This article is part of a series of articles on Power Tools of Manifestation, which begins here.
Feelings are the Engine of Manifestation
Manifestation requires passion, plain and simple. When there’s something you are trying to bring into your life, you need to feel great in your body while imagining this thing. Feelings are the engine that brings the thing into existence, and the more powerfully you can have feelings and the more powerfully you can rouse positive feelings, the more powerfully you can manifest the life you really want.
You need to be able to feel great in your body. This means getting to know your body and all its feelings, good and bad. Many people are so shut down that only the strong sensations register (hatred, fear, romantic infatuation). And for many people negative feelings are stronger than positive ones. It helps if you can become sensitized, so that small feelings (like delight, admiration, and the shiver of intuition that tells you when to avoid something or someone) catch your notice too. Most people live in reaction to their feelings like a boat tossed on ocean waves. To manifest consistently, you’ll have to learn to be in control of your feelings, to let them flow when you want to and transform them into something better when they are ruling you. If feelings are the engine, most people’s engines require a tune-up and better care.
Creating Negatively and Creating Positively
Fear and hatred are feelings and create as readily as love and joy. You can create with love or fear, but whatever you create will be permeated with the same feeling you saturated the visualization with. If you want to be happy, saturate your manifestations with happiness; if you are content being fearful, saturate your manifestations with fear. If you are comfortable with anger, you’ll easily saturate your manifestations with anger and create more situations to be angry about. Fueling your engine with negative feelings creates a downward spiral in which negative feelings create negative realities, which in turn create more negative feelings. Fueling your engine with positive feeling creates positive realities, which create more positive feelings. Fear creates fearful situations which create more fear. Joy begets joy. Manifesting is a spiral which will go forcefully in whichever feeling direction you fuel it with—and you can change direction whenever you like, simply by changing the feelings you are focusing on.
Here’s an example. There’s someone in your life that you just hate. It’s someone you are forced to interact with periodically, and you dread it. Your dislike of this person is so strong it’s palpable. When you think of them, your body becomes saturated with bad feelings. You are continually anticipating the next unpleasant encounter, even as you hope to avoid it. And then, when you actually do meet up with this person (which happens far more often than you’d like), of course it goes badly and you walk away with your dislike strengthened and validated. And feeling a little bit good because you were right about that person. Again.
So how much of that experience did you create? And how much of it will you create again next time? If we assume that the whole world is a dream inside your own head, then we can say that you created the whole experience from start to finish. This is an annoying but useful point of view, because it gives you responsibility for everything you experience, and with responsibility come power and control. This point of view implies that there’s something you can do about this kind of situation, some way it can be prevented in the future. Which is true, because there is.
Turn It Around in Two Days
Creating from negative feelings like anger and hate is a habit most of us have. It’s hard to break this habit, but it can be done, and it requires becoming aware of your feelings and your self-talk. Try this: spend a day being as aware as you can of everything you feel and everything you tell yourself about how you feel. On the first day just observe. Resist the temptation to act on what you are learning about yourself. Just watch what goes on inside your own head that first day.
Separate your thoughts and feelings. Notice which of the things you are experiencing are thoughts and which are feelings. Thoughts happen in words or concepts. Feelings are usually wordless and often are accompanied by physical sensations. If you hear yourself talking to yourself in your head, turn up the volume and start really listening to what you are saying. For example: “Oh there’s that awful woman again, I just hate her.” Notice the feelings you are having, the words you are saying to yourself about it all, and also notice the person herself. She is not your thoughts or your feelings about her. She is her own self, with her own life, her own thoughts and feelings, her own perspectives and perceptions. Separate these things.
On the second day, you are ready to start making changes. Observe yourself again, but this time, start to question your process. “I hate moon pies.” Why do you hate moon pies? Notice the feeling of hate. Where does it dwell in your body? Is it in your gut? Your throat? Your chest? If instead of moon pies you’d like to be offered soft pretzels, ask yourself what you love about soft pretzels. Take your focus off the dreaded moon pies and bring it to the beloved soft pretzels instead. Imagine yourself enjoying the pretzel and the good feelings of that. Do you love the saltiness, the softness, the warmth? Focus on what you love and then notice the lovely feeling that fills you. Then focus on that feeling itself. Strengthen it. Expand it. Blow it up. Ah, how I do love soft pretzels! Then hold it for at least 30 seconds and up to 5 minutes. You may be amazed at how fast soft pretzels will appear. Not only that, but at some point, probably much later, you may realize in retrospect that moon pies have not come around for quite some time. In delight, you can go on forgetting about the anguish of moon pies and focusing on the joy of soft pretzels.
Naturally, you cannot change a lifelong habit in just two days. However, two days is long enough to see the habit for what it is, and to begin breaking it. In two days you can get enough reward for changing that habit to motivate you to continue breaking it. Eventually the old negative-focus habit will be broken, replaced by a positive-focus habit and your ability to manifest will accelerate. It will become much, much easier to create larger, more challenging things faster. Most people need time and practice to grow into this.
The Fear-of-Disappointment Trap
When you haven’t had much practice, deliberately holding positive feelings can be downright uncomfortable. For many, hope is an uncomfortable feeling-state to be in, because it implies the possibility of disappointment. It is all too easy to grab onto that possibility of disappointment and make mental pictures of all the ways what you are hoping to create can go wrong. But once you head down that tunnel you are creating the very thing you are hoping not to create, and fueling it with disappointment and fear. This is a process that happens almost instantaneously for many people, especially those who are habitually cynical. Some folks will seek out and rehearse again and again all the things that might go wrong out of a mistaken notion of preventing negative outcomes by “thinking them through.” They have no idea that they are actually creating the negative outcomes they’d like to prevent and no idea that they are actually being ruled by their own fear and behaving like an emotional robot that can only run one program (a fearful one). They believe they are being logical. Then when what they want fails to appear, it’s only what they knew would happen. Then they get the side-benefit of being right and having accurately predicted what would happen. But getting to be right is a poor consolation prize compared to getting what you want. Such people tend to develop a chronically cynical or complaining tone of voice.
I’m not talking about ignoring possible consequences or deliberately cultivating a false naivete. Believe me, I’m in favor of exploring and preparing for all possible contingencies, including negative ones, but after a certain point it’s important to stop pouring negativity into what you are creating by obsessively going over and over negative possibilities in your head. And when it’s become a habit, you no longer have control over it.
If you are willing to be wrong and to be surprised by what the future can hold for you, if you are willing to feel hope and focus on that hope despite the magnetic pull of disappointment, you can break this habit. Clamping down on hope to avoid disappointment will only hamstring you. You’ve got to let yourself feel the hope, despite how uncomfortable it might sometimes be.
Create From Love and Passion
The best way to create powerfully is to passionately love the thing you are creating. If you do not love the thing itself, find something about it or something about having it that you do love. For example, I do not love parking spaces with a passion, but I do love the rush of validation I get when I find one, especially in difficult circumstances. So instead of focusing on the parking place itself, I focus on the moment of pulling into the parking place I’ve found, right in front of my destination, and the rush of joy that happens when I realize I did it. Again.
If you are having difficulty believing that what you want to create is possible long enough to have positive feelings about it, you must be able to rouse a good feeling which approximates the feeling of having what you are creating. Any good feeling, no matter how small, can help you, as long as you focus on it. Look for an aspect of what you are creating that you have absolutely no conflict about. Focus in on that and fill your body and being with that good sensation. Imagine the thing in as many sensory modes as possible (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) and place yourself inside the picture. Imagine it all from inside it: be there, in the future, with things as you want them. Go back to the good feelings. Notice all aspects of the good feelings. Roll them around on your tongue, so to speak. “Wow,” you may notice, “this feels good about it, and that feels good too, and so does that. . .” Dwell on the good feelings. Remember: they are the engine which makes the manifestation go. Hold them very purely as long as you can, for at least 20 seconds and up to five minutes. Do that every day. Then watch the thing begin to coalesce in your life, right before your eyes.
