“Change your attitude, change your life. No matter what you do, you will always fail if you lead with negativity and low expectations of yourself! Be grateful, understand your success is up to you! Rise to meet the challenge and you will hit it every time!”

Unknown

The above is an affirmation, mantra, quote, that I have had on my fridge for many, many years. I put it there in a moment of inner darkness as a reminder. It is my daily affirmation. I say it every day, generally, when I am taking the milk out of the fridge in the morning, I stop and say the mantra. Sometimes out loud and sometimes in my head, but I say it every day. At the same time, I am saying my mantra, I am reflecting on the collection of other things on my fridge door, magnets from travels, postcards from friends, my family tree, happy photos, and art.  So, I say my mantra and I reflect on the things I love, and I am grateful for. If I am having a bad day and I am feeling low, I will come to the fridge and say the mantra, reflect on the things I am grateful for and I immediately feel better.

“I am capable of my wildest Dreams”.

I describe myself in many ways, but mostly as someone that is always trying to improve myself as a person and the way I live my life. I have done a lot of living and through that process I have made many mistakes, which is fine, we all have, at the end of the day we are all perfectly imperfect and those experiences that make us different, ultimately shape us into the beautiful and unique person we become.   

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten”.

Anthony Robbins

But the thing is, you can’t keep making the same mistakes, you will get stuck, so you have to try new things and continue learning and improving, pushing yourself into uncomfortable places. When you become stuck it can be easy to get into a negative thought pattern with negative self-talk. One way of changing this is by saying a positive affirmation, or chanting a positive mantra, or simply finding a quote that someone else has said, that makes a positive charge in your mind and body.

An affirmation is a positive statement that you say to yourself preferably out lout, but equally could be in your mind, that puts you in to a positive mindset and helps you to be productive. Self-affirmation theory suggests that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-view and that threats to self-competence can therefore be resisted. When we feel threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing us to contemplate our self-worth.

Research was conducted in 2016 by Cascio CN and others to examine the neural mechanisms of self-affirmation on people under MRI. Participants who were affirmed showed increased activity in key regions of the brain’s self-processing (medial prefrontal cortex + posterior cingulate cortex) and valuation (ventral striatum + ventral medial prefrontal cortex) systems when reflecting on future-oriented core values. This neural activity went on to predict changes in sedentary behaviour consistent with successful affirmation in response to a separate physical activity intervention. These results highlight neural processes associated with successful self-affirmation and suggest that key pathways can be amplified in the areas of planning, prediction, and daydreaming. This ability fundamentally shapes human cognition, emotion, and motivation.

Going back 5000 years and drawing on the wisdom of Ayurveda, it has long been understood that doing affirmations or mantras in the language of Sanskrit, enhance your mood, intuition, awareness, compassion and even immunity. According to this practice, when you voice a mantra your tongue taps certain points in the roof of your mouth, sending signals to your hypothalamus, which is the main link between the endocrine and nervous systems. Its key function is to produce hormones that keep the body in a stable condition, called homeostasis. It does this by coordinating the messages and signals received from hormones with those from nerve impulses. When you repeat a mantra, the sounds echo inside of you, and carries electromagnetic vibrations to your thoughts and as the mantra or affirmation replicates it becomes a chant that positively elevates your thoughts.  

You can take the vibrational energy of your affirmation one step further and add a crystals vibrational energy along with it. As each crystal has an influence you can supercharge your affirmation. For example, if you are struggling with negative feelings of insignificance and imperfection, which is preventing you from showing love to yourself and others, then you can hold a rose quartz in your hand to find your way back to a loving vibration. Rose Quartz will relax your critical gaze and help to see yourself (and others) with compassion. At the same you can say an affirmation such as ‘I am good enough for anything or anyone’, ‘Love is flowing within me and around me endlessly’, ‘when I look in the mirror, I see beauty’. If you find yourself plagued by uncertainty and fear, then a garnet, which will ground your vibration, centre your reflection, and keep you putting one foot in front of the other towards your goal, can be used with voicing ‘I believe in myself and my dreams’, ‘I am capable’, ‘I achieve whatever I put my mind to’.

“Wellness is the natural state of my body. I am in perfect health.”

Louise Hay

If you want an example of positive affirmations in practice in modern times, then look no further than Louise Hay. She is the Mid-century Goddess of the self-help movement. First published in 1976, her book, Heal Your Body, is a step-by-step guide for healing yourself. She strongly believed that self-perspectives and other negative beliefs are often the cause of our health problems, so her practice focuses on your specific health challenge, its probable cause, and the information you need to overcome it by creating a new thought pattern using positive affirmations. Don’t believe it! Well Louise was able to put her philosophies into practice when she was diagnosed with irreversible cervical cancer in 1970. She considered the alternatives to surgery and drugs, and instead developed an intensive program of affirmations, visualization, nutritional cleansing, and psychotherapy. Within six months, she was completely healed of cancer.

Bringing self-affirmations into your Meno Mindset practice, you can decrease health-deteriorating stress, you can get more active and move some of that Meno weight and improve your metabolism, you can change the negative self-talk to positively charged messages of love and acceptance, you can take action and focus your intention to change for the better.

Let’s get this affirmation party started! Here are the next 3 steps you can take:

1. Choose your own adventure……. Pick an affirmation that has the vibrational energy that you want more of. It doesn’t matter if it is not perfect, what matters is that the affirmation reflects where you see yourself in the future, not where you see yourself now. Affirmations are about change and reprograming your mind to a constant state of positivity. Write your affirmations down. Put them where you can see them and say them frequently. I have the affirmation on the fridge, but as I look up from my screen and around my lady cave I have six affirmations in my immediate vision, everywhere I turn my head. They all resonate with me and have helped to get me to this point. I have added and replaced them over time as things transform in my life. My office is also filled with crystals that have the vibrations I need to help me achieve my goals and keep me in a positive mindset.

• Put your affirmations into practice! Affirmations work when they are repeated, remember your brain feels those positive words and turns them into positive thoughts and positive hormone releases, but you have to do the homework (this is a reoccurring theme during Meno). For example, if you want to lose that hormonal weight and say the affirmations ‘Being active fuels my body’, ‘I choose to eat food that’s good for my body’, ‘I like creating healthy habits that I will use throughout my life’; you can’t very well just sit on the couch, eat food that is not nourishing and continue to be inactive. You have to work at it. Say the words and make the words into actions. Words are useless if they are empty. And nothing will change if you keep doing the same old thing. Use the affirmation as the first step and keep stepping, one foot in front of the other, towards the person you want to be or the goal you want to achieve.

• Take your affirmation practice a stride further, by turning your affirmation into a real-life goal and plan to achieve it. Use a journal to record your hopes and dreams and your plan of how you are going to get there. Come back often. Keep reviewing and adjusting. If you have the space use post-it notes and write out each step you think you need to take towards your goal and put them up on the wall, where you can see them and where you can add to them or change them easily and if you are like me, tick off the steps as you do them, so you can visually see your action moving you in the direction you are aiming for. Like everything Meno, take small baby steps, make little modifications, don’t bite off more than you can chew, but at the same time, don’t underestimate your ability.

And in closing you can also use music to help you get the affirmations, vibrations and energy you need, so I am going to end with one of my favourite, get you moving and taking action tracks of all time, in case you haven’t noticed, I almost always have a song for that, rather than an app, call me old skool, but this is how I roll!

“You can do anything that you want to do. Put your mind, body, and soul to it. Prove it to yourself and say, I want (I want), I will (I will), I can do anything.
It’s a difficult world and you have got to prove. That you’re ready and you can do it! Nothing in this world can stop you. I know, I can, I will fulfil my dreams”.

Livin’ Joy, Don’t stop movin’ lyrics, 1996.