“I don’t chase, I attract. What belongs to me will simply find me.”

Do affirmations work? And how do you choose the right affirmation for you?

We’re bombarded with positivity propaganda these days — think positively and your life will change!

But we all know that’s easier said than done.

When it feels like life isn’t going your way, the easiest thing to do is focus on what’s not working.

You get stuck behind a bus on the way to work and then all of a sudden you’re thinking about all the stupid emails you’re going to have to respond to when you get there and how much laundry you have to do later and how all your bills are due this week and and and…

We know that where you place your attention is where you place your energy, and because the Law of Attraction exists, this means that what you place your on energy is what you attract.

So, if nothing seems to be working out for you, and your focus is on the subjective observation that nothing’s working out, you attract more thoughts and experiences to reinforce this observation.

Call it LOA call it confirmation bias, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same and your observable external circumstances will meet your internal vibration that’s generated by your thoughts and feelings.

The first step with any sort of transformation or change is always going to be activating awareness.

Becoming conscious of the unconscious.

Becoming aware of the fact that you are being a big negative Nancy right now and it feels uncomfy.

You need to recognize the fact that you are pulling yourself into a vortex of negativity and that all of the sh*t going on around you is a result of past thinking and feeling— your past self attracted these present circumstances.

Yes, you have to take radical responsibility for everything appearing in your reality.

I know that’s hard and we all want to blame God or Joann from accounting but it’s all you, you’re responsible for your vibration, no one else.

If your present circumstances are a result of past thinking and feeling, this means then that your present thinking and feeling is what is attracting a future to you right now.

The beauty of this fact is that you have the ability to shift your reality through your thoughts and feelings right now— your power is always in this now moment.

Now that you’ve become aware of the fact that you are in a lower vibrational state, you can set the intention to shift out of it and into a more comfortable place.

This is where the introduction of an affirmation comes in.

But here’s the catch, not every affirmation is going to feel right for you.

For some people, mentally repeating, “I love myself for who I am”, will actually just reinforce the fact that they do NOT love themselves and will cause more damage.

Same thing with repeating, “I am a money magnet”, when trying to attract abundance when you’ve got $400 in the bank— it feels like a lie.

You need to sort through affirmations or create your own that FEELS right, because the feeling is the secret.

You need to be able to sense the truth in it, it needs to resonate in your heart and soul, and you need to be honest with yourself.

If the affirmation you choose on some level feels like a lie that you desperately want to believe, your subconscious is going to focus on the fact that the “truth” is the exact opposite of the affirmation you’re repeating.

So when you’re shopping around for or crafting affirmations, make sure they feel really good; that when you say it you feel the relief, peace, hopefulness, eagerness, or excitement.

The affirmation that I use on a daily basis is vague and all encompassing.

“Everything is always working out for me.”

I really do believe this. I feel the truth in it. I know that even the things that I perceive to be as challenging or negative are helping me in some way, that I am learning lessons, I’m growing.

Everything is always working out for me.

When I’m slipping, I repeat this affirmation until I feel that relief, until I feel the truth in it, until I feel my vibration shift.

Here are a few affirmations that might work for you, and if they don’t, head to Pinterest and start sorting through to find something that speaks to your soul.

-“Today I abandon old habits and take up new, more positive ones”

-“I have so much to be grateful for”

-“I am worthy of receiving all of the good that is meant for me”

-“I allow myself to receive all of the good that is meant for me”

-“I accept myself for everything that I am”

-“My efforts and dreams are being supported by the universe”

-“I am at peace with all that has happened, is happening, and will happen”

-“I surrender to a higher power and trust that there is higher plan”

-“I am powerful and in control of my reality”

-“I choose to focus on the blessings in my life”

When you find the affirmation that gives you that wave of relief when you repeat it, put it places you'll see it often even if it's subliminal.

I keep a widget on my phone with my affirmation, and I'll put it on sticky notes on my mirror and in drawers I use regularly so that the message is constantly being placed in my mind.

Repeated thoughts become beliefs, and your beliefs dictate your behaviors.

With enough time and attention placed on these affirmations, you will begin to live in the truth of them and your reality will shift to meet that truth.

That's the power of affirmations.

Meditation 101

When I ask just about every new client about their existing meditation practice, I always get something along the lines of:

“Meditation doesn’t work for me”

“I’m not good at meditating”

“My mind doesn’t slow down”

To which I reply: that’s what everybody says.

First of all, when I say “meditation is a practice”, I mean it— it takes practice.

Just like working out your physical body at the gym, you don’t go one time and expect to leave with raging biceps and a juicy dumptruck. No.

You understand the assignment is to keep going consistently and with time and commitment you will watch your physical body transform into a stronger one.

Same thing with meditation. You aren’t going to sit down once for 15 minutes and have a life changing, out of body, ego-less experience.

You’re going to sit there and notice how chaotic your mind really is, and that can be really overwhelming, which is why most people give up and think meditation doesn’t work for them.

It's important to note that we think anywhere from 60-70,000 thoughts a day— most of which are totally unconscious, meaning we aren’t even aware that we’re thinking them.

So, if we're thinking 60-70,000 (mostly unconscious) thoughts a day, and you understand that your thoughts create your reality, you are going through every day creating your reality unconsciously with unacknowledged harmful mental programs, limiting beliefs, and uncomfortable thought forms.

Meditation helps to bring awareness to these unconscious programs, thoughts and beliefs and provides the opportunity to introduce new thoughts, new beliefs and new ways of being into your life experience.

But how?

I think it’s a pretty huge misconception that the sole purpose of meditation is to “silence the mind”.

Eventually, yes, that is a goal that can be reached, and having a quiet mind is a gift in and of itself, but there is so much more that can be accomplished.

What meditation is really meant to do is to help separate that seemingly never-ending chatter of the conscious waking mind from the awareness of the chatter itself, so that you can be in control of the mind.

The act of closing your eyes, stilling the body and moving your focus from external stimuli to the inner world in meditation slows the brainwaves down from irregular beta waves (conscious mind/waking brainwave state) into an alpha or theta wave state.

In this alpha/theta state, we leave the conscious mind behind and enter into the subconscious where your true self is accessed.

We want to get to the point where we can easily utilize the deeper mind as a tool to assist you in connecting and merging with your higher consciousness, creating your desired reality, and retrieving useful information stored in your subconscious mind.

Your job in meditation is to be the observer, the watcher of the mind, the witness.

Let the mind do its thing, don’t fight with it, and understand that you are NOT those thoughts. They're there and you're watching them, but you aren't the thoughts themselves.

They are a program. You are the gentle presence behind the thoughts, and you can watch them pass without being attached to them.

To become awareness itself, you can bring your focus back to the physical sensations in your body, the rhythm of your breath, a mantra, what you can hear in the space around you, the music you're listening to etc.

By doing this over and over and over again, and maybe you do it 100 times in your first few sessions, you are stepping into presence.

When you are present, you are aware.

You’re not thinking, there’s no talking in the head, you just are.

This might last for a fraction of a second before the next thought barges in at first, but you now have a taste of what’s to come.

You enter presence, a thought arises, you observe it, let it go, and return to presence. This is the general protocol for successful meditation.

The more you practice, the more you become presently aware, those spaces of awareness grow bigger and wider.

The brainwaves are slowing down.

The conscious mind begins to shut down—it’s no longer running the show.

You have gained back control.

Once the conscious mind slows down and eventually turns off, the subconscious mind turns on, just like when you're dreaming at night, but this time you're "awake".

You haven't drifted fully into a delta brainwave state, you are hovering right on the cusp of wakefulness, and it's here where the mystical occurs.

You’ve passed a very important threshold of consciousness.

The never-ending stream of thoughts has slowed with the brainwaves, and in the silence of the deep inner mind, your true self emerges.

No longer tainted by the chatter of the egoic conscious mind, you have access to more of who you really are.

Answers and direction seem to spring forth out of no where, as you're not actively "thinking".

Images flash through the mind of moments in the past that need attention and healing, movies begin to play of your ideal future, you receive downloads of ideas and information that illuminate your path forward in life. You see yourself and your life from a higher perspective, where you're able to detach from the suffering and effortlessly stumble into solutions.

The subconscious is finally able to speak without the loud static of the conscious mind drowning it out.

You’ve tapped into something powerful, elusive, yet always there.

This is why you start a meditation practice. This is why you COMMIT to a meditation practice.

It’s not always going to be easy, you’re not always going to want to do it, your body will fight with you, your ego will say you don’t have time and it doesn’t work anyway.

Yet every single time you make yourself take the time, you coerce your body to sit still and you become the observer of your mind and you continue to infuse awareness into the entire process, you are accomplishing something fantastic.

When you get to that first meditation experience where you transcend your personality and your personal reality and enter into a higher state of consciousness, you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s indescribable and invaluable.

I’ve been meditating regularly for about 4 years now, and where I can go and what I can do in my mind now blows me away.

Out of body travel, experiencing alternate timelines of reality, entering different dimensions of consciousness, visiting past lifetimes, receiving guidance and information from non-physical beings and so much more.

I’ve had to work at it, but I’ve unlocked a powerful part of myself that I can access anytime I want or need. If I am ever feeling stuck, all I have to do it meditate and I get everything I need.

I can say firmly and confidently that the best thing I've ever done for myself was form a meditation practice.

I know it’s intimidating to start. And I know your conscious mind is going to come up with a hundred reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t start.

Your first task is to become aware of this conscious mind trying to sabotage your growth— it hates change and it hates the unknown, so become aware of it.

Your second task is to start small, 5-7 minutes a day. It's best to do it first thing in the morning or right before bed as you are already in an altered brainwave state.

I always recommend a playlist on YouTube called “mettaverse light forms”— short and beautiful music tracks to listen to with headphones. Any "hemi-sync" or binaural beats music will be great, though.

Do your best not to judge your mind or to analyze the experience while you’re in it. Plenty of time for that after. Keep watching the thoughts roll through the mind, keep returning to presence, and know you’ve just begun a journey that will transform every facet of your life.

Start there and if and when you need some more direction, I’m here to guide you in this inner journey. However I can support you in becoming a more evolved version of yourself I will.

I've watched dozens of "I-can't-meditate-ers" transform into religious explorers of consciousness. I've watched them create new beautiful realities and new states of being. I've watched them ween off antidepressants and overcome anxiety. I've watched them sit down for 30 minutes of meditation and crave 30 more. I've watched them step into power they never knew they had. All from forming a meditation practice.

All of the keys are within, know that.

For additional support or questions that need answers, email me at kaitlyn@soul-magic.com.

Why Do Inner Child Work?

Between the ages of 0-7 (some would argue 0-10) our brains remain in a mostly theta brainwave state. This means that for those first formative years, we are in a highly suggestible hypnotic state.

Everything we experience those first several years is being programmed into our subconscious mind, where all of our beliefs are formed that will help us navigate through the rest of our lives.

This means that the relationship patterns you witnessed, the things you heard about yourself— both positive and negative, the way others treated you, your parents' relationship with money and finances, the expectations others placed on you and how you handled your emotions are still operating today unconsciously in your deep inner mind.

These core beliefs can be detrimental or beneficial. If you were raised to believe that you could accomplish anything or that money was always an available abundant resource, then you are most likely a highly successful and prosperous individual who believes in their power and potential.

However, when you take a step back and look at your life as it is, and notice the parts of yourself, the patterns you see or the habits you have that cause you any sort of discomfort or dissatisfaction, odds are it’s due to an unhealthy deeply programmed belief from your early childhood.

The good news is— what the subconscious learned can be unlearned and reprogrammed. This is where regression hypnotherapy comes in.

In a regression session, we target the area, challenge or belief you want to work on. For example, I had someone come to me wanting to work on their strong aversion to people who come across as inauthentic, uncomfortable being their true selves. It was getting to the point where there were people in her life that she perceived as inauthentic, and she couldn’t disguise her disgust towards them well enough anymore. She wanted to get to the bottom of why this aversion existed.

In regression, it’s important to note that although you may have a conscious awareness of where you THINK the problem or challenge originated, the presenting memory is typically what’s referred to as a Subsequent Sensitizing Event (SSE)— meaning the memory you have happened after the true original wound, or Initial Sensitizing Event (ISE). From my experience as a hypnotherapist, every single time someone thinks they know “where it all started”, there is an ISE that occurred much earlier in the life that holds all the gold that only the subconscious mind remembers.

And that’s just it— that is why we do regression— because the subconscious mind NEVER forgets. It has recorded every single waking moment of your entire lifetime. It knows the root causes and solutions to every issue in your life and through the hypnotic state we can access that information and healing potential.

When I regressed that client into her childhood to find the root of her aversion to inauthenticity, we went back to when she was 3 years old and her dad was yelling at her to sit down and be quiet because she was being too rambunctious dancing around and singing— an obscure memory that she never would have remembered consciously.

That one moment created the deep belief in that tiny mind that being her full self wasn’t permissible— that she had to alter who she was fundamentally to be accepted. Thus sprung her distaste for inauthentic people, as it was resentment towards her own trauma reflected back to her in other people.

Once we find the ISE, we’ve hit the jackpot. Remember, in the hypnotic state, you are in an altered state of consciousness where the gateway to the subconscious mind is wide open— which again means— we can program the mind with new experiences and new beliefs, and it will accept what it is experiencing as real, even though it’s imagined. I always say, when we're in that state of mind, what we are witnessing in our inner world is both real and imagined.

This is why the human mind is so powerful, and why quantum healing/regression hypnotherapy I believe is the key to unlocking your fullest potential. We are essentially time traveling, learning lessons and rewriting the past therefore altering your present and your future.

When we sit down with these younger versions of you and validate their experiences while sharing with them the resulting discomfort those limiting beliefs have caused, and we give them the love, support, and nourishment they weren’t receiving, you are being fundamentally changed. The subconscious fully believes that the love that your younger self is receiving is actually happening. You are quantum jumping timelines of existence and entering into an entirely new reality where that wounded inner child is now healed.

The effects of this work will radiate throughout your entire life. Relationships, perceptions, thoughts and behaviors all change to meet this new reality, this new version of you. You are more whole, more understanding, more connected to your younger self.

It’s powerful, liberating, and empowering to take back precious parts of you that may have been robbed or tarnished all those years ago.

Here’s a list of some of the issues that can be explored with regression hypnotherapy:

•Why you keep attracting the same unhealthy partner archetype over and over again

•Why you feel like you have an unhealthy relationship with money

•Why you won’t let yourself fully feel your emotions

•Why it’s so hard for you to say “no”

•Why you’re so hard on yourself

•Why you have certain phobias

•Why you’ve struggled with anxiety for so long

•Why you feel like you can’t attract meaningful friendships

•Why you have such trouble setting strong boundaries

•Why you find it so hard to trust yourself or others

•Why you hate being alone

•Why you find it so hard to love yourself

And so on...

If any of those stand out to you or if anything else popped into your head, understand that that is your subconscious mind trying to HELP you. Don’t be surprised if after reading this you receive clues to what your childhood wounds may be in the following days.

The great thing is, you now have the awareness of how and why this process works, so if anything else does pop into your mind, take advantage of the work and give your inner child the healing it deserves. That you deserve.

Email me at kaitlyn@soul-magic.com to set up your regression hypnotherapy session.