Affirmation · “The Subconscious Says Yes”
Evocation of a Desired Quality
To cultivate and install a chosen psychological quality (e.g. serenity, courage, patience) by saturating mind, feeling, environment, and body with it through reflection, repetition, imagery, and suggestion.
Evocation of a Quality in 6 lines: Write the quality (e.g. SERENITY) large and keep it in view. Reflect on its meaning and value. Feel it — repeat the word softly, recall it, let it pervade you. Picture yourself embodying it in hard situations. Take on its posture and breathing. Each morning, suggest it’s growing in you; keep one quality for a week. Idea + feeling + image + body, all aimed at one word.
What it is
This is Assagioli’s method for deliberately growing a specific inner quality — his worked example is serenity, but the same template builds courage, patience, compassion, joy, and so on.
Where the Ideal Model pictures yourself embodying a quality, the Evocation exercise immerses you in the quality itself from many angles at once: you think about it, repeat its name, feel it, surround yourself with it, and suggest it to yourself, so it gradually pervades your consciousness.
Assagioli treated qualities as something you can actively evoke and cultivate rather than passively wait for, working with his psychological law that idea, feeling, image, and bodily attitude all reinforce one another.
The Method
From “The Technique of Evocation of Desired Qualities” in Psychosynthesis (1965), using serenity as Assagioli’s model quality (substitute your own):
- Write the word. Take a sheet of paper and write the word — “SERENITY” — in large letters. You may decorate it, choose a colour or style that expresses the quality; the act of writing and making it focuses attention. Place it where you’ll see it.
- Reflect on its meaning and value. Sit quietly and think about the quality: what serenity is, its nature, its meaning, its value, its uses in daily life — especially in difficult or trying circumstances. Hold a receptive attitude and note any thoughts, images, or insights that arise about it.
- Evoke the feeling — draw the quality into yourself. Now move from thinking to feeling it. Try to feel serenity; let the emotional tone of it rise in you. Say to yourself, with quiet conviction, “Serenity… serenity…”, letting the word’s atmosphere pervade you. Recall a time you felt serene and re-evoke that state.
- Visualise the quality in action. Picture yourself serene in specific situations that usually disturb you — calm amid noise, steady under criticism, peaceful in conflict. See yourself maintaining the quality where you’d normally lose it. (This links to the Ideal Model.)
- Use the body. Adopt the posture, breathing, and facial expression of serenity — relax the body, soften the face, breathe slowly and evenly. Let the physical attitude help evoke the inner state.
- Resolve and self-suggest. Resolve to remain serene through the day and to radiate it to others. Give yourself the suggestion that the quality will grow in you — Assagioli especially valued doing this as a brief morning suggestion on waking, and recalling the word through the day.
- Saturate your environment. Surround yourself with reminders: keep the written word visible, and let it act as a cue that re-evokes the state whenever you notice it. Sustain the focus on one quality for a period (e.g. a week) before moving to another. (Sourcing note: the write-the-word, reflect, feel, visualise, embody, suggest, and surround-yourself steps — and serenity as the model quality — are Assagioli’s documented exercise, attributed; descriptions are faithful paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974) published this technique in Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques (1965), as part of his repertoire for the active cultivation of desired qualities and the development of the will.
It synthesises autosuggestion (Coué’s self-suggestion lineage), affirmation/New Thought, and visualisation, organised by his “psychological laws” about how idea, feeling, image, and movement reinforce each other.
The Traditions' versions
Coué’s autosuggestion — repeated self-suggestion of a desired state; Assagioli’s step 6 is in this lineage.
- Affirmations (New Thought) — naming and repeating a desired quality/state.
- Brahmavihara cultivation (Buddhism) — deliberately developing qualities like loving-kindness/equanimity through repeated evocation and phrases.
- Divine-quality contemplation (Sufism / bhakti) — dwelling on a quality (mercy, peace) to take on its character.
- Virtue rehearsal (Stoicism) — repeatedly contemplating and pre-rehearsing a chosen virtue.
- Vision boards / environmental cueing — surrounding yourself with reminders of a desired state (the modern echo of step 7).
Common refinements
Forcing the feeling. You can’t will serenity by clenching; relax and invite it (recall a serene memory, soften the body). Strain produces the opposite.
- Skipping the body and the imagery. Reflection alone is weak. The exercise works because feeling + posture + image + word converge — don’t drop the channels.
- Using it to suppress real emotion. “Cultivating serenity” must not become bottling up anger or grief that needs to be felt and acted on. Add the resource; don’t deny the signal.
- Switching qualities daily. Assagioli’s design is sustained focus on one quality for a stretch (a week). Scattering dilutes it.
- Treating the morning suggestion as wishful thinking. Keep it calm and matter-of-fact (“serenity is growing in me”), in the receptive waking state, not as a tense demand.