There’s an idea floating around that says we create our reality, and if you want to manifest a desire, you have to do some (or all) of the following:
- Become one with your desire
- Feel what it would be like to have your desire
- Spend a lot of time impressing your desire onto your subconscious
- Use subliminal messages
- Focus with absolute clarity on your desire
- Set positive intentions for obtaining your desire
- Visualize experiencing your desire with all 5 physical senses
- Believe you’ll receive your desire
- Avoid feeling negatively about your desire
This list is not complete by any means. There are as many techniques and rules for manifesting your desires as there are stars in the sky. A quick Google search for “how to manifest desires” will provide you with the option to buy countless programs for one easy payment of just $249 $97, promising to teach you the real secrets nobody else in the world has access to.
Before I go any further, allow me to explain why I’m writing this article. My experiences with manifesting desires contradict all of the conventional rules for manifesting. For many years I didn’t understand why. Now I do.
Spoiler alert: Along the journey I discovered that I was not manifesting anything. I was not in control or in charge of my life. I was given the illusory experience of being in control, much like a plastic steering wheel a child holds in the family car. When I began to question my experiences, they fell apart at the seams and the man behind the curtain was revealed.
I’m not writing this article to analyze any specific manifestation techniques. The purpose of this article is to create an inquiry into how manifestation actually works. Not how I want it to work, or how I think it should work – but how it actually works. And I’m exploring this because I’ve experienced an enormous gap between the way people say manifestation should work – and the way it actually works.
As part of this exploration, I’m going to share a story about how I broke every “rule” about manifesting desires when I obtained my dream job.
For ten months, I was rejected by every job I applied for despite 17 years of expertise
When I followed up on my applications, phone numbers were disconnected, managers were never available if I drove by, and in many cases no one ever answered the phone – it just rang forever. A cafe that wanted to hire me suddenly filled the position, and the only two interviews I got both said they were absolutely impressed with my skills and knowledge of the business, tested me in the store, yet still turned me down.
I was rejected from Fred Meyer, Starbucks, Target, Walmart, McDonalds, Dairy Queen, and never received a single reply from any of my 80+ online applications. Many of those applications provided no contact information to follow up, and some even explicitly stated that applicants were NOT to follow up. It was unreal. It was also maddening. My unemployment had run out and I had no money to pay the electricity bill, and there was a renter on my property sharing the electricity so that wasn’t going to go over very well. I was so desperate for a job I was willing to do anything that would pay me.
I had borrowed money for the previous month’s utility bills, and my current bills were overdue. The electricity was about to be shut off if I didn’t figure something out within days. So I got angry. I mean, I got really angry.
I spent most of my food money on gas just to deliver applications and get to interviews and ended up living off of ramen noodles, toast, and peanut butter for a few months when I had less than $20 in my bank account. I had to go on food stamps and spend hours doing surveys online for pennies just to survive.
I didn’t know if most of my anger came from not being able to get a job, or from listening to other people tell me they don’t understand why I didn’t just “go get a job” like normal people do. I did everything possible in the physical world. It just wasn’t happening.
My last job was literally handed to me on a silver platter by someone I had just met, and it required me to move to the city I wanted to move to. I didn’t put in any effort there. Clearly effort was not part of the equation for manifesting desires.
I knew that efforting in the physical world was a waste of time, but I was so upset that I kept doing it anyway. It was like beating my head against a brick wall.
I was faced with the dilemma of being unable to express to people what was going on. Nobody understood. People could only look at my situation from the perspective of, “just take the first job you can, you need to eat and pay your bills.”
Nobody seemed to understand that I wasn’t turning down jobs. I had no job offers to turn down. I was being rejected at every turn.
And the space I was in was, “I don’t care if I starve, I’m not going back to being a corporate slave and I really don’t care about the consequences.”
There are some people in this world who will sacrifice their convictions in order to be comfortable or to survive. Me? Nope. If I’m not living according to my convictions, I’m already dead. I’ll engage any experience life has to bring even if it’s not comfortable because I know what’s on the other side of the sword.
I suffered greatly for this way of being as a kid, but I always emerged victorious and created a massive wake of change for others. Rules were changed at my high school because I refused to back down in the face of opposition when standing up for what’s right. Suspension? Detention? Expulsion? Bring it on.
Everyone had opinions as to why I couldn’t get a job. Maybe it was my resume or the way I was dressed.
My resume wasn’t the problem. My attire wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had already declared to the Universe that I did not want to work in coffee anymore, and I wanted to pursue my passion – writing. Because life had become mundane working as a slave to corporations. I was done. I just wanted to be happy. And that wasn’t going to happen if I continued to ignore my passion.
I let the rage build up inside of me
And in that moment of complete self-hatred, something shifted for me. I got up from the couch and said out loud, “what the hell am I supposed to do? I can’t pay my bills. What, am I just supposed to go do what I love and forget about the money? Is that what this is about? Am I supposed to stop applying for coffee jobs and somehow go do what I really want to do? OK fine, screw this, I’ll just go be a writer!”
I was being sarcastic. I didn’t think I could “just go be a writer.” Who does that? Who just decides they’re going to get a job doing what they love by no other means than their own declaration?
I went on Craigslist, pounded the keys searching for writing jobs, applied to the first one I found, and had no idea what I was really applying for. I was absolutely convinced that I was wasting my time and would never hear back. I was convinced that they weren’t going to like my writing samples. Or if I did hear back, they’d offer me some low wage position that wasn’t worth my time.
A few days later I got a gig writing for a well known company where I get to work from home and I get paid well.
I didn’t see that one coming. And it happened inside of my absolute rage. And that’s why I’m questioning the conventional ideas about how desires actually become manifest.
I didn’t believe in my own dream
At one point, I had begrudgingly put on an attitude of determination and spent about three months submitting my work to various “paid writing opportunities” and ended up getting completely ignored and scammed in the process. And yet somehow the moment I got really angry and didn’t care if I lived or died is when my dream unfolded? How the heck did that happen?
Now I want to dive into a little background on my experiences that have caused me to move deeply into this inquiry. Because my dream job isn’t the only thing I’ve manifested contrary to the “rules” of manifestation. Not only have I manifested desires in a fit of rage, but I’ve manifested the majority of my desires without effort. In fact, the only desires that haven’t manifested are the ones I’ve spent time and effort trying to create.
I’ve noticed that the more effort I put into manifesting a desire, the longer it takes to manifest (if it manifests at all). And when I put a lot of effort into manifesting something, when it finally does manifest, it’s not exactly what I wanted.
On the other hand, when I don’t put any effort into manifesting, and I don’t spend any time focusing on what I want, my desires pop up like weeds – and they’re specific.
It’s as if the process of focusing on my desire actually interferes with its manifestation and dilutes the specificity of the desire.
I’ll give you a few examples:
Manifestation #1: I decided that I wanted to move back to Santa Cruz and live with my closest friend again, since we shared an apartment previously and it was such a wonderful experience. I made no effort to make it happen, and I didn’t focus on it. I set the intention with a contemplation, packed my boxes in anticipation, and left it alone.
Not long after, that same friend asked me for a ride to the airport. Somehow nobody else was able to take her. Before heading to the airport, we went to a coffee shop to meet up with a friend of hers. Halfway through the conversation he looked at me and asked me what I do. I told him I do web marketing. He said, “I need to hire you yesterday. You need to move here. When can you start, and how much money do you need?”
A week later I was living with my best friend in a new townhouse together on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and my salary doubled. Just like that.
Manifestation #2: On an excruciatingly hot, sunny day in Hollywood, my friend and I left our apartment and began the long journey to find her car parked way up the hill. Halfway to the car I realized I forgot my sunglasses. Going through the day without sunglasses was not an option. Within seconds I literally ran face first into a tree branch. It smacked me pretty hard. And hanging on that branch was a pair of black sunglasses. I joked with my friend that sunglasses really do grow on trees! And we had an even better laugh later on when we went to a restaurant that had a miniature fake tree on the counter wearing a pair of sunglasses.
Manifestation #3: I went to Goodwill and on my way in I wondered if I might find a pair of JNCO jeans. It was only a passing thought and I forgot about it the moment I entered the store. Until I approached the clothing rack, touched my hand to part the jeans and a rare pair of JNCO jeans fell to the floor.
Manifestation #4: I went to Target and was browsing the furniture section and saw a unit that had 9 cubes and thought it would be perfect for my room. I looked at the $75 price tag and walked away. As soon as I got home, sitting in front of my apartment complex dumpster was a solid wood unit with 9 cubes, just like the one I saw at Target.
Manifestation #6: I thought it would be great to have two 6 foot tall black bookshelves with 5 shelves each. A few days later, sitting next to the same dumpster, were two identical 6 foot tall black bookshelves with 5 shelves each.
These were not isolated incidents. I have furnished every house I’ve lived in this way – the furniture I need just shows up in my life. And I have documented at least 100 incidents of effortless manifestations. Life shows up for me when I’m in a space of total surrender, completely unaware that there’s anything “to do.”
Law of attraction advice is quicksand
The reason positive emotion keeps you struggling is because once you entertain a positive emotion you automatically have to start fending off your doubts about what you’re trying to manifest. For example, if your goal is to manifest a large sum of money, and you try to visualize yourself feeling ecstatic about having a large sum of money, you’re also going to induce your doubts. What if I lose the money? What if it’s not enough? Do I really deserve that much money? I’ve never had that much money before,” and on, and on.
Entertaining what seems like a “positive” emotion automatically brings in your doubts. There’s no way around it. And what do you do with your doubts? You try to ignore them, sweep them under the rug, convince yourself they don’t exist, etc. And by the time you’re done entertaining your doubts, you’ve created a scenario where you’re going to manifest your money – but it’s going to come to you through your limitations – not because they’re subconscious belief patterns you can’t control, but because you brought them into your conscious awareness.
Your subconscious beliefs aren’t controlling your life from some nebulous, untouchable place. It’s not actually that complicated, but when you’re holding false beliefs about manifestation, it seems like a legitimate explanation. Pop the false belief and that explanation falls apart.
Life has its own rhythm and flow
And “accepting what is” doesn’t mean giving in, or surrendering to a fate of oblivion in complete defeat. Accepting what is just means looking at what is and acknowledging it without making it right or wrong. It is what it is.