Transcript #010 - Affirmations

#010 - Jessie Parker - Healing with Affirmations - Episode Transcript

Amanda Parker: Welcome to today's episode of Don't Step on the Blue Bells, where we're diving into the transformative world of affirmations with the incredibly talented Jessie Parker. In this episode, Jessie, a gifted artist and healer who also happens to be my sister, shares her profound insights on how affirmations can reshape our reality.

With a background in film and video editing and a lifelong pursuit of artistic endeavors, Jessie channels her healing gifts into her artwork, affirmations, and oracle cards, as well as, more recently, working hands on with Reiki energy to promote well being and pursuing one's passions. The art of crafting powerful affirmations The impact of changing our neural pathways with simple daily habits and Jessie's unique approach to combining affirmations with visualization for deeper healing.

Get ready to unlock the magic within [00:02:00] and transform your life one affirmation at a time. Let's dive in.

Welcome to Don't Step on the Bluebells, Jessie, and thanks for being here today.

Jessie Parker: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I happen to be not only your sister, but a big fan of this podcast.

Amanda Parker: Yes, there's a secret there for everyone that Jessie has been the one doing the editing on the podcast since we kicked off . So, today we're talking about the topic of affirmations and This is something that a lot of people don't really fully understand what that means, or to be honest, that it has healing potential.

So I would love to begin, before going into exactly what it is, to understand what does healing mean to you?

Jessie Parker: I think at the heart of healing for me, it is aligning my mind, body and spirit. I think a lot of what might [00:03:00] constitute suffering these days is because we're out of alignment. You know, our body is giving us signals, our mind is giving us signals, our spirits giving us signals, and we see them as three different entities, instead of three things that are trying to harmonize together, I think for me, a lot of my own personal healing has been bringing those things more into alignment.

So the messages I'm getting in my brain are aligned with what I'm feeling in my body, and they do feel good to me or, you know, feel on track.

Amanda Parker: That's a really beautiful way of putting it, it's not just about understanding there's these different elements that make us up, but actually the role is these are different elements of one whole and our role is to bring them together into harmony -it's not like okay now you need to be good in your spiritual self and then you need to exercise more so that you do all of these things that are completely separate from one another.

Jessie Parker: Yeah, absolutely.

Amanda Parker: What does it mean to bring yourself into this harmony?

Jessie Parker: I'd say it all started for me back in [00:04:00] 2017. I'd gone through a major life change. I moved across the country from Los Angeles to New York. I had been very unhappy in L. A. towards the end. I had been depressed. I had a whole host of problems. I had not yet, I don't think, heard the expression, wherever you go, there you are.

So I knew I needed to get out of there, but I didn't realize that I would probably still have the same problems once I moved to New York. I'd had a shoulder injury for a long time that, um, I didn't ignore it, but I didn't go to the doctor. I tried, massage, and I tried acupuncture, and I tried different modalities of healing it more naturally, stretching, things like that.

And ultimately, I went to physical therapy, and it just kept getting worse. And I ended up having a very severe shoulder injury, and I ended up having surgery on it. And I went to a non traditional physical therapist at the time who, also had studied kinesiology and she was a dancer and all these other things.

So she had a different perspective on how the body moves and the way it worked together. And while I was [00:05:00] doing my sessions with her, it came up that she did, I think it's just called spiritual coaching. And she told me, which, I didn't really know or understand at the time, that the shoulder injury might not just be a shoulder injury, but it might be a symptom of something else.

And she told me that we tend to carry a lot of anger in our shoulders and our arms. And at the time, especially, I didn't like to feel anger.

I didn't want to feel anger. It doesn't mean that I didn't do that, but it just means that that was a very uncomfortable feeling. It was one I was not, comfortable expressing, comfortable acknowledging because to me it felt really mean to feel angry. And there was no discussion in my mind of, you know, this anger is justified.

You know, like everyone gets angry. Like in my mind, you know, I didn't want to be angry or seen as angry or come across as angry.

Anyway, so she really illuminated for me because I had all these problems. I, I had been feeling depressed and on top of that I had the shoulder injury . And I'd say she was really the first person to connect the dots for [00:06:00] me that these are not two separate things that are happening here.

That's where it all started for me.

Amanda Parker: Over the years you and I have spoken offline a lot about understanding the different things that are happening in your body and maybe the emotional reasons for that and I know the book that you're talking about I actually always just keep here on my bookshelf, at least, this is my introduction.

If you can't see, I'm holding up, You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. And I reference it all the time, especially, I often feel back pain or different things are happening. And that can mean, according to Louise, and also in my experience, you know, a lack of support or a fear of money or fear of this or that.

So it's this idea that we have these corresponding physical ailments to emotional pain or challenges or setbacks that we're feeling in our life. And if I hear you correctly, the feeling of that pain in your shoulder was [00:07:00] like, it had to get so bad for you to actually be able to realize, huh, maybe there's something else here that I'm actually not dealing with.

Jessie Parker: Yeah, and that's what it turned out to be. So I, it's funny because then after that first session where she mentioned this, I went back to my Louise Hay book and, the issue I had with my shoulder was bursitis, which I was not familiar with. I think I knew the name. Long story short, there is a squishy little sack in your shoulder that cushions the bones so that they don't rub against each other.

I had an injury that might've not healed properly or completely before I used my shoulder again. It kept, sort of healing and then, you know, getting injured again. And my bursa had solidified. They're supposed to be squishy, spongy sacks. Mine had solidified. And I looked up in Louise Hay's book, what this means and it said, literally "wanting to hit someone". And I was like, Oh yeah. If that, if that doesn't sum up anger, I don't know what does like, yeah, that actually sounds like me.

Amanda Parker: So watch out, if Jessie is [00:08:00] ever experiencing shoulder pain, don't cross her path.

Jessie Parker: That's the takeaway. I think I can leave now. Yeah.

Amanda Parker: Well, I think it's just, um, really fascinating that most of us don't know until we know. And even when you have an awareness that, oh, there could be a relationship to what's going on, you know, If you haven't been introduced to this before, why would you know it? If you didn't grow up with it, why would you know that this is even a thing that could be possible?

Jessie Parker: Yeah, and I think it's also important too because I thought the shoulder pain was the problem. The shoulder pain was a symptom. The shoulder pain was the thing that was telling me there was a problem. The shoulder pain itself wasn't the issue.

I mean it hurt, don't get me wrong, but the thing behind the thing was this anger that wasn't coming out.

Amanda Parker: So you went from this place of experiencing this pain, meeting someone who started to open your eyes to what could be beneath the surface. And then I also heard an element of what you said that. There [00:09:00] was, like, you didn't want to feel the anger, you didn't want to express the anger, you didn't want it to be there, so you kind of just pretended it wasn't, but that didn't mean that it wasn't actually there.

It just meant, oh, this, I'm going to control what I can express in this moment, and still the emotion was there, even though you were trying to push it down.

Jessie Parker: Yes. So one of the greatest things I also learned from the same physical therapist was emotion is energy in motion. Energy needs to move through the body. It doesn't matter what the emotion is. It doesn't matter what the energy is. That's why you feel better when you cry. That emotion has to go somewhere.

It has to move through you. And tears, for example, are a great release. Sometimes hitting that pillow is the great release.

It's your body trying to move that energy, and that in itself, again, is not inherently bad. The energy has to go somewhere, it doesn't disappear, and it's just going to build until your body one day really lets you know [00:10:00] that this.

This can't stay, you know, there's going to come a time when it really is just gonna force you to do something about it.

Amanda Parker: So how did you move from that place to understanding affirmations, or what was that introduction into your life?

Jessie Parker: So, the same woman I worked with, offered a course called Self Mastery, to learn about yourself and figure out what your thoughts and beliefs are so that if you didn't like them, you could change them.

So a lot of the work that I did in that self mastery course was to rewrite my beliefs and it was through the use of affirmations. So, that's where I really got introduced to it and where I got introduced to some of the practices I still use for using the affirmations

Amanda Parker: And just to clarify, because when you say rewrite my beliefs, what does that mean?

Jessie Parker: So basically, all of us have beliefs, most of our belief systems are adopted. I think it's like between the ages of like three to five years old. I think they say the majority of our beliefs become [00:11:00] kind of set by that age through watching the adults in our life, through the messages we receive from people in our life.

A lot of them are not beliefs we have chosen. They are not conscious. If I asked you, hey, what's your thought on this? You might not even have an opinion. You might not even realize that you have a deep seated belief around this thing. So, a lot of our beliefs are just in our brain, like I said from, you know, like your parents always do this, or you saw your parents do this, and so you developed a belief.

I'm trying to think of a good example.

Amanda Parker: Well, you can't because we have the same parents.

Jessie Parker: That's true, yeah. No, not a real example, oh my god, no. Just like a, you know, like a total figurative example.

Let's say you always heard your parents, complaining about money. As a five year old, you don't understand the nuances.

You don't understand how money works, how you get money, how you spend money. And so your belief might just be that money causes problems. It's not a conscious belief. At five years old, you don't understand these things, but somewhere in your brain, you realize whenever mom and dad talk about money, they fight or whenever they talk about [00:12:00] money, dad gets upset.

And then your belief, becomes money's a problem. And then, yeah, in your adulthood, you could have a lot of money troubles and not even realize why, because you might not realize you have this belief in the back of your brain somewhere that says, Ooh, money causes problems.

Amanda Parker: Hmm. Okay, so then you have this belief that's kind of hardwired, whether you realize it's there or not, but that you're actually able to decide on a different belief. You can actually choose to change that.

Jessie Parker: Yes, so that's one of the great things about being an adult and autonomy and choosing to go within and, you know, introspect and look at yourself and the things in your life and, and see what's working for you and what's not. And then there is a way to actually start. Changing your beliefs. And if, if you don't like something, if it's, it doesn't feel good, if you've got nothing but money problems, you know, thinking money is the problem is not going to help those problems at all.

So there is the opportunity to rewrite them. And, a lot of the work I've done, like I said, was through affirmations and, I will say this [00:13:00] affirmations are wonderful. There's tons of healing modalities out there. I don't think affirmations replace them all. I think they are a great supplement to anything that you're already doing. I feel like affirmations could easily fit in with whatever work you're already doing.

Amanda Parker: Yeah, that's also another really great point that there's so many options and it's not that there's one size fits all and it's not that you do this forever and everything in your life is forever healed and

Jessie Parker: Yeah.

Amanda Parker: Yeah. Well, I think I, I chased that a lot in my own journey that I kept looking for the teacher, the guru, the course, the whatever, the one and only expert who is going to make sense of everything for me.

That I could then have all the answers I needed to move forward, and of course, like, no, that's the whole journey of life, is figuring that out, so you can meet guides and people along the way and learn new tools that support you, but of course, you still have to do [00:14:00] the work and find what works best for you?

Jessie Parker: Yeah, there's a little bit of a, the spaghetti method in there. If you're not familiar with the spaghetti method, if you're cooking spaghetti, one way to know it's done is to throw it at a wall or at the ceiling. And when it sticks, it's ready. And so you might have to throw a couple of strands at the ceiling before it's ready.

We had the leftovers of that in one of our childhood homes

Amanda Parker: It's

Jessie Parker: stuck to the ceiling and

There was

Amanda Parker: always spaghetti on the ceiling. Sorry, mom.

So what exactly are affirmations then?

Jessie Parker: So , I'm going to start off with what I think a lot of people think of affirmations as, and it's kind of like platitudes or like positive messages and, in a way that is that, but truly anything can be an affirmation. I think affirmations have an action, like a verb, and a descriptor, let's say.

You know, the statement, I am, they always say, is one of the most powerful affirmations, because whatever I tell myself I am, it really defines me. [00:15:00] I'm defining myself. I would like to just impart the fact that it's not only positive message. It can be any message. But I would like to caution that anything , if you say it enough times can affirm for you what you already believe or create a belief.

Amanda Parker: So there's a coach that I know he's quite well known in the coaching world, his name is Steve Hardison. He might be a controversial character. But one thing that I really appreciate about his approach is when he's working together with clients, he has them create what he calls the document. And each client will create their own document.

And essentially, it's not just affirmations, as we're talking about today, but it is really speaking into existence, what you want your life to look and feel like. And the way that he frames this, which I always find really fascinating, to be honest, it can sound a bit cultish as well if you're on the outside, but he talks about how you create [00:16:00] yourself.

So every time that you are reading this document, which talks about those hopes and dreams and desires and the way that you want to be living your life, that you are actually creating yourself every morning. And when I introduce you on this podcast, you, Jessie Parker, I am creating you for the audience.

It's not just, Hey, here's Jessie. She's my sister. Although I did say that, but it's creating the artist, the healer, the entrepreneur, these different elements so that the person who's listening has a created version of who you are and that we actually have the opportunity to do that every day.

Jessie Parker: Yeah, that's a beautiful way of thinking of it too. But yes, that we have the opportunity to do that for ourselves every day too.

Amanda Parker: So affirmations help you bring. New thoughts and perspectives and ways of being and speaking them into the world through "I am" statements.

So is it as simple as I just decide, you know what, I am [00:17:00] beautiful. Or how does that process work to create an affirmation?

Jessie Parker: So there are a few steps in this process. I think the very beginning is we need to figure out what our current belief is. The thing with affirmations that I would love for people to take away from this is if you use them just as like a thing you say to yourself, and that's it, and there's no more effort and energy put behind them, they are not more than pretty words.

It is putting a new coat of paint on a house that's peeling, and the peeling paint is still underneath. You really need to peel away and scrape away that old paint before you can apply the new coat if you want it to look fresh and refreshed.

So first thing that a lot of people need to do and that I was very resistant to, as it turns out, is uncover what you actually think already, what you think about yourself, what are, you know, a belief could be about anything, but I'd say in this case, let's speak about ourselves.

What do I believe to be true about myself? I might believe I'm smart, and I might believe I'm funny, but do I go around saying, I'm so stupid? Oh, that was so I was [00:18:00] so dumb. Why did I do that? Right? So if I tell myself that I'm so smart, but then The second something, bad happens or I make a mistake, if I'm telling myself, Oh, my God, you're such an idiot, then that tells you what your real belief is, right?

That's like a way of uncovering what do you actually think?

So all the positive words in the world don't change what your actual belief is. So the first thing is, you have to uncover what you really believe. A great way of doing this and, uh, it'll be a little easier for you to do, I'd say intentionally is, when you're presented with a belief, see how you react to it.

So I created a, an affirmation deck and it's got 99 messages in it and I'll get into it a little bit more later, but a lot of those messages came from, I would look at the message and I would have a reaction to it. And it was like, okay, I guess I don't believe this, or I don't recognize that person in this message, you know, and so I had to have that reaction first, and then say, is this something that I want to believe, though?

Is this something that would feel good? For the example of, [00:19:00] you know, I'm smart, I'm stupid thing, you know, does it feel good telling yourself you're stupid all the time?

No. So then maybe you want to change it. So I'd say that's like, step one is you got to recognize what the underlying belief is. And like I said earlier, you might not even know what some of these are, you know, they're autopilot, like you telling yourself you're dumb when you make a mistake is autopilot.

How many times have you done it? You're not thinking about it. It's really just something that automatically comes out without you thinking about it, which is what a lot of our beliefs are. They're just so deeply ingrained that I didn't even realize it was a belief.

It's just this thing I say, and I don't even pay attention when I said it. You know, I didn't even notice it was a big problem to call myself dumb. I had a really hard time with mistakes, with making mistakes, with doing anything that I perceived as a mistake, right?

Because other people might not have noticed anything or thought anything, but I would beat myself up, you know, and it would be, Oh my God, you're so dumb. Why did you do that? Right over things that were not a big deal. And I really didn't realize how horribly I was [00:20:00] speaking to myself over things that truly were not life or death kind of mistakes.

There's no changing them, no changing your beliefs, no changing your thoughts and programs without actually taking a look at what's underneath. And that's really hard.

That's really, that can be ugly. That could feel terrible, you know, but the truth is, there's no way out but through. You've got to address it and undo the old beliefs at the same time, if not before, you create the new ones.

Amanda Parker: Well, it, it makes a lot of sense just to share a bit of my own experience with that, because I have often tried to create new beliefs or new ways of thinking about something and. I'll pull out, I mean, not out of thin air, like, it's a bit out of thin air, a bit out of aspiration. Like, ooh, I really want this.

But I can feel, everything is like, ugh, I don't actually believe this is possible, or that I can really get this. And then I put it on paper, and to [00:21:00] be honest, it actually just feels bad. Like, it doesn't feel good to work towards whatever that aspiration is, like, especially, I don't know, starting a business.

I'm gonna earn 10k a month in, the first year, and then I'm like, how? Like, I literally have no idea how. I don't really believe it. So every time I see that, it actually made me feel more like a fraud, more like I couldn't actually align to the thing I was saying that I wanted.

So, what I'm hearing is like, had I actually spent the time in that moment to think about, okay, what's the real belief there, if the real belief is, I will never earn 10,000 a month in this field of work and then I'm going ahead and telling myself I will earn this then of course, it's gonna feel completely unaligned.

Jessie Parker: Yeah, totally disconnected from what your reality is. Totally understandable. Awareness counts for so much, just knowing what the thing is, even if you don't address it, step one is just, I know. I might choose not to take action, I might choose not to deal with it, but I know it's [00:22:00] there.

You talk yourself out of it because it doesn't feel real. And I think that would be another thing that I learned when it comes to affirmations, there is a lot to be said for fake it until you make it.

Because I have to somehow convince myself this is real. And there's effective ways to do that, which I will share with you. One of the most important things I learned about affirmation you have to train yourself to feel the emotion behind it. And again, so this is connecting the mental, the thinking of the words, and then the physical, the body. Like, you have to get your body to believe this thing. Which is challenging. And I, I have a trick that I'm gonna share with you guys on how to do that too. We'll do a visualization a little bit later, and I'm gonna help you to connect with that feeling, whatever that feeling is. I'd say generally speaking, if you're not sure if this is new for you, and I don't know how I wanna feel generally, you probably wanna feel happy when you said this thing, right? Generally, you'd wanna feel like. Yeah, that feels good. Yeah, I'd like to think that.

So basically you need your thoughts to be aligned with the feelings in your body. That's where [00:23:00] the, the holistic approach comes in, because you can't have a message in your mind that your body doesn't believe is true, and you'll know it's true if you feel that in your body.

If you feel happy while you're saying that, whatever happy feels like for you in your body.

Amanda Parker: So what I heard from you so far is that step one is really to uncover the beliefs that are there to develop that self awareness and understanding. The second step will be to start to connect to the emotions or feelings that you want to be having.

Jessie Parker: Yes, I skipped ahead. So I think step 2 part a would be to see what sensations you're already feeling in your body because that would give you a gauge of how you're responding to this belief. People feel sensations in their body all the time that they disregard or ignore.

You might feel like a little ache somewhere, right? You say something, you feel an ache in your wrist, it feels unrelated, so you ignore it. So I think recognizing the feeling in your body and then recognizing how you'd like to [00:24:00] feel instead when you heard this specific affirmation. If you hear a message and it doesn't feel good when you hear it and it feels like BS, what would you like to feel like.

What is your barometer for good going to be so that you notice when you do feel it?

Amanda Parker: It sounds like before you even get to the stage of writing an affirmation, that you actually want to figure out how you want to feel So there's almost this reality check. Okay, what's going on in my life today? It's not just like, okay I'm gonna earn 10k a month. It's like what's actually going on?

Hey, I'm feeling nervous about business, or I'm feeling nervous about my professional career, and it really doesn't feel good, and here's the beliefs that I have. I'm not going to be successful. I'm not good enough. I'm not talented. People won't hire me. The list could go on. These are things I've definitely experienced, and I'm sure anyone else, especially entrepreneurs, have, uh, had this feeling somewhere in their, their bucket of fears and doubts.

So you [00:25:00] go from this place of, here's what I'm feeling, here's what I'm experiencing, to really connecting in, okay, how do those beliefs actually make me feel? And are these feelings that I want to continue having? To then starting to get a sense for, what would I like to be feeling instead? Before you've even created your affirmations.

Jessie Parker: And Yeah, and I think that's important to note because writing your affirmations isn't just necessarily saying the opposite of what the other thing is, it's not just all of a sudden, like, yeah, money is good. What do you want to feel about money? I want to feel safe with money.

You do need to figure out what the affirmation is going to be. It's not just going to be a generic thing for you. If you have this very specific money issue where you believe money causes problems, then you're going to need to know what you want to feel like with the money.

Do you want to feel safe around money? Do you want to feel comfortable? Do you want to feel that it's safe to spend it? You know, your affirmation, Amanda, around this might not be the same as mine. I might need to feel safe around [00:26:00] money and you might need to feel, safer on spending money, right?

Everyone really is going to have to create their own that feel good to them and, and feel specific to them.

Amanda Parker: So let's say that I come up with some affirmations. What's the process from there? Do they just work? How do I know they work? Do they not work?

Jessie Parker: You'll know. Um, so I would love to do an experiment with you, but first I'm going to give you a little background on some brain science. I would like to make the disclaimer that I am not a neuralscientist, so I am going to do my best to explain this as I understand it and as the explanation works for me.

There is a thing called neuralplasticity. Our brains are neuralplastic. And basically what that means is our brains are soft and squishy, and that's what allows them to learn new things or change or shift or grow as we change and shift and grow. Um, if they were solid, no new information would get through.

The general way that brains work, again, I'm not a neuralscientist, is there are neuralns in the [00:27:00] brain that create pathways. There's these little tendril kind of looking things that move through the brain and they connect things and make connections. And again, they're able to do that because the brain is kind of squishy and porous and every time we learn something new, the brain creates a new neural pathway.

If you think of a pathway as, like, a pathway through a forest, have you ever been walking in, let's say, like, a field near a wooded area, and you can see that area, that it looks like a trail. You can tell that there's a trail, that people have walked through it. It might not be marked, there might not be, pavement, but you could just tell that maybe the grass is matted down, or maybe it's all dirt, and there's just, like, the exact right amount of space between bushes that someone could walk through, right?

So that would be a neural pathway. That would be like a well worn neural pathway. That's like your, your oldest belief about yourself. That is, you know, like I am funny, right? You've thought you were funny forever. Perfect. That's I am funny.

Amanda Parker: That is an easy one for me.

Jessie Parker: Exactly, right? You're a laugh riot, Amanda. So let's say [00:28:00] you wanted to create a new belief.

So imagine it as if, let's say, a tree fell over that path, that well worn path in the woods that you're always going to.

Um, And now you gotta find a new way through. And you realize if you go, 10 feet to the left, the tree's not gonna be there, but there's no path there. There's brambles, there's bushes, there's twigs, there's branches, there's all this stuff in the way. But you got to get through, and you got to figure out a way through.

So, the first day, you might go through the brambles, and you get kind of scratched, and, you know, you're tripping on twigs, and you're falling all over the place and stuff, but you're going to forge this path just to see if it goes where you need it to go. And then, the next day, you come back to the field, and you walk to the old path, and then you remember, oh, yeah, the path is blocked by a tree.

I got to go to this other place, and you find the right spot, and, this time you're walking through, and you at least remember there's some twigs, so you don't trip over all the same ones. And, the next time you come back to the path, it's the same thing. But maybe this time you remembered, oh yeah, those brambles were really scratchy.

And you remember to bring, your clippers this time. And so you were at least able [00:29:00] to clip away the brambles. You still tripped on some twigs and there was a branch that you were not expecting and you fell. But you made it through the path and relatively unscratched and so on and so forth.

And then what happens is from now on, when you're reaching for a new belief, You start walking to the new path, right? Instead of automatically, autopilot, old beliefs, going to that old path that you know is there, that you know is worn, you start walking towards the new path.

And every time you walk on it, the grass gets a little more matted, and the ground gets a little more worn, and maybe the path gets wider, maybe you bring the clippers again, and you make it a little wider so it's more comfortable, so it's not just room enough for you to squeeze through, but, wider for you to walk with someone else

You clear away those tree branches and you just wear this new groove. And what happens is the old path, there are times that you're still going to autopilot, walk there first and go, Oh, oops. And then, you walk to the other one and that's okay. That happens to everyone.

But what you'll notice is over the course of time, the grass starts growing back on that old path. And, new [00:30:00] bushes grow up and start covering the path. And so now you have this new path that's walkable and flat and easy to navigate and there's no hiccups or things to trip on and the old path gets rewritten.

So that's how it works with writing a new affirmation. I don't know the exact statistics, but we might have a hundred thousand thoughts a day and I think the majority of them, like 70 percent, are negative thoughts.

So this is not unique to you. If you're having negative thoughts or it's hard to do this, you're not alone. But that also just shows you how much work and effort will go into intentionally creating and, reinforcing a positive belief, a new belief.

So there's different methods that we could use to do that, to repeat that message more so that we wear the new groove on the new path instead of playing the old message and, reinforcing that old path that we don't want to go through anymore. That's just a basic background on how affirmations can work and how we can actually not use the old message as much so that the new one becomes that's the go to.

Amanda Parker: Well, it sounds like we're using the [00:31:00] benefits of neuroplasticity to help us in creating these new pathways, and what that means is that it can be difficult in the beginning because we've already walked the same belief pattern so many times, and when you first decide you're going to change something, you might automatically default to the old way of doing things, the old beliefs, but that with time, with remembering, with reminding yourself, you actually can start to carve new pathways, new beliefs that help you to change literally the way that you're thinking, changing the way that your mind works.

Jessie Parker: Yes. And I'd love to challenge you. This isn't about affirmations, but I'd love to challenge you and anyone who's listening. If you want to see how a new neural pathway is created, relatively quickly, like in a really calculable way, I did a challenge one year where for a week or two weeks, I did one task that I would normally do.

But I did it with my non dominant hand. So you could eat [00:32:00] with your non dominant hand. For me, it's my left hand. You could eat with your left hand. You could brush your teeth with your left hand. These are super basic human functions, things that you do every day. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to ever put any thought or effort into it.

And you can see how much thought and effort it will take to brush your teeth with your left hand. And you will also see over the course of a week how much less effort, how much more natural it feels. That is, I think, the best way to see what it feels like to carve a new pathway. That wasn't there before because you've never had a reason to brush your teeth with the wrong hand before, right?

It's that same thing again with affirmations. It's not to say that you won't have moments of falling back to the old thing, but that's the awareness.

When we remember, whoops, I'm going to switch hands or whoops. I'm going to switch to that new message instead.

Amanda Parker: So if someone's listening and they're saying, okay, cool, I'm ready. Like, I really want to try this out. How can they begin this process and also how can they support themselves to succeed with it?

Jessie Parker: That's a great question. So I'd love to do this exercise right now. I'm going to pull a card [00:33:00] from my affirmation deck. And the reason I'm doing that is because there's a, there's prewritten messages on here. Neither you nor I know what I'm going to pull. And so it's going to be a true reaction from you and anyone who's listening to see what message is coming up.

And like I said originally, the way to know what you might want to change or what isn't working for you anymore is to understand how you feel about that thing. I'm going to pull just a random message, and before we look at it, before we know what it is, I just want you to be in your body and just see what comes up.

I don't want to guide you to see how you're going to feel, but feel for sensations, feel for your breathing, feel for any warmth, any pain, any, you know, oh, I think this is dumb or I don't believe this or whatever. Right.

I'm going to pull a message right now and I'm going to use Amanda as this guinea pig. And Amanda, I just want you, when I read this message to see what your initial reaction is to it and not the reaction you think that I want to hear or that you want to want to say you're feeling, but [00:34:00] like truly what comes up for you, right?

It is safe for me to feel my feelings.

Amanda Parker: My first reaction here is I have that on a post it on my mirror

Jessie Parker: So you're familiar with your feelings, I guess.

Amanda Parker: It hasn't always felt safe to feel my feelings so I will say that is definitely something I'm working on. So hearing that actually makes me laugh. That's my initial reaction.

Jessie Parker: I do say, though, that when I pull a message like this, sometimes it just reinforces the work we're already doing. So, again, for anyone else listening, too, if you're like, yeah, no, I've been working on that, good, this is your acknowledgement that that's working. Um, this is actually a very funny, specific card anyway, because feeling your feelings is tough.

Right? Like [00:35:00] remember my story about my shoulder injury because I refused to feel a feeling of anger and it doesn't mean it wasn't there. I didn't know a safe way to feel it because it felt like the extreme was I'm going to Hulk smash through a wall. It didn't feel like, Oh, I'll have like a little burst of anger and then I'll be refreshed.

Like, especially by the time I waited to start feeling my feelings, like it was not going to be that tame and simple.

So now we've got this message and you know, for anyone listening. You might have rolled your eyes and said, Oh, this is stupid. Maybe your impulse was to hit the pause button or to like, stop listening, right?

That's, that's an impulse. That's an unconscious impulse in your body. Like, I'm going to just take a break now. You don't want to hear it anymore, which means I don't agree with this. And then from there, figure out why it feels unsafe, let's say, to feel your feelings.

Do you not have someone to speak to? Do you not have a benchmark for feeling feelings? Like were you told not to cry when you would get upset? So now you don't know what to do when you get upset because your instinct would be to cry but you were told not to cry as a child, right? So this would be a way for you to figure out [00:36:00] how you feel about the message, how you react to the message, and then maybe start exploring why you feel this way, right?

You don't have to get too far into it unless you want to. You could journal about it. Something specific might come to mind for you, right? Like the, your parents telling you not to cry or something and that might be a moment of, oh, I guess that's why I feel unsafe feeling my feelings.

And then what would you like to feel instead of that? Maybe you just, maybe it's as simple as. I don't want to feel the tension in my chest when I am about to cry.

I'd rather just cry and then, feel better afterwards. Right.

You might have a problem with all your feelings . I think a lot of people tend to have, more challenges feeling what we would consider uncomfortable feelings, right? For a lot of people that might be anger, frustration, sadness. But there are a lot of people who have a hard time feeling joy. There are a lot of people who have a hard time feeling happy.

You know, you, let's say you grew up in a house and you had a family member with a chronic illness and they always felt sick or were always in the hospital and maybe you felt guilty feeling [00:37:00] happy because this person was always unhappy or unwell or whatever, right? So like people can have conflicting feelings about difficult emotions, and they're not going to be the same for everyone.

There are people who don't know how to celebrate. Maybe it feels like bragging if you celebrate, so they feel uncomfortable, right? So for here, if there's a specific feeling, you know, it's safe for me to feel happy. It's safe for me to feel angry. And then again, from there, we're going to move into what would that feel like in the body?

And if you're unsure how that feels in the body, I have a visualization I'd love to run through with you.

Amanda Parker: I just want to, quickly recap what you're sharing here before the visualization because I'm hearing a couple of different things. So on the one hand, if someone wants to get started thinking about affirmations, one way they can do that is by engaging with different beliefs, just reading it.

So it could be, for example, like Jessie has this affirmation deck, you can get yourself One of the affirmation decks, and I'll give you all the information for how to get [00:38:00] in touch with Jessie and her website and everything, it'll be in the show notes as well. So you can get yourself an affirmation deck, you can pull a card, you can see what's there, and you can just try it out and see how it feels.

I'm also hearing, and this is my own spin on what you're saying, which is Like, maybe you pick a card and you try that out for a week. Maybe just every day you're trying to see how these beliefs feel. If it feels good, great. If it doesn't, okay. But there's awareness in all of that.

There's an understanding and development and really understanding yourself through that process.

One other thing that I'm hearing, because you've mentioned it a few times throughout the conversation, so I just want to draw attention to it, a lot of our beliefs, it sounds like, come from childhood. So many of these beliefs, and I'm sure not exclusively, but many of these beliefs will come from the way that we were raised, or how we grew up, or if one parent or another had certain beliefs, or they were raised a certain [00:39:00] way.

So, I hear there's, like, quite a few mentions from you about thinking about the childhood home as you're also relating to some of these affirmations.

Jessie Parker: They say our brains were the absolute spongiest, I think, between ages Two to five and we're taking in everything around us, at that time, most children they're completely dependent on the adults in their life, whoever it is, it could be parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, just teachers, you know, it could be anyone.

And they see how people respond to stuff. They see how, how people speak, how people speak to them, how they speak to themselves, how they speak to others. And I think. a lot of us would have like a very specific correlation with something that happened in childhood with some of these memories.

And those are when they're going to be the most unconscious beliefs, right? We didn't consciously form them. We didn't set out to, to think these things. Then we'll find also just throughout life that these beliefs are reinforced. If you ever have had a thought about something and then You know, like you're 25 [00:40:00] years old and this thing happens and it's like, yeah, see, because you know, it's not safe to feel my feelings.

You might have a significant other who got annoyed with you when you cried. See, it's not safe to feel my feelings, right? And it's reinforced over and over.

If you heard your mother always speak about herself in a certain way, then that's the belief that you formed about that because that's what she said. It must be true. That's kind of the bottom line of it is at that age, you have to trust the adults in your life with your safety.

And if they say this, then that's got to be true because that's, what's going to keep me safe is agreeing with that.

Chances are, as a child, you recognized some pattern and tucked it away.

Amanda Parker: Honestly, we probably also create these new beliefs as adults and we're just not aware, you know, in your first job, if you just kept your head down and did your work, then you know, you develop this whole belief about professional persona or what you're supposed to do in the world based on these experiences, but most of them are going to be formed as kids.

So thank you for clarifying that.

Jessie Parker: Sure, but to your point about [00:41:00] that too, I'd like to say that's where the mind body spirit harmony comes in. You were told this is how you act as an adult. You go to work, you do this, whatever. How come I get headaches every day? How come I feel, you know, like, how come I get a stomachache every time I have to go to work, right?

That is because I don't want to be doing this thing, but I was told that this is how life goes. Gets lived and I'm following it, but I keep having all these injuries in my body or I feel sick every day. Like, is this, is this really working for you? Or your spirit, rather, right? You know, you go into becoming a doctor because you've got a family of ten generations of doctors, but you really wanted to be an archaeologist instead, and every day you go to work and your body's like, do we have to do this again? I'm gonna make your back ache right now, and your spirit's going, there's an archaeological dig in Egypt right now, you could just get a plane ticket and go.

Amanda Parker: So, I would love to hear about this visualization you're talking about. So tell us what do we need to do here to be able to participate.

Jessie Parker: So the basic gist of this [00:42:00] visualization is I know when you're trying to feel a new feeling for a message it feels hard. How do I feel that? I don't know. I've never believed this before. So how could I know what this feels like? So that's why I was saying I feel the underlying feeling that might be easiest for everyone to connect to is happiest.

This is a hack that I use for myself all the time because if it's something I don't know how to feel or I don't believe it, I need to trick my body into feeling this. So I'm going to guide you through a visualization right now where hopefully you will be able to cultivate a sensation in your body. Hopefully it is a positive sensation in your body. And then what we're going to do is once you have that feeling, again, it might feel warm. It might feel free. You might just be smiling. However, this feels for you. We're going to then recite this affirmation. It's safe for me to feel my feelings or whatever affirmation you've come up with. What we are trying to do is trick the body into feeling a certain way when the mind hears a certain thing.

And so this is just a great way to practice doing that.

Amanda Parker: Can we just [00:43:00] give, um, maybe two or three examples of what could be a common affirmation so that people who are listening can pick which one of those resonates the most just for this visualization?

Jessie Parker: Sure, one of the ones that I love is I am powerful, the feeling of powerful, like I have my own agency. I can make my own decisions. I make my own choices. It could be powerful as in physically, physically strong, physically fit. You know, I could run a marathon. I am powerful.

If it's important to me, it's important. So, without regard for what other people are thinking, if it's important to me, it's important. Bottom line. Um, that might be a good affirmation for people who are used to, deferring to other people, right? Like, oh no, you know, I wanted to do this thing, but Amanda wanted to do that. We'll just do Amanda's thing. It's fine. It's totally fine.

And I treat myself with kindness and this might not feel true for some people. Right? Do you treat yourself with kindness?

The way you speak to yourself? [00:44:00] The way you take care of yourself? You know, kindness is not just the words you say, but kindness could be, you know, I do drink enough water every day. I do get enough sleep every night.

If any of those three resonate with you or anything else, maybe you're currently working on an affirmation and it hasn't clicked yet, and then feel free to Sub that in right now. So I'm going to take you through a quick little breathing exercise just to ground you.

If you're able to close your eyes safely, you're not driving or doing anything. Please do that right now. I will count for you so you don't have to think about it. And we're just going to do a few box breaths, which means we're going to breathe in and then pause and exhale and pause for the same amount of time.

So we're going to do everything for the count of four and I will count for you. So breathe in. 2, 3, 4, pause, 2, 3, 4, exhale, 2, 3, 4, [00:45:00] hold, 2, 3, 4, breathe in, 2, 3, 4, pause, 2, 3, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. Pause, two, three, four.

Now you can resume your regular breathing.

I want you to imagine yourself in your favorite place in the world.[00:46:00]

It might be your favorite country. It might be your favorite vacation spot. Maybe for you it's the beach. Maybe it's the library. Maybe it's sitting at your kitchen table.

Paint yourself a picture. Where are you sitting? Or are you lying down? Or are you outside moving around? Imagine the weather, and it's your favorite kind of day. Maybe it's sunny at the beach. Maybe it's a rainy day and you're inside sitting on your couch.

Now imagine yourself doing your favorite activity. Maybe you're [00:47:00] reading or you're painting or you're snowboarding. Look around and see who's with you because all of your favorite people are there enjoying this activity with you. Your friends, your family. If you made the invite list to end all invite lists, these are your absolute favorite people and they're right there with you.

Imagine yourselves enjoying that activity. You're laughing, you're joking, you're having so much fun together. This is the day that you have been waiting for and the activity that you've planned and it's finally here and you're all together.[00:48:00]

Now think about that affirmation and repeat it to yourself. You can do it quietly or out loud. And see what it feels like to feel powerful while being outside and enjoying snowboarding with your friends. Or see what it feels like to treat yourself with kindness as you're sitting in a reading circle in the library with everyone reading their favorite book.

Notice what sensations come up for you in your body. Notice what that feels like to you, so that you can recognize it the next time you feel it.[00:49:00]

And on the count of three, we're going to open our eyes. One. Two. Three. So Amanda, since you're here, did you notice anything or feel anything?

Amanda Parker: Many things.

Jessie Parker: Yeah?

Amanda Parker: It was a very powerful visual. I really appreciated being guided through. It's actually a rare treat to have someone guide you live and in the present through something like that. And I could see myself in a beautiful place. I was surprised where I picked. It was actually the [00:50:00] yard, like the garden, well, British words, garden, the yard next to mom's house.

So out on the side, lying on a beach blanket in the sun with the cats.

Jessie Parker: Yep.

Amanda Parker: And it felt so happy. Smiling to myself. It

Jessie Parker: I saw you through the camera.

Amanda Parker: and gleeful.

Jessie Parker: Good. And then how did it feel? Did you, did you repeat an affirmation to yourself? Did you notice the connection state, or how did that feel for you,

Amanda Parker: Well, I had, I tried two affirmations. So first, I forgot which affirmation I wanted to work with and I said, Shit. Then you mentioned one and I said, Ah, yeah, okay. So I tried I am powerful and it really had no resonance. It wasn't important to me, so I just let it go. And the one that stuck was I treat myself with kindness.

And that felt really beautiful because that's exactly what that [00:51:00] moment felt like. It felt like a kind thing to do, to just be there and be present in that place in time.

Jessie Parker: I love that. And I think that's a good reminder too that you just said is, not every affirmation is gonna mean something to you anyway.

You know, if you did a different visualization, maybe a different message would stick. One thing I wanted to tell other people, this visualization is one example, but if you wanted to feel a certain feeling, you could watch a TV show or watch a movie.

If you're having a hard time feeling sadness, like, do a Google search and find out what the saddest movie is. Get you've got to get yourself into that feeling. I was crying at a Kia commercial the other day, you know what I mean? So that's, that was PMS.

But, you know what I mean? If you know, something makes you feel the way that you're trying to feel if you know something makes you cry and you need a good cry, watch that movie or watch that scene, let yourself cry, and then repeat, it is safe for me to cry, right? Let yourself feel that feeling.

You try and [00:52:00] match the message that you're trying to feel with the emotion that you're trying to feel. And that's going to be up for you to gauge how you're going to, how you're going to best feel that, how that's going to best come across for you.

Amanda Parker: It's, it is funny too, because I'm fully aware that we have the record button on and we're sitting here and we're talking about affirmation. So the first thing I remembered, the first affirmation was that it is safe to feel my feelings. And I said, You know what? It doesn't feel that safe right now. I'm gonna

Jessie Parker: I am being observed actually at the moment.

Amanda Parker: So it was a full body lie. And I said, you know, I'm gonna pick a safer affirmation for the time being.

Jessie Parker: going to force this. We've only got three minutes. That does bring me to like how to write an actual affirmation. Because I'm sure plenty of you have been waiting for that too. Because there are, more effective ways to write them, and less effective ways.

They say two of the most powerful words are I am and then, whatever you put after that. [00:53:00] So that's a great place to start with an affirmation. You know, I am powerful. I am wealthy.

But you also might need to be more specific. You know, what is it you want wealth of? Do you want money? Do you want friends? Do you want family? Do you want love? These are where affirmations can get really specific to you.

There's, it's safe for me to.... You know, it's safe for me to feel. It's safe for me to pursue my dreams. It's safe for me to, try new things.

One of the other ones that I have in my affirmation deck is I give myself permission to. I give myself permission to apply for new jobs. I give myself permission to say no. I give myself permission to rest today.

Which actually is another point in affirmation making a lot of people think of it as looking in a mirror and going, you can do this. And there's some merit to that, but it's more powerful to speak to ourselves in the first person.

I can do this. That's different. I'm not telling someone else. I'm telling myself, I can do this. I've got this. I give [00:54:00] myself permission. I am powerful. And then you're really speaking to yourself. And it also mirrors the voice that you hear in your head. When you're talking to yourself. Well, maybe I'm the only one who talks to myself all day long, but, uh, the voice.

Yeah. Okay. Well, there you go. But you know, if you're speaking to yourself, then you're hearing that voice from the first person, right? Me. I am. I'm taking agency. I'm taking control. I am taking responsibility for these thoughts and feelings. And I am speaking to myself.

Amanda Parker: This is a good opportunity to ask. Are there other resources or books that you would recommend for someone who is really curious and wants to learn more? Where would you tell them to look?

Jessie Parker: I gave you a link for a, YouTube video for this woman, Mary Kate, it's like 20 minutes long and it's like morning affirmations. And it's a really pleasant thing to listen to.

She's created all the messages. And it was just a really nice way to start a day or end a day.

Amanda Parker: Because I'm only very recently exposed to affirmations It's not [00:55:00] something that I have practiced before but I've been following another book of Louise Hay, which is called Mirror Work and it's a 21 day process of examining beliefs and how you feel about yourself and how you talk to yourself and starting to frame those affirmations.

So there's a lot of really great ones in there as well that she helps you just try on and try this out and by the end, because I'm almost at the end, even though I've done it much more than 21 days now, I'll have my own set of affirmations that really resonate for where I am and having tried out a bunch of them as well through her book.

Jessie Parker: So then once you have the affirmation, there's different ways that you can incorporate them. Because remember we talked about you have however many thoughts a day and the majority of them might be the thing you don't want to think.

So you really have to actively counteract those other thoughts so that you can change them. So, one of the things that I do that Amanda mentioned is, I write little notes and I leave them for myself around the house. So, I did [00:56:00] this more, I used to live in a different place with a different situation, but for example, I had one note by the light switch in my bedroom. I had another one hanging on my mirror. I had one at the top of the stairs as I was about to go down. Another one at the bottom of the stairs when I got to the bottom.

So things like that, that's somewhere you walk by those spots every day. And you're going to see those in the different spots and it'll just remind you and instinctively you'll repeat the message, right?

You read it, you'll repeat it. And then boom, right there.

Another great way. That I found to learn them was I would record a message of myself saying these affirmations over and over again.

And that's another great way, again, to hear it in your own voice as you're repeating it to yourself.

And one trick that I have for that, especially with recording, but even if you're just saying affirmations live is emphasize a different word in your affirmation every time you read it.

So for example, I am powerful. I am powerful. I am powerful, right? And your brain hears that differently every time so you don't start tuning out. Your [00:57:00] brain will start thinking kind of like, oh, I already know this. So you have to find ways to make it interesting for your brain so that it doesn't just tune out because it's already heard this before.

Amanda Parker: All right, those sound like really good tips, especially for someone who's just getting started. But honestly, for anyone who's already been doing this for a while, who wants to be able to engage differently, or maybe even lost touch with their own practice of, Let's say, creating themselves and speaking themselves into the world.

And I'd love to ask you, because I know we're at the end of our time here, I know you've got some exciting projects coming up, so I'd love to hear you share those with us as well.

Jessie Parker: I do. Thank you for asking. So, one of my latest endeavors is that I have been working on my Reiki training, and I'm actually currently in the process of opening my own Reiki practice.

So I'm really excited about that and to help bring this different mode of healing, into people's lives, whether they're familiar with it already or they're not. I'm excited to be working with that. [00:58:00] It's, I think just been one of the culminations of things of me enjoying working with my hands.

And then I discovered this healing modality that I literally get to use my hands for too. So I've been really enjoying learning about it and practicing it.

Amanda Parker: That is amazing. So, how can people get in touch with you if they want to know more, either about the Affirmation work, some of your beautiful artwork that you have, these affirmation cards, or when the time comes to be able to sign up and have a Reiki session with you.

Jessie Parker: So I think the best way for people to reach me is through my website, which is www.jessiemakestuff.com. There is a contact form on there if you'd like to message me. There is a tab for the affirmation cards, which are called A Gentle Reminder. So if you'd like to order a set for yourself, you can order it through there.

If you have questions for me, obviously contact me. I would recommend using the subject in the contact line as Bluebells. So that I know who you're contacting me from and also it doesn't go to spam. I get so many [00:59:00] that are just hello in the subject line and I think my, my email just registers that as spam anyway.

So definitely let me know you came from Don't Step on the Bluebells.

Amanda Parker: I .Am really excited to share this. I know that you created A Gentle Reminder and it's already been out in the world helping people for a couple of years, so I'm excited that it gets to have, another chance just to reach different people who haven't had that exposure yet.

You've been such a huge support of the podcast and helping. I mean, really behind the scenes, not for me behind the scenes, but for anyone who's been listening. Just making sure that everything is flowing and that these messages of healing and transformation really come out in the world. So, I know we were thinking of doing this episode for a while.

Thank you for coming on, sharing your time, sharing your wisdom. And, this unique and remarkable approach to healing that you're bringing into the world as well.

Jessie Parker: Thank you, and you're welcome, and I'm so glad that we did this. This was a lot of fun. Parker [01:00:00] girls!Amanda Parker: So, thank you again, and thanks everyone for tuning in, and until next time, see you on Don't Step on the Bluebells.