I’ll tell myself a new story…. A word on “Manifestation”

I would love to believe that we could all just tell ourselves “I’m wealthy, I’m happy, I have a Ferrari (Well Harley V-Rod if it was me), and it would just happen. However, I just can’t be sure the universe works like this. In this post I’m going to look at some practical and objective ways around this common misconception of manifestation.

It seems that some popular spiritual books over the last 10 years have pushed the idea that we can all just believe it and we will achieve it. The most popular that springs to mind is “The Secret”. I’m not going to spend this post running that publication down, but these days I can get a good gut feeling about what is correct and what is not. There is just something to this philosophy that doesn't sit right.

It is the underlying expectation that thoughts become things that I just can’t get my head around. We all have lots of thoughts during the day, some relevant and necessary and many not so much. If our thoughts really became things then I would dread to think of the weird and cluttered things that would manifest into our lives.

How many times has someone wronged us and we waste a lot of time and energy thinking of all the hideous stuff we’d like to see befall that person? If our thoughts really did manifest in this way, our enemies would all succumb to unpleasant situations no? I would say this rarely happens.

How many times have we all wished hard for more money? Perhaps we bought that lotto ticket or scratch card and truly believed that this time it was going to be our lucky day, the same as we believed the last 20 times. Did we win? Indeed, before learning the disciplines that my blog is about, I also wrote myself a big cheque and looked at it and focussed on it for many many days. Did I suddenly become a millionaire? I wish!

My work over the last four years has really just shown me that in order to change on a profound level, we need to shed the control of the ego and work on our underlying emotional traumas. As these change the way our energy flows through us, it in turn changes how we interact with the world around us. It’s all based on energy… metaphysical energy.

See “Fire and water chi”

My teacher rarely explains to me in detail how things work, but he did say that when your energy is in the right place, what’s meant to be for us flows to us quicker, life unfolds how it’s meant to and more importantly we can face the balance of challenge and rest with a more open and flowing standpoint.

I see this as being the ultimate trick, to let life unfold! Easy to say, and it’s hard. We as humans all want more than what we have, we wish for different scenarios and situations in our life. Learning this energy work and gaining balance and the ability to roll with the punches that life can deliver is really where the power is. All too easy I suspect if we could all just will a perfect life with an abundance of everything we could imagine, what would be the point in this I wonder?

I am never keen to talk about things that I haven’t experienced directly… I do believe that we have a set path and particular lessons to learn in life. It is the ultimate teaching ground. I hesitate to use the word Karma, but I get the impression that we come here with a particular path to walk. If this is ordained by a higher power or if it’s a result of past actions in lives already lived, I do not believe that just thinking positively or repeatedly telling ourselves that we are something/someone different will change this.

I often observe people around me very accomplished, who seemingly cruise through life without too much catastrophe. And yes, I have wished many times that I was one of these people. Here comes the warning about that tricky devil, the monster. Our run away ego, always comparing and judging. I have fallen into this trap before, observing these people and going “What am I doing wrong?”. This sets us up nicely for all sorts of judgements by the monster. And this is a super fast way to perpetual suffering.

Now I have no idea how some lead such blessed lives, perhaps they have already learned their lessons in past lives or they are young souls who haven’t built up so much karma yet… just guesses.

But if lets say, some of these people attribute their successes to practising the lessons of the secret… We see this and go “Well it works for them, so I’ll try it”. We do so enthusiastically for a year and what happens when we do not become as wealthy or successful as them? Here is the worst part, and I have observed this in more than one person, the monster uses this “failure” as another way to judge us!! “Ah, you're so useless” it'll say, “you cant even get the secret right”, and on goes the cycle of judgement.

It may seem contrary to what I have said, but I will talk about something similar that I did find useful, before learning these disciplines. That would be expressing gratitude. After a week or so of doing this, I found it far easier to see things to be grateful about. Do I believe that this practice caused more nice things to flow to me? No. I just believe it trained my mind to notice all the great things I already had in my life. This is a completely different thing I’d say than just expecting ourselves to become a different person by just telling ourselves a different story, or by expecting fantastic things to happen just because we concentrate on that.

The last word on this I’ll say, is that the crummy stories we tell ourselves are often related to the activities of the monster. The poor me scenario, the I’m such a loser thing, the nothing ever goes right for me… These are all judgements and they are perpetuated by not getting to the root emotions that are still stuck inside us as a result of trauma.

See “Trauma and the monster”

It does take a bit of work and discipline, but I can promise you that life will be fundamentally more tolerable once we attend to these emotions. Again I say, that with a more balanced and flowing energy plus the resilience to knocks that this work gives us, we may find ourselves in a state where being or having more becomes less relevant to us.

Life without self judgement and the monsters expectations of being more than what you are is infinitely preferable, but I’m afraid it’ll take a little more than a daily manifestation practice to shift the balance.

To sum up, It’s the monster that is the perfectionist, It wants a perfect life, it wants you to be perfect and it’ll judge you if it doesn’t have that. This causes us to suffer. It is far preferable to do the deep work on ourselves so that we can absolutely face the imperfection of our messy human lives. It’s almost like gaining a superpower, a kind of invincibility, when you get to the point that you know no situation or emotion can flatten you, that you can do the work and soon come back to a balanced and flowing state. This is what we should be aiming for, and not to be simply glossing over our deep traumas and fears by telling ourselves we’re something we’re objectively not.

A post on manifesting from another site:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21524975/manifesting-does-it-really-work-meme