When I first heard about manifestation or the Law of Attraction, I chalked it up to another quick fix or self-help selling tool. However, I’ve recently learned the value and power of this practice, what it really is, and what it definitely is not. Have you ever wondered what it is and how it works? Is it real or mindless foo-foo? Let me share my journey with you.
My curiosity about manifestation was first piqued when I started my spiritual mentorship sessions. I came into contact with the principle but needed to grasp its meaning. Upon further exploration, I realized that I had often crossed paths with manifestation. Times when I wished myself into better situations, clearly saw myself thriving in my mind’s eye, or dreamt about a fairy tale future at night to escape my realities. Looking back on these moments and memories, most of these have become a truth for me and manifested in my life.
If you are thinking I am referring to some kind of magic wand that I waved over my life to create a fairy tale, don’t worry; I’m not that naïve. However, I did need to explore this concept of having envisioned certain things for my life, which eventually came to pass. In my journey to understand manifestation, I learned that it is a concept of like attracting like. I realized that it’s all energy, and we receive what we put into the world. Think of that stage where you were lost, perhaps driven by misguided truths told to you your entire life, and you always managed to end up in bad relationships. Selfish friends, abusive partners, bad jobs, etc. When you feel negative or are lost, you attract that into your life. Hence, the challenging relationships and situations that follow.
Have you ever had that girls’ night with a soul friend when you opened the second bottle of wine, laughed about the stupid decisions you made when you were younger, and reminisced about the strange relationships you cultivated? It makes for a good laugh about the past. Still, part of the reason it’s so funny is that it’s difficult to see yourself in similar situations now. Could it be because you have learned to be kinder to yourself, love yourself more, and therefore attract better situations and relationships into your life?
Another example would be the inevitable bad day we all have. These days are notorious for going from bad to worse to downright horrible. It’s like every little thing that can go wrong compounds with other things that went wrong that you did not even plan for. I’m not suggesting you never have a bad day and smile your way through life. I am highlighting that we are more aware these days and rest easy in knowing that this is not an unfixable situation. It’s just a phase, a moment, and we get to recreate how we want to handle this in the future.
This is not a magic wand we wave around. I get so frustrated with people who willingly stand on a podium to the world proclaiming how we can change our lives “just like that” and “have everything we ever dreamed of.” Usually, these opportunists also target their messages to those who are the most in need of kindness, a break, or something to believe in. As with everything, that’s worth it in life. It takes real work. There really is a spiritual and psychological connection to all this.
To go even deeper into this concept and shine a light on what it means to me and how I perceive it, it’s best to start with what manifestation absolute is not! There is so much room for interpretation and, unfortunately, exploitation by those with bad intentions toward others. Keeping a good dose of common sense in your back pocket is always worth your weight in gold. The old saying still rings true in many situations: If it seems too good to be true. It is.
Although you can work toward manifesting your dream home, a good spouse, or a fantastic travel adventure, it’s not a genie in a bottle. We still need to do the inner work of getting to these things we envision for ourselves in the future. This is where spiritual mentorship has been of great help to me. It helped me better define exactly what I want, why I like it, and what steps I will take to achieve it. Better yet, spiritual mentorship equipped me to eliminate the confusion that sometimes clouds the road to the vision we have for ourselves. I always thought it was so easy to say what I wanted. Just think of what I want, and say it. There is so much more to it than that. It’s easy to give a broad and vague concept of what I want, but the water tends to become murky when I need to get down to the dirt and bones of it all. Some direction here, especially from someone who knows how to navigate the path better than you is invaluable.
Manifestation is a natural evolution of our spiritual journeys. Once I committed to exploring myself more deeply, my own spiritual journey, and then started to progress, I came to a point where I realized I was creating a lot of what was going on in my life. That’s when I grew curious about wanting to learn more about this, how it works, and how we co-create our own realities.
The critical thing I learned about manifesting my own desires is the emotion and the feeling behind it. It’s like getting on stage and bluntly reciting a profoundly moving poem. There is no justice to that, and the message is wasted. I needed to really FEEL it. Imagine what it felt like to achieve the vision, how it would make me feel, and what this feeling would mean. What would this feeling look like? Once I started doing this, I realized how many things I thought I wanted; I actually did not wish to do. I didn’t have the passion for it, I didn’t get a good feeling from it, and it was hard to commit to it.
Ultimately, I attracted or created what I could feel was accurate. For example, I wanted to develop FIGGI Skincare. I had to really feel and imagine that it was real. See the packaging, imagine how it would feel to use my own products for the first time, how this would feel on my skin, etc. Visualization helped me immensely in this phase to not separate myself from the envisioned feeling. I didn’t want to be a spectator in this show but the main character. I had to make sure I tried to imagine how, for example, the day cream would feel on my skin. I worked on really imagining what emotions would come up for me the first time I received a completed product from the production line: joy, accomplishment, achievement? I needed to work through all of that.
My spiritual mentor took it even further and tasked me with getting into this feeling. What do I see, hear, feel, smell, or taste? This helped me remember that we sometimes tend to make the simplest things the most complicated for ourselves. This causes us to get stuck in “the wanting.” I always think of Dr. Seuss’s book “Oh, the places you will go.” He talks about the waiting place, a most useless place where all you do is wait. Waiting for a train to leave or the mail to come. Then he lovingly reminds the reader that this is definitely not the place for you. Stay away from getting stuck here. To me, this is the same as “the wanting.”
We get so lost sometimes in how badly we want something that we confuse manifesting something with constantly staring blindly into the hurt of not having it or not having achieved it yet. I had to get out of this space and move from wanting to the feeling that I already had it. As long as you are stuck in the wanting, you’re postponing the realization of manifesting your desires into the future.
After this, you also have to do a healthy dose of work. Get the business running, get the qualifications you need, figure out how you will do it, etc. The work still needs to be done, and anyone who says differently is nonsense. In the end, we are still co-creators of our own universe, which is not a spectator sport.
Time for an important reality check: Unfortunately, life is filled with horrible events, evil people, and an unloading of baggage that was not necessarily created by us for our shoulders. However, we all get to a point where we are the creators of what happens to us. What we choose to do in that situation, how we choose to act, and what resources we choose to use and how. We can still use a little help sometimes. Without kindness and aid in the world, we would all be in dire straits.
There are situations in my past that I deeply struggle with, and I constantly battle with the Why. Why this happened to me? At the end of the day, I must remember I am in the here and now. Here and now, it is my choice how I see these past tribulations and what I do with them. I can co-create a different space and a different reality for myself. Not by magically snapping my fingers but by being clear on what my soul wants and needs from me at setting to make that a reality with the tools manifestation taught me.
It’s about empowering yourself to change your perspective of something and take back your own power from that situation. This greatly depends on where you are in your journey, the tools you have been given, and the resources you have to work with. Although these were all mountainous obstacles for me to overcome, I learned I could walk through the storm if only I gave myself permission to do it.
Love and Light