Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Four)

In melding meditation with affirmations, there is an important caveat about the latter. It starts with a well-known problem associated with simplistic positive affirmations. For instance, if someone who feels completely inadequate repeatedly says: “I am extraordinarily successful, confident and powerful!”, their mind may respond: “No you're not.” 

This contradiction will actually make the exercise counterproductive. In what I’m proposing, the approach sounds different because my affirmations have been embedded into a broader meditation practice and in my accumulated life experience. 

An affirmation like “I can continue learning and growing” is much easier for the mind to accept than “Everything I want will come to me.” The first one produces some useful mean and I don’t think that its effect becomes less effective with age. 

In some respects, older folks like you and me might in fact have an advantage that we didn't have in your 30s or 40s, as we’ve got decades of experience to draw upon. 

When we all agree that difficult or challenging experiences can become sources of growth, we are not merely repeating a motivational slogan, but we are pulling from an accumulated lifetime of experiences that can be substantiated. 

Our mind can now say, “Yes. I've actually seen this happen”, giving our affirmation considerably more credibility and it may be the main reason why my current practice feels different from the positive-thinking philosophy I encountered in the 1970s. 

In these days, the message was largely, “Believe that you can.” Today, my practice is in fact closer to, “I have lived enough to know that I can change—and I intend to keep doing so.” 

That's a much deeper proposition. Still, I would remain careful about attributing every positive development I’ve experienced since 2020 to meditation and affirmations. I will admit that life contains too many variables for me to establish that from personal experience. 

That's actually more interesting to me than believing that a simple affirmation will somehow magically attract a desired outcome. In reality, I've discovered something potentially much more useful: I have developed a way of deliberately influencing the person that will make my future decisions which is a very powerful form of self-development.