You know the feeling when you get stuck in your head? When your little inner voice just won’t quit with the negative comment and the criticisms?
Please tell me this happens to you…
It is time to turn off that voice and invite the positive voice to lead the ongoing dialogue in between the ears!
When people tout the benefits of positive affirmations and mantras they say a lot of really cool things. I look at positive affirmations as simply the self talk I need to hear in order to drown out the negative voice, the self talk that is helpful vs toxic. Mantras are a simple word or sound that you repeat to yourself over and over again. I recently started listening to OM mantras on YouTube to check them out.
This site claims that mantras can cleanse your body of stress, allow you to experience more synchronicity and serendipity and unite our left and right brains allowing us to access our gut feelings, intuition and creative problem solving.
This one states “It is our self talk that creates our self concept, and there is a one-to-one relationship between our self concept(s) and our level of performance.” In other words if my self talk tells me I am stupid and lazy I will perform at a stupid and lazy level. I have read that positive affirmations, self talk and mantras help you plug into the universe which will then conspire in your favor to reach your dreams.
HOW COOL IS THAT?
I am sure that 10 years ago I would have laughed at this concept and dismissed it as BS. How could positive thinking and mantras change my life? I would have thought people used these as coping mechanisms when they couldn’t actually get themselves to do something about their life circumstances.
I can visualize someone quietly telling themselves “I am fit and trim, healthy and strong. Capable of doing any activity I set my mind to” while sitting in a recliner clearly overweight and not having walked a mile in the last year.
Flash forward a few years and that is actually one of the positive mantras I use daily. When I get down on myself for not exercising or for feeling sluggish I quietly tell myself “I am fit and trim, healthy and strong. Capable of doing any activity I set my mind to.” I recite this to myself while out waking the dog and while driving to work.
Getting my head into a positive framework sets me up to make good decisions regarding my health throughout the day. If I listened to the negative self talk that my mind goes to, as if on auto pilot, I would hear a very different message. That message sounds more like “I am stupid, I am lazy. I don’t want to exercise.”
I am learning that I have a choice regarding which voice to listen to and I choose to listen to the voice that gets my kayak paddling in the right direction!
Sometimes when it seems like I will never reach my goals I go back to the beginning. I identify those goals, tell myself why they are priorities and get my head back into the game of figuring out how I will accomplish them. One of my goals is to be in great health so I can enjoy my retirement instead of spending it in a nursing home or suffering from chronic pain and depression in my old age.
Positive mantras and affirmations get my head out of the negative space and back onto the path of health, wealth and happiness. If this is accomplished because my left and right brain are working together to creatively solve a problem or because my positive self talk is impacting my level of performance or because I am plugged into some higher power or for some other unknown reason, who cares? Really does it matter why my head is in a good place? It only matters so I can remember to keep doing whatever I did to get it there!
As long as I am paddling in the right direction, I will take any help I can get. When the only voice you listen to is the negative one you get STUCK in a rut and it isn’t a good one.
I have been using this practice for several years and what I recite to myself has a way of coming true. I have been using “I am fit and trim…” for about 4 years and I finally feel like it is coming true. I have hit my goal weight and have actually lowered the bar so to speak because I can do better.
When single, I used to recite to myself “I am in love with a wonderful partner who loves me as much as I love them.” Believe me it was better then hearing myself whisper “I am a loser and no one will ever love me”. I did fall in love with a wonderful person who loves me as much as I love them and that mantra is no longer needed!
I won’t divulge the positive self talk I engage in these days as I don’t want to jinx the process but I am confident that my goals will be reached.
I AM CONFIDENT BECAUSE EVEN THE UNIVERSE IS CONSPIRING IN MY FAVOR!
I won’t reach my goals simply because I tell myself I will but because in the telling and re-telling, I get better and better at making the right decisions, at recognizing the opportunities that present themselves and at banishing the doubts and negative message that my sub-conscious spreads like wild-fire when I am not paying attention.
We all have an inner voice that whispers negative self talk in our ear at every opportunity. But you don’t have to listen to it. It doesn’t have your best interest at heart. That voice is talking out of fear and insecurity. Silence that voice by creating the internal dialogue that leads to positive outcomes. Choose health, wealth and happiness by creating positive self talk that leads you toward the achievement of your goals.
Paddle on!
