Manifestation & Your Life
Although you may not appreciate the fact, the greatest gift that you have been given is the gift of life itself.
And even the adversities and challenges which you faced are a gift, because they offer you the opportunity to grow and develop into the person you can truly be.
You may feel that these things are cliches, yet there are deep truths hidden in the simple assertions. Suppose for example that you meet a person who focuses endlessly on the negative, the struggles they face, the difficulties that present themselves…. Or a person who seems lacking in gratitude or happiness, who constantly focuses on the negative.
Do you imagine that this person is growing or withering in spirit?
And do you think that that’s the basis for fulfillment and happiness?
By continuously focusing on the negative, on what is wrong, anyone – and perhaps that includes you – will program their mind with negative expectations. In turn, your mind, the obedient servant that it is, will create situations which reinforce in your mind the truth of what you believe about yourself and the world.
You Get What You Think About: You Are What You Think About
In a way this is a truism. It’s hardly worth focusing on evidence that supports that assertion. (Though, if you really feel you need to, try practicing gratitude three times a day for five minutes of time the three weeks… And at the end of that time be astonished by how your mental attitude and outlook on the world has changed.)
You see the thing that matters in trying to manifest anything is a simple truth: unsuccessful people focus on problems; successful people focus on solutions.
I’d go further – I’d say that successful people focus on gratitude, happiness, opportunity, and thankfulness. When they do that, there’s a magical transformation that makes difficulties, powerlessness, struggle, and challenges all seem like opportunities for growth. Your thinking can be either your enemy or your ally.
Giving up your power to struggle and challenge makes you a victim. Again: what you focus on becomes your reality.
So if you want to be successful, you need to focus on what’s working for you right now and what might work for you in the future.
You need to focus on your strengths, rather than your weaknesses.
In short, you need to focus on your dream, and how you can fulfill it.
Overcoming Problems Is Essential to Manifesting Anything
Yet, problems are a part of life, and they will always exist, no matter what our lives look like. The key is to have an outlook on life, an energetic viewpoint, and emotional position, which is fundamentally positive and expects the best.
Remember, nobody has to be perfect to succeed in getting what they want. They just have to be good enough. (Eckhart Tolle‘as ideas are worth seeking out on all this…)
There are many subtle aspects to this principle: for example, if you’re a person who feels that they need to see every detail of the road to the destination, you’re never going to achieve very much, because it’s physically impossible, and spiritually unlikely, that the universe is ever going to reveal to you the exact pathway that will get you to your goal.
Manifestation tends not to work like that! Certainly if you know anything about the Law of attraction, you already know that the universe will always respond to your requests and give you what you want if you ask in the right way.
It’s better to know the destination and imagine yourself in that destination than to try and picture every detail of the pathway that could take you there.
And when you meet difficulties and obstacles on the way, it’s better to get your mind creating solutions rather than focusing on problems.
The truth is: successful people always focus on solutions and opportunities. And by taking this viewpoint, you become aware of your unique gifts and skills, and you realize that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and you also realize that you are capable of living the life of your dreams regardless of your background, your lack of experience, your dysfunctional family, and anything else that sucks you into a victim mentality.
Yet having said that to a friend who was failing in every area, he challenged me to explain how somebody with deep-seated limiting beliefs about their ability to succeed could ever really expect the principles that I have set out above to work.
And, I must admit he got me thinking.
I’ve always said that to manifest anything is necessary to have complete belief in both your ability to manifest, and in the possibility of you actually having what it is that you’re trying to co-create in your life.
If that’s true, then the natural implication is that you need to have a system of examining and eliminating limiting beliefs.
For one thing, the limiting beliefs that hold you back operate at a subconscious level. You may not even be aware of them, but they dictate every aspect of your behavior, and they certainly control the level of success that manifests in your life.
What I’ve come to understand is that some people manage to eliminate limiting beliefs simply by virtue of their own intelligence: they look around them, they see evidence that contradicts their beliefs about the world, and they then find that their beliefs have changed.
Other people can find that their beliefs about how the world operates will change just through hearing some simple maxim or piece of advice.
For example, Marc Allen tells the story of how he heard the following expression “within every adversity is an equal or greater benefit”, and how simply hearing this changed his perspective on his business life and opened up new opportunities to him.
Yet it’s undeniable that many other people cling to their deep-seated beliefs in a way that seems to make it hard for them to change. This is probably because these people have a fixed and rooted identity that depends on the beliefs that they hold about themselves.
So once again we come back to an issue of personality: either you are a person who can adapt easily, or you are a person who has rigid beliefs about the way the world operates, and about the way you function within the world.
It’s even possible the difference between these two categories of people are counts for why some achieve success and others do not…. Assuming that people who find it easier to change their beliefs are more likely to be able to take opportunities that present themselves in the world.
And where does that leave the question of visualization? If that – being able to picture your desired outcome – is the key to manifesting a different way of life, then surely the deep-seated beliefs you hold about yourself are almost irrelevant?
I don’t think so, in fact, because those deep-seated beliefs that you hold about yourself need to be in line with the image of yourself that you’re visualizing for it to manifest in your world.
One way or another, if your limiting beliefs are getting in the way of what you believe to be true about yourself in the world, then those limiting beliefs need to be changed or eliminated, and your subconscious mind reprogrammed with positive expectations.
And one way that you might be able to do this (surprise, surprise) is by visualizing success. Perhaps that alone can reprogram the subconscious mind into a more positive frame of mind.
Perhaps visualizing success allows you to grasp the dream that you are striving to achieve. When you start by daring to dream, you begin the act of reprogramming your mind to seek out opportunities, and the means to make them manifest as reality.
Ask and You Shall Receive
Marc Allen has an interesting take on this. He points out that Jesus said “ask and you will be given”. He didn’t say “ask and you will be given if you deserve it”.
So if that’s true, there maybe limiting beliefs are an irrelevance: maybe achieving success has absolutely nothing to do with whether you believe you deserve success or not.
Maybe it’s about believing that success is available to all of us, deserving or not.