A long time ago I read that in order to get what you want, you should write down affirmations and read them at least once a day. I had read in a number of books that I needed to change my thinking on the level of the unconscious – that the unconscious doesn’t know the difference between negative and positive thoughts and if you think about negative things a lot the unconscious thinks that’s what you want, and because it somehow has the power to make things happen in the outside world, it goes out and gets you negative things. That was why I was having problems, those books suggested, at least as I interpreted them, and to change all that I had to feed my unconscious positive thoughts through affirmations so it would bring me what I wanted.
So I typed up a bunch of affirmations. The affirmations said things like, “Infinite intelligence attracts me to a man with whom I harmonize perfectly,” and “I know that no matter what the negation of yesterday was, my prayer or affirmation of truth will rise triumphantly over it today.” I decided it would give my affirmations extra power if I put them on index cards and put the index cards in a nice box. So I found an old cardboard cigar box and some really nice wrapping paper I had bought in our local New Age store, which has since gone out of business. The paper was printed with beautiful colorful drawings of animals and plants and sea creatures – seashells, badgers, peacock feathers, schools of fish in tropical blue water. I cut it up and taped pieces of it on the box and then I taped my affirmations onto pink index cards and put them all in the box. For a while – maybe five days or so -- I read the index cards every day, then I kind of forgot about them. For years they stayed in the box and the box stayed on a corner of my desk, getting dusty, the tape peeling away from the edges of the pictures, the affirmations inside just sitting there neglected, with nobody using them to try to neutralize the destructive power of their negative thoughts.
Flash forward about fifteen years, to today.
Recently my therapist went to a conference on EMDR and came back with a number of techniques other therapists have found helpful. One of the speakers at the conference said that at the end of her sessions she suggests that her clients put all the bad feelings and terrible childhood memories the clients just dredged up in EMDR, away in some kind of imaginary box. I liked that idea and my therapist and I agreed to try it. And so, toward the end of my EMDR work that day, when it was time to come back up out of my deepest self into the upper air, my therapist said as a way to help me with that transition, “Why don’t you picture a box that you can put all this away in for now, until we need it again next time?”
The box that came to me was that old cigar box sitting on my desk – maybe it’s not even there any more, and I just picture it there because it used to be there – that box that I covered with pictures of animals and birds and seashells and sea creatures and that I put typed affirmations taped onto pink index cards inside. Except, in my EMDR trance, what I saw was not the actual box as it is now, the pictures all old and fading, the tape that held them on peeling off, or even the box as it was when I first made it, the pictures all shiny and new and colorful, the affirmations inside still charged with their magical power to change my life. What I saw was some light airy non-physical version of that box, the physical box transformed into a spiritual box, like a physical body transformed into a spirit, maybe, after death. My EMDR box was a beautiful celestial blue, and there was a kind of light shining from it. It still had those pictures on it but they too were transformed, more like the real things they represented, real birds, real animals, real seashells, except that they weren’t real of course but animals, seashells et cetera in my imagination.
I put whatever childhood pain and bad memories I had just dredged up during EMDR -- I can’t remember any more what they were -- inside the box. I closed the lid, the session ended, I got discharged out into the world and ordinary life. As I was walking along the sidewalk toward the place where I’d parked my car, it came to me that this – this EMDR, this path to my unconscious -- is what I have now instead of affirmations. That these days, instead of just saying positive things to my unconscious, I’m changing what’s in my unconscious. That life has somehow brought me to this place, given me this magical box so I can change – really change – so I can get – really get – what I want and need in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment