Apparently, 40 Out of 86 Affirmations Were More Than Enough...

Two years ago, as I was getting closer and closer to the birth of my first grandchild, I was finishing another David Richo book called, "When Love Meets Fear". Of course, as luck would have it, the more I progressed through the book, the more I became aware of fear and fearful things in my life. It was clear in each case that the fears were already there before I'd even touched the book, I was just becoming more aware of them and less afraid of most of them. Including some fears directly related to the impending birth of this first granddaughter.

At the end of this book, Richo included a list of "fear affirmations" and I ended up memorizing all 156 of these just in time for Harper's in November 2010. While Harper was coming into this world, I waited in the waiting room and wrote a blog on fear and quoted all 156 of those affirmations. http://mikelrecovery.blogspot.com/2010/11/taking-advantage-of-richos-fear.html?m=1

Not long after my youngest daughter's marriage to Daniel in June of last year, Rachel became pregnant and she was ecstatic! She seemed to live for having a baby. She, like her older sister Katie, always wanted above all else to be a mother. Me on the other hand? I started experiencing a resurgence of fear. I refreshed my memory of Richo's 156 fear affirmations, but that only seemed to increase the fears. I tried re-reading When Love Meets Fear and other than discovering that all 156 fear affirmations we plagiarized by his own book, that didn't help much either! But as I got toward the end of the book I discovered that Richo had also included another list of affirmations: 86 of them. I read through the first ten or so and nothing really struck me as insightful or beautiful (these being the usual requirements leading to me deciding to memorizing something...). But I was getting desperate as the baby was due in about a month. So I began memorizing them in groups of five.

I'd memorized 40 of them when Rachel learned that her son Oliver had died in her womb one day before he was due to be born. One day shot of 40 Weeks. Oliver was born the following day and that was five days ago. Yesterday, after the funeral service, I had to drive my son back to Berkeley so he could work today. On the way back to Sacramento today, I started reciting these initial 40 affirmations. As I did this I began to realize how each and every one of these affirmations had been a huge part of how I successfully walked through all that I have in the last five days, especially

#27: I accept the losses in my life and grieve them fully.

And

#28: I allow every human feeling.

This is precisely what I did as I began saving Yes to Grief Tuesday morning...

I will soon resume memorizing the rest of this batch of 86 affirmations, but for now at least these first 40 are more than enough!

Thank you David Richo!

Take care! Glad to be back blogging, even if by iPhone thumbing.

Mike L.