By Elisa Novick
When I first learned about utilizing affirmations for programming the consciousness, I came up with an ingenious idea. I bought a watch with an hourly alarm (I believe it was one of the first ones) and every time it beeped, I’d say to myself “I love you, Lisa.” (Lisa was my given name.)
I was at a gathering one night and my watch alarm beeped and as the women looked over at me, I explained what I was doing. About 15 years later, a woman approached me and told me that she had attended that gathering and ever since, every time she heard a watch alarm beep, she would say to herself, “I love you, Lisa!” Wow! How absolutely wonderful — a source of prayer for me that I hadn’t known about! Yet I wondered why she didn’t substitute her own name.
I was just learning in those early days about the power of negative and positive self-talk. I experimented and found out that there was a place inside of me that responded to, “I love you, Lisa,” that was different from the one that responded to “I love myself,” which was also different from the place that responded to, “I love me.” I tried many variations, such as, “I love myself unconditionally,” and “I am loved,” “I am the Beloved,” and “I am God’s beloved daughter,” etc. Each vibrate in different parts of the body and energy field and feeling centers and the frequencies these words carry are healthier and happier than the ones created by the stream of negative judgments that most of us carry around with us.
Here is a great story that displays what we usually do: I once participated in a seminar in which we were instructed to raise our hand every time we found ourselves judging anything, and then were sent off to lunch and told it was to be a silent meal. It was funny, and I suppose sad as well, that in the silent dining hall with little going on but eating, hands were popping up continuously throughout the room!