• What are switchwords
• How to use switchwords in everyday life
  1. Negate bad thoughts
  2. Find, retrieve or memorize things
  3. Get out of jams or lose bad habits
• Making a switchword sentence
• How to combine multiple switchwords
• Table: A list of useful switchwords for love, health and work

What are switchwords

James T Mangan dedicated his life to understanding the power of individual words. In his book, The Secret of Perfect Living, published in the 1960s, he coined the term switchwords. Switchwords work because they bypass the conscious thinking minds and reach out to our subconscious minds. They are words that, like switches, help us turn off the blocks in our subconscious and turn on our hidden potential.

Amazingly, these are simple words we use in our day to day lives. However, when we use them with a focused intention, they start creating magic. To categorize them as a manifestation tool, however, is to sell them short. Switchwords are an amazing clearing and cleansing tool.

How to use switchwords in everyday life

You can use switchwords for good health, money, love, weight loss or any other intention you may have. Let’s look at three examples of how switchwords can help you in your everyday life.

1. Negate bad thoughts

I was taught switchwords and how to apply them in a happiness class. Of all the switchwords, the one that particularly caught my fascination was “Cancel”. Every thought carries energy. Using the word ‘Cancel’ clears the energy behind a negative thought. It can therefore prevent a negative intention from manifesting. So for a week I experimented. Every time I had a negative thought, I cancelled it by repeating, “Cancel, Cancel,” in my head a couple of times. Sometimes I even put a red cross across it in my mind.

For almost a week after I began, I found that I was cancelling every other thought. One morning as I woke up, I had the first thought pop into my head: Cancel. It was truly a moment of elation for me. I started experiencing a mind free of negative thoughts. I became aware that the mind is not the content, but rather the stream of awareness where thoughts come and go.

2. Find, retrieve or memorize things

Soon afterwards, I started experimenting with other switchwords. “Reach” a word which is used to find something or solve a problem, became my next favorite word. I couple it with the word “Divine” which means to work miracles. After all if you have lost something, it feels like a miracle when it shows up. I had the habit of misplacing my keys all the time, so “Reach Divine” was a real life saver. Additionally, this phrase can also be used to help you recall or retrieve. During a job interview, I used “Reach Divine” to memorize my technical fundamentals that I had forgotten to brush up and it worked. It is not only recalling, but also memorizing that you need on occasions like a job interview. “Care” helps you to memorize and retain information. I repeated the phrase “Care Divine” after studying a module for an interview. Sure enough, I remembered things a lot faster.

3. Get out of jams or lose bad habits

So much of our life is spent in traffic jams, especially if we live in metro cities. Chanting ‘Divine Order Now’ clears traffic and helps you get out of jams. Adding ‘Halfway’ to this mantra can make a distance seem short. Another handy switchword that my mother used for a long time was ‘Off’, which is used for sleeping or quitting an unwanted habit. She often chanted ‘Off Divine’ before sleeping and started falling asleep faster and better. An acquaintance of mine also used ‘Off Divine’ every time he smoked or had the urge to smoke to help him get rid of his habit.

Chanting ‘Divine Order Now’ clears traffic and helps you get out of jams

Making a switchword sentence

The trick to using switchwords is that the more playfully you apply them, the easier it is to see results. Moreover, there is even a template that allows you to combine different switchwords to help you affirm what you need. It reads something like…

“Bring Together With Divine Love <put your choice of switchword here> Now Done Thanks”.

For example, to manifest your heart’s desires, you may use the switchwords “Find Charm”. You can use these words in the template like this: Bring Together With Divine Love Find Charm Now Done Thanks!

How to combine multiple switchwords

• Don’t crowd all the switchwords into the same phrase or sentence. For example, use one phrase for health, another for prosperity, another for self-esteem and so on. Break down different areas of your life and apply switchwords to them
• Make sure you are not using conflicting switchwords. For example, if you are looking to get publicity—for which you use “Ridiculous”, and at the same time use “Cut”, which is used for moderation or cutting down, the end result may not be as effective as using ‘Ridiculous’ and a word like “Hole”, which means to appear attractive.
• I have found that using maximum four switchwords for one purpose works well, especially if you put these in the above template.

Have fun while you play with switchwords and experientially understand their essence.

This was first published in the October 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Personality to presence

The inner child is a personality within us. A personality is created by the mind to get something. For example, the ‘star child’ personality gets created when a child realises that the only way it can get the attention or love of its parents is by winning in a competitive environment or shining in a particular skill. Here the mind map is: achievement = love and attention. When seen in awareness, your personality is just a set of mind maps with filters that you use to view the world. A mind map limits you from fully experiencing life; your entire effort and energy is spent running after what this personality needs, but you never seem to find it outside yourself. By reaching the point of creation of this personality, you discover that point in time when an incident created a belief that you have an unmet need and the corresponding realisation that you are not enough to meet that need by yourself.

Once seen for what it is—just an unmet need—acceptance is natural. As a result, the personality loses its hold on your emotions and dissolves, leaving a divine child behind. The divine or the magical child is in fact just an essence. It is a presence that naturally arises, uninhibited in the absence of a personality. It simply exists and seeks nothing.

This journey from the wounded child to the divine child is made through the following stages:

Retrieval → Emotional catharsis of the ‘original pain’ → Understanding the unmet need → Physically meeting the need → Re-parenting

5 techniques to help heal your inner child

1. Regressive guided meditations to recover the inner child

This is the first step in the healing process. Through a guided meditation, you regress to the point where you lost touch with your inner child. During the meditation, you retrieve that child from your subconscious into your conscious mind to begin the healing process.

2. Non-dominant hand writing or drawing

In this technique you consciously address the child within you regarding a particular problem, situation or feeling, by writing the questions with your dominant hand, and then allowing your non-dominant hand to move on paper in the way it wants to, without filtering. This hand channels the energy of your inner child. It can give very specific answers, draw, bring out emotions and can also trigger body aches, pains or symptoms that reveal the state of your inner child. This technique can also be used to channel higher awareness from one’s essence.

3. Art therapy

Some issues are so deeply locked into the psyche that words are not enough to fully honour and feel the emotion. These deep imprints release through hands-on work. Working with clay, mud, paints, crayons, water, paper, drums and through body movement or dance allows the body to have a cathartic experience and transform the emotion.

4. Voice dialogue or role play

To keep the wounded inner child in place there are strong sub-personalities attached to it and they must be addressed as a ‘critical’ self, ‘perfectionist’ self and so on. These are the underlying energies that will jump in and re-create that self, even if you heal the wounded child within. Voice dialoguing is similar to doing a conscious role play by allowing each of these sub-personalities their space to voice themselves as if they were individuals. This has to be done in the presence of what is called the ‘Aware Ego’. The Aware Ego is the conscious interrogator within the person. It comes from a non-judgmental place of pure observation. It is the space of understanding within us where we join the dots about the needs of the different personalities. In my experience, it helps to give ‘props’ to these personalities to allow you to fully embody that personality, such as a red lipstick to the ‘compulsive seducer’ who acts out sexually or a stick to the ‘inner patriarch’. These roles are often archetypal and therefore their personalities can be recreated very intuitively.

5. EFT [Emotional Freedom Technique]

Tapping, as this is popularly called, is highly effective in allowing emotion to surface at a bodily level. Tapping as part of inner child healing is specifically speaking in first person as the wounded child itself, and voicing your feelings and thoughts as if you were going through the traumatic situation in that moment. Spontaneous visualisation might also happen during this process and deeper memories can come up as you go through the EFT rounds. It is necessary that you keep tapping through every layer until you get a bodily experience of light.

Inner parenting

However wonderful, cathartic, deep and life-transforming your inner child healing is, all this beautiful energy could easily and very soon get swept away with old thought patterns if you as an inner parent do not take responsibility of your inner child.

While the techniques mentioned above dominantly employ the subconscious, inner parenting requires your conscious mind to be involved in deciding how you want to channel the creativity, sensitivity, awareness and insights your inner child is giving you. The very reason one gets into inner child healing is unaware parenting. If you fall back into old habits with a more open, vulnerable and fragile inner child self with no masks and no defences; you will attract even more intense wounds and might even completely shut down. Therefore, don’t expect wonders if you are not consciously parenting your inner child.

Taking ownership of your inner child fully includes talking to your inner child through affirmations, words of comfort and encouragement and proactively changing your actions to meet the needs of your inner child. Enforce your authority by being firm and disciplining your inner child by seeing through the falsity of the core beliefs it is holding on to. This is the only way to sustain the energy of your transformation from breaking out of your wounds.

Inner child healing is not a pill that can be popped; it won’t set things right after you go through a fixed number of sessions. It requires constant self-awareness and is therefore not for ‘spiritual shoppers’. This work can go on for a lifetime. For those who have seen life’s magic, experienced through the divine inner child, the journey into every layer of oneself becomes more and more fascinating until one emerges as the hero.

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