This is the third article in a series about using the Law of Assumption.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the Law of Assumption, it is a way to manifest your desires in life — it is similar to the Law of Attraction, but with some key differences.

Note that the Law of Assumption teachings I am discussing in this series of articles are based on the work of Neville Goddard (1905-1972) a New Thought teacher & author from Barbados. (You can find Neville Goddard’s book here.)

In this article, I am going to cover how to use affirmations to manifest your ideal life, the Neville Goddard way.

In the last two articles in this series, I went into:

• (1) How the Law of Assumption works
• (2) How you can get the ball rolling by setting an intention that will manifest.

In the article on setting intentions, I gave a spiritual ritual which enables you to choose any desire you have in life, and get the ball rolling so that it manifests. 

However, once you have set an intention, it can help to do some work in order to align with it, using manifestation techniques.

Why Using Manifestation Techniques Is Helpful

Before we go into the techniques you can use to manifest, let’s just have a look at the principles behind the techniques.

According to the Law of Assumption, you manifest and create your reality according to the contents of your subconscious mind.

Whatever your subconscious mind accepts as fact, is what manifests. 

You are a piece of God, with the ability to create your world. Your higher self takes whatever is in your subconscious and energy field, and aligns you with a reality that matches whatever is there, in your subconscious mind. 

This means that Law of Assumption techniques are all about changing your energy and impressing upon your subconscious mind the fact that you already are what you desire to be, or that you already have what you desire.

This means that in order to manifest your desired reality, you must speak, feel, think and act as if you already have it. This does not mean that if you desire to get married, you literally pretend to everyone that you have a husband or wife. It means that you take on the persona of being a husband or a wife, in your inner world. This means steadily convincing your subconscious mind that you are already married. This aligns you with a reality or a ‘lifeline’ where you are married, and the Universe will conspire to bring it about for you.

So, how do you impress your subconscious mind so that you can manifest what you want?

Neville Goddard teaches that one way that you can convince your subconscious mind and manifest what you desire, is to use affirmations. 

Affirmations are crafted statements which affirm that you already are or have what it is that you desire.

For example, if you want to be married with kids but you are single, you could affirm “I am a happily married mother/father of 2.”

My experiences using affirmations

When I was going through my Law of Attraction phase around 15 years ago, I tried using affirmations and I couldn’t keep up with the practice. I felt delusional and like I was saying things that simply weren’t true. I felt worse after affirming positive things. 

Fast forward 15 years later, and I love affirmations, and they work!

I’ve been using them for around 4-5 months, and the weird thing about this is, people are repeating my affirmations back to me, word for word. These are people who have no idea that I am affirming or what I am affirming. I’ve had multiple affirmations repeated back to me by multiple people. 

This to me is a sign that through these affirmations, I have been slowly shifting myself to a reality where my affirmations are objectively true in the outward world. 

My mind is a little blown. 

Caveats to using affirmations

So, what was the difference between 15 years ago and now? Why was I able to get affirmations to work well for me this time?

First of all, this time I was more dedicated to changing my life. After experiencing a series of challenges in my life, I knew that something needed to change and I stuck with affirming (I did it every other day for around 15 mins) for months. 

So it’s a good idea to remember that you must persist with this practice. You can’t change a lifetime of subconscious programming in one week. I believe it can take at least a month, and often a few months or more, to see any results from affirmations.

How affirmations work & the importance of your words

The fact is, your subconscious mind accepts whatever your conscious mind tells it, even if it’s totally inaccurate (take a look at hypnosis videos to see this in action). For example, if you say “Oh, I can’t afford that”, your subconscious mind will see to it that you cannot in fact afford what it is you’re talking about. 

If you say, “I’ll find the money”, your subconscious mind hears and accepts this, and your Higher self will see this as its mission in terms of what it will manifest next.

Your words are incredibly powerful, like casting a spell, and life will reflect back to you what you are saying. So on one side of the coin, it’s really important to stop saying negative things about yourself.

This is something I have had to learn in the last year. I think British people tend to do this a lot, but I used to say certain things about myself that were self-critical and self-deprecating. I had to learn to stop that, and when I did, after several months I noticed I was not those things anymore, that I was telling people I was. 

In his book ‘The Power of the Subconscious Mind’, Joseph Murphy (a New Thought minister who trained with the same spiritual teacher as Neville Goddard) tells the story of a man whose daughter has a disabling illness, and the father tells people that he would give his right arm to see his daughter cured. The pair get into a car accident and the father loses his arm, and the shock of the accident cures the daughter of her health condition. 

This example shows clearly that in your affirmations, you should only use words that inspire, elevate or bless you or someone else in some way. 

How to actually use affirmations the Neville Goddard way

Note that when you use affirmations, you should say them as if you’re celebrating something that is already true. You’re shouldn’t just mindlessly parrot them. For example, if you affirm:

“I am in perfect health”

You want to feel transported to a reality where this is true, and feel the celebration of it, the satisfaction, the freedom, the adventure or whatever it is that perfect health would evoke in you. 

So with affirmations, I recommend memorising a few of them and saying them in idle moments, such as when you’re exercising or on the train or bus. (In a public place, I choose to say my affirmations in my head.)

So, the trick with affirmations is to affirm often, and over a period of months.

Note that saying affirmations at first can feel delusional, especially if you currently are not what you are affirming.

For example, if you affirm “I am in perfect health” but you have cancer, this could create resistance. You could start with something less emphatic such as, “Everyday my health is improving in some way.” And once you have affirmed this for a while, you may be ready to move on to the more emphatic affirmations which celebrate perfect health. 

There is often some resistance with affirmations — the trick is to ignore it, or see the affirmations like you are an actor taking on a role. When you say them, you take on the role of what you’re affirming. Just for a moment, you’re stepping into the version of yourself that has or is what you are affirming. Over time, this persona or role will become more familiar to you, and at some point when your subconscious mind is sufficiently impressed, the ‘Bridge of Incidents‘ will begin to take you towards your goal or desire. 

Here are some more examples as to things you can affirm:

If you’d like to be wealthy or make more money, you could affirm: “I always have more money than I need.”

If you are currently working on psychic development, but you are having doubts about your abilities, you could affirm: “I love that I can channel my Higher self and Spirit guides, on demand.”

If you are having trouble being patient with your kids, you could affirm “I am such a patient person, especially with my children.”

If you would like to manifest multiple things at once, you might like to use the affirmation “Isn’t it wonderful? Something marvellous is happening to me right now!” and feel the feeling you would have if you knew the Universe was conspiring towards your good, right in this very moment. Neville Goddard mentions this affirmation because it was used by one of his students, a woman in her fifties, who had no job, no money, no family, no friends and no-one to call on for help. She used this affirmation for around 2 months and an old friend who she hadn’t spoken to in a long time, had become wealthy and sent her a sum of money out of the blue. She then received legal papers from this friend, guaranteeing a monthly income for the rest of her life (you can read the full story, from Neville Goddard’s book ‘The Law and the Promise’ here.)

Handy tip with affirmations: if you worry about something often, affirm its opposite. 

Putting icing on a rotten cake

One of the ways that people can get tripped up with affirmations is when they have a lot of wounds or trauma from the past. 

You may feel that your cake (i.e. what is underneath) is rotten, but the icing (i.e. what you are saying to yourself with your affirmations) looks good. So, you’re just papering over the cracks in your psyche.

What do you do if you feel this way?

Focus on healing, while you are manifesting using affirmations. Keep using the affirmations even if you feel like a fraud (and you probably will feel like a fraud in the beginning, but keep saying the affirmations anyway because it will reprogram your subconscious mind.)

Here are some ways to heal while manifesting:

• Set an intention to heal (use this article to set an intention for that) – you don’t need to know how it will happen, just set the intention for now
• Try EMDR 
• See a therapist
• Try cord cutting if you need to heal a particular relationship, present or past
• Do Joe Dispenza meditations daily (I recommend this one because I have got so much out of them, in terms of healing – more on that in a later article.)
• Focus on improving your self-concept

Further Resources:

You can find the next article in this series here: A Complete Guide to Neville Goddard’s SATS Technique for Manifesting

And you can find Neville Goddard’s books on the Law of Assumption here: Neville Goddard: The Complete Reader

More Instructions on Using Affirmations to change your life:

• This Is My Current Favourite Method For Quick Manifestation — Robotic Affirming

A list of positive affirmations for various life areas:

• Positive Affirmations for Manifesting Better Health
• Positive Affirmations for Manifesting More Psychic/Mystical Experiences in Your Life