For once it might be grand, to have someone understand, I want so much more than they’ve got planned.
Belle – Beauty and the Beast
Some people think I’m an alien with my head on cloud 9.
To be honest with you, it’s not true at all. Cloud 11 is where it’s at.
What I am, is a strategically creative person who always sees the bigger picture even when doing something mundane like the dishes.
My focus is on how it fits into daily life and can be more efficient, as well as how it fits into other people’s lives, and even how different approaches affect the world. I struggle to create or do something just because. There needs to be some sort of function or purpose (ideally one that benefits others as well).
Why poetry…
I went to into this in great detail in my book’s intro, but the most inspirational person in my life was my grandfather, a Dutchman with an awesome sense of humor and an amazing view on life despite everything.
Suffering from childhood abuse, he made up his mind to live very differently.
He lived through German occupation, escaped from a German camp he was sent to, survived the hunger winter that followed liberation (hence his absolute refusal to waste food, always making sure leftovers were finished), and later experienced guerilla attacks when he went to Indonesia as an army medic (he also had his own pet monkey who saved his life but that’s another story).
When I was young, my grandfather looked after me a lot.
He had many passions and believed life wasn’t a life without the things you loved. One of those passions was poetry, and he played a lot of rhyming games with me whenever he took me with him on a train ride.
Adding the Dutch tradition around Christmas time to write a poem (accompanying a chocolate letter) to each member of the family and it became a way to connect with others, make them laugh, make them think, uplift them, and wish them well for the next year.
Poetry is something that has always been a part of my life, but due to personal insecurities I saw my stuff as fun rhymes rather than actual poetry. It just wasn’t classified as such in my head. During my editing work that began to change as I began to truly see the impact words could have.
And if such simple sentences could hold such power, then what if I wrote something that would orient someone’s mind to align with the affirmation on a deeper level?
I wanted my poetry to make a difference.
It’s not enough to just express myself, I wanted it to be something that could change someone for the better, to give her what she always needed to hear to believe in herself and take that step forward.
Of course, doing so also positively influences everyone around those individuals and thus in the end makes the world a better place for everyone.
Why affirmations and why Louise Hay?
That being said, I have many passions. Like teaching and writing fiction for example. Two of those passions, psychology and self-help, sparked an interest in the Law of Attraction through the Secret.
Several years later I read Louise L. Hay’s ‘How You Can Heal Your Life’ which would (even more years) later inspire this book.
The minute I started reading it, I was reminded of something my grandfather had said when I was a little girl. He said that all disease starts in our head.
Many books later (I need more bookshelves), I became an editor for an author who specializes in the Law of Attraction.
This way of changing your life by changing the way you look at things made complete sense. After all, the way you look at things influences the choices you make and the actions you take (or shy away from).
But which affirmations should I write poems for?
In that funny way life comes together, severe back problems brought me back to Louise Hay’s book.
Inspired by her affirmations, I went through every single one for every single dis-ease. I then organized them into 111 main affirmations with several sub-affirmations (also included in the poems) to cover as wide a range as possible.
To find out which poem corresponds to which condition, you can check out her book. It contains a list of afflictions where she gives you the affirmation(s) which you can then compare to the list of poems.
Why 111 poems? Why not 200?
If you wonder why 111, there is a special meaning to that number. It represents independence and new beginnings, indicating that your life is about to undergo a major transformation.
This number means to pay close attention to your thoughts and emotions as you are manifesting what you keep thinking about, whether good, bad, or ugly.
You must have had a great life…
A bit about my story… My grandfather who meant the world to me passed away when I was 13. After that my insecurities built up during a custody battle, school bullying, and then some, were even worse.
For years I actually thought I was ‘broken’ or defective somehow.
Even if I cared for people really easily, I couldn’t seem to really fall in love or connect to people like they could (I found out later just how shallow those connections were and wouldn’t even want that kind now, but at the time they seemed impressive to me who had none).
Even at a young age, I just wasn’t like everyone else and couldn’t do what seemed to come so easily to others like make friends. Perhaps I was very bad at getting along with people. When I was little I got the feeling that people pitied me or tolerated me but didn’t actually enjoy spending time with me.
I became very quiet and insecure.
Having two stepsisters didn’t help, despite being close in age. If anything, it was worse because I felt so different. At the age of sixteen, I finally made a few friends who valued me for me and for the first time in my life I felt it was okay to just be me.
I never had to offer them something or have something special to keep their attention. We could sit on the couch doing nothing and still have a blast.
Despite this, I still felt it was really hard and awkward to connect with people I didn’t know.
Then I moved to a different country. To be more exact, I moved back to Canada where I was born. And suddenly it was so easy to talk to people. In fact, as time went by I found myself connecting really easily with several people who had been labeled as “very difficult to be around and talk to”.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that I was socially incompetent, but simply that I lacked confidence and the right environment.
That being said, after moving over 30 times in my life I’ll be the first to say that moving isn’t a magic key to make everything better. Whitney Houston sung it beautifully:
I can’t run from myself, there’s nowhere to hide.
Whitney Houston
A change in environment can help, but only if you change your choices and actions with it.
Moving to Canada wouldn’t have done a thing if I hadn’t started genuinely speaking to and connecting with people. This became easier with people who shared similar circumstances.
From there it became easier to connect with people in general (though nothing happens instantly, I just summarized several years of effort).
Your perspective colors your world.
It can make everything seem hard, or make everything seem easy. This perspective originated from conclusions about life that you came to when you were younger (and often don’t even remember) and it can be changed.
You can change your life.
From the very beginning, you had more power and were more capable than you realized. I’ll say whatever it is I need to say to get you to see that. That is why these poems were created. To verbally accompany you and illustrate that you have always had everything you needed to become the person of your dreams who lives as you always dreamed you would.