would subscribe to the company’s quarterly or semi-annual washing plan that she was trying to push on its customers, as any one in the window washing business is doing nowadays, following in the footsteps of car washing outfits. 

Sure why not double or quadruple revenues, everyone tries to do it, right? In fact, in the home services industry, window cleaning companies are aggressively shifting toward recurring revenue subscription models. They structure quotes into bi-annual (twice a year) or quad-annual (quarterly) packages. While it's absolutely used to secure add-on sales, it is also driven by a mix of business economics and logistical strategy. 

With a "First Clean" catch, companies usually charge a premium (sometimes 1.5x) for the very first clean to establish a baseline, then drop to a lower rate for subsequent maintenance cleans. If a plan offers a flat discount across all visits, it’s up to the client to verify it’s truly cheaper than booking on-demand. Of course if the house is situated near dirt roads, coastal salt, heavy tree pollen, or an area with heavy construction, a quad-annual program might provide some value, but if the home is shielded and clean, an on-demand, once-a-year clean remains the most cost-effective option. 

So I answered the young lady that called me that way: “You see, I adore watching the dirt gradually deposit itself on my window panes, be it dirt from a heavy rainfall, insects crashing on it, or birds violently colliding with their mirror image on the glass and leaving a mark and a few feathers. For me it punctuates the rhythms of nature and when twelve months later it's time for cleaning again, it has effectively filtered all the bullshit that pour on us daily in this troubled world.” 

Bahm! As I was writing these last words, a big bird just hit a large window that was cleaned two days ago. It was a solid, hollow thunk—the exact tax you pay for keeping the glass flawlessly clean."

9-27 Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Five)

Now that we’ve been deliberately training the exact faculty that alcohol apparently helped me access years ago, we’ll discover that there's an intriguing connection with my (or your) meditation This is where our situation becomes particularly interesting as we already know what it feels like to enter a state in which deliberate, analytical thought becomes quieter while attention remains present. 

That is very close to what we want here. Recent research specifically examining mindfulness and second-language performance found that mindfulness is positively associated with a second language performance, even though researchers caution that its direct contribution appears relatively modest. 

Another 2026 study involving foreign-language learners found that mindfulness-based work was associated with greater awareness, acceptance, attentional control and with reduced speaking anxiety, although some of the benefits diminished after the intervention ended. So I wouldn't try to force us into a deeply meditative state immediately before speaking. 

That could actually make us too inwardly focused. Instead, we should think in terms of meditation bringing us relaxation, openness to open our Spanish flow and then get out of our own way. There is one technique I think might particularly benefit us, let’s call it "Spanish stream of consciousness." We set a timer for five minutes, we start talking in Spanish and make a pact with ourselves: For five minutes, the objective is not accuracy. 

The objective is continuity, we could even record ourselves, but refrain from listening to the recording immediately. Do another session the next day and after a full week, listen to the first and last recordings. We should probably discover something fascinating: expressions that initially required conscious construction have begun to appear automatically. 

That’s precisely the transition I was describing in my previous piece — from words stored in memory to linguistic reflexes. And perhaps the deepest lesson from your experience with alcohol is not “alcohol helped me speak languages.” It may might become: “I already possessed more linguistic knowledge than I could access while worrying about using it.” If that's the case, the goal isn't to put something into our brain. It's to get the gatekeeper out of the way. 

Good luck in trying this!