When Hay House Publishing sent me my free copy of “Experience Your Good Now! Learning To Use Affirmations” by Louise L. Hay I was reluctant to read another book on positive affirmations. The word “affirmation” was weighted with a preconceived idea of how “affirmation books” often appear, lists and lists of positive statements, but without the “how to use them” aspect. I was glad to be proven wrong.

As a therapist, I often encourage my clients to use affirmations. I believe that they can be a powerful part of our healing process. And, because I am a therapist practicing EMDR (Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing), asking my clients to identify their positive and negative beliefs is commonplace. EMDR therapists seek to release those “negative cognitions” by identifying the traumas that “taught” them in the first place. For, even though we know positive affirmations about ourselves, “logically,” the negative beliefs about ourselves are locked within our histories. We have to purge and release the past events from our nervous system, not just the cognitive, thinking part of our minds. If we don’t, the body will still hold onto those beliefs. Our actions come from those negative thoughts, rather than what we know logically about ourselves and would prefer to chose instead.

Quite frankly, many of my clients come to therapy saying that they already read, copied, wrote, and repeated positive affirmations over and over. “It didn’t work.” I believe that we can find ourselves getting “stuck” like this; it is because we also have to explore what negative cognitions are getting in the way. Because we know that traumas “store” negative beliefs in the body, it is challenging to find books that truly address where those beliefs came from.

With this in mind, it appears that Louise Hay has taken a more in depth approach to affirmations, and one that I believe gets to the source of our negative cognitions. “Experience Your Good Now!” offers specific ways for exploring how to shift one’s thinking. Her steps, exercises, and questions are simple, refreshing, and a joy to read. Her book helps us to actively identify foundation events that contributed to our negative beliefs, as well as looking at the secondary gains to not challenging them. In other words, we are asked to not only identify what we believe about ourselves, but also what we fear would happen if we were to let go of those beliefs. And, in my opinion, if we are willing to take the time to complete the exercises that Louise Hay offers, we can truly dig in and find where those core negative beliefs live, and begin to releasing their power over us.

Also, as an EMDR therapist exploring negative beliefs, I see that our negative cognitions about ourselves usually revolve around one of three themes, responsibility, safety, and choice. For example, “it’s my fault,” or “I am not good enough” is taking inappropriate responsibility or self-blame, “I can’t trust others” is about safety, for example, or “I am out of control,” is about the sense of having no choices. Therefore, I was happy to see that “Experience Your Good Now!” explores how to use affirmations to address these themes. Louise Hay also captures ten specific areas of our lives such as health, emotions, money, friends, love, critical thinking, addictions, forgiveness, and aging. By looking at these ten areas, we can learn what created our current beliefs about ourselves, as well as how to change them. Therefore, I truly believe that Louise Hay has created a useable affirmation book, one that can complement our healing work, as we release the negative beliefs we adopted from our old wounds.

Oh, and by the way, this just in! Hay House has also got a I Can Do It! Sea Caribbean Cruise contest for those who read the book. You can enter and find out more at www.experienceyourgoodnow.com

I write this on the heals of just having driven to Flagstaff, AZ, an attempt to “wind down,” my soul craving down time, rest, and moments of pure “nothingness.” Yet, I notice my anxiety increasing, for my ego is not happy with me. In fact, it is seething. It doesn’t want to sit. It doesn’t want stillness. In fact, I have noticed, of late, that its internal chatter has become more persistent, attentive, and even petulant at moments. I don’t seem to notice my ego peering over my shoulder, examining the book I’ve read, The Shift, by Dr. Wayne Dyer; it arrived free, from Hay House Publishers, for me to review. And now, my ego is concerned; it’s not happy with me. It knows the gig is up.

With a constant borage of agitation surrounding his work, the man sitting next to me is on a rant. I struggle to avoid it. Those “other people” at his work “don’t get it” they are “too small minded to see the value of [his] work.” My stomach is turning and I feel like I am going to be ill. I am viscerally experiencing what Dr. Dyer calls the “very twisted world of ambition,” that nurtures the ego’s desire towards “being better than everyone else, winning at all costs, accumulating more stuff, and being seen by everyone else as being brilliantly successful.” My anxiety increases while I feel my energy draining. I struggle to meet the man with compassion, for know I have to. I have been him. I am him. But, I still can’t be near that vibration because it feels too overwhelming. My ego tells says I’m “just being to sensitive.” But all of a sudden, a reassuring inner voice tells me that I’m onto something, and Dr. Dyer’s book seems to anchor me in reality.

What Dr. Dyer summarizes is that through a focus on ambition, we have bought the idea that what we do, own, and how we are perceived is really who we are. As if a highly skilled snake oil salesman eying us from across the street, peddling his wares, the ego is a trickster. For the glittering goods we buy from him, our self-serving ambitions are the very things that lead to suffering. We fear losing what we have accumulated, thus working harder to get more and more. And, like the man I overheard at lunch today, we become attached to the idea that we must defend our ideas and things because they are “ours.” It is ironic, asserts Dr. Dyer, for we are still connected to each other, and to the divine. My, and your, ego would love to keep us separate, but we are connected energetically, albeit that we all bought that snake oil that our egos peddled.

Dr. Dyer’s message echoes various ancient texts, including the Upanishads and the Hua Hu Ching, that all of us have forgotten who we are. That in our desire to become, that we have forgotten a shining light within us, our dharma, what we are here to bring into the world. We have forgotten that we already are. That in our focus on the material, we have been consumed by ambition, driven to create lives that look, sound, and feel good from the outside, but are merely costumes. We have forgotten why we are on this journey, forgotten that we were born from an energetic connection to the divine, that formless spirit, God, Source, The Tao. Dr. Dyer details that, ironically, the universe is always ready for us to shift, remembering that this place we came from, but instead we buy into what the ego has sold us, that this is where we should be.

The good news is that we were born with a round trip ticket, one we can always use to return to that part of us that always knew its divinity. We just have to be willing to cash it in. We have to close the door on ego’s desires, opening another door, moving towards a life of meaning. And as I eagerly write this, I can note that my ego sarcastically chimes in that “ when one door closes, and another opens, it’s the hallway in between that can kill you.” It’s still persistent, that shady, snake-oil seller. I’m onto it.

The Shift reinforces that if we don’t want what the ego sells, a “U Turn,” ensues, one that involves specific steps to returning to and remembering our connection to Source. To me, this is the most valuable part of The Shift. Dr. Dyer thoughtfully, consciously, and skillfully summarizes a 7–Step Summary and 4 Cardinal Virtues that can shift us towards living a life of meaning. And, while echoing the inspiration of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Dr. Dyer’s language transforms what are often seen as inaccessible Eastern principles into a usable and easily understandable Western text.

We can U Turn from what our egos are attached to, challenging ourselves to “be,” to move towards meaning and away from the unreal. Dr. Dyer has successfully taught us why, and how to, avoid that ego driven snake oil sales-man. Because of Dr. Dyer, we know the ego’s tricks. This time, we have The Shift, and we’re ready for it.