In the post-Secret world we understand that setting intentions is a key to manifesting the life that we want.
One of the key rules for intentions is that they need to be set in positive terms, like affirmations and hypnotic suggestions, which are used to reprogram our subconscious. Positive phrasing is important because the subconscious, which holds our most important beliefs and programs, apparently doesn’t hear negative words like “not”. So if you set an intention to “not overeat”, the mind hears “overeat”; with contrary results.
My own sense of why the subconscious is poor at negatives is that the coin of that realm is not so much words as sensory experiences: pictures, feelings, sounds. These do not include equivalents of “not”. When we say I will not smoke, we are most likely to see a picture of smoking, perhaps with a red slash through it, with the verbal “not”. What the subconscious receives is the image and/or feeling of smoking.
Intentions are more often thought of as being addressed to spirit than the subconscious, so you may wonder why spirit also has trouble with negatives. Perhaps it is because while we think in words, what spirit receives is the pictures and feelings that words invoke as we think them.
It is known that aligning our emotional state with our words is important in powering all these processes. It is likely that the emotions tend to follow the picture or sensory experience evoked by the words, rather than the words themselves. We are back with the subconscious.
There is another reason for working with positive phrasing. It forces us to clarify what our true intention is. If we can’t say “my intention is to not worry”, what replaces worry? Where is it we do want to go? If this is fuzzy then spirit still has a hard time knowing what we want. Even with things that are better defined, “I don’t want to be fat”, is more clearly something like “I want to be my ideal weight”. But what exactly is that for us?
In every case the exercise of really envisioning what we want; how does it feel to be our ideal weight? perhaps we also want to be more athletic? how does that look and feel? engages us in a whole different way and begins to bring hope and joy into the process. And if there are any underlying blocking beliefs it will flush them out as well, helping to increase our havingness.
Life should be lived manifesting the positive, not fighting the negative.
In this coming year there are great opportunities to realize the positives. May you find out what you really want to create; aligning your senses and your heart with positive words, bring it easily and effortlessly to your life.
(© 1/2009)
