Many people treat affirmations as if they were sacred prayers handed down from ancient sages. I know I did when I first encountered them. No one told me that, but I was so used to committing prayers to rote memory and blindly repeating them even if I didn’t understand what I was saying. I guess I just assumed that these affirmations were sacred incantations that had to be repeated verbatim. After all, affirmations are superficially related to prayers in that both can be used to gain something or fix some problem.

In contrast, I now believe that affirmations should be treated like working, fluid statements that need to be changed as we change. There are two reasons to modify an affirmation: either you have changed in some way, or the affirmation doesn’t work for you because the wording is not ideal.

1. Your relationship with affirmations or with the situation has changed.

An affirmation may be good for me today but not next week because:

1. As I use affirmations and incorporate them into my life, my understanding of how to work with this tool will evolve. So, my affirmations should change according to my evolving understanding of how they serve me.
2. As the affirmations I am using begin to take hold in my consciousness, the way I feel about and respond to certain situations will change, and, as a result, the situations themselves may change. This is also an opportunity to modify any affirmations I have been using so they remain relevant to my current situation.

For example, as I make progress towards a desired goal, it would be reasonable to advance the target I am aiming for with my affirmation. If I want to lose 50 pounds, I may set an initial affirmation to release 15 pounds of excess weight. When I have lost 10 of those pounds, I may revise the affirmation to keep the process going.

2. The wording of the affirmation is not good for you.

Words are like maps that allow us to communicate about everything. They point to a person, place, thing, feeling, or idea. They have a meaning. That meaning is mostly the same for all of us otherwise, we couldn’t really communicate anything with words.

However, a particular word may have a subtle nuanced meaning for me that it does not have for you or for most other people. We gain these subtle meanings from experiences throughout our lives. Some of the most powerful of these experiences are from our childhood because that is when we are most vulnerable, and our ability to evaluate the truth of what we’re told was limited then.

So, we each carry our own unique set of negatively-nuanced definitions that are mostly unconscious (some may be positively-nuanced). If we encounter an affirmation that uses one of those words, the idea expressed may sound nice, but there is that word that creates some discomfort. We may not be consciously aware of it, but the discomfort causes us to avoid practicing the affirmation. So it will not work for us.

If we understand that this can happen, we are more likely to notice the uncomfortable feelings, and then we can try to change the words in the affirmation to better suit our preferences. This also allows us to rewrite the affirmation in language that sounds like we naturally talk to ourselves. This will also make the affirmation more acceptable to our subconscious mind.

An example

I have several physical discomforts due to aging and not taking the best care of my body for many years. While I don’t go around complaining about them to everyone I meet, I do groan and moan to myself around the house, and I know my wife gets an earful of my sighing and moaning.

I have made some adjustments to my physical activity as a result of these discomforts, and we have had to limit the types of vacations that we go on together because of things I can’t do now.

Several months ago, I realized that I wasn’t helping myself feel good and heal by my “silent complaining.” So, I started using a simple affirmation: “I love my body.”

For some reason, it is easiest for me to remember to use this when I am lying in bed at night waiting to fall asleep. I discovered two things as a result of this practice:

• First, I noticed a diffuse sense of warmth deep in the lower part of my torso, around the area of the second chakra. It really felt nice and comforting.
• Second, I fell asleep very quickly once this feeling started. I should note that I have hardly ever had trouble falling asleep at night, but now it is even quicker once I remember to use this affirmation.

I occasionally try to get specific about what I love about my body, but most of the time, I fall asleep so quickly that I don’t get to do that. I must say that so far, the physical discomforts have not changed, but I am enjoying those two benefits. I have decided to try using that affirmation during the day, but it has been hard for me to remember to do so during the day’s busyness.

Recently, I felt like making a subtle change in the affirmation. I changed it to: “I love this body.” It sounds like a very subtle change, but it has a distinctly different meaning to me. When I refer to “my body,” it feels like I am saying: “This is what I was given.” Whereas when I say “this body,” it feels like I am choosing this body. In the former case, it feels like I am stuck with what I was given, but in the latter case, I made the choice. And it feels like I am renewing that choice every time I say, “I love this body.”

Your turn

How does this relate to you? Do you have some affirmations that you found in a book somewhere that you aren’t using fully? Is there some way that you could rephrase it so that it would feel more natural and acceptable to you?

Does this discussion have any meaning to you?

Update Six Weeks Later

Over the last six weeks, there have been some dramatic shifts in how this affirmation has morphed as I have used it. Each of these changes popped into my head as I was repeating what I thought was the currently ‘approved’ version of the affirmation. I was not seeking to improve the affirmation I was using, but I was open to hearing and considering changes. 

The first change that occurred to me was to say, “I surrender to this body” instead of “I love this body.” The idea that accompanied this was that I would be surrendering to the innate wisdom of my body about how to heal itself. 

The word “surrender” was not one that my mind wanted to embrace in any way. I had to acknowledge that I do not know how to heal my body, but my body knows how to heal itself. I was not yielding all my decisions to my body rather than my conscious mind, but I was acknowledging that my conscious mind did not know how to best support the healing of my body. 

This decreased but did not eliminate my internal resistance to surrendering. Maybe it’s a Western male thing. So, I combined the two affirmations to come up with “I love and surrender to this body.” Now, the resistance was less, and it felt more like resentment like I wasn’t sure about turning over some of my assumed power to this “stupid body that has caused me so much discomfort for years.” 

The most recent change that occurred to me was to address this feeling by saying, “I trust, surrender to, and love this body.” This version has felt good to me for the last few nights. But that might change again tonight. 

I hope this clarifies for you what I mean when I talk about uPdating (that’s not a typo but a reference to the 15 Priniciples in my forthcoming book Affirm Yourself) or editing your affirmations as your relationship with them clarifies. 

Be sure to let me know what you think about all this.