Manifestation
When I sat down to write this week’s newsletter, I was tempted to get chatGPT to write it. But you know, it wouldn’t be the same. AI may form grammatically sound sentences and compose coherent essays about anything under the sun. But you’d miss my warmth, you’d miss my wabi sabi.
I think back to all my sessions with clients where they’ve felt safe enough to open up, be vulnerable and emote. There’s healing in the collective silence that follows an emotional moment. There’s an acknowledgement of being imperfect, of not knowing all the answers, of hurting, of just being human.
I don’t know if all the AI generated text will ever amount to a warm hug from a friend.
It was 2006.
My aunt, who was learning astrology then, told me that I would meet my life partner in 2008. The husband and I started talking to each other in 2008. Coincidence? May be. But I was tempted to think otherwise.
Having been indoctrinated in science, sometimes it’s a bit challenging to fully embrace non-science (nonsense?). Nevertheless, I am equally curious about both because you know, there are things that are a part of our collective imagination, there are things that are shared with a few others and there are things that only belong to your own individual imagination. That’s okay (note to self).
About a year ago, I discovered manifestation. At first I was curious, and then I got obsessed. It took me down a rabbit hole of various self discovery and control techniques. I’ve had a year to experiment with this both personally and with some of my clients. It’s still very early days, but I wanted to share what I’ve personally discovered about meditation, subconscious and neural reprogramming so far.
1. Meditative state
The pre-requisite for going deeper mentally is being relaxed physically. You’re basically re-prioritising for your brain, so you’re able to expend more energy on your mind than the rest of your body. Getting to this state of your body isn’t easy. It took a lot of trial and error to be able to achieve a vaguely meditative state, and get my brain to disproportionately serve my mind. Marisa Peer has a bunch of videos on YouTube that has worked well for me in terms of getting into a hypnotic state quite quickly.
2. Exploration
People get very excited with neural programming, and try to “fix” every “negative” thought so they can start to call in positive things in life. But it’s useful to just simply explore all your beliefs while in a mediative state and examine it, rather than interfere with it. Examining something without interfering is not easy either. I’ve found it helpful to journal my experience/ observations while in a meditative state once I drop out of it. I find Lacy Phillip’s guided deep imaginings and journal prompts helpful.
3. Reprogramming
Once you’ve spent a few days, weeks, months or years observing your beliefs while in a meditative state and recording it diligently, you may be ready to review your observations. You will start to observe patterns in beliefs that may not have served you well in the past, and you may start to discount the utility of some of them in the future too. These are beliefs that you may consider reprogramming. You may have the will to reprogram, however, how they manifest into a reprogrammed belief is relatively fluid. I’ve learnt that it takes a lot of practice to stabilise.
4. Manifestation
The road to manifestation from reprogramming is an uncertain one. I say uncertain because you may attract a lot of things based on your reprogrammed beliefs. Not all of them are things you will receive. It hugely depends on your ability to differentiate between a real opportunity and a mirage.
If I were to break down the manifestation journey into different stages, I’d say getting into a meditative state is 50% of the effort. Exploration is 40%. Reprogramming is 9% and the last 1% is intuition, patience and commitment to your beliefs before manifestation.
This is extremely powerful stuff, so I wouldn’t recommend trying any of this stuff if you’re not feeling like it, because the intent to go on this journey trumps everything.
What I am listening to/ reading/ watching:
Lady Chatterly’s lover: In a world of polygamy and open marriages, this story hardly makes a dent in the modern society unlike the controversy this book caused when it was published in the 1920s. In fact, I could very well write one just about anybody today, we’re really in that era where people are finding multiple ways to satisfy their needs that remain unmet in a marriage. Technology is a HUGE enabler today.
Shapely Gal song: Parked Outside by Askling and Davai.