Making Some Mantras

We've talked about affirmations and I hope you all are finding them useful as tools. This exercise, drawn from several Vein of Gold tools, offers you something even more portable than your affirmations: mantras. Where affirmations are proactive, I think of mantras as reactive. Affirmations can help us set our attitudes, mantras can help us realign them when they fall into chaos.

A good short affirmation can be used as a mantra, but you may find it useful in your creative recovery to have both available. A mantra should be easy to chant to yourself under any circumstances. And should be deployed under any circumstances that seem to require it.

Faced with your inner critic? Repeat the mantra until you can think of something else. Feeling daunted by the project you want to begin? Repeat the mantra until you're working instead of contemplating working. Manage to make some progress, then hobble yourself with doubts about what you're doing? Repeat the mantra, etc.

Mantras can be clever and fun, but they don't need to be anything special. My favorite mantra of late has been simply, "I can and I will. I can and I will. I can and I will. I can and I will. I can and I will."

Potential Mantras for Combatting the Deadlies

Potential Mantras to Empower You for the Task

Potential Mantras to Locate You in Your Process