Affirmations: Who are you trying to convince?
The idea of using affirmations and visualization as tools for healing is nothing new. You know the drill: choose an optimistic, constructive scene or sentence to repeat or picture, using it as a focus for your intention, attention, and the expectation of good results, and, after a period of repeating this process, magical changes transpire.
Metaphysical teachings say that by intensely focusing your expectation on a desired result, you literally realign the signal that the energies of your emotions and imagination send forth into the energy that permeates everything (the Universe, God, however you like to think about it). This signal supposedly attracts energy that matches your projection of thought, resulting in the manifestation of the conditions you imagine.
If metaphysical advice about changing your reality by changing your thinking sounds too bizarre, be assured that science notices this phenomenon when studying the way expectancy and assumptions change our biochemistry. Fear and anxiety, for example, seem to depress the immune system. Optimistic attitudes seem to improve immune function.
Science also routinely grapples with the recognized (although not understood), common, and powerful effects of the placebo response. This undeniable healing response is activated when individuals believe they have been given a powerful drug, but in actuality are taking something with no scientifically acknowledged active ingredients. From the mind-body perspective, belief is the active ingredient in the placebo response -- or any treatment. Strong belief in a cure can be a catalyst for shifting our attention -- our unconscious affirmations and visualizations -- from a focus on sickness to one that allows healing.
Affirmation in everyday life
In his book, The Placebo Response, Dr. Harold Brody, M.D. reports a classic example of this phenomenon. The case, dismissed by science because it’s only a single incident, was published in 1957. A patient called Mr. Wright, in the final stage of terminal cancer, begged to be treated with an experimental drug called krebiozen, which was making the news as a miracle cure for cancer. Although his condition was so far advanced that he was not a candidate for the study, Mr. Wright was eventually given the drug "as a compassionate exception."
Miraculously, Mr. Wright began to recover, regaining weight and strength, his tumors shrinking to almost undetectable size. However, his improvement stopped and he began to deteriorate again when he became discouraged by media reports indicating that krebiozen was not performing as hoped in the drug trials.
Brody writes, "Assuming that the power of suggestion had been largely responsible for Mr. Wright’s response to the medication, the physicians decided to tell him that the first batches of krebiozen sent to their clinic had not been at full potency." They built up his confidence in the "new batch being sent to them," then injected him with sterile water after assuring him that this treatment was a stronger batch of the drug.
Mr. Wright, his confidence bolstered by the encouragement of his doctors, once again began a dramatic recovery. Dr Brody reports, "His remission lasted until, for a second time, the newspapers undermined the physicians—stating unequivocally that ‘AMA reports that krebiozen is worthless against cancer.’ Mr. Wright once again began to sink, his tumors grew massive, and shortly thereafter, he died."
Lessons from the placebo response
This example of the power of belief gives the student of mind-body medicine important clues about using affirmation and visualization for health. A misconception about using affirmation is that it works by repetition. The idea that affirmation works by repetition is the same theory that produced prayer wheels and prayer flags, those devices covered with words of prayer that when spun (or flapped by the wind), supposedly send prayers by the millions directly to God.
This approach has God (or the universal energy) gauging your conviction by adding up your affirmations or prayers like a teacher who has assigned you to write, "I will be healed of cancer," six hundred times on the blackboard. From this perspective, affirmation or prayer is seen as a test of your sincerity and commitment. If you can convince the monitors that you really mean it, you get what you affirm or pray for.
But as the krebiozen example so clearly shows, belief is what makes affirmations and visualizations "work," when they do work, not repetition. Choosing to believe in a treatment triggers the internal shifting of attention to a focus on the expectation of health instead of illness. When the patient finds ways to feel hopeful, health-promoting visualizations and affirmations come spontaneously in response to the new expectation of health.
Repetition is often a by-product of strong belief, since you tend to return mentally to thinking about and picturing anticipated results. But the shift in belief that changes your feelings is the "active ingredient" in using affirmation for change, not the number of times you repeat your affirmation. In fact, affirmations often serve only to reinforce your doubt in a cure. Why do you have to keep repeating this mantra if you really believe you'll get well? Wouldn't you just go about the business of healing without belaboring the matter? As the krebiozen story shows, if you can believe with absolute conviction in a completely new way of being, one energetically charged vision of this desired self can be enough to set you on the path of change.
This should make it clear that who you’re trying to convince when you use affirmations is not some force "out there." YOU are the only one who must be convinced in order for change to occur. First you must change your mind about what is possible. Then you change what you expect for yourself as a result. Lastly you play with the picture of this new version of yourself until you become comfortable with it, which automatically brings it into your reality.
Purity of heart is to will one thing
The other important lesson to be drawn from the krebiozen story is that all your active beliefs count if they fuel your feelings. Mr. Wright’s belief that something outside of him—a drug—could cure him if science gave it the seal of approval, filled him with health promoting feelings of hope, optimism, and confidence. But he believed in science’s evidence more than he believed in the evidence of his own body. Therefore, when scientists changed their beliefs about krebiozen, saying it was worthless, Mr. Wright believed he was doomed. His belief in a cure died, sending a powerful energy of hopelessness through his body.
Mr. Wright got well and got sick according to his belief, not according to a phrase he repeated. His absolute conviction in the power of science drove both results. If your beliefs bring up doubts and fears that cause you to worry about and imagine your affirmations not working, even as you try to imagine them coming into being, you have set up a contradictory energy broadcast. The contradictory signals effectively neutralize your affirmations and interfere with getting the good results you hope for.
Part of the problem we have with using affirmations comes from a distortion in our understanding of the idea that "you get what you concentrate upon," It is assumed that thinking about something a lot equals concentration. In reality, your thinking may reveal the direction of your concentration, and you may use thinking to remind yourself to shift your concentration, but thinking itself is not "concentrating" in the "you get what you concentrate on" sense. You may think day and night "I am healthy" and not budge your illness one molecule in the direction of health if your beliefs are concentrating your attention in the direction of continuing illness.
Your beliefs determine your concentration
What is concentration, then, if it isn't what we think it is? Concentration is your focus of attention. Your focus of attention is directed by your beliefs. And what you are concentrating on is often so automatic and unquestioned that you don't notice it. It's what you would describe as "The Truth," but it's actually a choice of belief through which you filter all information. For example, you may believe that a diagnosis of cancer is likely to be a death sentence. You may affirm "I'm healthy in every way," but this will feel like a lie unless you find ways to believe differently about what it means to have cancer.
By definition, if we believe something, we think it’s true and don’t consider questioning it. So, how can you tell if you’re contradicting what you’re affirming?
To winkle out contradictory, unconstructive beliefs, try this:
Contemplate the difference between how you think, feel, and behave when you know that something is possible as opposed to when you aren’t sure if it is. For instance, if you misplace your keys in the house, you know they are in the house somewhere. As you look for them, you think and act far differently than you would if you lost your keys on a trip across the country or while playing on the beach.
List the differences in attitude, expectation, thought, imaginings, and behavior for each of these two hypothetical conditions—one list titled "I know I can do this" and the other titled "I doubt I can do this." Learning to pay attention to thoughts or feelings that compare with those on the "I doubt I can do this" list will put you on the trail of beliefs that are interfering with getting what you say—or affirm—you want. Cultivating thoughts and feelings on the "I know I can do this" list puts you on the track for desired changes.
A reluctance to act in accordance with your anticipated desired outcome can also point to unexamined conflicting beliefs. When you know something will work, you behave, as well as think, differently. Therefore, your affirmations are the foundation for new action—a new way of being in the world. As you project the intense feeling of your affirmation, it naturally follows that if you really expect change—and you must to make change happen—you naturally begin acting, little by little, as though that change is coming.
You can't force yourself to go in a mental direction contradicted by your beliefs without feeling conflict in the form of tension, fear, worry, or other unsettling emotions. You may find the most useful affirmations are simple reassuring ones that don't fly in the face of the fact of your illness: I can find ways to deal with this. I can get the help I need. I'm an individual, not a statistic.
Remember, you use affirmation and visualization all the time without being conscious of doing so. Mr. Wright had no idea that he was using this powerful tool for change, yet his expectations were faithfully materialized into his experience. Next time you decide to consciously use affirmation to shift your reality, remember that the universal energy is more like electricity than it is like your parents or a strict teacher. You simply plug into it by anticipating going in the direction of well being in whatever ways you can in each moment.