Why DON’T positive affirmations alone work?

Fri, Nov 7, 2008

A Passionate Career, Creating Success, Emotional Freedom, Law of Attraction

Limiting Belief

I’m a hopeless case! Positive affirmations don’t work for me!

Playback Affirmation

Even though I have repeated positive affirmations to myself until I am blue in the face and they still haven’t worked for me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself…And I’m willing to be open to the possibility of success using other self-development techniques such as EFT.

You may have been wondering what those blue and orange words, that say “Limiting Belief” and “Playback Affirmation” above them, are at the top of each of my blog posts. For the past 3 months I’ve been using this weird (yes, it might get a little weird soon) technique to dissolve limitations within me that keep me from creating the happy life that I want for myself. This technique is called the Emotional Freedom Technique. Gary Craig, one of the founding fathers of how EFT is practiced today, defines EFT as:

A powerful new discovery that combines two well established sciences so you can benefit from both at the same time:

Mind Body Medicine
Acupuncture (this new version does not require needles–anyone can do it).

Now before I get into explaining what is involved when you do EFT, I want you to know about this truly amazing movie called Try It On Everything that will show you step by step how to use EFT as well as walk you through the various personal issues it can help you resolve. I just got my copy of the DVD yesterday–and let me tell you that I totally wish it was available to me 3 months ago when I started (the movie was released about 3 weeks ago) on this lonely journey without visual aids! I think it is the best way to be introduced to EFT. And actually, even though I saw the movie a few months after I started, it definitely cleared up a few questions I had concerning the various styles of EFT, and how “borrowing benefits” works (you’ll see what I mean when you watch the movie).

Here’s what you will be doing during an EFT session:

Creating a “Setup Phrase” around an issue that you want to resolve. Let’s say you want to lose a few pounds of weight you just gained. The issue, or “limiting belief” can be: “I feel fat from gaining these few extra pounds”.
Then you plug this limiting belief into the Setup Phrase so that it becomes: “Even though I feel fat from gaining these few extra pounds, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
You will now begin EFT by first saying this Setup Phrase out loud 3 times while you tap on a designated acupressure point on your body.
Then you will say out loud the “limiting belief” as a reminder phrase while tapping on each of the remaining designated acupressure points specified in the Try It On Everything movie.
After the first round of EFT on this issue, you can take a deep breath and note your level of negative emotion in response to your issue (on a scale of 0-10, 10 being intense negative emotion).
The goal is to reduce your negative emotion down to zero (negative emotions such as anger, physical pain, resistance, guilt, shame, fear, etc). So if you are not at zero, or at least a level of negative emotion that you can live with, then continue doing more rounds on the same limiting belief until you feel “functional” in life.

Now I know that the above instructions sound a bit woo-woo (the technical term I like to use for strange and unconventional) due to the fact that there is quite a bit of tapping-on-your-body involved and talking to yourself out loud, so let’s address the question that’s been lingering on your mind ever since you read the heading of this post “Affirmations Don’t Work!”…

Why DON’T positive affirmations alone work?

Because. Behind those positive affirmations that you keep saying to yourself may lie these lingering nagging draining self-sabotaging limiting beliefs that you still hold to be true about reality, your life, and who you are. These limiting beliefs are not true. They are SIMPLY NOT TRUE. And yet you believe them! It’s not that you consciously want to believe them, you just believe them because you don’t yet understand why things have happened the way they happened for you (both the good times and the bad times), so these beliefs you’ve created are a way of making sense of how you’ve come to this present moment being the way you are, having the experiences you had in the past, why some people have more money than you do, why you can’t seem to lose weight, etc, etc.

The only thing that is keeping you from having the life that you want are harboring the limiting thoughts that you believe are true. These limiting beliefs are the words spoken by your harsh Inner Critic and projected onto your Subconscious Mind. When you begin to dissolve these limiting beliefs that you’ve bought into, you will look around you and see your World shift: relationships will heal, physical pain will disappear, financial abundance will be yours, excess body weight will melt off, and many more exciting dreams will come true for you!

In some upcoming blog posts I will illustrate a few key areas of where and how EFT has tranformed my life. For now, here’s a sneak preview:

I take things less personally
I lost 5 stubborn pounds (that wouldn’t budge for over 9 months before EFT)
My roller coaster relationship with my sister has become a more loving and enjoyable one
I started writing again (a career that has eluded me!)
I created This Blog AND made it public (sharing some things that I’ve been afraid I will be criticized for)
I no longer relive the emotions of certain past memories that used to haunt me
I no longer have recurring dreams of certain people in my past who have hurt me
Getting over dramas (disappointing outcomes in my daily life) that I otherwise would mull and sulk over for weeks and months have now been reduced to days and sometimes even seconds of my time.
For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of safety and empowerment and control over how things play out in my World. I may not be able to control my environment and what other people do, but I can control how I feel and how I experience what is happening around me.

***

I hope you join me on this transcendent journey to becoming the person you were meant to be by getting started with EFT. Get the movie so you can “Try It On Everything” too!