Having made myself toxic with negative self-talk and backsliding into an unhappy funk, I have initiated a new blitzkrieg of affirmations. The idea is to think a positive affirming thought with every breath as much as possible during the day. Driving, stretching, walking back and forth to my truck, between tile cuts, full press. Affirmations have helped me a lot in the past and they are, at this point the work at hand. I was thinking along these lines:

If I think I am old and tired, and I feel old and tired, I am old and tired. If I think I am vigorous and healthy, and I feel I am vigorous and healthy, I am vigorous and healthy. If I think I am a looser, and I feel like a looser, I am a looser. And If I think I am a success and I feel like a success, I am a success. (success with a broader definition than just career and financial). And it is not because I have some magical power to make my life what I want it to be, it is because my life is all of this. My life contains the full spectrum of success and failure, courage and cowardice, joy and depression, health and disease…. The way I feel is largely a matter of what aspects of my life I am identifying with at the time. If I am locked into a negative aspect it becomes the filter through which I see everything. I am predisposed to the negative. For reasons of history, conditioning, and circumstance, this is what I contend with. Would that it was not so. But it is. So, to compensate, I have to make it a conscious endeavor to counteract my natural tendencies. Much in the way someone with diabetes has to watch what they eat, and someone who is a little hard of hearing has to concentrate more on listening.

I am not a big Eckhart Tolle fan. A friend gave me his book, “A New Earth” and have looked at it. He strikes me as a bit too certain of himself. However, the other morning I had one of those experiences where I was journaling about something, and several times I glanced up at his book, and then finally gave into that nudge. I opened his book and he was talking about something relevant to what I was thinking about. He added a nice component, actually. He has this concept of a “pain body”:

“because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion, almost everyone carries in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain, which I call the Pain Body”

This clicked for me because I could see I have been identifying lately with my pain body. He talks about a woman he was working with and how she was able to come to a place where she could accept this part of her, but create a little breathing room around it. Enough to where she could begin to see that she is far more than this pain body. Bingo. Thanks Eckhart. I know these sorts of things, Having studied them before, but it is good when I am reminded. And it is good to get new ways of seeing them. It’s also nice to have the little intuition nudge and respond to it and have it so clearly rewarded. Thanks journaling angles.

So the blitzkrieg is on. Life is good. Life is loaded with possibility. I am healthy, vigorous, and strong. I can change my life. I am at peace with my life. My life is abundant. I will see something beautiful today.