I love and accept you, Mark Anthony Provost. I am so proud of the person that you have become and are going to be. I am grateful and honored to be you. Upon waking, I repeat this mantra in the mirror four times before I begin my day. I have been doing this for over three years and the results have been amazing. Meditation, positive affirmations, visualizing, exercising, eating a plant-based diet, serving others, reading great literature and journaling are all integral parts of my life to create masterpiece days, however, I truly feel like I have left the house naked if I forget to face myself in the mirror each and every morning. I welcome you to try it for yourself, share my mantra and witness the benefits.
Most of us were negated as children and adolescents by a trusted adult while standing face to face or while they were looking down at us. Most of us consciously forget this critical negative experience in our lives, but trust me your subconscious mind does not! The latest neuroscience has undoubtedly stated that the conscious mind is only running about 5 percent of the show while our subconscious minds control the other 95 percent. This is the secret to living an amazing life: using the conscious mind through consistent, loving affirmations to rewire the subconscious mind. This is very similar to what meditation does by using our conscious attention to focus and allowing for nonjudgmental, compassionate reflection. We literally rewire our circuitry by doing these practices daily. I think of it as erasing the chalkboard (our subconscious mind) that was written by others and beginning to write our own loving scripts by using our conscious awareness.
My clients often ask me for my definition of success. My response is emphatic: when you treat yourself better than you treat your best friend! This is true wealth. Amazingly, loving relationships, financial abundance, and work that we love are all byproducts of a loving relationship with ourselves. It's kind of ironic that those who wrote our subconscious programs would confuse self-love with arrogance, but when you think about it, our society as a whole would agree with them. Arrogance is an obvious attempt to over-compensate by showing others the love we do not feel for ourselves. Those who love themselves realize that in order to love and respect others, loving and respecting ourselves must be a precursor. I invite you to give it a try and begin each and every morning spending a minute in the mirror. At first, you may feel foolish and uncomfortable, but in time, you will be astonished at how this loving practice reclaims your birthright and revolutionizes your life!