(This is Part 2 of a series. Go back to Part 1.)
I've loved to work with affirmations and mantras from time to time. I've loved looking into them, experimenting, hanging with them as they go deeper and deeper.
There's so many beautiful kinds: ancient Hindu, early Christian, Sufi, Tibetan, New Thought affirmations and many others.
The trick with an affirmation is to find one that you resonate with so much—on both a sound level and feeling level—that you can do it all day, more or less, letting it go on in the background.
Doing it for 20 or 30 minutes a day is good too; however, if you really want to know the power of these things I would recommend finding one that you can love hanging with all day.
As you repeat it silently inside, you'll be doing it at first. But after awhile it will take over and then it will do you: You won't have to do a thing; it'll just go on by itself in the background.
It'll just start going on in the background no matter what else you're doing. Whether you're doing the laundry or working on a spreadsheet or whatever, after awhile you'll be doing it in the context of the affirmation going on.
It's best not to continue it if you'll be doing something where you need to concentrate, like driving or operating machinery. Use your good common sense there. Though after awhile you'll be even more alert than you were before; you'll be aware of everything.
You'll find yourself deepening, calming, smoothing out. Life will start taking on a great pleasure, especially if you're working with the right one.
Don't judge your progress, though. After all, if you plant a seed you don't dig it up every day to see if it's sprouting, do you? No; you just water the seed every day and then one day the sprout just appears above the earth.
The seed has to work underground for awhile. That's normal; that's how it works. So don't judge how it's doing; just keep going in great faith.
After working with a number of different affirmations and mantras, I would like to recommend this one that came to me one day. I think you might find it very helpful, in the sense of deepening towards extreme happiness. Here it is:
I am so in love with you.
A shorter version is simply:
I love you.
An even shorter version that has a kind of rocking quality to it when repeated slowly inside is:
love you
In my opinion, anyone who consistently hangs with any of these seeds will have their life transformed right in front of their eyes.
The mind likes to crunch on things. It doesn't much care if they're positive or negative—it just wants something to crunch on.
If you give your mind that phrase to crunch on, instead of the usual negative diet, the reality of that phrase is going to start moving deeper and deeper inside you, because whatever we focus on expands.
What's going to happen after awhile is that you'll begin falling in love with the world, and right in front of you the world is going to transform. It'll become more and more beautiful with each passing day—even the suffering, even the garbage. It's all going to start looking like angelic heaven to you.
But really, you'll just be seeing more and more of what reality actually looks like.
You'll see the divine in everything and you'll begin to
know that God is hidden everywhere, in plain sight. Just look around you; there it is. Just look inside you; there it is. It's everywhere, and you'll just begin to fall in love.
From a state of being in love with the world, you'll have a vastly better chance of nurturing your corner of the world. How could we nurture the world from a place of anger or hatred or fear or regret? Not likely.
But from a place of love, paradoxically perhaps, we have a much better chance of being effective in whatever it is we're doing.
(This is the end of Part 2. Go to Part 3.)
—jim sloman, 10.25.03 for 4.18.05
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