John Derrick

Do Affirmations work?

Yes and No.

Can they actually backfire?

Yes. Let me explain:

The two most powerful times to use a daily affirmation is when you first wake up before you get out of bed, and the last thought you have just before you go off to sleep. Those are the best times to program your subconscious mind. Certainly, the more times each day the better, but those two times pack the most impact.

Now, let’s say that your affirmation is “My body is completely healthy and lean” and it’s  the first thing you say every morning and the last thing you think before you drift off to sleep each night.

Will these words make you healthy and lean?

NO.

Words have no power in the law of attraction. If you say that you are healthy and lean everyday it will have no attraction power by itself. None. Zip. Zero. You might as well say you are the king of Egypt for all it matters.

It is the feeling that activates the attraction. Feeling is the vibration that goes out from you into the universe and actively attracts to you. Hollow words with no feelings attached have no power whatsoever.

So to make an affirmation have any power at all, you have to have to FEEL that which you are saying. In the example above, many people who are overweight will affirm that they are thin, but inside they are FEELING even fatter as they say the affirmation because they know it is a lie. Day in and day out, the affirmation is resulting in the FEELING of being fat, so you are in essence attracting more of being fat, not being thin. Thus, the affirmation backfires completely.

The universe does not speak English, Spanish or any other spoken or written language. The universe runs completely on vibration. Vibrations in you are powered by feelings. So if you want to have or be something, you have to vibrate at that level. Words are completely unnecessary to the universe, but they can be helpful for you to get you into that state of vibration.

If you can feel thin, without any words at all, then consider that your daily affirmation. IF you need words to make you feel thin, then use the words, but remember it is the feeling that counts. Pay attention to what you are feeling when you say the affirmation.

Remember, all affirmations are to be said (and felt) in the present tense, never the future. For example you never affirm that you are GOING TO BE anything, because what you are putting out into the universe is a constant message of “going to be” , and not actually being or having that you desire. That is never a good place to be stuck.

If you want to be healthy, feel healthy now and be thankful now for your great health. If you want to have money, feel having money now and be thankful for the tons of money you currently have. Like attracts like. You don’t want to attract “Someday being rich” to yourself.

Gratitude is a powerful vibrational feeling, so it can be used to begin almost any affirmation.
Some great examples of affirmations are:

I am so grateful that:
Money comes to be easily and frequently
My life flows through grace and ease
I have the house of my dreams
That universe is supporting me in my every effort

Even more powerful than affirmations is the use of a Manifesting Card. A Manifesting Card combines the power of daily affirmations, with the power of a vision boards, visualization, power of positive thinking, and the gratitude method….

Imagine the power of all those tools rolled into one little card that you can easily put into your pocket…    that is the power of a Manifesting Card.

Using the Manifesting Cards method will dramatically cut down the time it takes for your manifestations to come true.

Daily affirmations DO work, but they can take a LONG time before you see results.  There are many different reasons for this, all of which I cover inside here.

So if you are like me, and you don’t like to wait for the things you want today, I suggest you use the Manifesting Cards method.

Check it out for yourself, Click Here.

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written by John Derrick

My Favorite Product For This Week:

I am not a vegan… and not a vegetarian. I don’t have any strange eating habits except that I do like to eat foods that make me feel good and foods that give me abundant energy.

But I have been a milk drinking, cheese eating dairy lover since I was a small child. I grew up drinking milk every single day in my breakfast cereal and as a snack after school and the drink served with dinner.

A while ago I cut out most of my milk drinking and replaced it with Soy milk. Of course now I am told that soy milk MIGHT be bad… mostly it’s one famous doctor who says soy milk is bad, and even though I have not seen any concrete evidence, the anti-soymilk campaign moves onward. That’s okay, because Almond milk tastes great and so does Oat milk… but I’m sure someone is already writing me an email to tell me the evils of these milks also.

WARNING: Don’t try to detox on your own…

What I want to tell you is shocking…

I had no idea. Honestly. And I like to think that I am “in the know” about a lot of things.

Yes… I did know that dairy is loaded with fat and cholesterol. That is why I limited my intake of it, reasonably.

About a week ago my wife said she had been talking to a friend of her’s and that the two of them had decided to go a week off of dairy. They wanted to know if I would join them.

She had some printed pages that touted all the health benefits, but without a moments hesitation I agreed to join them.

I grabbed the best dairy free cookbook I could find (I love this book) and I was ready to begin.  Of course I ate a good deal of dairy on the weekend leading up to the Monday we began the 7 days of no dairy.

I wondered how great would I feel after a week of no dairy? Or perhaps nothing would seem different and 8 days later I would be enjoying a piece of cheese.

Mmmmm  Cheese….

BOY WAS I WRONG

Giving up dairy was about as hard as I expected for the first couple of days. By the end of day two I was feeling pretty ill, which is out of the norm for me. Honestly, ever since I flipped my life upside down with the law of attraction I have become a high energy and healthy kind of guy.  The kind of guy who always feels great.

Day three, instead of rolling out of bed with enthusiasm and excitement for the day ahead, I woke up feeling more tired than I was when I went to bed.

In fact, I felt groggy and brain foggy all day.

I’ll skip the day-to-day play-by-play, and tell you that for seven days straight I have felt terrible, in different ways. I can’t concentrate… I am experiencing headaches, which is something I never have.

I don’t have the deep down energy, and I tire easily. My stomach is bloated and I am retaining water.

My skin has broken out in three different kinds of rashes in three different places on my body. In general I am itchy… and honestly I am cranky. Strange emotions are coming up… anxiety and anger, which I have not felt in many… many years.

I am even late on the 11 cent sale I promised all of you…. because of this brain fog and lack of energy.

Long story short, going off dairy cold turkey causes the body to go into a detox. When I search online I find claims that going off dairy for one week will cause an entire gallon of mucus to exit your body. Obviously, things are not always pretty.

Today it is 10 days later, and I don’t have any desire to go back. Food tastes great without dairy. It seems that at the 10 day mark, for me at least, the cravings have mostly subsided.

Now many of you know that I quit smoking cold turkey the day my son was born. I was in the room with my wife and waiting for our little baby boy to be born, and I really needed a cigarette. The moment he came out and I cut that cord, I KNEW RIGHT THEN I would never smoke again, because I wanted to be around to see my son grow up. Even though I was a bar tender back then, and I worked around smokers who all tried to taunt me into picking the habit back up (many smokers can’t stand ex-smokers among them) It is a promise that I have always kept. As a matter of fact, it was Aug 1st, 1999 when I stopped smoking… 9 years and 12 days and counting… . I CAN HONESTLY SAY… QUITING DAIRY IS HARDER THAN QUITING CIGARETTES

Seriously….

My body never went through this kind of hell when I quit smoking. Sure, I have cravings… and it was difficult… but I didn’t get bad breath, skin rashes, headaches, lack of energy, bloating, water retention, and a host of other not-so-pleasant physical problems.

The only craving I have is for cheese. I LOVED CHEESE. Now I know why…

THIS IS GOING TO BLOW YOU AWAY

Cheese is actually physically addictive… no kidding. I must have missed the Surgeon Generals Warning label on the block of cheese.

YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT DRUG IS INSIDE CHEESE!!!

Check this out:

So here is an excerpt from an article in the Orlando Sentinel July 13 2003:

Of all the potentially addicting foods, cheese may be the most complex. In research studies using vegan and vegetarian diets to control cholesterol or reduce body weight, most participants soon forget the lure of ice cream, sour cream, and even burgers and chicken. But for many people, the taste for cheese lingers on and on. Yes, 70 percent of its calories may come from waist-augmenting fat, and, ounce for ounce, it may harbor more cholesterol than a steak. But that cheese habit is tough to break.Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies — they also hide inside cows’ livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal’s bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese’s appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

(some paragraphs about chocolate addiction snipped)

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them “cheese cravers,” and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a “Cheese Forum” held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry’s scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, “What do we want our marketing program to do?” and then gave the answer: “Trigger the cheese craving.” He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy’s Cheddar Lover’s Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the “Ultimate Cheese Pizza,” which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”

I am sharing this with you because I care. I wish someone had told me how harsh detoxing could be.

I wish someone had told me how addictive Cheese can by.  Or even mentioned the morphine compound found inside.

I’m the kind of guy who turns down pain pills, even after a surgery…

I never knew I was ingesting Morphine with my cheese and crackers.

So if you decide to clean your body up… and want to cleanse yourself without all the horrible side-effects that I have had… you really need to READ THIS NOW.

Overwhelmingly I support the Master Cleanse if you want to purify your body.

Me… I just made a split second decision to join my wife and her friend…  I decided to make myself the subject of an experiment if you will…

For those of you wondering about my wife and her friend. YES… they had a rough ride also, including migraine headaches (much worse than mine), irritability, skin breakouts (body acne), and emotional instability (although don’t tell my wife I pointed that out… at least not until she is over the detoxing)

And that is what they cared to share… most people are not as forthcoming with their dirty details like I am. What can I say… I try to live my life like an open book… for all to see, observe and hopefully learn from my mistakes.

Oh yes… there has been a positive thing about this diary detox so far…. I have lost 5 pounds even though I feel like I am eating more than usual, and my wife has lost 4 pounds.. her friend didn’t offer up any weight related conversation.

SO… if you want to go off dairy please don’t let this scare you. Instead, just do it slowly. If I had known then what I know now, I would have simply cut my intake of dairy items down over a 2 – 3 week period and went off it slowly.

Knowing what I know now… I just can’t bring myself to ingest anything dairy.

Wishing you the best day,

written by John Derrick

My Favorite Product For This Week:

(There is a Surprise for you at the end of this post)

I wanted to share some of the photos I snapped while on my family trip to Yellowstone National Park.   They are all taken with my humble point and shoot Canon SD600.  Those of you who know, that means this camera only has a 3x zoom, so everything I photograph has to be pretty close.

You may click on any image below to be taken to the larger version of the picture.

It’s an amazing feeling to see the wildlife living along side of humans like this.  We saw deer, rabbits, and antelope relaxing inside residential areas.  None of them showed any fear.

These buffalo have specific spots that they like to lay in.  When you come across these little bare spots with no grass or plants…  that’s a buffalo bed.  Many of them like to make these beds right next to the road, although it would be unwise to leave your car and approach these magnificiant creates, because they have been known to attack people.

Yep, you can see bears from the road too!

This Grizzly Bear was pretty far up the hillside when we spotted him.  As we watched him, more and more cars began to park around us and eventually the road became blocked as people left their cars in the middle of the road.  Meanwhile this Grizzly Bear marched down the hill to see what all the comotion was about.

The offical rule of the park is to remain 25 yards away from wildlife…  except for bears and wolves.  Those you need to stay 100 yards away from, for safety.

These animals are wild.  They live off the flesh of other animals.

We were able to see with the aide of binoculars, a bear taking down an injured buffalo.  Minutes later four coyotes were able to drive away the bear and then they began eating the dead buffalo.

Rangers closed the street down when a small black bear was 20 yards near the road.  No cars were allowed to travel on the road until the bear moved away.  The rangers looked visually disturbed.

If the park Rangers had seen this….

I was amazed at how foolish these people were.  One man even brought his small child along to see the grizzly bear.  About 3 seconds after I took this picture (at my full 3x zoom) the bear stood up and made a scary noise that seemed to let the people know that they were in real danger.  He didn’t seem to happy.  He then continued to cross the road between cars and proceeded down the hill on the other side.

Lucky people. 

Many people do not realize that Yellowstone sits atop one of the worlds largest super volcano.  The caldera is 35 miles by 45 miles across.  The park is full of boiling water, with colorful bacteria that thrives on the high temperatures.  The smell of sulfur permeates the air in the entire southern half of the park.

Taking my five year old on these small wooden bridges without railing was a bit of a challenge at times.

One of my favorite pictures.

The hot steam hit us several times depending on the wind direction.

Another image that I am fond of.

Hot water is being pushed up from deep underground where it boils out over
this rock formation and joins with the fast moving stream.

Taken by my wife from the passenger seat of her Kia Rio.

The four of us made the entire trip from Washington State to Yellowstone’s north entrance in southern Montana in my wifes 2006 Kia Rio, and to be honest with you we had plenty of room.

I decided to run a test on our trip and see if I had in fact found a way to increase the gas mileage from an average of 29 MPG to 35 MPG.  I knew it would be tough, because we had four people in the car, and the trunk was packed full with our luggage.

The results of my efforts will be shared here…  VERY SOON. It’s Ready Now!

You will be amazed! – And you can put some of your hard earned cash BACK INTO YOUR POCKET!

FIND OUT MORE

written by John Derrick \\ tags: following your bliss, vacation, yellowstone national park

My Favorite Product For This Week:

Oh my gosh there is so much going on here that I don’t know where to begin.

It’s been two weeks since my last post here.  It’s amazing how fast time goes by.

I am back from my family vacation to Yellowstone National park.  We had a blast!  There was a lot more there to see than I had ever been told.

Best of all, I was testing a product that can save all of us hundreds of dollars each month and the results look great!  I still have to crunch some more numbers, and I’m not a big fan of math…  but I can already see how this is going to save me money.

The only question at this point is just how much money are we all going to save each month?

Even if you save just $100 a month, that’s better than getting a 60 cent raise at an hourly job, and with no additional taxes!

Don’t worry, I am more than happy to share my results with you.

Stay tuned.

written by John Derrick

My Favorite Product For This Week: