Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to you joining me tomorrow for Day 16, where I will lead you through a guided meditation. In the meantime, you may want to listen to the guided body scan meditation below from Sura Flow.
Hello and welcome back to the 90 day of the meditation challenge. Thank you for joining me. Today is day 14 of our challenge. It’s also the very end of week two of this challenge, where we have been exploring positive affirmations. During the last week we have been exploring positive affirmations as a way to to bring a focus of positivity to our lives. It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day trials and challenges and and it can actually be difficult to see beyond the problems that we’re currently experiencing. So with positive affirmations we are actually making a choice. We are deciding that we are going to be searching for the good things around us, the good things in this life and the blessings. And things to be grateful for. Later on, I will lead us in a guided meditation and then there will be time for you to do some journaling. The topics we’ll be covering today are self-compassion, how we talk to ourselves. What about what we think, our thoughts in our mind? Our thoughts come and go, and sometimes they come crashing all around us. We have roughly 80 000 thoughts each day. And for the vast majority of them, these are not terribly nice, for some reason. We tend to do a lot of negative self talk. The funny thing is that we can find it easy to be kind to other people, and we can show empathy to other people and want to help them out and want to be supportive and say lovely things to other people but when it comes to ourself, often for some unknown reason we can be really harsh on ourself. So it’s a matter of remembering to be kind to ourselves to give ourselves unconditional love. And if we really struggle with that, just imagine that we are back to when we were a little child and just imagine that if you’re thinking thoughts about yourself. Just picture yourself as a little child that you used to be when you’re three or four years old, how would you treat your three or four year old person? How would you expect that you would be towards a 4 year old? You would be gentle and kind wouldn’t you? So try and remember to be gentle and kind to yourself too. And also take the time out to do things that make you happy. Do things hobbies and activities that give you give you some some joy and and satisfaction.
Our attitude is about taking the time out to to make the decision to be positive. So we’re going to say positive affirmations and we’re also going to find three things to be grateful for. So in this week’s workbook for week two you will see there’s a sheet here called gratitudes and positive affirmations. You can either write in this if you’ve printed it out, or just simply get a blank piece of paper and a pen and write down three things that you’re grateful for. Look around you, it could be anything. And also note the reasons why and then also write down three affirmations for yourself. It could be something that you have now or maybe something that you don’t possess yet. It could be a feeling that maybe you don’t have now, but you really want to have it. It could be as simple as saying as your positive affirmation “I am enough”, or “I am brave”, “I am courageous”. And write these down, write down your affirmations and your notes. Write them over and over until you get to the end of the page. And just remind yourself in every moment, that you do have a choice. We can choose how we react to whatever situation we are in. And we can choose to go on with our day and to live our life with purpose. And we can choose to create our own positive focus.
Now I will lead us in a guided meditation a focused awareness one that we explored in week one of the meditation challenge. By taking the time out to do a meditation that will empower us to choose to find some calm and some peace. We will now take the time to have some deep breaths. Breathing in and out. We’re going to count down from five down to one. Breathing in peace and breathing out calm. Find somewhere that’s comfortable to you, it could be sitting up straight. Or it could be lying down and in your own time you may gently close your eyes.
Five breathe in calm, breathe out peace.
Four breathe in calm, breathe out peace.
Three breathe in calm, and breathe out peace.
Two, breathe in calm, and breathe out peace.
One breathe in calm, and breathe out peace.
Now you may gently wriggle your fingers and toes, as this now brings our meditation to a close. We can now take this time to set our intentions for the rest of today and tonight and moving in tomorrow. Now ask yourself, what are the highest intentions that will give you the most benefit? So if you take your piece of paper and a pen, and you can write down in a column your intentions. What you want to do and what you want to feel you would like to be achieving today? What are your priorities for today? Set down your your highest priorities, and then for the rest of the paper take the time to write down all and everything that comes to mind. Whatever is circulating up in your head, write it down now sort of like a brain dump get everything out of your mind. All your thoughts and write it down and you could continue writing until you have filled up three pages. Just get everything out of your head and down onto paper.
I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for day 15 of the challenge. Thank you for joining me today. Tomorrow will be the beginning of week three of our meditation challenge. During week three we will be exploring the body scan meditations.
Today is day 13 of our 90 day challenge,and this week we’ve been working on positive affirmations. I’d like to just begin today by doing a short meditation. It’s going to be a focussed awareness meditation. So let’s begin.
Meditation
If you’d like to just find somewhere that’s comfortable to you, just gently move around, loosen your shoulders. You may sit down or lie down – whatever’s best for you right now. If you like you may close your eyes as well. Now take a deep breath in, and out. We’re going to count down from five down to one. Five, breathe in calm, breathe out peace. Four, breath in calm, breathe out peace. Three, breathe in calm, breathe out peace. Two, breathe in calm, breathe out peace. One breathe in calm, breathe out peace.
You may take this time, to return to your normal breath. And as you’re taking deep breaths in and deep breaths out, focus your attention towards what is your highest intention for today. What is is important for you to do. And moving on with your day today and tonight and into tomorrow. So take this time now to set your intentions and then in your own time you may wiggle your feet with all your fingers wiggle your toes and then open your eyes. This now brings the meditation to a close.
Gratitudes
So if you have some paper and pen handy, please write down three things that you’re grateful for. For me, I would say that I’m grateful to be in the countryside right now. I’m grateful to hear the birds. It’s lovely to hear and to see these birds, and even the sea gulls. The seagulls make me recall the sea, and oh how I wish I was by the sea now. But i’m not. However, I’m still grateful to be by some water. And grateful to see the trees, and grateful to see the birds.
Affirmations
No we will move onto positive affirmations. Please write down three positive affirmations for yourself on your paper. You may write these out repeatedly, over and over again, from one line onto the next – until you get to the end of your page. So write down some positive affirmations that are important to you. So for example you could write “I am exuberant”. “I am powerful”. “I am courageous”. “I am confident”. “I am brave”. So enjoy the rest of your day, and i look forward to seeing you tomorrow, which will be day 14 of the 90 day meditation challenge. Thank you, and goodbye.
Welcome back, and thank you for joining me today for another day in this 12 week challenge.
We’re nearing the end of week two where we have been exploring positive affirmations. In the book I shared with you yesterday called “Sura Flow”, Sura states that positive affirmations can be healing. I trust you are keeping well and have found some value to listening to the guided positive affirmations over the last few days.
By now you will be able to identify those niggling default judgments that sprung up, or as Julia Cameron calls them, “blurts”. And you will be able to see them for what they are and turn the situation around by creating your own positive affirmations. As Sura Dahn Kim says in her book called “Sura Flow”, affirmations can be healing.
Last week we did some focused awareness meditations. And by now you’ll be able to confidently create a guided meditation for yourself. Today we will practise what we learnt last week, by taking the time out for a short “focussed awareness” meditation. Perhaps counting down from 1 to 1 and saying “breathe in peace, breathe out calm”.
So let’s do a guided meditation now. We’ll do a short one counting back from three to one i’m going to say breathe in calm and breathe out peace.
If you like, you may close your eyes, and let’s begin. Three, breathe in calm, breathe out peace. Two, breathe in calm, breathe out peace. One breathe in calm, breathe out peace. And as we go into our day, we will take this opportunity now to set our intentions for the rest of the day, moving into the night and beyond to tomorrow. This now brings our meditation to a close.
Now if you have time now, take this opportunity to get a pen paper and write down three things that you are grateful for. This could be something that might have happened today or yesterday or this week. And you may explain the reasons why you’ve made those choices. Or you may simply just open your eyes now and look around you. Is there anything that you like the look of? Is there anything that you admire from Mother Earth? For example, I am sitting here in a field of bluebells, so I would say that I’m grateful for the beautiful bluebells. I’m grateful for the shelter from the sun, and for the trees.
Next, you may want to list three positive affirmations for yourself. What are three things that you want to affirm for yourself? And if you have some pen and paper, write them down now.
Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to you joining me tomorrow for Day 13. In the meantime, keep well and keep safe.
Welcome back to another day of this challenge. Today I wanted to share with you these three things:-
1) Books by Julia Cameron and Sura Dahn Kim with their thoughts on what are positive affirmations;
2) A talk on positive affirmations from Sura (see link below); and
3) A new app by Radio 1 called “Relax” featuring calming music.
Thank you for joining me again, and I really appreciate you taking the time out to be here. Today, I would like to share with you two books whose author’s have written about positive affirmations. The first one here is by Julia Cameron and it’s called “The Artist’s Way”. If you flick through to pages 30 – 33, you’ll see that Cameron talks about affirmations and she also refers to the enemy within. Being the core negative beliefs. This is essentially ourselves, talking to and about ourselves.
It is generally known that a person has about 80,000 thoughts a day. And the majority of those are negative. Many of the thoughts we have about ourselves are negative. On page 30, Cameron talks about “commonly negatively held beliefs”. For example, “I’m not good enough, I don’t have good enough ideas, I get stuck or or I can’t do this, or I can’t do that, or everyone will hate me if I do that, and you concern yourself with fears of what could happen for events that have not yet happened. Cameron has created a column graphic on page 32, in which she has written example of negative beliefs about yourself and then have an arrow to the next column, where you write down a chart of positive beliefs. In other words, whatever negative belief you have about yourself, you can put an arrow next to it and then write down in the column next to it, the complete opposite of what that negative belief was. For an easy example, for the negative belief it could be “I’m unhappy and I will always be unhappy” – but the positive alternative is “I am happy”. And another example of a negative belief is “I am doomed” so the positive alternative to that is “I am saved”. On page 33 Cameron talks about using affirmations as a weapon to arm ourselves. On page 34, Camerons says that “affirmations will help you to allow yourself ..”. “An affirmation is a positive statement or a positive belief, and if we can become one tenth as good at positive self-talk as we are at negative self-talk we will notice an enormous change …. affirmations help achieve a sense of safety and hope”. Cameron explore what are our core beliefs. She refers to negative statements as blurts, and then how we can convert these blurts into positive affirmations.
Another book I would like to share with you is called “Sura Flow”, and it is written by Sura Dahn Kim. In her book, Kim talks about effortless meditation. At page 58 of her book, Kim discusses “healing affirmations”. Kim explains that “affirmations help you to heal”. On page 59, Kim explains that “affirmations help you release limiting thoughts and beliefs by seeding new positive thoughts that lead to new experiences”.
Below is a link to a video by Kim, on the “Healing Power of Affirmations Positive Self-Talk”.
3) You may also like to explore the new app from Radio 1. It launches officially later today, and it is called The Relax app. This can be helpful for anytime you need to zone out and chill and unwind.
Talking about unwinding, please take the opportunity today to practise your “focussed awareness” meditation. Perhaps counting down from 5 to 1 and saying “breathe in peace, breathe out calm”.
Here are some articles about the new “relax” app:-
Goodbye for now. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be here today. And I look forward to you joining me tomorrow for Day 12. Until then, take care and stay safe.
Ps. If you haven’t already downloaded this week’s PDF worksheet, log into our course website here:-
Alice Letts 