Often when we use affirmations, we stop doing them, inner resistance comes up towards the stretch that they mean to us - we use affirmations because we want to change some habitual ways of perceiving or behaving, so to say retune our subconscious mind.

We are now combining affirmations with EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques. EFT is a powerful tool to relieve stress, anger, frustration and other emotional issues quickly and gently.

The classic way of doing affirmations that worked for many people, is that you boldly state the desired outcome in the present tense, without negations, as if you already had achieved it. Now, Gary Craig said in his brilliant video series "From EFT to the Palace of Possibilities" that affirmations work for every person every time. And he is absolutely right.

Well, now you will say - "Hang on for a second - I know plenty of people who did not loose the weight they wanted, did not become more prosperous, did not achieve what they wanted!" Now, how do you explain that?

OK, let's look at how this works. Say you weigh 220 pounds and you would like to be at 160. So you create an affirmation:

I fully enjoy my fit and slim body, weighing 160 pounds.

A good affirmation - in the present tense, with an emotional verb, a double positive formulation, i.e. it's a positive goal and doesn't contain a negation. The classic idea is to repeat that over and over again until it becomes a dominant habit and it also manifests in outer reality. And at some point in time that may actually happen. But sometimes, often enough it doesn't!

So let's look at what actually happens in such a case. The rub is in what happens AFTER you say your affirmation: either you believe what you just said or you don't. Well and as we usually use affirmations in order to cause some change to happen that means that what we are affirming hasn't happened yet. Especially when we try to achieve something that is a major shift in our perception, something that we have struggled with for a long time or when we try to remedy something that is an absolutely obvious reality (like the overweight in our example) then most likely, you start off an internal echo, that small inner voice that goes something like:"Liar, look in the mirror, slim and fit, ha! You are fat, these are 220 pounds around your waist and that's what you are!" or "You want to achieve your goals easily and effortlessly - look at you, you don't even get around to clean up your desk! You are failure - already your father told you that."Or some other comment where we resent ourselves for past failures, past programming or what we perceive to be failures.

As we know affirmations are stronger when they carry an emotional current with them. Now what do you think which of the two statements before carries the higher emotional current and also the higher credibility? The second statement - the internal echo - of course, and exactly that is what gets affirmed and holds you firmly in the place that you actually wanted to leave.

If that happens, we need to take another approach, or it will take a very long time and lots and lots of repetition to make statement 1 stronger or increase its credibility and your desire for it, until maybe one day it will overrule your internal echo and become the truth that is affirmed. Or maybe that will never happen.

Let's look at another case - same situation, same affirmation, but this time your internal reply or echo goes like this: "Anyone in our family who got slim died of cancer shortly after! I want to stay alive, I better keep my weight - it may not look nice, but I will stay at least alive."

Well logically you know that cancer caused the weight loss and not the other way round. But your emotional truth is "Uncle Joe was a big guy, but then he got slimmer and slimmer and then they found out that he had cancer!" If you don't address your fear and your belief that weight loss is associated with sickness, danger or hardship, you actually sub-consciously don't even want to go there. A part of you actually doesn't want to loose weight. And you won't.

The same can be true for prosperity, loving relationships or any other subject - we first need to release the limiting beliefs from our past, our hurt, anger or resentments, before we can plant a new seed in the soil of our sub-conscious mind. As long as still all this weed is there, there is no space for new ideas and habits.

So we have to plant a new belief that total health and reaching your ideal weight can go together, while we release the fear that loosing weight means hardship or sickness. Logically we know that the causality is the other way around, but that has to become our emotional truth to take effect in our lives.

The Choices Method, developed by Dr. Patricia Carrington, is exactly offering that. There is much less resistance to our affirmation if we said - In the past I believed that slim means sick, but now I choose to be totally healthy while I reach and maintain my ideal weight. What is your internal echo to that? There is no resistance - Yes, I don't have it yet, but if I had a choice, I'd choose to be 160 pounds and healthy. And by that I can develop a positive feeling towards that goal, feel how good this would be, get in this positive emotional state and do some tapping to release past fear, hurt or anger that doesn't allow me to get there.

And that is exactly what we do here at affirmationaccelerator.com. We offer you stimulation for your eyes with beautiful pictures, for your ears with the narration and the wonderful music by Tomas Michaud (if you want to know more about his music, please visit www.worldmelodies.com) and you also stimulating the energy system of your body by tapping on the various EFT points. You acknowledge whatever limiting ideas were present, get some positive choices to replace them with and link the two together, so that the transition will work even faster.
And the best thing is - if you do it once or twice a day it will only take a few minutes - a short holiday for your mind and soul and you will feel some relief quite quickly, many people feel it already while doing it the first time. Over the course of a few weeks, you will gently and effectively change your thinking patterns, remove negative beliefs and establish your positive choice instead.

Try it and have fun.