The purpose of Affirmations are to help you change your current thinking to something that is good, something of value, something more positive. If you have or still currently think negative things about your self, your life etc; then changing your thoughts through affirmations can be very helpful.  Our thoughts become things, so ask yourself, what are you focusing on..the more you focus on it, the more you get of it.  Change your "stinking thinking" and replace it with positive affirmations and you will see a difference in your life. It is time to replace all those years of negative self talk, change your thoughts and change your life!

The following are some of my favorite youtube affirmation and inspirational videos....enjoy! :)

Follow me to a video affirmation

Follow me to "I'm Alive" Incredible & Inspirational

Follow me to another Powerful Affirmation video

Follow me to creating a Happier Life video

Follow me to an Inspirational video with the music "Your beautiful to me"

Follow me to Live a great life and inspire! A great inspirational message with music. Live the life of your dreams! Dream. Dream big.

Follow me to "Don't Give Up, You are Loved" song by Josh Groban with pictures to inspire someone who is really feeling blue. Here is the link to the video and song by Josh Groban....beautiful!

The above affirmations were helpful to me prior to becoming a Christian.  I now mediate on The Word of God and see what he says about me.  I no longer believe the lies of the enemy but the Truth of God. It is a process, but your mind can be renewed, I am living proof that it is possible.  All things are possible with God.

The Bible tells us we have a spiritual Enemy. John 8:44 explains: "He was a killer from the very start. He couldn't stand the truth because there wasn't a shred of truth in him. When the Liar speaks, he makes it up out of his lying nature and fills the world with lies." (MSG)  The lies of the enemy are in your mind!

Romans 12:2
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.


1 Corinthians 14:15b (NIV)
So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.


Numbers 23:19
God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?

Romans 8:6
The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace;

Romans 8:7
the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.

Romans 8:27
And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

What is "Renewing Your Mind?"

This information can be very helpful...it comes from www.theworryfreelife.com

The "patterns of this world" that Saint Paul is describing are the thoughts, beliefs and interpretations that we have accumulated from our life. Influences of parents, teachers, coaches and peers have left indelible impressions on us and shaped the way we think. But the problem is more difficult than that because as the science of cognitive psychology has proven through years of research on hundreds of thousands of adults and children is that we are not aware of most of what we are thinking. The vast majority of our thoughts are imperceptible, occurring on the outer edges of awareness very quickly and rapidly. Most of the time we can not even recall the thought or belief but they have a profound effect on the way we feel and behave. This is one of the cornerstones of our program: that how you think determines how you feel. Now putting this all together you soon realize that if we're not aware of what we think or believe then there is a lot of our experience that we are powerless over. Negative and overwhelming feelings just seem to happen to us.

Try this at Home

To demonstrate that we are not fully aware of most of our thoughts, try this simple and fun exercise for yourself. First you will need a pen and notepad and a simple timer: a watch with alarm or a kitchen timer will do nicely. Set the timer to go off in 7 minutes and then continue on with your day. When the timer goes off immediately write down whatever you were thinking or daydreaming about. Repeat this process several times throughout the day, randomly changing the amount of time so that it always surprises you when it goes off. Do this enough times to build up a substantial log. When you review this list a day or so later you will be amazed at how many unresolved conflicts and worries are rattling around in your head that never reach full awareness or get your undivided attention.

It is by logging these "silent assumptions" and "automatic thoughts" that you begin to gain the awareness necessary to make effective change in your life.

In our upcoming book and in the classes we teach we give you the tools you need to further uncover these barely perceptible thoughts and reframe or re-interpret them so that they produce healthy and constructive feelings, and give you a much greater sense of control over your life. Hence the second part of Paul's' admonition to be "transformed by the renewing of your mind." Developing an awareness of your automatic beliefs and then changing them to produce more happiness, less suffering and more control is the essence of real transformation.

The last part of Paul's instruction is the beautiful part: "Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will." We have found that by becoming aware of and replacing the unhealthy thoughts, pathways to a greater experience of the promises of Faith become much more accessible. Christ promised "abundant life" (John 101:10) and our experience is that God's grace, and infinite love becomes the rich reward for the hard work of renewing your mind. With the impediment of distorted thinking out of the way life becomes an experience of much richer gratitude, hope and increased blessings. essence of real transforma¬tion. faith become much more accessible. Christ promised "abundant life” (John 101:10) and our experience is that God's grace, and infinite love become the rich reward for the hard work of renewing your mind. With the impediment of distorted thinking out of the way life becomes an experience of much richer gratitude, hope and increased blessings.

Two Lives

Candace is a single mom of four kids. Their ages are 23, 20, 18, and 15. She is divorced now after having been married for 28 years. She was the wife of a pastor leading a good Christian life. It was an idyllic existence that she thought would surely produce all the right results in her children, since she was folowing the Bible and leading a Godly life. Surely God would bless such devotion and obedience and produce happy and responsible adults from these blessed children she loved and nurtured so well.

But life took a completely different turn. Two of her oldest children became serious drug addicts, and a third had to be evicted from her house because of an irresponsible abuse of property and privileges; a nightmare for any parent.

One of the basic principles we teach is that we cannot control the thoughts, emotions and behaviors of other people. We draw the metaphor of a garden to ilustrate this principle. Imagine your mind and life are a garden surrounded by a property line and protected by a fence. Inside that property line are your thoughts emotions, behaviors and sensations. Outside of your property line are everybody else's thoughts, emotions, sensations and behaviors. You cannot control what other people think, feel or do!

Candace was bombarded with feelings of guilt and worthlessness. "Doesn't the world say that 'the apple doesn 't fall far from the tree?'" "What did I do wrong?" “I should have done better." “I must be a lousy mother." "It must be my fault that my kids behave this way." The fallacy in all of these thoughts is the same. They assume she is responsible for her adult children's poor reasoning and destructive actions. Candace began to realize that her children are completely responsible for their own lives, and while the profound loss she feels over their tragic circumstances is very painful, the sting is lessened by realizing she is not responsible for what they do. Their mistakes, their actions, their feelings, and their bad choices are not her fault. They are outside her property line.

How to live life as a work of art

"How to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events..."

Flow is often described as a state of optimal human experience. People who experience this often describe it as a feeling that a person is outside of what he or she is doing. It is the ability of being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Learning to increase flow in your life allows you to increase your capacity for life-affirming experiences. It is a state of ecstasy that many religious mystics advocate for experiencing God at a profound level.

Until recently, ecstasy was thought to occur rarely or only in those who gifted to have the capacity for it. The discoverer of flow is Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. He believes that is an experience that can be learned. It is not something that just happens to you. It is not random but occurs because you make it happen. It has nothing to do with your environment. It can occur when you are in pursuit of a worthwhile goal, be it mental or physical. It is most likely to occur when you are engaged in an activity which you find challenging.

When the challenge is greater than our abilities, we become anxious and emotionally activated. When the challenge is significantly less than that of which we are capable, we become bored, and emotionally deactivated. If there is an even match between the challenge and your ability to meet the challenge you are a likely candidate for experiencing flow.

Athletes refer to this experience as "being in the zone." This is a common experience with elite artists, musicians, actors, and athletes. A jazz musician who is engaged in a challenging riff is often not aware of where she is or who is present. She is not even aware of playing the notes or listening for the rhythm of the tune. The phrase most often used to describe this experience is "being at one with the music."

However, flow can occur for average people, also. Some people experience flow when they go for a walk, read a book, listen to music, spend time with a friend, or even when washing the car. One of the major restrictions for enjoying and experiencing flow is worrying how you appear to others and what they might think of you as you engage in your activity. Flow is the result of being able to transcend these concerns. We show you how to do that in our upcoming book, Renewing Your Mind.

It seems that flow is more than pleasure. It must have a sense of achievement on your part that contributes to the result. According to Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, 15% of people say they have never experienced the "flow" while 15-20% of the people he has surveyed say they experience it every day (or several times a day).

How would you know if you were experiencing flow? The following is a list of common descriptions of what others feel like when they in the flow.

1. Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training.
2. Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going.
4. Knowing the activity is doable – that your skills are adequate, and you are neither anxious or bored.
5. Sense of serenity – no worries about self, a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of self — afterwards feeling you have transcended your self in ways not thought possible.
6. Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don't notice time passing.
7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces "flow" becomes its own reward.

Paul's Difficult Work Assignments

Paul is a career employee for a major U.S. corporation. When first employed 18 years ago it was commonly held that this "cradle to grave" employer would surely see him through to his retirement. But then the dot com bust and 9/11 changed al that. The company's revenues and stock price plummeted. The firm was acquired by another giant and new management began to "shake things up." Suddenly employees who were near retirement age began getting fired. Turnover, which was unheard of 20 years ago, became abundant.

As he was also near retirement, Paul found himself being singled out. In one instance he was given the responsibility for a task that would take weeks to complete and given only hours to finish it. He was clearly being set up, and he knew it. The morning he was expected to give a report on his unfinished project, he drew on the training from the class. He reviewed the "facts" about his situation and developed a plan to face the best, worst and most probable outcome of the meeting. If things went realy badly he would consider his firing as the company doing him a favor. He had researched other careers and was confident in his marketability. He had even developed financial plans to cope with as much as a year's unemployment. He had rehearsed his response to their impossible demands and was determined that he was going to stay in control. He remembered one of his favorite lines from the movie Little Big Man: "It is a good day to die."

The meeting went better than expected. When the management could get nothing other than the facts out of him, they released him with a clearer outline of what they expected. They were frustrated and he was triumphant. Not because he had beat the company but because he had dealt with one of the most chalenging situations in his life and had handled it with control and dignity. He had been tempted to retaliate, to avoid the situation, to run away, but instead he faced it head on with aplomb and valor — he had held his head high!

These are just some of the victories that we have witnessed because of the materials taught in Renewing Your Mind. Buy the book when it comes out, encourage your church to teach the curriculum. It really does change lives.

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Jesus teaches us that, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.”¹ The Enemy (i.e., “the thief”) wants us to stay focused on pursuing the little temporary forms of happiness that merely mask pain and keep us from experiencing the fullness of life God wants for us. He knows by keeping us focused on what we cannot control in the world around us he can keep us from growing, keep us from becoming mature believers, and keep us from attaining the abundant life God wants for us. That abundant life is attainable by learning to master the B-E-S-T life. The Bible tells us: “A river flowed from the land of Eden, watering the garden and then dividing into four branches.”² We are going to look at these four areas (B-E-S-T) of our lives as the most important and only things we can really control in life. The sin life, the life that is devoted to making the outside world conform to our wants, distorts the B-E-S-T life. The B-E-S-T life is the “abundant life”—the life filled with purpose.

So how do you get the B-E-S-T, abundant life? You get it by managing the four parts we just mentioned: our behavior, our emotions, our sensations and our thoughts. Why these four? Because, these four parts are the four pieces that make up all God-created human beings. There are not three parts or more than four parts. All other aspects of human nature are related to one or more of these four parts. For example, spirituality is certainly an innate aspect of human nature. It is the combination of our thoughts and behavior.

The Domino Effect

It is often easier to understand how the dominoes work by looking at the last domino and working toward the front. The last domino represents how the world reacts to our behavior—it is not about how we feel about our behavior. If you throw a chair through a window, the consequence is a broken window and maybe a broken chair. If you consistently treat your friend badly, the consequence is a broken friendship. Some of the consequences we are now living with have been the result of our behavior. If people are angry or disappointed with us, it is likely we have done something to make that happen. There are many life consequences that can be the result of our behavior, things you either did or failed to do. This relationship between behavior and consequences is easy to understand. It is important because it is the foundation for personal responsibility. We want our children to learn this at an early age so they can grow up to be good citizens.

The next connection—between behavior and emotions—is also easy to understand. Most of us are aware of how our emotions drive our behavior. We may mope when we are sad or discouraged; we may be noisy and boisterous because of our excitement when our team wins; we may act thoughtfully when we feel a sense of importance as we are engaged in a meaningful discussion. It is fairly well accepted that emotions can be powerful drivers of behavior. When people are asked “why” they did something, a common response is: “Because I felt like it.”

Unfortunately, the next link is the difficult one to grasp. When asked why we feel a certain way, our response is likely to point to something or someone in our outside world. One powerful example is the feeling of falling in love; another common source of overpowering feelings occurs when we lose a loved one. Most people point to the outside world out of habit. “If that hadn’t happened, then I would not feel this way.”

We want to show you that the truth is deeper than this. With one specific exception, what you think, not what happens to you, is always the source of our emotions. Our emotional responses are because of the way you interpret outside events. If you are late for an appointment with your boss and miss it because of car trouble, your feelings about the missed appointment will depend on how you interpret the missed appointment. If your boss wanted to demote you or fire you, missing the appointment would trigger relief because you would be telling yourself how lucky you were to have had the car trouble. On the other hand, if your boss was going to make you the new vice president but chose someone else because you did not show up, we doubt you would be feeling elated. So, for the theme of this book, we want you to get used to accepting the fact that all your emotions (both painful and non-painful) are caused by your thoughts, whether you are aware of them or not.

This idea is important for learning how to live the abundant life with the Big “H.” When all our dominoes are standing, you will be experiencing the Big “H.” The problem is that when you look closely at the Dominoes Chart, you will see that the first domino—life, the outside world—has a round bottom. It does not stand up easily and when it does, it is not for long. This is indicative of life itself. The outside world is constantly crashing into our personal space. Sometimes it does so in an annoying way that we might be able to shrug off; other times, life hits us so hard we wonder if we will ever recover. Almost reflexively, we reach down and try to put the first domino upright. Even when we succeed, it will eventually fall again, knocking all the other dominoes down. When they stand because we have kept the Life domino up for a while, we get to experience the little “h.” But then it falls and the chain reaction starts all over.

We are going to teach you how to begin using a different strategy. Instead of trying to keep thev first domino from knocking over the other dominoes, you will learn to change how you use the second domino. You will learn how to lift the “thought” domino off the table, slather the bottom of it with super glue and firmly place it back on the table. When the glue dries, the second domino will be immovable, no matter how hard it is hit by the first one. The writer of proverbs reminds us, “be careful how you think, your life is shaped by your thoughts.”

Our personal experiences in life are often the effect of an unseen chain reaction. This chain reaction can lead us to believe that our lives are not our own, that we are victims of a cruel and unfeeling world, and the universe is ruled by a God that is uncaring and even vindictive. We are calling this chain reaction the Domino Effect.

The first lesson you need to learn is that God wants us to acquire the skills to control this chain reaction by taking control of the second domino. The human has been designed to react to an unpleasant (or maybe even a pleasant) life event with an automatic thought response. Our brain wants to understand what is happening. It becomes a cluster of perceptions, interpretations, judgments and other mental activity. But now you are going to learn that the most powerful thing you can do to transform your life and live more in accordance with God’s will is to change the way you think about certain life events or triggers. We will use the words life, trigger, and activator interchangeably to describe the first domino. The Bible tells us throughout that controlling the second domino, our thoughts, is an imperative step in obtaining the abundance of blessings God wants to bestow upon us when we conform to His will.

The discovery by modern psychology, that thinking produces emotions, only reinforces what the saints and prophets have been telling us for ages. But, until recently, what was not clear was how unnoticeable some of that thinking really is. The scientists call it “automatic thinking” or “silent assumptions.” Some of our thoughts occur so rapidly that we cannot even perceive we had any thought at all. They seem hidden. Normally we only perceive the audible thoughts in our daily lives, but destructive, paralyzing emotions such as guilt, anxiety and depression signal us that more devious thoughts are occurring quietly and rapidly enough to be just beyond our ability to perceive them.

To give you an idea of how powerful this connection between thinking and emotions is, research has shown that the emotional effects of uncovering and replacing negative thinking can produce the same good and pleasant brain chemistry as anti-depressants. As a testimony to this, I (Pat) was able to quit taking the prescribed anti-depressant Serazone after mastering the materials we are presenting here.

This graphic helps explain Eve’s fall using the Domino Model

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I can't wait to get this book...this stuff is the bomb!  This is what I have used myself and it works....I am living proof, you can change your life by changing your thoughts!  It is a battle but when you win the war, the feeling of victory is priceless!

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