What’s Manifestation?

Manifesting isn’t necessarily hard because we are constantly doing it whether or not we are intentional about it. The tricky part comes from embodying what you want to manifest as if you already are that person who has it. And if your mental health is plummeting, it will probably be difficult for you to imagine your life any other way than it is right now.

So if this happens to you-you’re trying your hardest to manifest positive changes but you’re not getting the results you wanted-it’s likely a sign from the Universe saying it’s time to take charge of your mental health. 

How Do I Manifest?

Sometimes, the Law of Attraction can ruin your mental health. If this happens, there are probably a few reasons, and they have nothing to do with manifesting or the LOA. Rather, they have everything to do with the current state of your mental health, and your motivation behind wanting to manifest. 

People with poor mental health and mental health habits are often desperate to try anything to improve their situation. But what they don’t yet realize is that acting out of fear and desperation will only make the situation worse. Especially if they continue to associate their self worth with tangible material items. 

It can be pretty demotivating if you’re working to manifest something positive for yourself, and it doesn’t seem to work. But that doesn’t mean you have failed. It means you need to change your approach and your mindset.

In my research for this book, I realized the people who say the LOA ruined their mental health, or that it heightened their anxiety/depression, went into it believing all they had to do was “think positively” and their life would transform overnight.

And because they weren’t able to change their thought patterns immediately, they ended up experiencing shame, guilt, and feelings of extreme inadequacy. They most likely thought to themselves, “I cannot think positively therefore I can never manifest positive things for myself, so my life will always be horrible.” Of course, we now know that there is so much more to the LOA than just thinking positively.

Managing our mental health can be painful sometimes. It’s tempting to punish ourselves for thinking and feeling the way we do. But how is that going to change anything? When has beating ourselves up ever resulted in anything positive?

When we’re in this mental space, all we can do is meet ourselves where we are. Accept where we stand now and continue to express gratitude towards the many blessings we already have. If we refuse to see what blessings we have, or if we refuse to be happy with the blessings we have, our mental health will never improve. 

Positive Manifestation

Positive thinking is the “secret” to a genuinely happy life. However, the biggest myth surrounding the LOA is you must always be positive no matter what. “All negative feelings are bad and will attract bad things, therefore you must only ever have positive or happy feelings and thoughts in order to attract good things.” This is called toxic positivity and it cannot be any further from the truth.

If you find yourself feeling very sad, the worst thing you can do is not allow yourself to really be sad. It may seem counterintuitive because we have been conditioned to repress unpleasantness and replace it with positive thinking. But sadness is there for a good reason. If we invalidate our own feelings by not allowing ourselves to really feel them, it will be next to impossible to manifest abundance. 

While positive thinking is vital to manifesting abundance, it’s not realistic to only ever be positive. There is a major difference between feeling your feelings so you can move on from them and completely replacing them with “positive” feelings so they can be ignored. 

Everyone feels bad sometimes, and everyone reacts differently to bad feelings. All emotions are totally natural and deserve to be felt. 

How boring would life be if we never experienced a full range of emotions? Why would we even have the ability to feel all these different feelings if they didn’t mean something to us? These “low vibration” emotions get such a bad rap. People often mistakenly believe that if they are feeling low vibes, then they will attract only more low vibes.However, this is not how the LOA works. 

The LOA reacts to your core beliefs more than your emotions. How you’re feeling today doesn’t necessarily represent how you feel about your entire life. Core beliefs are not the same as emotions, even though emotions often arise from core beliefs.

Allowing yourself to feel low vibe emotions will not put a damper on your deliberate manifesting efforts. Even master manifesters do not manifest instantaneously. It takes a buildup of energy in order for the Universe to respond. So feel your feelings and get to know yourself better.

In fact, allowing your low vibe emotions to exist will ultimately make you a happier, more well-rounded person. You’ll likely be even more grateful for all the good things in your life if you’re aware of the not-so-good things. You’ll be able to move on from those low vibes sooner. You’ll be a stronger, healthier, and better person for it. 

If you carry a core belief that there are no good people in the world, you’ll only ever attract “bad” people to you because the LOA can feel this belief in your soul. This may make you feel very sad and defeated, which piles onto your existing core beliefs. This energy then builds up, and the Universe will respond to it. 

How Do You Manifest?

Our human brains have evolved to focus mostly on the negative things, purely in terms of survival. And there’s a tendency to blow the negative way out of proportion. If we are afraid, we are less likely to put ourselves in a situation that could kill us. This primal belief continues to bleed into our modern society, and some people are committed to embracing it.

People committed to being miserable are likely stuck in a coping mechanism (or several) that makes them feel safe. They rationalize with themselves that it’s better to stay in a negative, familiar mental space than to step out of their comfort zone into the unknown—no matter how great the rewards might be. 

If someone lives in a toxic negative mindset and they don’t know how to break free, they might benefit from “faking” positivity in the short term. Here, breaking the habit of perpetual negativity is crucial to moving past it. This could be done by quickly replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. This could do wonders for someone who hasn’t had a positive thought in a long time. 

Eventually, they will have to work through all that underlying unpleasantness in order to make real, lasting progress. This “thought replacing” technique is only meant to help open doors to new ways of thinking and being. It’s a very thin line, but it can work for some people. As long as they are not committed to being miserable. 

Think of your low vibe emotions as a long, underground tunnel. You enter the tunnel, either on purpose or you find yourself there somehow. You look back down the tunnel where you came from, and you can easily obsess over the path you already took that brought you here.

You can sit down on the ground, swallowed up by the darkness, wishing you could go straight up through the ceiling to escape, but you know can’t. Or, you can also glance backward and acknowledge where you came from, and when you face forward again, you can clearly see the way out of the tunnel.

You have to keep walking through the darkness for a bit, but you will get to the light soon. You know if you keep walking, you will be free. 

This is the difference between a negative mindset and a positive mindset. A negative mindset leaves you stuck, refusing to see all the distinct possibilities in the outcomes. A positive mindset acknowledges what brought you here and helps you see the light at the end of the tunnel. There are possibilities in positivity!

Spiritual Manifestation

Toxic positivity exists, as does toxic negativity. The former ignores the darkness, while the latter ignores the light. Toxic positivity is not how anyone manifests good fortune. We can’t live life to the fullest if we are only focusing on the lighter emotions and ignoring the darker emotions. Doing this will cause repression and resentment.

Over time, darkness will build up higher and higher, until we cannot ignore it any longer. And then we end up having major mental breakdowns because we are so overwhelmed with emotions we don’t know how to deal with. 

Positive thinking is only a small part of transforming your life with the LOA. If all our thoughts are negative and self deprecating, how can life be anything more than difficult? There is a major difference between putting ourselves down and leaning into our negative emotions. Learning that difference takes a lot of self-awareness and self-forgiveness.

The negative emotions have something to teach us and expose us to. We can work through them, let them go, and grow as a person. Negative self-talk is often the result of trauma and years of suffering. It teaches us nothing other than how easily thoughts and opinions manipulate us. The negative emotions will probably dissolve away much quicker than the negative self-talk will. 

In order to dissolve either, we definitely need to put in the effort, which gets easier as we learn to differentiate between a negative opinion about ourselves and a negative emotion triggered from an outside circumstance.

Both are important to work through before we can truly adopt a more positive mindset and therefore be abundant. Does anyone really want to live with a negative mindset forever? I can totally understand the appeal of the “perpetual positivity” myth, especially for those who have stuck in perpetual negativity. 

But unfortunately, positive thoughts alone are not enough to change anything. Mindset is an important piece of the puzzle, but that’s all it is. A single piece in a 1,000 piece puzzle of life. The phases of manifesting are: ask, believe, take action, and receive.

If you ever come across anything LOA related that tries to tell you all you have to do is “believe” and you shall receive, throw it out. That is patronizing and absolutely false. Believing and positive thinking is only one part of manifesting. It would be pretty awesome if all we had to do was order the Universe to give us what we want and then just wait for the Universe to deliver.

But it doesn’t work that way. Anyone who truly believes life can be transformed only through changing our thoughts and nothing else has been fed lies. I’m sorry to burst anyone’s bubble-I would love it if that were true, but it is not. 

We have to be willing and ready to do our fair share of the work. We are manifesting regardless of how much (or how little) conscious effort we put into it. Choosing to put in no additional effort at all will only result in more of what we already have. Which isn’t always a bad thing, but if we’re looking to change our circumstances, then we have to change what we’re doing that has brought us here. 

One of my favorite proverbs is “nothing changes if nothing changes.” Wishing for something to change but we don’t take any action to change it is just a waste of our energy. Energy that we could spend on actually making changes. The wishing and the believing are very important to manifest abundance and transform our lives, but it is literally only half of it. The other half is action. Honest, dedicated action.