Ms.

Changing Our Lives with Healing Poetry:

A Tool for Girls and Young Women To Create The Positive Messages and Images We Need

By Jerrice Baptiste, Creator and Instructor of Authentic Poetry

Poetry has been a tool that allowed me to express myself and to heal my deepest wounds. The poetry that I write helps me to achieve peace and fulfillment from my life situations. I call it Healing Poetry or Authentic Poetry. I write healing poetry about each area of my life that I feel I need healing. I create a positive experience through this writing which is uplifting, satisfying, and most of all healing. I wrote a manuscript titled If Only They Had Told Me... Healing Poetry And Affirmations For Your Soul. The healing process and poetry that I share in this article are derived from my manuscript.

I am finally able to give to myself the messages that I needed to hear and know all of my life, from myself and from others who affected me. I am able to release the pain, frustration, and hurt, while replacing them with positive messages and affirmations in the healing poetry. I can explore my underlying feelings in the writing and transform them into strong positive messages that I can read and start affirming everyday.

I wanted to become aware of all the areas in our lives that need healing, the relationship with myself, the relationship with my parents, siblings, mate, and friends, my relationship with my daily roles, my relationship with food, communication, career, illness, health, faith, self-confidence, discipline, success, forgiveness, fulfillment, self-image, guilt, shame, love, respect, courage, balance, stress, and trust. I use the word relationship because I am having an interaction with all these things, or they are having an interaction with me. In this sense an interaction allows me to have an effect, to change, to mold, to decide, to cooperate in our own way. I can determine what role that another person, event, situation and messages will play in my life, and what underlying feelings remain.

We can become healed when the relationship that we have with our self-image is one that we can feel positive about. The voice that you are hearing in your head that says that I am ugly and fat is usually louder than the voice that says I am beautiful and healthy. You would feel angry and repulsed if someone else said those negative words to you, then why let that negative voice of your self-image overpower you?

If you grew up with a parent who constantly told you that you are fat and ugly, you can now change the content of that message. You have to give to yourself a positive message, then the emotion that you associated with that negative message will change as well. That was a revelation that I had during the time that I was experiencing my pain with the relationship with my mother and I needed her love and acceptance, but knew that I would not be getting it in the way that I needed. It was heart breaking for me. I cried for many days and was stuck in the denial that I would someday be able to hear the words that I wanted from her. I was disappointed every time from not hearing the words I accept you, and I love you. I had to start giving those words to myself. It wasn't enough that I would say I accept you or I love you to myself or to write it down, I started hearing her voice and picturing her face saying the words to me. It made a tremendous difference. The message was more solid. I was finally getting the message that I needed from her, but it was coming from me.

There are key people in our lives like our parents, siblings, mates and friends. Our relationship with each one of them has a great impact on our lives. The quality of that relationship is very relevant to how we function and feel about ourselves. Our interactions with the people in our lives have a subconscious effect on us. We can receive their love, approval and acceptance by creating the positive messages that we need from them. It is important that the long lasting messages in our minds are positive.

We can create positive messages to replace the words that our parents, siblings, and friends tell us. If your parent says a negative message like you always disappointment me, you never make good choices. You can choose to recreate that message into something positive like I accept that your choices are right for you. Repeating the message reinforces it, and then it is the only message that remains in your mind. In this way, you end up not caring about the content of the negative message; you have replaced it with a better more positive one. We determine what messages pollute, and which ones build, our self-image. We can be empowered from the positive messages that we create to occupy our minds.

For every negative comment, or judgement that you can recall that your father, mother, sister or brother had said to you as a child, you can replace each one with a positive message coming from that same source. We have wounds in our lives, we can patch them up, put them away and continue to feel the soreness until it opens up again, or we can face them at their roots and achieve total peace, freedom and fulfillment with them. We can then stop living in constant pain.

I am only an expert of my own experiences and I am sharing the tools that I have used for healing. I have developed a unique way of combining the use of affirmations, visualization and writing healing poetry. Doing this work has taught me a lot about my true identity as a spirit in this world. I have created my own individualized way for embracing and processing my life experiences, which has enabled me to turn negative events and negative messages into positive influences to benefit my life. I hope my poems can be tools for others to begin their healing process as well.

Even if you never thought of yourself as a writer, or a poet, you can use positive words and images to change your emotions, and replace the negative messages that distort your self-image to arrive at a place of deep inner peace and knowing. If you have a negative self-image, the process for healing is to first identify exactly what events or situations you need to heal, acknowledge its meaning in your life, then replace the negative messages and images associated with the events, by creating the exact positive messages and images that you believe that you needed in your life. The healing happens, when we no longer bury the emotions associated with the events in our lives.

Creating Affirmations

Affirmations are positive messages that evoke positive feelings and reprogram our minds from negative messages.