Unit 7: Charging Your Image with Energy

Your image is well in place by now, but there’s something more you can do to make it as powerful and effective as possible. That something more is to charge your image with emotion. In this unit you will learn how emotions play a vital role in charging your images with creative energy and implanting them vibrantly on your filtering screen. You’ll also begin to use this important component in your regular visualization exercises.

The Power of Emotion

Emotions have long been regarded by many as frivolous by-products of the mind. They’ve been politely accepted when expressed in small, non-threatening ways, such as when smiling fondly at sleeping children, falling in love, giving a hearty cheer for the favorite ball team, or offering sweet remembrances on Mother’s Day. However, there’s definitely a point at which emotions “have gone too far” and are considered out of control, disruptive or disturbing. For example, tears, anger and shame often make others uncomfortable and are best held in check. Even unbridled joy can cause peevish glances.

Certainly in the past, the scientific community saw little value in emotions. Those who were scientists of varying types—doctors, physicists or engineers, for example—made a point of remaining calm and rational at all times. They feared that emotional expression would interfere with their capacity to do their jobs effectively. The concept of the machine had become so powerful a model that properly raised, good citizens often denied themselves the expression of a significant and important part of their human experience—their feelings—in an effort to be more reliable, efficient and productive like a machine.

Lucky for us modern folk, emotions are making a comeback! The culture at large has begun to recognize that emotions are vitally important to the quality of life for both men and women, and that it’s necessary to feel and express our feelings as fully (albeit as appropriately) as possible in order to have a happy, healthy psychological life. All kinds of therapies have been developed over the past 25 years or so, designed to assist the “closed-off” and the “uptight” to tap into and become more comfortable with their emotional selves.

What still remains to be widely recognized, however, is the powerful role our emotions play in the creation of events or experiences. Emotions don’t just enrich our lives; they propel our lives into one direction or another. It helps to think of emotions as energy in motion (E + motion = emotion). Once understood, that energy can be channeled into our creative activities—including our creative visualizations—to fuel and empower them.

Emotional Vibrations

Have you ever been able to dance and sing when you were feeling sad and lonely? Is it easy to relax and “veg out” when you have gotten a great idea about a new project that you want to start? Do you feel like buying everyone you see flowers when your boss has done something that caused you to feel angry and unappreciated? Your answer to these questions is most likely, no! Why? Because when you feel sad you aren’t in the mood to dance. When you have a new idea you usually can’t wait to begin working on it. And when you aren’t appreciated, it’s hard to care right at that moment about spreading joy with flowers! In other words, it’s difficult to do something when you feel like doing the opposite.

Now, all of our experiences have matching emotional components. Many people call these vibrations. There are certain emotional vibrations that match singing and dancing. And there are other emotional vibrations that match relaxing and forgetting about daily concerns. And there are still other emotional vibrations that match the feelings of anger and not being appreciated. In fact, every event or experience that you can think of will have a matching emotional vibration. Some are subtler than others, to be sure. But no experience is, by nature, emotion-less.

In Unit 1 we talked about the concept of like attracts like. It’s a universal law that has proven itself time and time again. Emotions (e.g., emotional vibrations) are also subject to that law. They, too, attract “like.” For example, how do you feel when someone sincerely smiles at you? Most of us feel like smiling back. And when you are feeling very angry toward someone, which of the following are you most likely to do: a) kiss them, b) give them the “hairy eyeball” or c) ask them if they are hungry. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the response, whether it flows to us from another (as in the smile) or wells up from within.

In fact, emotional vibrations are so good at attracting similar emotional vibrations that we can call them magnets. Few would deny that joyful people magnetize more joy into their lives. Similarly, few would deny that hateful people magnetize more hate into their lives. We don’t think of ourselves as magnets in this way, yet that is, in essence, what we are.

We can use this understanding of how emotions act like magnets to really charge up our visualizations! We do this by generating the feelings within that are consistent with the scene we are picturing for our goal. In other words, you want to feel the emotions that go along with the pictures you are seeing in your mind’s eye. For example, if you were visualizing a promotion at work, you would practice feeling excited, proud, or however else the promotion will make you feel. Or, if you want greater balance in your life, you would practice feeling calm, unruffled, centered or other feelings you associate with being in greater balance.

Emotions as Information

What about “bad” emotions such as anger, hatred or fear? Should we try to not feel them so that they don’t magnetize bad stuff to us? NO. Please understand that I’m not recommending that! Our emotions are important to us and we should acknowledge them all, the positive as well as the negative. You know that we all sometimes feel a variety of negative emotions—let’s be honest about that. But there’s really nothing “bad” about them.

In fact, there’s something very good about them: they give us important information about ourselves. They tell us something about ourselves that we need to know. They may be telling us about the thoughts we are thinking, the beliefs we are holding, the choices we are making, or the responses we are having. Most of all, they are telling us that we are moving not toward, but away from what we really want.

When you feel a negative emotion, allow yourself to really feel it—but be sure to do so appropriately. You can yell in your car (with the windows rolled up, please), write down your feelings in a letter that you won’t mail, or beat on a pillow, etc. Once the negative emotion has been expressed, you will be in a good position to analyze and explore it. Where did it come from? What was it trying to tell you? What changes could you make in your thoughts or beliefs so that you won’t need to experience that emotion again for the same reason? If you were to keep feeling that emotion, where would it take you? Do you want to go there? If not, in which direction would you rather be going? Use the answers to questions like these to understand why you felt the emotion and what you want or need to do to respond to it.

I’m sure you know that negative emotions are not the only important emotions to pay attention to! Positive emotions offer us not only the pleasure of feeling good, but also provide information and guidance. Have you ever heard the expression, follow your bliss? It’s good advice, because the feeling of bliss (or excitement or joy) also tells us something about our thoughts and beliefs, the choices we are making or responses we are having, and, most importantly, that we are moving toward what we really want. So emotions, both positive and negative, give us valuable information that we can learn to use for our own benefit.

Emotional Habits

Problems in our lives can occur when we get stuck in negative emotions and don’t use them as the feedback mechanism that they are intended to be. Hard as it is to believe, negative emotions can become habits—familiar friends we don’t necessarily like but become used to and learn to get along with. They may become part of our identity without our realizing it. Some people are even addicted to certain negative emotions.

You probably know people who have a tendency to be irritable, melancholy or always in a crisis. These people have made a habit out of certain negative emotions. Though comfortably familiar, their negative emotional habits color their world negatively and work toward magnetizing more unhappiness to them—seeming to justify their gloomy outlook. Negative emotional habits may result in behavior patterns such as martyrhood, victimhood, insecurity, defensiveness, aggressiveness, and stinginess.

You probably also know people who have a tendency to be “up,” cheery or who rarely let things get to them. Their positive emotional habits color their world positively and work toward magnetizing more happiness to them—justifying their cheery outlook. Positive emotional habits may result in behavior patterns such as generosity, openness, happiness, supportiveness, assertiveness, and cheerfulness.

Positive emotions help us when they become habits because they attract more positive experiences. I don’t know anyone who gets upset when that happens! However, while negative emotions have their place and purpose, they, too, attract like unto themselves when they become habits. I know plenty of people, including myself, who would just as soon do without any and all unnecessary negative experiences!

The trick is to embrace our positive emotions and make them habits, while turning any negative emotional habits around into positive ones. No law says we have to have a balance between our positive and negative emotions—equal pain and pleasure (though some suggest this is so). While "positivity" and negativity exist in balance in the Universe (as best we understand it), we are certainly not tied to experiencing either one or both. There’s no cosmic scorekeeper keeping a tally of all our positive experiences and making sure we have an equal complement of negative ones!

As we learn to work with our emotions, we can choose how much of each we want to experience. In the following exercise, you will explore some of your positive and negative emotional habits and learn a technique for turning the negative into positive once you have “gotten the message” they have to offer.

Emotional Habits Exercise

1. Take a few moments to think about what one of your strongest positive emotional habits might be. Write about it below.

A positive emotion I habitually feel is (Example: cheerful)

___________________________________________________________________________

2. Ask yourself, What has this emotion helped me to create or magnetize into my life? (Example: It helped me to get picked as department representative at the regional conference.)

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Give yourself a big pat on the back and thank yourself for making this emotion a habit and magnetizing this experience into your life! Don’t forget that it’s just as important—if not more important—for us to pay attention to what we are doing “right” as to what we are doing “wrong.” Acknowledging success empowers us to create more success!

3. Now think of a negative emotion you habitually feel and write about it below.

A negative emotion I habitually feel is (Example: irritable)

___________________________________________________________________________

4. Ask yourself, What has this emotion helped me to create or magnetize into my life? (Example: An unpleasant commute in traffic each day.)

___________________________________________________________________________

When you are ready to stop creating this or any negative experience, you can make the commitment to express, process and let go of the habitual negative emotion(s) which have magnetized it to you. When you break a negative emotional habit, you make room for new, positive emotions that are more enjoyable to feel and experience in your life!

To help you begin to do this, answer the following series of questions about the negative emotional habit you have just identified.

5. Where does the emotion come from? Think back to when you first remember experiencing this emotion. (Example: My mom was irritated by everything, it seemed. I guess I picked it up from her.)

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6. What is this habitual emotion trying to tell you? (Example: That I see the world as an annoying, irritating place where people do irritating things for no good reason.)

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7. What changes could you make in your thoughts or beliefs so that you won’t need to experience this anymore for the same reason? (Example: I could focus on the world as being a friendly, supportive place and remember that when people do things that irritate me, they may have a good reason which I would understand if they could tell me.)

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8. Where is this habitual emotion taking you? (Example: Into more and more experiences which irritate me and separate me from others.)

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9. Where would you rather go? (Example: Into experiences where I’m aware of the consideration and cooperation of others and have harmonious interactions with them.)

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10. What emotional habit(s) could you develop which will help you to get there? (Example: Patience and a “go with the flow” attitude.)

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You can use questions 5 - 10 to help you explore any negative emotion you discover has become a habit, and decide which positive emotion you’d like to replace it with and why. If you are aware of other negative emotional habits you’d like to work with now, you can take a few minutes to answer these six questions about each negative emotion before going on. You may want to do this on a separate sheet of 3-hole punched notebook paper and add it to this unit. That way you’ll have it handy for reference in the future.

Once you’ve discovered some of your negative emotional habits and made choices about the positive emotions you’d like to make habits instead, how do you go about making serious and permanent changes in your thinking? Well, one way we have already discussed is to use some of the mind technology products that help to reprogram the subconscious mind with new data. There is another very powerful technique you can use, however, which works directly with the conscious mind and gives you full control and conscious awareness of this change process. It’s called pivoting.

Replacing Emotions Using Pivoting

Emotions are pretty flexible little guys, you know, although some seem to be a bit more stubborn than do others. They can be released and replaced without major surgery and without a lot of wear and tear on you! Once you know the emotional habit that isn’t serving you, and have identified the emotional habit that will take you where you would rather go, you are ready to make the desired change(s).

The most successful technique I know of for changing negative emotions into positive emotions is pivoting, taught by Abraham on the tape Pivoting and Positive Aspects (see resources). Imagine you are walking in one direction—toward a negative experience—and are feeling pretty bad. Because you are becoming more attuned to your thoughts, you realize that you are feeling specific negative emotions which are propelling you in this direction. To use the pivoting technique, you stop, choose replacement thoughts and emotions, and then turn 180 degrees on your “mental” heels to move in an entirely new direction—toward the preferred positive emotion and experience.

Pivoting is as simple as that! But lasting change takes more that one pivot, please understand. You will need to repeat this exercise every time you catch yourself thinking and feeling in a negative direction. With practice, over time, you will replace the negative habits with new, more positive ones and will no longer need to pivot (on that issue).

How do you know when you need to pivot? You could continuously scan your thoughts and emotions to try to “catch” the negative ones. But that’s hard work! An easier method is to be increasingly aware of how you feel. When you feel good, you are going in the right direction. When you feel bad, that’s your signal to stop and ask yourself, “In what direction are my thoughts and feelings taking me?”

Choosing the Right Emotions to Energize Your Image

Now let’s focus specifically on the emotions that will help bring your goal to life while using creative visualization. The following exercise is designed to help you select exactly the kinds of feelings which will match the image of the “happy end result” you are picturing in your visualization exercises and help magnetize your goal to you.

In a moment, you are going to write down some of the feelings you expect to feel when you are enjoying the achievement of your goal. For example, if your goal is financial abundance, some of the emotions you might expect to feel when you receive that abundance are safe, wealthy, free, and joyous. For practice, close your eyes and consider what each of these different feelings might feel like. What does it feel like to feel safe? You may need to remember a time when you felt particularly safe to clearly get in touch with this feeling. (For example, I remember being a child sitting next to my father in church one particular Sunday morning. He had his arm across the top of the back of the pew and my head was tucked into the bend inside his elbow. I remember feeling so safe there, as if nothing could ever hurt me in that place.)

Next—eyes still closed—see if you can feel what it feels like to be wealthy, then free, and then joyous. Again, you may want to refer back to a memory to help generate the appropriate emotions, but you may not need to. The important thing is to feel the feelings in the present.

Emotions Exercise

Okay, now it’s your turn to come up with some feelings. On the lines provided, make a list of 10 emotions you expect to feel once you have accomplished your goal. They don’t all have to be bowl-you-over emotions like “ecstasy” and “excitement.” Some may be subtle and soft like “at peace” and “contentment.”

1. _______________________________

2. _______________________________

3. _______________________________

4. _______________________________

5. _______________________________

6. _______________________________

7. _______________________________

8. _______________________________

9. _______________________________

10. _______________________________

When you have finished this list, close your eyes and, one by one, feel each emotion as best you can. Then place a circle around the numbers beside the emotions that you enjoyed the most. When you have finished, you will have identified the best emotions to bring into your creative visualization exercises to charge them with just the right energy for accomplishing your goal. (Over time you can make refinements and changes to the emotional component as you see the need.)

Energizing Your Image

Adding the emotional component to your creative visualization is fairly simple. After you have relaxed and brought your scene onto your mental screen, bring in the emotions you have selected to charge your image with energy. Allow yourself to revel in these emotions for a few minutes, remaining aware that whatever is created in consciousness is created in experience. I sometimes like to remind myself at this point that what I’m visualizing is really happening in the quantum now—and a done deal, as it were. All that remains is for the created events to play themselves out in my experience.

After a minute or so, when you feel ready, let go of the emotions and count yourself back to waking consciousness as usual. You will find that sometimes your visualizations seem more energized than at other times. That’s normal. Your emotions are connected to your body, and when the body is tired it may be more difficult to feel charged up about anything! Not to worry; the point is to do the best you can each time, not to be perfect each time. (And every little bit helps, as they say!)

Affirmations

Another powerful technique you can use to generate positive, energy-charging emotions is writing and using affirmations. An affirmation is a positive statement. Well, actually, perhaps I should say a statement positively put. For example, I am wealthy is an affirmation. However, I am poor is also an affirmation! Both are statements made affirming what is believed to be true.

In Unit 1 you learned a little about the subconscious mind and that it stores data (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, etc.). It stores all the data that is fed to it—the helpful data as well as the not-so-helpful data. It’s important to understand that the subconscious mind’s job is simply to store data, not to evaluate it. That’s the role of the conscious, aware mind. The subconscious mind stores whatever data you accept as true; the conscious mind chooses which data you want to accept as true. [I believe that part of the process of growing up is moving our primary seat of awareness out of the naïve subconscious mind (which believes anything) into the savvy conscious mind (which believes selectively). This is also part of the process of becoming “enlightened.”]

Affirmations can be repeated regularly to facilitate implanting new thoughts and beliefs into both the subconscious and conscious minds. You can use affirmations while driving, dressing, cooking, cleaning—or any time you have your mind free to focus on specific thoughts. Some people like to listen to affirmation tapes that contain many affirmations related to various subject areas such as health, prosperity, inner child, inner peace, losing weight, etc. (Some of my favorites are those put out by Bernie Siegel and Louise Hay. There are many other good ones available, as well.)

The more you hear an affirmation, the more deeply implanted it becomes in your mind. After awhile, it will replace the data you formerly drew upon for creating your experience. For example, let’s say that Albert used to believe that he was poor and never had enough money to pay his bills. As a part of using creative visualization to help create wealth instead of poverty, Albert began to affirm over and over again, My financial prosperity increases daily.

After several weeks of affirming this regularly, Albert can expect to be thinking more about how his financial prosperity steadily increases than about how he always has trouble paying his bills. The more he focuses on the new belief about his prosperity, the less attention he will give to his former belief about his poverty. Eventually, the belief about prosperity will “take over” as the predominant belief (remember the scales demonstration) and become a new habit of thinking for Albert. Affirmations don’t change our thinking overnight, but they can and do help us to make dramatic changes in our thinking when consistently used over time.

Writing Your Own Affirmations

Now it’s time for you to write some affirmations to help you achieve your creative visualization goal. For this exercise, I want you to refer back to the list of qualities you completed in Unit Four of this workbook. Since these are the qualities you want in your experience, by affirming them, you can help bring them into your experience all the more quickly.

Take one quality at a time, and develop a positive statement affirming that the quality is now a part of your experience. Be sure to incorporate the following into each affirmation:

¨ Write the affirmation in the first person, using I and me.

¨ Use only positive terminology. Do not use do not, don’t, won’t, no, or any other term in the negative sense. For example, instead of I’m not poor, say I’m wealthy. Instead of I don’t smoke, say I breathe in only fresh, clean air. Remember, the subconscious mind doesn’t judge, it hears you focus on poor or smoke and pays no attention to not and don’t. The key is to focus on what you do want.

¨ Write the affirmation to take place in the present. If you affirm that you will be happy, you are affirming that it’s a future event—and it will always be in the future. Instead affirm, I am a happy person or I am becoming a happier person.

While you do want to affirm for the present, it may sometimes be helpful to not “go all the way” with some affirmations in the beginning. For example, if it’s too difficult to affirm (and believe) I love myself, then soften it a bit and say I am learning to love myself, or I am willing to learn to love myself. Just be sure to keep it in the present.

Here’s an example of an affirmation written from a quality. For the quality of “clear communication” (the goal being an improved relationship), you may want to affirm something like, My partner and I communicate clearly with each other. If you find your conscious mind arguing with that and saying, “NOT!” after each time you affirm this, make the affirmation less direct and less easy to argue with. The following are some examples of less direct affirmations: I am willing to communicate clearly with my partner; I am ready to begin to communicate more clearly with my partner; and Communication between my partner and me is becoming more and more clear. These affirmations could be used to ease into the new thought without having it challenged by the conscious mind.

Affirmations Exercise

Now it’s your turn. Write seven affirmations related to the seven qualities you identified (on pages 33-34). Additional lines have been added to allow you to write other affirmations related to your creative visualization goal that may come to you.

1. _______________________________________________________________________

2. _______________________________________________________________________

3. _______________________________________________________________________

4. _______________________________________________________________________

5. _______________________________________________________________________

6. _______________________________________________________________________

7. _______________________________________________________________________

8. _______________________________________________________________________

9. _______________________________________________________________________

10. _______________________________________________________________________

11. _______________________________________________________________________

Now you have a list of positive statements you can repeat to yourself often to help fill your screen with new, exciting data. You may want to make a tape of the affirmations you have just written, and play the tape when you go to bed at night to nourish your consciousness with positive thoughts as you drift off to sleep. During your creative visualization exercises, you will definitely want to remember some of the most emotionally charged affirmations you’ve just written. Feel the emotions you identified in the "Emotions Exercise" above and affirm the affirmations you just wrote! This will help you create a powerful emotional charge to feed to your image.

Unit Follow-up Activities

1. Continue to repeat your visualization exercise a minimum of four times each week, and begin to add the emotional feelings and/or affirmations to charge your image with energy.

2. Practice the technique of pivoting a minimum of twice each day for the next seven days.

3. Continue writing in your journal.

Go to Unit Eight