All You Need To Know About Affirmations

Positive Thinking and Affirmations are quite popular off late, but there is very little statistical information in the public domain as to how effective they have been.  Stay in touch with this blog for a series of articles on affirmations and how and why they dont work for a larger number of people. 

If you take the time to browse what several psychologists have to say including various organizations and associations, right uptil what are known as Third Wave Psychologists, you will find that are unanimous in the conclusion that random affirmations do not always work for you.  Self-esteeem plays a very important role and whereas positive affirmations can benefit those with high self-esteem, it could even be counter productive in case of people with low self-esteem. 

Ideally, a coach or therapist would focus on acceptance and commitment clarifying your values and committing your behavior to them. At a time when more and more people are looking for answers outside the traditional medical model, there is no doubt that there is an overdose of information that is available to the people at large and most of it is superficial.  Third Wave Psychologists agree that affirmations work best when they are congruent and concomitant with other interventions like Life Coaching, Hypnosis, NLP, etc., which help bring about an alignment of behavior and values.  Ancient Indian and Buddhist approaches are validated now by reinforcing the concept of acceptance of negative thoughts and emotions which are born out of past and present actions and behavior before attempting to override them. 

Whatever you resist, persists – Carl Jung

Whatever you fight, strengthens – Eckhart Tolle

The first step to change, is awareness.  The second is acceptance – Nathaniel Branden

The reason for writing all of the above is to ensure that readers are not misled into believing that random positive thinking will create miraculous results.  Most people would have tried it and quite often given up.  It is abundantly clear that awareness, mindfulness and acceptance play a significant role before affirmations can create transformation. 

At the same time, I must also add that a remarkable study conducted in 2002 found that 80% of the people tested who took the six most popular antidepressants of the 1990's got the same results when they took a sugar pill placebo. 80%!

Your subconscious mind is incredibly powerful! Far more than you can imagine it to be.  Awareness, mindfulness, acceptance and effective affirmations are possible only when you are able to connect with your subconscious mind.  Thus I go around imparting the Nirmiti Nidra technique to people across diverse sections of the society.  The program is offered free to all schools and institutes so that the youth can derive an early advantage.  In the workshop, participants are also taught to formulate affirmations for themselves.  It is extremely important that affirmations are formulated by you personally, because the same words can mean different things to different people.  The 12 laws of the subconscious mind are also explained to the participants with examples. 

Mere thought conditioning will not suffice, behavioural conditioning is equally important. You can read more about this here, the article also briefly touches upon why affirmations fail.  Stay tuned to this blog or our facebook page so you do not miss out on future posts. Over the next few weeks, a series of articles will provide you with positive affirmations that you can use for inspiration.  Do not use them as is, but use them as inspiration to formulate your own which are intricately aligned with your own values, objectives and goals after becoming aware of the challenges you face by way of negative thoughts and behaviour.   

An affirmation is a statement that is repeatedly uttered with confidence and assertion about a perceived truth to program your subconscious mind and bring about a significant change in your life. The ability to program your subconscious stems from the fact that your subconscious does not understand the difference between reality and imagination.  Reality is your perception of the world through the five senses.  Imagination is your visualization of the world through the same five senses. 

What is Nirmiti Nidra vis-a-vis Hypnosis, NLP, Meditation

Meditation is a practice in which an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or for the mind to simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content, or as an end in itself.  It would perhaps be controversial to say most people who meditate after learning a basket of techniques from various sources, have no idea why they indulge in it.  The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices that includes techniques designed to promote relaxation, build internal energy or life force and develop virtuousity.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. Its creators claim a connection between the neurological processes ("neuro"), language ("linguistic") and behavioral patterns learned through experience ("programming") and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life.  It was developed by studying hypnosis, gestalt and allied psychotherapy methods but of late, the balance of scientific evidence reveals NLP to be a largely discredited pseudoscience. Scientific reviews show it contains numerous factual errors, and fails to produce the results asserted by Bandler & Grinder.  In my opinion, the reason why NLP fails (although many people will not admit it to be so) is only due to the fact that the subconscious mind has not been accessed appropriately.

Hypnotism is often stated to be an altered state of consciousness.  But with consciousness itself being difficult to define, an altered state of an undefined state is rendered even more difficult.  We can therefore say that Hypnosis is a state of mind or human consciousness which presupposes focussed attention and an enhanced capacity for suggestion.  It is an altered state where the level of awareness is very different from the normal conscious state.  Focus and concentration are increased manifold and peripheral awareness is minimised to such an extent that sources of distraction are blocked out.  It also makes the person high suggestible so he is more yielding than normal.  A hypnotist communicates and interacts with the subconscious mind. 

Self-hypnosis can thus be defined as a self-induced state of mind resulting in a heightened state of focused concentration and rendering yourself more yielding to suggestions by programming your subconscious mind. It is used to change your thinking, alter your habits, and take control of the person you are—along with relaxation and destressing from everyday life. It's similar to meditation and yet is definitely more effective when you have specific objectives and goals to attain.  It is incredibly empowering!

Nirmiti Nidra uses techniques from medtitation, NLP and hypnosis to easily and effortlessly empower you to program your own mind.  It is not a religion, cult or lifestyle.  It does not use any chants, hymns or prayers.  Nor does it rely on breathing or any complicated techniques that one needs to practise for weeks or months.  In one single day, you are FULLY EMPOWERED to access your subconscious mind, anytime, anywhere.  Once you have learnt the technique, you of course need to use it each day to ensure you create the relevant neural pathways in your mind. 

Nirmiti Nidra is not brain washing, sleep, unconsciousness, mystical state or mind control.  It is a technique to enable you to be more aware, in control if yourself, in a natural blissful state, where you are connected with and communicate with your subconscious mind.  Remember, your subconscious is 30,000 times more powerful than your conscious mind.  It has nothing to do with will power.  Will power is petty compared to the power of your subconscious mind.  Nirmiti Nidra enables you to quickly and comfortably access your higher consciousness and at the same time to disconnect and come out of the state whenever you wish to.

Nirmiti Nidra can be used to rectify physical, emotional, mental, and behavioral dysfunctions. It can enable you to move in and out of various states of consciousness, enable you to guide awareness, enable you to experience mindfulness, and also enable you to enhance or diminish certain patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, believing, or relating. When used optimally, it can facilitate healing and wholeness at every level of system.

Nirmiti Nidra can be used to modify behaviour, emotions and/or attitudes. You can use it to help deal with the problems of everyday living, to boost confidence and to develop new skills. A phenomenal stress and anxiety reliever, it can also be used to help alter habits, to program your mind with positive thoughts, to achieve your goals and desires, to heal minor health issues, to accelerate spiritual progress, to solve problems and enhance decision making abilities.

The foundation course will empower you to do so much more with your mind.  Advanced levels will empower you with so much more physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually that you will be stupendously surprised to learn of possibilities that you didn’t know existed.  As long as your desires to become who you want to be dovetail with the purpose of your soul’s journey to earth on who you are meant to be, a world of infinite possibilities are at your disposal..... just by establishing a connect with your subconscious mind.

In Just 8 weeks Meditation can GROW your Brain

Neuroscientist Sara Lazar's amazing brain scans show meditation can actually change the size of key regions of our brain, improving our memory and making us more empathetic, compassionate, and resilient under stress – read the article fully and then view the video.

Led by Dr. Lazar, a neurologist and instructor, a team of researchers at the Harvard Medical School, have discovered that just 8 weeks of meditation can fuel grey-matter in the hippocampus and promote brain ‘growth’. To be more specific, the regions in the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress showed measurable changes sparked by meditation.

Those who did not go take part in Dr. Lazar’s course experienced no such structural brain changes.

16 volunteers took part in Dr. Lazar’s mindfullness course with respect to the study, and MRI scans were taken 2 weeks prior to and after the study.  Incredibly, it was evident that after just 8 short weeks of practicing mindfulness meditation, Dr. Lazar’s volunteers showed thicker grey matter in several important areas of the brain, including the left hippocampus, a small horseshoe-shaped structure in the central brain involved in memory, learning and emotional regulation.

Additional parts of the brain positively affected by just eight weeks of meditation were posterior the cingulate cortex – also important for memory and emotions; the temporoparietal junction, involved in empathy creation; and the cerebellum, which helps to coordinate movement.

She said: “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day. This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

Britta Hölzel, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany, said: “It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life. Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change.”

The meditation course seemed to cause the brain to form denser connections among important centers that regulate our behavior and help us to be ‘smart.’

This translates to all sorts of possible benefits – from handling stress better at work and in our lives, to conducting out responsibilities with more élan. Sure, you can cram for those finals, or beat your head against the wall trying to meet a deadline at work, but maybe some life-long meditative practices can help.

Her talk and pictures are highly motivating for those looking for an edge in their industry or who just need some extra oomph to get through their hectic lives.

You can see Dr. Lazar talk about her brain scans in a Ted Talks video here.

Nirmiti Nidra Workshop 21 Sep 2015

 For more details, visit www.rajeshseshadri.com