Unpopular opinion: I don't believe that we "manifest" things in our lives. In fact the whole term manifesting gets my back up in ways you can't imagine. The idea that making a vision board and constantly imagining what could be for yourself somehow makes things happen for you seems absolutely ridiculous to me. Mostly because the flip side of that is that you are also responsible for all the bad shit that happens to you too.
I refuse to believe that I am responsible for the brain hemorrhage that changed my life. I refuse to believe that I wanted to lose a baby.
What I do believe in is object fixation. Let me explain. My husband used to race motorcycles. He would talk about how on the track if there was say a seagull sitting there, if you look at it in order to not hit it, you are for sure going to hit it. If you looked to beyond the sea gull, you would both live to see another race.
The same thing is true in life. We notice the things that we are thinking about. This is why setting an intention for yourself is such a powerful and change motivating practice. You plant the seed. When I was really beating myself up for being tired all the time, the hard days seemed so hard. They knocked me off my feet, and flat on my back. They felt overwhelming. When I set my intention to strive for balance, I started looking at tired differently. Instead of berating myself for fatigue, I remembered that it was the other side of the coin of pushing myself further. I could reframe the tiredness as "wow I must have worked really hard the other day, good work me." When I set my intention to look for joy, I would notice something beautiful, I'd file that in my joy folder. When I'd belly laugh at a joke, into the joy folder. When my husband would unknowingly run his fingers along my scar on the back of head, into the joy folder. All of those things could easily either have gone unnoticed, or been misinterpreted. Setting the intention primes our brains to look at things a little bit differently.
So although I do not believe at all that creating a beautiful vision board with pictures of a beach in Mexico will just take you there, perhaps that is your way of setting the intention to stick at the things you don't enjoy. The reminder of balance. The nudge to yourself to remind you it is okay to relax. All important things. We need to be clear though, in what really we are telling ourselves. Because the poster of the beach if it doesn't prompt you to do something differently, it is useless. Instead it reinforces the story you tell yourself that nothing good ever happens to you.
How can you make that wish, that desire, a vehicle for change? What small thing can you change about the way you react to your environment, will make a difference? We experience stimuli all the time, the world is constantly coming at us. When we are on autopilot we let the stories we tell ourselves run our responses. But they are just stories. We could be telling another story that feels better, feels truer. Every time something pops up for me where I get my back up, want to automatically refute what I am hearing, assume that they other person is just wrong or out to get me, THAT IS THE SIGN THAT I NEED TO CHANGE THE STORY. I'm not really that important, and I do believe that ALL people are fundamentally good.
Most of our experiences exist in our minds. This is why people remember things so differently, why we like different music and movies. This is what creates optimists and pessimists. The stories we tell our selves about the motives of everybody else are usually just stories. This doesn't me you have to put up with behaviour from others you don't like or that hurts you, we can set boundaries and communicate. Your people will have your back. But they only thing we truly have control over is how we choose to respond to life. So I choose to respond in ways that align with the person I want to be. I choose compassion and joy.
My point is this. The idea that you can just think about money and somehow money will just start showing up for you, sounds and feels like a big turd to me. However setting an intention that you work hard for the things you want will help you remember when you want to quit that you are a hard worker. You can think about finding the right guy all the time, or you can set the intention that you will see each person as a soul. The only thing we can change in this world is really ourselves. True contentment comes from changing the story in your head to the truest one possible.
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