If you've ever tried using affirmations and wondered why they don't need to work today, this episode is for you. Will explore why it's hard to break free from old conditioning and happy affirmation to create anything active that helps you company to your authentic center. Welcome to Roots of the Rise with me, Sarah Hope, where spiritual wisdom needs practical tools in short episodes. Each one is a taster, not a deep dive, meant to spark curiosity and guide you toward authentic alignment. The stories you've repeated to yourself over and over and over again. And the holidays, they can be a time when those old stories really show up. Stress, worry, self-criticism. But what if there was a way you could change the story? A way to step into this season and the new year for that matter, feeling calmer, more grounded, and more joyful. And that's what we're diving into today. One way of doing this, which is using affirmations. But how do we make affirmations truly effective? How do we embody them so that they actually transform our life? Before we get into how to make affirmations really effective, let's just back up and talk about why we're stuck. From a neurological and psychological perspective, your feelings inform your thoughts, which drive your actions, and that's how you show up in the world. Feelings often come first. Our bodies react to stimuli before our minds even label them. You might feel your stomach tighten or your chest constrict before your brain says, I'm anxious. This is supported by somatic and embodied theories from people like Antonio Damasio and Bessel Vandercock. You know, emotions arise from physical sensations in the body, and thoughts are our mind's way of making sense of those sensations. Now, from a cognitive behavioral perspective, thoughts come first. You think I'm not good enough, and that thought triggers sadness or shame. In that model, changing your thinking patterns changes how you feel. From my perspective, and look, I'm not a psychologist or a psychotherapist. Uh, you know, I am not a somatic teacher. But what I'll tell you from my experience working with hundreds of people is that it's not really one or the other, it's both. Thoughts and feelings are so deeply interwoven. They dance together. And unless you have an extreme level of awareness, you're not gonna sit there and be able to pick out chicken or egg. You know, a thought can create a feeling and a feeling can inspire a thought. And what really matters is awareness, noticing which one is leading in any given moment and learning how to interrupt or alchemize that cycle so you're not unconsciously reacting from old conditioning. And the really exciting part is that you can change all of it. You can. I wish it were simple, but it's not. You know, one of the best books I've ever read that explains why it's so hard to change is Dr. Joe Dispenses' Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. I'll link it in the show notes. It is fantastic. It's an easy read. And in it, he talks about why it is so hard on so many levels to actually change, you know, how we show up in the world, which it is in and of itself a habit. You know, we kind of get used to responding a certain way to stimuli, which is a habit. You know, we have habitual responses to certain triggers. He says, as you continually think about your problems, consciously or unconsciously, you only create more of the same difficulties. Maybe you think about them so much because it was your thinking that created them in the first place. Perhaps they feel so real because you constantly revisit those familiar feelings that first created the problem. If your thoughts determine your reality and you keep thinking the same thoughts, you'll continue producing the same reality day after day. Your outer life will keep matching your inner state because your environment is constantly reminding your mind how to feel. There's a great Carl Jung quote that points to the same thing. He says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. As you do the same things, see the same people, go to the same places, look at the same surroundings, you are literally cueing yourself to reproduce the same experiences. In some respects, your environment is controlling your mind. If the input remains the same, how can you expect the output to be different? This is why it's so powerful to clean up a messy space. Or if you've been stuck in a rut at work, you know, if you have like a home office, to rearrange the office can sometimes cue a change in how you're relating to your work. There's power in changing our external stimuli. Have you heard that saying? Nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Every time you activate the same neural pathways, they strengthen their connection, making that reaction or thought pattern easier to trigger the next time. So, what about beliefs we hold about ourselves? Let's say you are someone who often thinks it's all my fault. After 20, 30, 40 years of repeating that thought, you not only feel guilty, you think guilty thoughts automatically. You've built an internal environment of guilt. Each guilty thought signals your body to release the same chemical cocktail that feels like guilt. Over time, your cells adapt to this chemistry, building more receptor sites for that feeling until guilt becomes your body's version of normal. It's like living next to an airport. You stop noticing the noise unless a plane flies really close. The same thing happens in your emotional body. Eventually, your cells become desensitized to the usual level of emotion. So you need a stronger reaction to feel the same familiar state. A mood is a short-term chemical state that lingers after an emotional reaction. When that state lasts longer, it becomes a temperament, a habitual emotional tone. And when it lasts for years, it becomes a personality. So if how we think, act, and feel is our personality, then our personality is what creates our personal reality. To create a new personal reality, we have to create a new personality. We have to be greater than our environment, greater than our circumstances, greater than our past. And this line from Dispenza hits really hard. He says, if you can master suffering, you can just as easily master joy. We all know people who seem permanently stuck in suffering. Maybe it's you. Maybe you feel stuck in suffering. You know, people who are stuck there, they say, I don't know how to be happy. But what they're really saying is I've memorized this emotional state for so long. Nothing in my environment, no person, experience or opportunity can move me from it. I am attached to my pain because it feels familiar. I know that's hard to hear, but you know, it speaks to what we were talking about in the episode about, you know, recognizing that sometimes we are broken. It doesn't mean that we're unfixable. It doesn't mean we can't move away from our pain, but it does mean that we have become so attached, so stuck, so habitually in the same chemical state that trying to mentally force ourselves to feel differently than we do is very, very difficult. When you start to see how your emotions, thoughts, and body chemistry, something you can't, you know, make change just by thinking, I'm gonna change my body chemistry, when they all reinforce one another, it becomes very clear why change can feel so hard. You're not just fighting a mindset. This isn't a question of willpower. You're working with years of wiring. But the good news is your brain and body are always capable of change. You can teach them something new. That's where conscious practices like affirmations come in, not as quick fixes, but as tools to gently reprogram those automatic loops and help you live from a new emotional state. Affirmations are one of the most talked-about tools with this, and there's real truth to how powerful they can be. Say something often enough, and you can rewire your brain to believe it. That's the power and the caution of self-talk. Did you know? This is one of my favorite little tidbits. The word abracadabra comes from, I believe it's Aramaic, meaning I create as I speak. How you speak to yourself literally shapes how you feel and how your life unfolds. If you speak harshly to yourself, you will start to see life through that same lens. And remember, we don't treat the things we hate very well. If you harp on all the things you lack, you will only see scarcity in your life. Where attention goes, energy flows, another annoying but true saying. Another key point: your brain does not know the difference between something happening and you imagining it happening. That's why visualization is so powerful. Visualizing the calm, confident, capable version of you isn't fluff, it's neuroscience. You can't think your way out of a feeling, but you can feel your way into a new way of thinking. And that is the key point with so much of this work. One of my favorite Instagram accounts, uh Abundance Alchemist, puts it perfectly. He says, Most manifestation techniques are distractions. Journaling, scripting, affirmations are tools. But if you're using them to get something instead of embodying the energy, you're just reinforcing lack. Because when you say to the universe, I want more of this thing, you're also saying to the universe, I don't have enough of this thing. And if you don't feel the change, if you don't embody it and bring it into your lived, felt sense, it won't stick. It's the same with gratitude. Writing three things you're grateful for means little unless you actually feel the gratitude in your body. More on that next week. So to be clear, I'm not down on affirmations. They are really powerful, but they work best when combined both with emotion and consistency. If you've told yourself 70,000 times, I'm not worthy, it's gonna take a lot of repetitions to rewire your subconscious mind. For example, if you repeat an affirmation like, I am worthy, I am lovable, I am strong. Even just 10 times per minute during a half-hour walk or workout, you've said it 300 times. Do that daily for two months. That's 18,000 times. You will start to feel the shift. You may begin to dream about it. Your brain will begin wiring toward that new truth. It becomes part of your lived experience. But the key, the key is combining the affirmation with emotion. The more you feel them, the faster they integrate. But let's just acknowledge that going from feeling deeply unlovable to lovable is a big leap. If an affirmation feels too far away, use a bridge. Instead of saying, I am worthy of love, try. What if I knew I'm worthy of love? What if just tacking that on at the beginning can be a really useful way to just open the door to thinking differently. In my experience, that bridge is necessary because if you have been stuck in 40, 50 years of unworthiness, saying an affirmation, you're not going to be able to feel it. You're not going to be able to embody how it would feel because it's completely foreign to your felt sense of life. I find affirmations to be especially effective when they are done, once you're a good ways down the path, you know, once you've had these glimpses of moments of feeling that way, once you have even a single experience in which you have had a deeply embodied sense of this new way of thinking, because then you have something to fall back on. Then you have felt it and you can bring up that felt experience. If you have never had an experience of worthiness, then it's like trying to describe to your body what the first thing that comes to mind is what an orgasm feels like without that person never having experienced one. Very, very difficult to bring something into your body if you've never actually experienced it. So to me, affirmations are more an advanced practice, not a beginner one. But that question of what if I knew I was worthy or whatever it is, uh, is a good way to bridge. It's a good way to bring it into your practice and to use the technique a little earlier. And there are other ways to fast-track this process too. Like doing it while listening to Theta by Noral Beats, for instance, can increase the efficacy. So I wanted to give you a few affirmations to carry with you into the holidays. I am worthy of love and joy this season. I embody peace and presence in every moment. I honor myself and care for my energy, even in the busiest of times. I am setting positive boundaries this season. Maybe one of those resonates for you. Maybe you need something different. Take a moment now to just think about what you really want to take into these next few weeks. And once you've found an affirmation that feels good, say it slowly. Really feel it. Visualize, feel yourself living from that state of being. Here's a fun little bonus that I actually just did that I'm really enjoying. Rename your app folders on your phone with affirmations. You can put all of your uh kind of money apps into one called I Am Wealthy, your fitness apps into I am healthy. Maybe your photos, Instagram, Facebook, if it's a positive thing for you and helps you stay connected, you could title it I am connected or I am blessed because it reminds you of all these uh connections in your life. Uh, you could put all your games in a folder that says I am playful. Like I said, I just did this, and I gotta say, it gives me a little mood boost every time I look at my screen. I mean, my work folder says I am inspired, and it reminds me how much I love what I do, even when I'm tired or on a deadline. You know, affirmations aren't about wishful thinking, they're about rewiring your brain, integrating new truths, and stepping more fully into your authentic self. So pick one or two this week, repeat them daily. If you have a practice of going for a walk, say it while you're walking, you know, feel them, embody them, and watch how your life begins to shift. Quietly, but powerfully. Give yourself the gift of conscious words, conscious feelings, and conscious presence to who you want to be. You deserve it. Next episode, we're going to dive into the always talked about list three things you're grateful for daily practice: the promise of it and the pitfalls. So make sure you follow or subscribe so you don't miss it. Until next time, remember, know who you are, love who you've been, and be willing to do the work to become who you're meant to be. Just a quick reminder this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist, and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist, or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope it inspires you to grow, heal, and seek the support you need to thrive.