Framing And Recent Manifestations

These are tasters, not deep dives, meant to spark curiosity. You root deeply, rise freely, and remember who you truly are. I'm going to take a few minutes here at the beginning to share some of my recent experiences with manifestation, both the ones that have felt successful and the ones that didn't. And it's really what's led me to want to talk about this on the podcast today. And I think it's useful because I'm willing to bet you're going to hear yourself in some of what I have to share. But that said, if you'd prefer to skip ahead and go straight to some of the common pitfalls in manifestation teachings, feel free to jump to around seven and a half minutes. As I talked about in the last episode, which you might want to listen to before this one if you haven't yet, last fall I really went all in on manifestation. I was focused on three things eliminating our family's debt, creating more spaciousness in my day-to-day life, and building a really full, thriving work schedule. You know, clients, retreats, courses, workshops, all of it. It felt like time. Like I was finally capable of going all in on all aspects of my life and doing it all really well. So I did everything right. Uh, I doubled down on budgeting, building out new offerings. I filled my calendar with so many workshops and classes and retreats. You know, I visualized every single night the zero balance, the packed retreats, the full schedule, and I trusted the universe. I really went all in with the manifestation practices I spoke about last episode. But then in December, something happened. Two things really. My husband got a job promotion. Yay. And I hit a brick wall. I had like somewhat of an existential crisis. Uh, you know, at the time, I was waking up at four o'clock in the morning to start working, then doing my normal day, staying up until 10 to keep working. And at the time, I thought I was inspired. I mean, I really felt like it was excitement, you know, momentum, alignment. But then all of a sudden, the week of Christmas, I had this major realization, which was that I was still trying to prove my worth by doing something I thought I had like quote unquote cured myself of a long time ago. But nope. Certainly parts of what I was doing were inspired, you know, motivated by joy and the love of my work. But a good part of it, I was still trying to prove that I am a worthwhile person. I hadn't been manifesting from freedom. I had been manifesting from pressure. And when I had that realization, honestly, my first thought was like WTF. Like, what in all that is holy am I still doing dealing with this demon? Seriously. I mean, after all the work, all the growth, all the therapy, all of the meditating, all of the things that I've done, you know, knowing all these techniques for becoming my best self and doing them, practicing them. How, how am I still dealing with this same limiting belief from childhood? It was so depressing. I was completely demoralized for about a week and was struggling to process it just internally on my own. And then finally, actually a couple days before Christmas, while I was wrapping presents with my husband, I had a complete breakdown with him, you know, explaining that like this isn't actually how I want to live. I don't want to keep missing out on time with our son. I don't want to feel this stretched, to always feel that pressure of my to-do list weighing on me. And, you know, plus my husband, who so often puts his foot in his mouse. I mean, he warned me about that particular tendency of his when we started dating, and oh, he was not kidding. Uh anyway, he said something in that moment that he's actually said many times before in the past, you know, years since our son was born. But somehow it finally landed. He said, Sarah, the only one pushing you this hard to do any of this is you. You don't have to. You could quit it all tomorrow and stay home. And if that's what made you happy, we would make it work. Which, of course, I mean, you can hear it in my voice now. I'm getting emotional, just remembering it. I mean, it killed me in the best possible way. And I have no idea what made it land in that moment when he said it so many other times, but it finally did. So since that moment, I've pulled back. I canceled what I could, I simplified where possible. I have tried to only do that which brings me joy when it brings me joy. And it's working. I mean, as I mentioned and like had that moment in the last episode, I am feeling the spaciousness that I was craving, which was one of the things I wanted to manifest. That's here. I'm feeling it more and more every day. However, I am not living that vision that I visualized before that I was so invested in, that that life that I was like so hell-bent on manifesting. The debt is not completely gone, though we are on our way. Some of my offerings have done incredibly well, but others haven't. You know, one of the events I was most excited about keeping on the calendar is this retreat on the chakras I'm facilitating in a couple of weeks. And I truly thought it was going to be packed. Not just thought, I felt it, I knew it. I could see it so clearly. And yet, six weeks out, I only had two registrations. Again, WTF. What is going on? I felt so defeated and so stuck and honestly like a failure and a fraud. Like, who am I to be teaching about manifestation when clearly I can't do it? Because it wasn't just visualization. I could feel that reality. So what went wrong? And all of that is what led me to this conversation, to wanting to do this two-part series on manifestation, because I want to talk about some of the pitfalls in manifestation teachings, how they can actually set you up for self-judgment and leave you feeling exactly like I did, like a failure. One of the most common critiques is that manifestation teachings can imply something like this. If your life isn't working, you must be thinking or vibrating incorrectly. For example, someone experiencing illness, they are visualizing themselves being healthy, eating well, believing that they can be cured, doing all the things, and yet they're still sick. Or someone struggling financially, or not even struggling, someone like me who just wants to be debt free. And yet they still have a balance on the credit card. If everything is framed as your vibration created this, it becomes really easy to start blaming yourself. Now look, I'm not saying there isn't some truth here. In certain circumstances, there really is truth to the idea, the knowledge that we create our world, every experience and circumstance we have. However, life outcomes are influenced by many factors. Social systems, trauma history, economic conditions, opportunity, access, chance, just dumb luck. Your vibration, what you were putting out in the world, matters, but you don't live in a vacuum. Other people, especially the people close to you, influence what happens in your life too. Take this promotion of my husband's. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had decided to pass on it. We made the decision together, but at the end of the day, it really was up to him, and he chose to go for it. Well, his energy, his vibration, that impacts mine. How this winter has gone for me has been largely influenced by that one choice and what my husband's going through right now. And then think about the larger forces at play. If you haven't noticed, the world is in a little bit of chaos right now. A lot of that has spun up and escalated in the last few months, especially the last few weeks. So, how might that be playing a role in the collective consciousness, which then filters down to each of us individually? I also think it's worth mentioning that your ability to manifest simply through your vibration has a lot to do with what level of consciousness you are operating from. A person who just started meditating, who's super stressed, getting poor sleep, has two kids, and is just starting to do deep inner work, someone who is still carrying a lot of what we call ama in Ayurveda, undigested experiences or emotional residue that creates toxicity in the system. Well, that person's ability to manifest cleanly is going to be very different from someone who has been meditating for 40 years, sleeps really well, whose kids are out of the house, and who, you know, goes on a detox retreat every year. Those are two very different nervous systems, two very different energetic baselines. It makes me think about all of those um Instagram reels of like the 20-somethings showing their perfect daily routine. You know, the protein smoothie, gym, meditation, journaling, cold plunge. And the caption is something like, we all have the same 24 hours in the day. No, no, no, we do not. That person does not even remotely have the same 24 hours that my friend has, who works a full-time job with a 45-minute commute and has two kids. Those two situations are not even remotely the same. Uh, it also makes me think about, you know, all those Instagram posts from people saying that they manifested a million-dollar business or their dream job, their perfect partner. And maybe they did, but there's something important here happening that we don't always talk about. You're hearing from the people who succeeded using a method. Well, there are so many people out there who tried the same thing without success. And those people are completely invisible. We tend to pay attention to the success stories because those are the people speaking the loudest, writing the books, posting the reels. But what you don't see are all the other contributing factors that helped that person manifest whatever it is: timing, skills, resources, networks, market demand, all kinds of circumstances that exist alongside mindset and energy. So manifestation stories can sometimes end up over-crediting mindset and energy and under-crediting circumstance. If you only listen to the winners, the method starts to look foolproof, even when it isn't. My point is this: there are far more variables at play than just your vibration or your thought patterns. So to say that manifestation isn't happening simply because you're vibrating or thinking incorrectly, it's just a huge oversimplification of reality. And when a system oversimplifies reality like that, the only place the blame has left to go is back onto you. Yeah, another problem with manifestation teachings, many of them, is what's called spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassing refers to using spiritual ideas to avoid dealing with emotional pain or psychological wounds. It's when you hear things like, you know, just stay in a high vibration, don't focus on negative emotions, shift your frequency, and what you don't want will disappear, and what you want will appear. Now, look, on the surface, these ideas can sound positive, but my concern is that they can subtly discourage people from doing the deeper work. You know, things like processing trauma, moving through grief, looking at your shadow, actually going to therapy and working your stuff out. Because if the message is simply stay positive and raise your vibration, then difficult emotions can start to feel like a problem or even like a failure. There starts to be this subtle pressure to maintain positivity. If someone believes that negative emotions will block their manifestations, they might start to feel afraid to experience hard things like doubt or sadness, frustration. But in reality, most therapists and contemplative traditions agree on something really important. Healing requires us to move through these difficult emotions, not bypass them. Healthy emotional regulation means allowing the full range of emotions. We've talked about that ad nauseum on here. You can't meditate your way around grief. You can't affirm your way past trauma. At some point, I will do a whole episode just on spiritual bypassing because it's a whole issue unto itself. And it can be like pretty subtle and sneaky in the ways it shows up. Uh, but we're gonna move past it now just because time. You know, I'm not saying there isn't value and a deep truth in the core manifestation teachings I went over last episode. In fact, a lot of what shows up in manifestation work overlaps with things that productivity experts and well-established psychology has been teaching for years. You know, the benefits to vision setting, working with identity-based behavior change, cultivating optimism and dealing with limiting beliefs, meditation, regulation, acting from purpose and joy, all of these things matter. But we have to draw a line somewhere between that and wishful thinking, and especially blame-based spirituality, particularly self-blame. Instead, it can be more helpful to think of manifestation as something like intention plus mindset plus aligned action plus openness to opportunity, not thoughts or energy vibration magically controlling reality. Intention and energy, it shapes our perception, it shapes our behavior, and that absolutely shapes our lives. But it does not give us total control over reality. Manifestation teachings often tell us if it didn't happen, you weren't aligned enough, your vibration was off, your belief wasn't strong enough. But I don't actually think that's the whole story. What if the manifestation didn't fail? What if it revealed the energy behind the desire? What if the universe or the divine or God didn't block the manifestation? It interrupted the pattern driving it, because maybe what we thought was alignment was actually a very sophisticated version of old conditioning. As I've been contemplating how, you know, blatantly some of my intended manifestations didn't pan out, I've actually found a lot of comfort in revisiting these basics. Because instead of asking myself, why didn't it manifest and trying to figure out where I went wrong, where I was vibrating incorrectly, I started asking a different question. You know, who was the version of me that wanted it so badly? And for me, the answer was pretty clear. It was a little girl who learned that she had to prove she was worthy of love. So the deeper question became what is here for me to learn? Maybe, once and for all, that I don't have to prove anything, that I'm worthy of love simply for being who I am. And once that old programming is acknowledged and loved, what becomes possible then? What's open and available now? What feels like aligned action now? That retreat that didn't ha only had two people sign up for it. Well, as I contemplated all of this, I realized I can change this. So I did. I talked to the retreat director. We shortened it up so it's only a two night instead of a three night. I slashed the rate for my tuition because I realized, you know, taking a day off of work and adding that extra night, that puts a lot of financial pressure on people. Maybe that's why they didn't sign up. How about I take all of these external variables into consideration and just rework things. Within 24 hours, I had two more people sign up, and that's continued. You know, one thing that I've decided to do as I sit with this question of what is aligned action now is to bring back a daily visualization practice that I love to do whenever I'm in this place of what now. It's just about inviting the divine to help inspire how you move out and act in the world. And what I love about it is that there's no actual intention setting in it, no vision planning, no trying to manifest something specific. Instead, the only focus is bringing in the light and wisdom of the divine, God, consciousness, whatever word resonates with you, and asking that intelligence to infuse my heart, my will, and my actions with its guidance. It's less about directing reality and more about listening for what wants to move through me next. When you are starting from a place of confusion, feeling lost, unsure what next step to take, I find this to be incredibly powerful. Because instead of trying to force clarity, you allow clarity to emerge. Members, there is a guided version of this visualization waiting for you on Patreon so you can experience this too. Because I wish I knew exactly what the next chapter looks like for me. I haven't fully integrated all of this yet. I am still grieving to a certain degree the vision of what I thought I wanted. It honestly feels like parts of it just sort of fell apart, and I'm sitting in this somewhat uncomfortable, uncertain place of like now what? If not that, then what? So if something in your life hasn't manifested the way you hoped it would, instead of asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe try asking, what part of me wanted this so badly? And what might that part actually need? And when you're looking for clarity, you can ask, if not this, then show me something better. I don't have all the answers for myself yet, but I do know this. It was not failure that led me here. Because as you heard in that last episode, when I had that aha moment while talking all of this through, because I am such a verbal processor, I realized I actually am manifesting exactly what I wanted, which is more spaciousness in my life. These days, you know, more often than not, I feel completely in flow. There is a peacefulness, a regulated, easy kind of joy to my days, the sense of openness and expansiveness. Now, maybe the specific details I came up with as what I thought were going to be the important components of manifesting that spaciousness, maybe I was wrong. You know, that that vision doesn't match my current reality at all, but it absolutely feels like what I was going for. If I trust that the universe has my back, that God, the divine, has my back, which I do, then this lack of manifestation of certain things is just as meaningful a signal as if everything had unfolded exactly the way I imagined. Sometimes the path forward doesn't come from forcing something into existence. Sometimes it comes from letting an old story fall apart so something more true, more authentic, more aligned can take its place. And if you are in a moment like that right now, where something you deeply hoped for hasn't manifested the way you thought it would, please hear me. You are not a failure. It may simply mean that life is inviting you into a deeper level of honesty, alignment, or healing. And sometimes that invitation is actually the beginning of something far more meaningful than the thing you were trying so hard to create. Thanks so much for listening today. I hope this episode helped you let go of any self blame or judgment if something you've been trying to manifest hasn't happened yet. Members, there are actually two guided contemplations waiting for you in Patreon. The first, heart empowered thoughts. The third is about 20 minutes, and it focuses on stepping into your own authority, listening to your inner voice, tuning out external noise, and learning to trust what arises within you. The second is the five-minute divine alignment contemplation I mentioned earlier. This one centers on inviting in the light and wisdom of the divine, God, consciousness, source, whatever language resonates with you, and allowing that intelligence to guide your heart, your will, and your actions. If you're not on Patreon yet, it's a membership platform where I share show notes, reflective prompts, guided meditations, other resources to help you really integrate the episodes on a deeper, more embodied level. You can check it out through the link in the show notes, and you get seven days free to explore it all. I hope you have a wonderful week. And remember, know who you are, love who you've been, and be willing to do the work to become who you are meant to be. Just a quick reminder: this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist, and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist, or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope it inspires you to grow, heal, and seek the support you need to thrive.