Manifesting is a technique often taught by coaches and guides as a way to help us see more of what we want in our experience of reality. It’s a powerful tool. It’s the hands-on (hearts-open) application of the Law of Attraction. This practice is essential, if we want to live from creator consciousness (taking self-responsibility) rather than from victim consciousness (life is happening to me).
Here are four of the key things to remember about manifesting, as far as I can see.
Process of revealing, not doing
Perhaps the most common thing I see people forgetting is that manifesting is not something that we are personally doing. What does that mean? Well, we are misled to believe that the verb “manifesting” describes an activity, or a set of actions taken by an individual person, that leads to a particular end result. It’s normal for the mind to create an apparent linear sequence of events, because this is how we tend to perceive things. But the truth has more dimensions and more complexity.
The misunderstanding here becomes obvious when we look at the origin of the word, manifesting. It is a term that is quite commonly used these days to roughly mean: “to make something happen.” But if we investigate the dictionary definition of this word, before it was co-opted by new age coaching, it actually means: “to make something apparent.” It’s not about doing; it’s about revealing. We are not calling into existence an entirely new thing. It’s just that when we manifest, we can suddenly see and access something that was present and available to us the whole time, but we were previously blind to it or blocked from experiencing it because of our way of seeing.
If we attune to the process of unfolding and revealing that’s constantly happening, we remember that manifesting is not an activity that is done individually. Manifesting is always a collaboration with Spirit. No matter how skilled we get at visualization, affirmation and managing our vibration, it is impossible to manifest anything purely from the exertion of personal will alone. The idea that we can “do” manifesting, is just our ego talking. As I wrote on my first blog post on this topic back in 2017, “When you manifest your desired reality, you are not doing something as much as you are discovering it; you are not receiving a gift as much as you are revealing it.”
All of the common mistakes in manifesting can be traced back to this basic assumption: taking the process (and the outcome) way too personally.
Fixating on form over feeling
One thing that often happens is that we get overly fixated on the form. We start to envision our desire, it takes a shape. Maybe it has a face. Maybe it has a name. Maybe we see it happening in a specific place. This can help us to connect with the essence that is critical to manifesting, which is the feeling we have when we imagine holding or experiencing the thing. But the point here is to feel the feeling; the point is not to imagine the thing. It’s okay to have a picture in our mind’s eye, but once we use that picture to evoke the feeling, it’s best to let the details of the picture get blurry. We want to get super clear on our desired experience and how it feels, yet leave the specifics up to the determination of divine plan and divine timing.
Visioning without verification
Another mistake is visioning without verification. Maybe we can easily go to the happy place in our mind, time-traveling to our desired future reality. Maybe we are even able to let go of the particulars of that time or place or space, and really just dwell in the feeling it brings. But if that is where it ends, we are not anchoring the manifestation process in our right-now reality. We need to be able to see how the desired feeling is already available, here and now. That means bringing the felt sense of our manifestation into the body, in the present moment. We want to verify on the physical level, that the emotional and energetic experience we’re having while we’re visioning is already part of our current reality.
Not taking aligned action
Last but not least, manifestation requires aligned action. Even if we have a clear sense of the desired feeling, and we can solidly anchor that feeling in our body, the experience we want will forever remain in the distant faraway future, unless we take observable steps in our immediate reality. We need to make moves and take decisions that are congruent with our desired manifestation, without discriminating according to where we are in relation to it within time and space. Instead of acting AS IF our heart’s desire is already here now, we must act AS IT IS already here now. We’re not pretending that our desire has been fulfilled in an imaginary future fantasy. We’re presencing the fact that accessing the felt sense of our desire now, means also accessing the felt sense of its fulfillment simultaneously.
As I wrote in Regenerative Purpose, our purpose is the sacred union of a divine plan and grounded action. What this points to is that manifestation is a process of creative alchemy. When we are engaged in active collaboration with Spirit, we are effectively transforming concepts, visions, and ideas gathered from the ether, and bringing them into form into the reality of our physical surroundings.
Most importantly, it’s about remembering that when we manifest, it’s not something we are doing. We are merely opening to what is designed to be revealed through full expression of our being. And then we witness the soft landing, as we move from sky to ground: our thoughts become feelings, our feelings become actions, and our actions shape the objects, events and experiences that shape our lives, materially.
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