I’m happy! I’m healthy! I’m terrific! These are the 3 positive affirmations I told myself for 20+ years. Why did I say these? Because I felt mad, bad, sad and sick most of the time and really wanted to feel different. I heard about the power of the mind and did my best to employ it. BUT it didn’t work! How discouraging! When I wanted to feel better and told myself that I did feel better, I was really just lying to myself and not dealing with what was really going on. Why did I feel mad, bad, sad and sick? Maybe that would have been a better starting place for me. While we don’t want to throw continual pitty parties and conjure up all sorts of stories about why our lives are hard, we also don’t want to ignore how we feel. The ostrich method doesn’t work. What does work? How do we actually make our lives and ourselves the way we want to be?

For me, I had tried the sheer brute force method. I had everything I wanted. A husband and children, a lovely home, nice travel, a deep spirituality, close friends, pets and a kind extended family. What was missing? Why was I feeling mad, bad, sad and sick? I was so busy trying to be what I thought I should be that I didn’t even know who I was. This disconnect from myself was causing a lot of emotional upset as well as physical pain. When you reach rock bottom, what do you do? Well, sometimes you go lower which was apparently where I needed to go to learn some things. I broke my back in a hiking accident and had the opportunity through years of further chronic pain and healing to find myself. Once I finally listened to myself, got real with who I really was, and got rid of the negativity that was pulling me down, my whole world changed.

You might wonder how I got rid of the negativity. It was not with positive affirmations. It was with the power of the subconscious mind. I learned that the reason I felt bad was because of self-limiting beliefs I had picked up in my childhood. These were subconscious beliefs that ran my thoughts, feeling and actions 95-99% of the day.  With a form of feedback I was able to tap into my subconscious and find beliefs that were getting in my way. Boy was I surprised with what I found. Some of my limiting subconscious beliefs were these: I was not accpetable as I was.  I should be how others wanted me to be. I felt the way I felt because others made me feel that way. I believed that how others acted was based on their love for me and if they didn’t act how I hoped, they must not love me. I believed that those close to me would leave me so I’d be mean to try to get them to leave to prove to myself that I was really not worth loving. I did not love or accept myself which meant I didn’t love or accept others either. And the list goes on and on! Can you see how those thoughts were causing me to feel mad, bad, sad and sick?

Tapping into these beliefs was very revealing, surprising and a bit discouraging and depressing. Was that the real me I’d been hiding from? Now that I knew some of these self limiting beliefs, how do I change them? I already knew positive affirmations didn’t work for me. I thought that being aware of my patterns could help me change but it was actually not the case either. Because these were subconscious patterns, they’d rear their ugly heads before I even realized what was going on and there I was again, in the same old bad pattern. I could not seem to knock it off. Was their any hope for me? Just when I was about to run away because I could not handle life anymore, the answer came.

If you think you can you can. The catch was, if you think you can in your subconscious mind you can. I’d been trying to “fix” myself with the wrong mind! What I had been doing in the past with positive affirmations was as effective as yelling at my computer to run a new program when it was doing something I didn’t like. The only way to reprogram my computer was to delete the old code and install some new code. I researched methods of subconscious change and found one that was so incredibly effective for me that it absolutely blew my mind. My entire life changed in a weekend. My mind was reprogramed and I was now happy, healthy and terrific. Not because I was trying to be but because that was the new me. I encourage you to tap into the power of your subconscious mind. We were made for glory, not for mad bad sad. Join me in the subconscious revolution that is sweeping the world!