The Real Secret to Manifesting

 

The universe doesn’t give a damn about you. It may not sound like it, but this is good news. The universe doesn’t give a damn about you, not because you are not worthy or are out of alignment with the cosmos or have been put under a curse for ten generations. No, the universe doesn’t give a damn about you because it has no damns to give.

Many of us are taught to spend our lives hoping for something outside of ourselves to fix our problems and make us whole: a winning lottery ticket, a wise guide who knows all the answers, a guru, a guardian angel, or some magical being, force, energy, or genie sitting out there in the universe who will make everything work out for us. For years, I longed to believe this, too. I thought there was a stern cosmic parent tracking all our actions and deciding if we were worthy to receive our dream house or to meet our soulmate or to be cured of cancer. As a neuroscientist and physician, I know today that we have no proof of such a force or being but we have a great deal of scientific evidence of the power of our own minds to produce changes in our lives that may at first appear impossible. This is the practice of manifestation.

There is much confusion about manifestation in popular culture, so before I go any further, here is what I mean by the term: manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy. In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock.

Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions. In fact, the first step in successfully manifesting is to separate yourself from the belief that there is an external source for solving your problems, and that this external source is what is manifesting in your life. If you want to lead a rich, meaningful, and prosperous life, you do not have to appease any power beyond yourself. You simply must believe that the source of your well-being and success is nothing other than the power of your own mind. The reality is that the same mind that creates the obstacles to the life you want is also the source of the intention that will make the life that you want real. This is the real secret. The damn you give must be your own. This is the real magic.

Manifestation is about cultivating a fierce belief in possibility. Maybe you struggle to find meaning in the events of what feels like a haphazard existence, or you wonder why you and your loved ones have to suffer when there is no good reason to and you feel powerless to help. These struggles begin to limit your vision of what is possible and make it more and more narrow.

For years I allowed my environment to dictate the terms of my life, and I didn’t believe I could effect any meaningful change. This is so often the case when we experience trauma: the pain and shock of the traumatic experience take on an exaggerated authority in our minds that is difficult to challenge and frightening to confront. This pain is powerful enough to alter not only our own genes but, as researchers in the field of epigenetics have discovered, the genes of subsequent generations. Our minds and bodies organize around preparations to prevent a similar trauma from happening in the future, and in the process, our consciousness becomes caught in reacting to a frightening and unreliable external world rather than envisioning the changes we can make. In the process, we give away the energy, attention, and focus we possess to make a real difference in our own lives; we are distracted away from our own power. Without knowing it, we trade our innate self-agency for magical thinking. It’s a raw deal.

The world can indeed be starkly unfair, and this unfairness can shatter a person’s dreams. And as unfair as I once perceived the world to be, I know today that countless other human beings in this world are treated with greater injustice, on both the individual and systemic levels. The societies they live in have created structural roadblocks that limit their ability to manifest, whether due to their race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, gender expression, or other arbitrary criteria. Still other people are afflicted by serious illnesses of the body and the mind and can find little relief from their suffering, which also affects their belief in their ability to manifest. Manifesting is not a cure or a fix for all suffering. Like all human activity, it can be limited by countless factors beyond our control and reality has the final say, regardless of our intention. That being said, if there is a possibility of change, using the techniques of manifesting will more likely than not help bring it about.

I was moved by a story I heard once about a POW during the Vietnam War who practiced an attitude of “long-term nonspecific optimism.” He did not know if or when he would be liberated and he recognized that his situation was outside of his control: to fight his captors was to possibly be killed or to lose the will to live from despair. Instead, his conscious practice of optimism allowed him to remain hopeful that his circumstances could change. He used the power of his mind to keep his belief in the possibility of freedom alive. It gave him resilience. And when he was released, his attitude of optimism helped him not to focus on the past but to look forward to future possibilities.

Thus I see manifesting as, at its heart, a practice of well-being, engagement with the world, and living a good life. By practicing it, we cultivate dispositional optimism, defined as a generalized tendency to expect good outcomes across important life domains. Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health to how quickly wounds heal to slower disease progression. Where some may believe that the only measure of a successful manifestation is the material results it delivers, I consider this view to be misguided. The true gift of visualizing our intentions again and again is to go through life with a buoyant sense that things will work out for us, which liberates us to be both responsive and resilient no matter what our external circumstances bring.

from the Introduction to Mind Magic by James R. Doty, PhD