A New way to practice Positive Affirmations
Positive Feelings, Happy Life
This morning I sat down to do some gratitude journaling and something unexpected happened.
I didn’t just feel good. I felt like I finally understood something about myself I had been carrying around without ever examining.
I’ve been reading — he writes about spirituality and self-acceptance outside of religion — and one idea in his book How to have a Great day without religion stopped me completely.
He said we shouldn’t just acknowledge the good traits we have. We should actually trace them back to the hardship, failure, and refinement that built them. That the difficult path is not separate from who you are. It is why you are who you are.
So I tried it.
I wrote down every trait I genuinely value in myself. Kindness. Resilience. Loyalty. Industriousness. Creativity. Empathy. Friendliness. And next to each one, I asked: what did I actually have to go through for this to exist in me?
Resilience came from the seasons I had nothing left and kept going anyway.
Industriousness came from problems no one was coming to solve for me.
Empathy came from knowing what it feels like when someone is unkind, and deciding to be different.
Creativity grew in the spaces where I had no tools, so I made my own.
Every trait had a root. And every root ran through something hard.
What struck me is that these traits didn’t arrive in me polished and ready. They were refined. Through failure, friction, and the kind of difficulty that does not feel like a gift while you’re in it. But looking back this morning, I could see the whole picture, and it was actually beautiful.
Here’s why this hits different from regular affirmations.
When you say “I am resilient,” the words are true but they land flat. Your subconscious does not update through repetition alone. It updates through felt experience, through memory, through the moment you actually see the evidence.
When I traced each trait back to a real memory, I wasn’t just claiming something. I was watching my own mind confirm it. I could see the season. I could feel the weight of it. And because my visual memory and emotional memory were both activated, something in my nervous system registered it as real.
Joe Dispenza’s research on subconscious reprogramming speaks to exactly this: lasting change happens when a clear thought is paired with an elevated emotion rooted in memory or visualization. The feeling is what teaches the subconscious to believe the thought. Without the feeling, you’re just saying words.
Marisa Peer, who developed Rapid Transformational Therapy, makes a similar point. The mind responds to vividness and emotional charge. Self-belief built on specific evidence is significantly more durable than self-belief built on declarations alone.
That’s the difference between saying “I am resilient” and saying “I am resilient and I know exactly what built that in me.”
One is an affirmation. The other is a remembering.
There is also Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory, which offers the psychological reason this practice creates something lasting rather than just a temporary lift.
Positive emotions like gratitude literally broaden your awareness, which allows you to build durable internal resources over time — resilience, connection, creative capacity. You aren’t just feeling better. You are building something that accumulates.
I’ve experienced a version of this in community too.
I play We’re Not Really Strangers with people I care about — a card game designed to bypass the surface and go straight to what’s real. Every single time I’ve played it, something shifts in the room. You can feel it. People walk away lighter and more connected than when they arrived.
Learning to do that same excavation alone, with yourself, for yourself, is its own kind of practice. To hold your own history with the same curiosity you’d bring to someone you love.
That has been one of the most stabilizing things I’ve done this year.
If you are going through something hard right now, this is not a call to think positive thoughts.
It’s an invitation to look at yourself honestly and see the craftsmanship in what difficulty made you.
You were not just surviving. You were being built. And the person you are today, the specific and irreplaceable version of you, could not have come any other way.
That is worth sitting with.
The practice — 15 minutes
List 5 to 8 traits you genuinely value in yourself.
For each one, ask: what did I actually go through to grow this?
Let the memory come. Stay with the visual and the feeling. Don’t rush past it.
You are not claiming something you hope is true. You are recognizing something you already built.
Read it back out loud. That part matters more than it sounds like it will.