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?