Here's another confession I have: I dislike affirmations.  Like the following:

I am important.  I am the Most Important Being in Existence.

This is so because of the oneness of All That Is.

What's there to disagree with?  It goes to the heart of what humility is, what false humility is, and addresses that the perception of separation is what creates problems in the first place. It's not about arrogance, but about letting go.

The problem is that it's nice in theory, but the execution of getting to truly know this has its own problems.

My first taste of affirmation was as a teen.  I was in a fairly screwed up family dynamic — the pushy, British stiff upper lip Borderline Personality Disorder mother (not to use labels or anything!) — and being expressive, I showed my pain.  This was uncomfortable for those around me, so I was sent off to healers who of course focused entirely on me.  One of them, a rebirthing therapist, actually helped — doing rebirthing (conscious, connected breathing) gave me an experience of what it was like to feel intensely without too many labels.  Yet another thing she did was to send me home to do affirmations.  30 of each one, handwritten on paper.

Lines.

All of them were positive, like above.  All of them sounded good.  Yet they also felt like punishment.  Like what teachers made you do when you did something wrong.

That's just how it was introduced to me, of course.  But it's also the essence of what an affirmation is.  It is the intellect telling the heart and body to learn something.  "Hey, you!  There are problems here!  Learn this so the problems can go away."

But how do you learn about the oneness of the universe and the importance of Who You Are, if you treat parts of yourself as separate from others?  By shouting a command from my mind, I was treating my heart as subordinate, as the one making mistakes.  And of course my heart retreated.  Nothing likes to be given orders like a punished child.

There are, of course, ways to talk to the heart.  And to the body.  Ways in which speaking and listening become the same thing.  Talk without words.  Desires without expectations.  Paulo Coelho calls it "The Language of the World", the universal language.  It's the same language that enabled Siddhartha in Herman Hesse's book to understand the universe from the sound of a river, by understanding it through this language.  It's the language of the trees in the wind when your mind stops and just observes and feels.  When the mind feels and the heart thinks, and you are completely present in your body.  It's the language of Being.

So now, when I tell myself "I am important" the sense of the affirmation above, I deeply listen to the reaction of my heart.  I'm not telling myself to do anything.  I know I'm not mistaken or wrote in the perceiving that I'm unimportant, or even the times that it seems like this statement is a complete falsehood.  I am opening myself up to Truth, which means opening myself up to my heart as well as all the reactions that come.  It's the big-T "Truth" that encompasses all the little truths, such that my heart feels pain when I really let in that possibility.

So now a conversation with my heart may look like this:

I am important.  I am the Most Important Being in Existence.

Are you sure?

No.  But I know it's Truth, and I want to live it.

I know it is too, but I'm here to make sure you know it.

Is that what all this confusion and pain and believing the opposite is about?

Sure.  You have to what's not the truth before you can see the truth for yourself.  For ourselves.

Even in this conversation, it is implied that my heart is something separate from who I am, and that's obviously not the case.  But that's part of the journey of life here: we experience something as separate so that our mind can grasp just a little part of what the universe is.   It's not equipped to see too much.  But this helps us look at the little truths with more passion.  The truth of the dandelion swaying in the wind.  The truth of childlike wonder in running through a summer's sprinkler and pointing it toward others in play.  The truth of our own hearts.  The Language of the World.

That sort of exchange is more of an affirmation of life than any exercise from an external source can be.

The bottom line is no one can truly know their importance, in an ultimate sense, until they also know that they are the universe.  That is the nature of Being.

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written by rakesh, March 08, 2009

Just finished Paulo Coelho's Brida and now your post. Not sure if this is some Omen I got to pick !!. Great post.

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written by twocrows, April 04, 2009

blech. what a negative introduction to affirmations -- things that are, by their nature, positive. unless, of course, they're approached in a punitive fashion.

glad you survived that and got to where you are.

punitive prose
written by lovingawareness, April 04, 2009

Yes - sometimes in my gentle moments, I congratulate myself for simply having survived. We take that for granted sometimes!

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written by Consolidate Student Loans, April 17, 2009

i have one fav quote :

“A man exists for a generation, but his name lasts to the end of time.” -Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

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