Meditation

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Steps leading up through woodland into light, symbolising a path to manifestation mastery

What does it take to master manifesting?

Meditation Other
Steps leading up through woodland into light, symbolising a path to manifestation mastery

The secret delight in manifesting is not what you get, but what you give

Going all in – manifesting is investing!

This investment involves investing in yourself! Unlike most investments, if your investment is not performing, you can do something about it. What you ultimately get from manifesting can multiply your initial investment. The universe is generous, but you need to make the first moves with integrity and dedication.

Overriding the “sameness” mode of your brain and system

Thoughts are words and words conjure images and emotions. Thinking is like breathing – it happens automatically, but when you think about breathing you can shape your breathing. You can choose to breathe quickly, slowly, shallowly, deeply, through your mouth, or nose. You can even choose to hold your breath for a time. While you may not be able to stop your unhelpful thoughts directly, you can change the way they sound and even think new thoughts in new ways.

One of the things your brain does is to create familiarity. This neural circuit doesn’t really care whether you feel satisfied and fulfilled, or miserable and anxious. It is unconscious. If what you think, feel, do and how you engage with your environment is familiar, your system can function more economically. However, by investing a little more energy you can shift gears. You can change your brain and manifest a new, self-determined way of showing up in the world. When you show up differently in the world, the world shows up differently to you. Once you are firmly on the path of your self-determined reality, once this is familiar, your brain’s passion for familiarity will help you to keep it consistent.

Your consciousness, in contrast, which may not be entirely localised to your brain, is not limited by having been optimised for sameness. Quite the contrary, you can choose thoughts to think and emotions follow based on your core values and intrinsic goals. In time and with familiarity these thoughts are generalised and become beliefs. Beliefs produce behaviours that directly and indirectly change your environment.. The notion that the presence of consciousness indirectly alters the nature of matter is, perhaps, obvious. The notion that it directly alters the nature of matter within the human body may not be so far-fetched either.

Feeding subtlety over intensity

Some word and feeling combinations contain a greater emotional charge than others. When you want to make a change in your life you may need to invest your presence emotions with a lower charge. Emotions that are not so strong right now, but are ultimately better for you. This involves being willing to go beyond a stronger and more detrimental, but temptingly familiar feeling. Giving your attention instead to a more subtle, yet nourishing feeling. You don’t need to get this right every time, but you do need to be prepared to make this sacrifice.

With practice, soon enough, and quicker than you may think, the emotion that serves you well will become more and more familiar and amplify in intensity.

Mental manifestation with or without deliberate action?

Manifesting your deepest desires requires mental and behavioural work. Many manifestation processes focus only on the mental. This can seem, on the surface, to be enough for your desires to simply fall into your lap! There is something deliciously appealing about rubbing a lamp, making a wish, sitting back and waiting for it to come true. Well. However, if you approach manifestation by repeating your affirmations and visualising your future, without walking the talk and changing what you do, things may not work out the way you had anticipated. Personally, even if I were able to manifest in this way, I wouldn’t want to. Ordering take-away occasionally is nice, but something changes if you do it all the time, because the personal investment is low. Alternatively you could buy quality ingredients, invest your time and apply your love and creativity in preparing a meal. Doing this can open up a world of satisfaction and health benefits that you can’t get from ordering-in. True fulfilment is multiplied by your personal contribution.

The importance of sacrifice and contribution

To contribute something must necessarily involve sacrificing something else. In this case energy, time and instant gratification were sacrificed for a greater, more complex system of rewards and possibilities. Preparing a meal requires applying your existing skills and acquiring new ones, being creative, solving problems and fulfilling a need for yourself and/or others. It is a multi-sensory, multi-faceted experience.

Sacrifice, in this sense, is not a symptom of scarcity, but a demonstration of your belief in an abundant world. When what you give away, or let go of is seen as part of your manifestation process, what you ultimately receive is sweeter, deeper, more worthwhile and longer-lasting.

The magic of synchronicities

This magic is exciting, beautiful and awe-inspiring! How wonderful to notice when something that happens is just too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. When you are left speechless at how something amazing reveals itself to you, indicating that what you are putting in is making waves! Inspired by ancient Eastern wisdom, Carl Jung recognised the importance of the mystical. He identified “synchronicities” as those moments where your dreams converge with waking life. He framed these events as markers that life is flowing in the direction that was consciously intended.

While engaging in the manifesting process you might notice something unexpected during your day that reminds you of something you had manifested. You then have a choice as to how you interpret it: as your brain making connections and perceiving patterns in the environment; and/or a convergence of forces more universal than your brain alone. Either way the effect can be powerful. Identifying synchronicities can validate your process of manifestation and spur you on, so embrace them and enjoy them!

Reflection question

Which of the following values would you choose to make one of your strongest, to apply to your manifesting process?

  1. Dedicated graft/work
  2. Personal sacrifice
  3. Delayed gratification
  4. Integrity

The Role of Community and Journaling in Manifesting

Feeding your learning forward – Using your own experience to inspire and support others through their own manifestation journey

When you feed your learning forward, you use your own experience to inspire and support others through their own manifestation journey. Not only do you get the delight of helping another soul to learn and grow, you solidify your own learning and growth. You get to master the craft for yourself. If your learning ends with you, you might settle for a somewhat vague understanding, compared to the level of integration you cement when you pass that understanding on to others.

This feeding forward can be done with anyone whom you feel would be responsive and welcoming of your support and encouragement. Loved ones, family members, friends, or colleagues, for example.

In my (premium) Insight Timer course, “Manifestation From The Inside Out”, there is a course classroom, which is an ideal space to feed this kind of learning forward. Additionally, my (free) Insight Timer and Facebook groups of the same name, “Believe – Relieve – Conceive”, are great spots to give and receive assistance.

So start the whole process knowing that you will be inspiring and supporting others to do the same and notice the difference this makes from day 1!

Journaling your manifesting journey

Journaling your experiences, desires, setbacks, successes, fears, courage, struggles and breakthroughs once a day, every day is golden! It can help in so many ways to balance, maintain and develop your mental wellbeing. Furthermore, it works wonders for your manifestation journey, especially if you don’t currently have so many people around you who you feel comfortable opening up to!

Journaling needn’t take up much of your time. Even if you write 3 simple words just before you go to sleep, or when you wake up, there exists a conversation you know you have every day, acknowledging what it is like to be you and tracing a path of your existence and wellbeing.

If you choose to keep a journal of your journey of manifestation, this can serve to:

  • Consolidate the affirmations, visualisations and feelings
  • Work through difficult moments, so they become learning moments
  • Identify areas to work through that you can bring to the classroom for this course
  • Track the development of your skill and habit
  • Identify what works and what doesn’t serve you
  • Remember your synchronicities and tune yourself in to notice more
  • Help to remain consistent in your approach to manifestation
  • Become a record of a meaningful and important journey that you can look back on with fondness

All you need is a pen and notepad, or a notes app on your phone. Just date each entry and write!

Reach out to me here if you are looking for personalised guidance in manifestation.

Reflection question

Much of the manifestation process is internal, at least in the beginning, but the results involve radical differences in the external world. In a sense it is an art of making the internal external. Which method of externalising do you feel resonates most deeply with you?

  • Sharing and guidance in online classroom, or group settings, as mentioned above?
  • Journaling?
  • Sharing and guidance with family, or friends?
  • Other ways?
A notebook with an orange pen on top. In orange writing it says "I am the author of my story". The notebook is set against a background of a white knitted woollen blanket

What is Manifestation and How Does it Work?

Hypnotherapy Meditation Other
A notebook with an orange pen on top. In orange writing it says "I am the author of my story". The notebook is set against a background of a white knitted woollen blanket

What Actually is Manifestation?

In manifestation we use imagination and emotion to become as familiar with a speculated version of reality as possible. We imagine from the assumption that it has already happened, or well on the way to fruition. This imaginative process is repeated daily until it manifests as a new habitual experience, or a new event occurring.

This repetition and layering of a speculated version of reality, often referred to as “visualisation”, is considered fundamental to manifestation. If it is overlooked it is easy to see how one might mistakenly conclude that manifestation does not work.

How do we Know Manifestation Works?

We know that imagining something can make it more likely to happen. We also know that being positive can make us happier, which can make us more successful.

Science can’t explain why manifestation comes about, whether the law of attraction, quantum theory, an unstoppable mindset, or something else. While science manifests an answer to that question, there is nothing to stop us exploring and taking full advantage of this phenomenon.

A swimmer doing butterfly stroke from left to right in a swimming pool, from above

Visualisation in Athletics

It is common practice for athletes to visualise throughout their development and in preparation for races, matches or events. Michael Phelps, Novak Djokovic, Mohammad Ali, Lindsey Vonn, Christiano Ronaldo and Usain Bolt are all well-known visualisers.

Manifestation Requires Visualisation and Deliberate Action

It should be highlighted, of course, that there are no athletes who only use mental manifestation, without physical training. Similarly, you can’t expect your a million pounds, or irresistible charm to fall into your lap with visualisation alone. Manifestation synergises visualisation with deliberate action steps.

“Visualisation” is “Foresense”

Rather than “visualisation”, however, I prefer to use the term “foresense”, since effective visualisation is not only visual. It involves a richly multi-sensory blend, including that which we can see, hear, feel, taste and smell, that brings a speculated reality to life.

Affirmations Describe What you Manifest

Affirmations work hand in hand with foresense. They are emotionally supportive and encouraging declarations that bring new possibilities into being. Affirmations can be declared and repeated as thoughts, or out loud. They are an important part of manifesting because they can conjure foresense, or vice versa, because they become internalised as thoughts, then beliefs and because they can override limiting thoughts and beliefs.

A decorated gold-coloured genie's magic lamp for granting 3 wishes

Manifestation is not Magic, but it Can and Should Feel Magical

This is an oversimplification, but let’s say you want a Tesla car. In all likelihood you’re not going to wake up tomorrow morning with the keys to your Tesla in your hand. Would you really want that, even if it were possible? If you have manifested a Tesla, beneath that would be your commitment to believing in the process and yourself. It will be because you have put in the action steps and made waves in the world. You will have flexed your internal locus of control. You will have demonstrated to yourself that you are capable, significant and resourceful. These qualities are worth a thousand Teslas!

If this is what you get, manifestation is working for you. If you miss these cues and your Tesla leaves you feeling empty and unfulfilled, you may be chasing your tail. You may be unaware of your innate and abundant value.

There is nothing wrong with believing the universe is on your side, with a little serendipity, and that when you take yourself and the world on, the universe steps in to lend a helping hand. Think of this as a reward for your input.

Whatever you believe, manifestation works within your understanding of the universe.

If however you know you are prone to delusional thinking. If your understanding of the universe diverges wildly from the reasoned consensus of human thought, I recommend you only engage in manifestation practices with the approval of a medical professional. Manifestation should be a practice that harmonises the relationship between the imagined, or interpreted world and shared physical reality.

A turquoise Tesla car in a showroom

What do you Really Want?

Will it give you what you think it will give you? Have you given it much thought? Many people don’t. If you were to perform a survey of all the people who own Teslas, I doubt you would find a significant correlation with fulfilment and life satisfaction.

If you obtain a Tesla (or if you become a millionaire, for example), does part of you feel like it could empower you, give you resourcefulness, significance, attention, approval, love, or contentment? Could it make you feel more worthwhile?

These qualities exist within, or between people. When you become familiar with these qualities within you (spoiler alert: you already have them!), you may simultaneously realise that you are capable of obtaining way more than just a Tesla and your priorities may change completely.

Grid of multiple photos of the same person displaying a variety of emotions

The Importance of Emotion in Driving Manifestation

You will know when affirmations and foresense are working because you will feel it. The more you focus, the richer the sound of the affirmation, the greater the colour and motion of the foresense, the more likely you are to feel something.

This emotion is another important marker. This is the feeling that, when habituated, drives us forward in our deliberate action and helps us to identify opportunities in our environment that are conducive to our manifested outcomes.

The same parts of the brain are active during imagined inner experience and real external events. When these interacting affirmations, foresense and emotions are at play, our bodies are more likely to naturally output behaviours and modes of operating that bring about our manifested outcomes. This reduces the need to push ourselves to think, or feel the right way, or do the right thing, for example.

Close up of a blank stare on a young child's face in black and white, as if to represent disconnection, or isolation

Understanding Resistance to Manifestation Techniques?

This phenomenon of manifesting the mental and physical condition as if you are in a certain situation can work against us as well as for us. Trauma can inhibit your self-esteem, your ability to move towards goals and motivate yourself.

Any internal experience of trauma that may have been picked up during the course of life can replay and loop itself during a variety of different external encounters where it is not needed and not helpful.

The Still Face Experiment highlights how even a short moment of absent expression on the face of a parental figure can leave a child distressed. You could be the greatest parent of all time. If a timely opportunity is not provided for them to return to positive, comfortable interaction with the parent, the formation of a traumatic experience can follow. An event such as this may be generalised by the child as not feeling they are good enough, or not lovable, as caregivers, or people in general being unavailable. This kind of interpretation may be all an infant is capable of, that seems to them like the best way to safeguard their survival for the proceeding moments, or days. These manifested rules can persist throughout a lifetime and colour our relationships with ourselves and others, if not addressed in therapy, or meditation, for example.

Trauma Can Function Like Negative Manifestation

Such interpretations function just like affirmations. However, they often contain a polar opposite message to the abundance, or confidence, or love you might choose. So, whether or not you have obtained traumatic experiences, you may have a build-up of existing negative manifestations. You may, or may not be completely aware of them, or any resistance they present to the manifestation process.

It may be that this can be overcome through committed habituation of affirmations and foresense alone. On the other hand it may be that, significant emotional, or behavioural resistance arises, blocks you from effective manifesting. In which case, you may choose to seek professional help in working through that resistance. The key here is not to try to push these feelings and interpretations about yourself and others away. As Carl Jung said “What you resist not only persists but will grow in size”. The key is to learn to remain with them with calmness, to be curious and responsive, not reactive.

This kind of assistance can reduce the fear enough to release its power and control over you, leaving you free to manifest as you would choose.

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