Affirmation · “The Subconscious Says Yes”
Behrend's Daily Sitting
Keep a fixed daily regimen — a dawn breathing-and-affirmation sitting plus timed periods of ‘steady recognition of thought-possession’ — built on the rule ‘ask, believing you have already received,’ so the desired good is held as a present, already-owned fact rather than a future hope.
Build a fixed daily container: sit at dawn in a straight chair; open a window and take ~10 slow breaths, drawing a circle of light into your solar plexus. Recognize “one Life, one Substance. in me.” For a month, impress a chosen affirmation each night (“My mind is a center of divine operation”). Twice daily, hold for 15 minutes the steady recognition that the thing is already yours — log how vivid it is. Close in grateful praise, not pleading.
What it is
Behrend doesn’t leave the practice to inspiration — she prescribes a regimen. The governing rule is the scriptural formula she treats as a law: “Ask, believing you have already received, and you shall receive.” Her reasoning is exact: “No one can think a thought in the future.
Your thought of a thing constitutes its origin. THEREFORE the thought-form of the thing is already yours as soon as you think it.” So the daily work is the “steady recognition of [your] thought-possession” — holding the desired good as already owned.
Around this she builds a concrete schedule: an early-morning sitting (“Five o’clock in the morning is the best time”), a gentle breathing and circle-of-light exercise to open it, a fixed nightly-and-morning affirmation impressed for a month, and two timed 15-minute “recognition” periods a day — even logging “the vividness with which you experience your mental image.” This is Behrend’s disciplined container for everything else in her system — distinct from the picturing method (behrend mental picture visualizing) and from a single spoken word (behrend speaking the word).
It is the timetable and the present-tense stance (“already received”) that hold the whole practice together, closest in form to a daily “scientific prayer / spiritual mind treatment” but in her own Troward-lineage idiom.
The Method
- Sit at dawn, undisturbed. “Rise every morning. at five o’clock, sit in a quiet room in a straight-back chair.” Behrend frames the early hour as the best time “to go into this sort of meditation.” (A nightly sitting “just before retiring” pairs with it.)
- Open with the breathing / circle of light. “Open a window, take about ten deep breaths,” and “draw a large imaginary circle of light around you.” On the inhale, see “great rays of light. entering your body at all points, centralizing itself at your solar plexus”; hold a few moments; exhale slowly, “spraying” the whole body with imagined light.
- Settle into the one-Substance recognition. Sitting upright, “mentally know there is but one Life, one Substance, and this Life Substance of the Universe is finding pleasure in self-recognition in you.” Repeat an affirmation of this kind “until you feel the truth and stimulating reality of the words.”
- Impress the fixed affirmation for a month. Each night before sleep, “impress firmly upon your subjective mind the affirmation: ‘My Father is the ruler of all the world, and is expressing His directing power through me,’” and rethink it each dawn. Behrend stresses you must accept it “understandingly,” not merely because she gave it.
- Hold the present-tense possession. Work the syllogism until it lands: the thing’s thought-form “is already yours as soon as you think it”; your “steady recognition of this Thought Possession causes the thought to concentrate, to condense. and to assume physical form.”
- Keep the timed practice and a record. “For every five minutes given to reading. spend fifteen minutes in the use and application.” Do “two periods of fifteen minutes each every day” of steady recognition; time how long you can hold the conception, and keep “a written record of the vividness” of the image. (She even sets a “five minutes every day between 12 noon and 1 o’clock” period for envisioning “new sources of wealth.”)
- Close in gratitude. End “in the happy assurance” that “the Creator of all creation is operating specifically through me” — “not a form of supplication, but a steady habitual affirming,” opening “the flood-gates of your soul in heartfelt praise.” (Sourcing note: from Your Invisible Power, “Suggestions for Making Your Mental Picture,” Ch. XVI “Suggestions as to How to Pray or Ask, Believing You Have Already Received,” and “Hints for Application and Practice”; quoted phrases are Behrend’s, numbered structure an attributed paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Genevieve Behrend, Your Invisible Power (1921), chiefly the breathing/affirmation passage in “Suggestions for Making Your Mental Picture” and the whole of “Suggestions as to How to Pray or Ask.” The “ask believing you have already received” rule is her treatment of Mark 11:24, read through Troward’s law that “the thought-form. is already yours.”
Common refinements
Future-tense asking. The whole pivot is “already received.” Petitioning for a future delivery contradicts the method; recognize present possession.
- Borrowing the affirmation without owning it. Behrend insists you think it over “until the impression is made upon your own subconscious mind understandingly” — don’t parrot it.
- Skipping the schedule. The power here is consistency (a month of nightly impressing; daily timed periods). Sporadic practice is the failure mode she names elsewhere (“for an hour or so”).
- Straining the breathing. It’s gentle and “without strain or tension”; stop if light-headed.
- Supplication and worry creeping in. Close in settled praise, not anxious pleading.