Is manifesting as simple as positive thinking?
I was 16 when I decided to take my dream of studying fashion design at central Saint Martens seriously. I studied their graduate shows. I interned. I developed a portfolio of weird drawings and wacky ideas. On repeat I chanted affirmations, I visualised acceptance letters. And yet when it finally came down to crunch time, although it felt like a sure thing, I applied twice and didn’t get in. What went wrong? Why do I see some people manifest so effortlessly and others not? Is manifesting a simple as just positive thought alone? Answering these questions has taken me on a ten year journey.
Any manifestation starts with an ask. But it’s important to remember that the thing we ask for, we want it because of how it will make us feel. We want more money to experience freedom, business success to feel validated in our ideas and our contribution to our communities. It’s the emotions of accomplishment, success and worthiness that makes our goals worth striving for. It’s the bit in the middle that we can find difficult to navigate.
The 1960’s book to inspire what we today know as modern day self-help goes some way to explain why this might be. Psycho cybernetics by Brandon Maxwell suggests that the difference between wanting something and having it is down to who we think we are. Do we think we’re good enough? Or do we spend our time preparing for failure? It’s the stories that we rehearse over and over in our head that shapes everything we do from how we approach risk and change, to what we think we can achieve next year. Who we think we are, becomes the blueprint for every manifestation.
I spoke to Lydia Johnson the founder of the London hypnotherapy clinic about the role she thinks the way we see ourselves and the world around us has to do with our ability to manifest the things we want. “The trick is to uplift our conscious mind and our subconscious will align to this. With hypnotherapy we practice this process and learn to understand that mind and body alignment is paramount in letting go of conflict or repetitive patterns of behaviours keeping us stuck on a loop” suggesting that we when let our minds run on default, it can so often be that the conscious mind is running around like a brand new puppy, consuming everything it can find without questioning it’s quality. The sentiment is echoed by Loli Moon, as practising spiritualist and mystic “The easiest rule to remember in life and the realm of magic is understanding that what you focus on, is what grows”
When I think back to my younger self, my advice would be that all those affirmations are going to be useless until you address feelings of unworthiness hiding in the background. You can’t want things to feel successful, you’ve got to feel successful in order to have them. Manifesting takes us on a journey to discover where we learnt and believed in our own inadequacy. And no points for guessing that they usually stem from societies limiting stories of success and a side helping of childhood trauma. What I’ve learnt along the way is that manifestations aren’t the result of just wanting something. That’s the easy part. They’re the result of owning your worth and in this society, it’s one of the bravest things you can do.
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