Mindfullness and Law of Attraction

[DanielCoetsee]

Hello Everyone.

I've been practicing mindfulness for well over a year and have seen many amazing benefits. Lately my mind keeps going over this certain question and was wondering if my fellow friends could shed some light on the subject. When a thought comes into my head like " people don't like you, or you are no good". Now is it about just observing those thoughts and seeing them as meaningless, or can I insert my own positive thoughts after those. Like " you are worthy of love". My confusion comes with where do the use of affirmations come into all of this? Please anyone with advice feel free to comment

[JonW]

Hi Daniel.
Great question.
I'd say you can do both. Observe the negative thought as just a thought. In Jon Kabat-Zinn's phrase, "a mere secretion of your mind."
When it comes to the affirmative ("I'm a good person/I'm an attractive person/etc.") don't just think it but breathe it and feel it. And work loving-kindness meditation into your daily practice. There's some excellent free guided meditations online.
All best,
Jon

[BioSattva]

Hi Daniel

When a thought comes into my head like " people don't like you, or you are no good". Now is it about just observing those thoughts and seeing them as meaningless, or can I insert my own positive thoughts after those. Like " you are worthy of love". My confusion comes with where do the use of affirmations come into all of this?

Does your breath think you are worthy of love? How about your heart? No matter what you do they'll carry on caring for you. Negative thoughts can be termed 'negative propaganda' (after Mark Williams) and so it can be countered by positive propaganda in the way you are doing so - with more thoughts, however that is more like hypnotherapy.

Your own body's reflexive self-caring processes can, in my experience, act as positive propaganda beyond thoughts. Try it right now - has your breath been caring for you all along while you've been reading this? I think it has - has it been 'saying', "I love you; you are worthy of love"? Were you listening to it? How do you feel when you do listen to it? Like sharing a moment with an old close friend?

So via one's attention-placing, one has a choice as to which propaganda one trusts - one's positive body 'language' which can't be challenged or argued with, or one's thoughts which can't really be trusted to be true. The choice, Daniel, is yours (sorry, just having a Cilla Black moment) .

[Chris Manning]

Hello Daniel,

Personally I think that answering your mind's "people don't like you, or you are no good" attack, with an affirmation is ok, but there are far more effective ways of dealing with it.
To engage with these attacks is to be drawn into the battle. The likelihood is that your response " you are worthy of love", will quickly be followed by another attack which says "You? worthy of love? Ha Ha, who are you trying to kid?" followed by a long list of reasons why you're not not worthy of love. This can leave you much more deflated than the first attack.
Also, just patiently watching it play out, without believing it or engaging with it will give you a new strength which will eventually lead to freedom from it . This doesn't mean it won't happen ever again, more that when it does happen it won't interfere with your life.
Along with watching the emotion, I suggest you try naming the emotion out loud. If it is fear, worry, shame or whatever, just state it, saying "fear, fear", then watch what happens.
Every time it rises its head, name it, over and over again.
I have had enormous success with this in some very dark circumstances.
Dark thoughts love a battle as that's where they are harder to defeat but they hate being brought out into the open.
Just like Rumplestiltskin, discovering his name completely disempowered him.
Affirmations seem to be a rejection of the present moment. They can be an attempt at covering up the emotion and pushing it away. Mindfulness on the other hand opens up the emotion so that it can be examined. It's a sense of moving into it rather than moving away from it. Mindfulness is interested in every emotion, particularly the dark ones as that's where the root of our problems lie. To be free from anything we have to spend time getting to know it. Nothing is ever going to leave because we denied its existence.
I suggest that you also try something called metta (loving kindness) practice. This will help you to feel more in tune with self love in a very healthy way.

All the very best Daniel.
Chris

[BioSattva]

Along with watching the emotion, I suggest you try naming the emotion out loud. If it is fear, worry, shame or whatever, just state it, saying "fear, fear", then watch what happens.[...] I suggest that you also try something called metta (loving kindness) practice. This will help you to feel more in tune with self love in a very healthy way.

This is great, Chris. I really like the way you put things. One can even combine the above two methods by using Thich Nhat Hanh's approach as posted here:

with that energy of mindfulness, we can recognize our anger, our fear, our despair. We practice recognizing and embracing.

When a mother working in the kitchen hears the cries of her baby, she puts anything she is holding down and goes to the room of the baby, picks the baby up and holds the baby dearly in her arms. We do exactly the same thing when the seed of anger and fear manifest in us; our fear, our anger is our baby. Let us not try to suppress and to fight our fear and our anger. Let us recognize its presence; let us embrace it tenderly like a mother embracing her baby.

When a mother embraces her baby, the energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the baby. The mother does not know, yet, what is the cause of the suffering of the baby, but the fact that she is holding the baby tenderly can already help. The energy of tenderness and compassion in a mother begins to penetrate into the body of the baby, and the baby gets some relief right away. The baby may stop crying. And if the mother knows how to continue the practice of holding the baby mindfully, tenderly, she will be able to discover the cause of the suffering of the baby.
[...]
"Oh my little anger, I know you. You are my old friend. I will take good care of you. Oh my little fear, I know you are always there. I will take good care of you." That is the attitude of non-duality, the attitude of non-violence, because we know that mindfulness is us; love is us; but fear and anger are us, also.

It took me a while to discover that the little anger is our "old friend" because it got us through to where we are now - without those 'wild' reactions, we could never have survived in the wilderness, so it saved our bacon over and over again - it's an evolutionary backup system just in case we lose all our inherited culture and our DNA needs to continue. Even when we think our anger has our worst interests at heart and is a 'negative' aspect of our being, we can realise that it is a part of our innate self-caring nature as a living organism. Here is Thich Nhat Hanh again from that same post:

Let us enjoy our breathing.
Breathing in--I feel I am alive.
Breathing out--I smile to life.
To Life…smiling to life

[rara]

Hi Daniel.
Great question.
I'd say you can do both. Observe the negative thought as just a thought. In Jon Kabat-Zinn's phrase, "a mere secretion of your mind."
When it comes to the affirmative ("I'm a good person/I'm an attractive person/etc.") don't just think it but breathe it and feel it. And work loving-kindness meditation into your daily practice. There's some excellent free guided meditations online.
All best,
Jon

Still no "like" button on this forum...so I must say I like this!

Affirmations of positivity are a great way to change things around. It's you at the end of the day, so you craft what to believe! The negative words are built-in to you for one reason or another (presumably growing up people made you feel worthless?) Have a practice at saying "whatever" to those thoughts and let them pass on...

[rara]

Be very careful using terms like "law of attraction" too....your OP doesn't relate to this actual subject I'm afraid...most probably because the current fashion of "law of attraction" is selling it in a load of books which quite frankly is a load of BS. Just sayin'