One day at a time

These days I am experimenting with repetition. For years I didn't really go with affirmations because to me they seemed like lying. I was still under the illusion that I was very dedicated to honesty and didn't appreciate the manipulation and lying to myself by telling myself things that weren't true today. I really didn't get what they were talking about when it came to affirmations.

Then I went through psychic seminary and saw how we are programming ourselves and being programmed by others all the time. Family and society start programming us even before we are born - this I know. I had railed against and done many hours of healing work around this fact and got to know its depths. I also learned that under the surface energy on any of these lie/beliefs I'd naturally picked up, the face and voice that perpetuated them was me. The old Pogo joke, "I've met the enemy and they is us!" I saw over and over again that no matter what the lie was and who " started" it, I'm the one that has kept it alive in some form and brought it with me through the years. The fact that many of those "perpetrators" have died has also helped me get real.

I started noticing how in the name of telling myself the truth about myself, I'd lie like crazy. I noticed how I often seemed to not feel better until I had settled on the absolute worst interpretation of what I had said/done/whatever. As a child someone had told me, "if you aren't in pain, you aren't telling yourself the truth about yourself," and as an impressionable child I listened? That, or I've just rebelled and resisted the concept so much all my life I periodically become that notion. Or maybe it was just all that Catholic training I grew up with. All I know is that I was willing and would go to any lengths to get myself feeling bad about myself and had no problem lying like crazy to get there. Totally an inside job.

Now that I've done the research and really listened to inside my head enough that even Catholic denial can't keep me believing that the river of criticism is true, I've started changing the tapes, so to speak. Now I take another slice of the truth, a slice less caustic and more neutral, or more caring, and repeat that thought over and over for a while, till I lose focus and fall unconscious again, usually at my desk at my day job. But more and more often during the day am I remembering to challenge the old tapes.

I love that bumper sticker that says, "Don't believe everything you think." And, "Don't believe everything you feel" would be good too.

Between not believing all the old tapes/lies/hooks, and playing around with the stories I tell myself about me and the world, etc, things do seem to be improving. A little at a time.