Do we really manifest?

For the last few years I have been questioning ‘manifestation’ and the extent to which we control this with our vision boards, manifestation mandalas, positive thinking and vibrational aligning, versus it happening anyway, regardless of our efforts.

It was my Reiki Master who put me onto the film The Secret, about the law of attraction – the idea that your thoughts and emotional states emit a frequency that magnetically attracts equivalent outcomes, and that anyone can intentionally manifest their desires by visualising and believing in their goals – which caught the attention of new age circles.

Around the same time, I will never forget standing by an Australian yoga teacher, a Hare Krishna devotee and head of a local yoga centre, who was married to a Guernsey lady at that time, and purveying his extensive lands near Byron Bay in Australia, when he shared with me his secret - that he had manifested the property and prosperity through The Secret. He recommended that I follow his lead and manifest greater abundance in my own life.

So I set to task, and filled a manifestation booklet with all my desires. I was travelling a lot at the time and I remember that I often fell asleep giving Reiki to this manifestation booklet held between my hands. This book was filled with all sorts of longings, dreams and wishes, from finding my soul mate to a life partner with whom to have children, from travelling around the world, to attracting new clients.

I put a lot of effort into manifesting during those initial years, not least working with my manifestation booklet but also using the Reiki symbols on manifestation mandalas, keeping vision boards and working with Sankalpas in Yoga Nidra too. In many ways it worked as the life partner and the children arrived, the world was travelled and the clients came, but I always wondered if all of this would have happened anyway, whether I needed to put in so much effort, trying to realise these dreams.

I also questioned whether all my efforts merely highlighted my lack of trust and faith in the universe – that I didn’t trust the universe to bring me whatever I needed to live a more harmonious life in alignment with my soul. Furthermore, I questioned the manner in which this lack of faith and trust caused me to try to control the unfolding of my life, and grasp instead.

Because there is something else I noticed. That often the most life changing moments in my life, the ones that set me on a new and more aligned, light, heartfelt path, were not ones I had specifically tried to manifest, but that came in anyway. Becoming a yoga teacher, setting up Beinspired, meeting E and then later my stone friend, the book writing, the trip to Nepal to trek Everest Base Camp. These things just came in.

With the yoga teaching, I had been immersing myself in yoga in Byron Bay, a place I chose to base myself because my heart demanded it, even though I had wanted to go to India, but the powers that be said Byron. And it was here I met a couple of male yoga teachers who inspired me to the extent that I was keen to continue immersing in yoga. As luck would have it, one of the men, Lance, was about to start offering teacher training courses, this before they became mainstream, so I applied and was lucky to be given a space.

Months after the teaching training course finished, when I was still immersing in yoga and cleaning in the hostel in exchange for accommodation, it was Lance who told me to return home to Guernsey to teach. His confidence in me and my passion for yoga, helped me overcome my insecurity and I added Reiki to my offering with the support of my Reiki Master.

Sitting with her one night, the name “Beinspired’ came through and the idea of using the chakras as a logo for what I wanted to bring to people – healing and freedom. I had never thought I might end up a yoga and Reiki teacher, but because I was so passionate about these practices and had benefitted exponentially from them, and while no one turned up to my first class, I felt compelled in many ways to keep trying and certainly the universe supported this.  

Because that’s the other thing on this soul path – it is never just about us. We are part of something much bigger, with unity and harmony the underlying energy. We each of us have a role to play in this if only we could recognise it and when we are aligned with our greater purpose, whatever that may be, then it is my experience that the universe rushes in to support us – and in fairness was supporting us long before we realised it was supporting us.

What I have also noticed is that the most life changing moments in my life have always been preceded by a fleeting thought or a feeling, that asks things to be done differently, even if that is turning up to a dolmen one spring equinox, or booking a trip to the Outer Hebrides, or visiting a particular second hand bookstore in Shetland just because of a feeling.

I had prayed for greater love and intimacy, I had longed to deepen my yoga practice, and I had been itchy to write again but lacked the momentum. The dolmen visit gifted greater love and intimacy, not in the way I expected it, and changed my life in exponential ways. The Outer Hebrides gifted a yoga teacher who told me about another yoga teacher who helped me find my way to my current yoga teacher, which also exponentially changed my yoga practice and therefore the trajectory of my life. Shetland gifted me two books which inspired me to write again, about grief this time and before I knew it I had written a book.

Not to say this all happened easily, each arrival brought with it a dark night of the soul as I was asked to let go of who I thought I was and the life I had been living to allow something else, something more loving, fulfilling and enrichening to come in instead.

Because here’s the thing, we can’t just pray for greater love and intimacy in our life, for example, and not expect to go through a process where we have to let go of everything, which gets in the way of this in the first place.

We don’t just hope to deepen our yoga practice without going deeper into it and facing our Samskaras, the scars and patterns, the shadows, that keep us trapped in more of the same.

We don’t just write a book about grief, without going deeper into the grieving process and our emotional landscape.

All of this was messy. All of this asked a lot of me. All of this found me on my knees. All of this ushered in many a dark night as I was asked to let go over and over again.

It was confusing too. Who am I? I was no longer the person I was before these events came in and yet I didn’t yet know who I was becoming. It helped me to appreciate that it doesn’t serve us to define ourselves or limit ourselves by title or role, that we are a being, an essence, having a human experience and there is no limit to our potential, once we get out of our own way.

That space that one enters during this process of shifting from one way of being to another is a little like being in the chrysalis. I was no longer the caterpillar, but not yet aware that I might become a butterfly instead. It’s hard.

In such moments I have a tendency to reach for what is known and certain, to try to turn away from the new path my soul has chosen, and go back to an old path instead. Old paths are known. Old paths are certain.

But really we are now too changed to go back, and it’s too early to feel confident about the step ahead. So we live in this in between world, a liminal space.

It’s not an easy place to be.

We long for certainty. Yet the universe doesn’t provide this. It gives us one step at a time, not the whole path ahead.

So we have to dig deeper into trust and faith, trusting that the universe has our back, and faith that whatever needs to drop away will be replaced by something more aligned instead. That ultimately we are safe and held in love

We have to remind ourselves over and over again that it is not about us, it is about the bigger picture and the role we play within this. Our current “me’ culture doesn’t help, we can easily confuse the little self with the big self, just like we can easily confuse meditation with disassociation or higher guidance for the desire of the ego mind - the mind is VERY good at pretending to be the heart.

Furthermore, the soul path doesn’t accord to current paradigms. It doesn’t care about Instagram and how many followers we have. It doesn’t care whether our book is a best seller. It doesn’t care about business models and whether our yoga classes are paying their way. It cares only that we are true to ourself and playing our role in the assignment we took before we incarnated here on planet earth.

But it also asks us to keep our feet on the ground. Not push those nudges into being, forcing our life in a certain direction just because we think it should be so, because we’re keen to be defined by a certain title or role, in our quest for recognition. We know when it is time for change. We know deep when the soul is guiding us. We also know, or will soon find out if the ego has been leading the show all along. And yet this too is all part of the journey, to reclaim the deeper self

The path demands discernment and patience.

Our dreams always come true if we truly open to them, if we are prepared to do the inner work. But they rarely manifest in the way we imagine and never in our time frame.  

They’ll come in, manifest when the time is right, regardless of our efforts at manifesting.

And yet here’s my disclaimer. We do have to do the work. The glimpse comes, the thought, the feeling, and then we need to align with it. We have to find the courage to make the choices that need to be made, to take action when the opportunity presents itself.

I am conscious from observing clients, that the universe does sometimes intervene, creates situations to get us out of a particular situation, which is slowly killing us, when we don’t have the courage to take the leap. I have seen how the universe essentially rescues us at the last minute, but it’s never easy, the situation itself can be messy, disciplinary meetings, threat of job loss, illness, all these things to get us to start paying attention and so in many ways the change is forced upon us.

I have also seen clients force the change, when the time is not quite right, and they have floundered because there isn’t enough grounding, they haven’t yet managed to embody all that is needed, to hold the space they are trying to enter, and I am reminded again how easily we confuse egoic mind for heart – which voice are we truly listening to, the egoic one with its loud demands and desires, or the quieter voice of the heart which talks gently.

Put simply, if we listen, quietly, to the heart, to those nudges and align and act upon them, continuously getting out of our own way, making peace with and letting go of all that’s been, then the change will come, when we are ready, in co-creation with the universe, gifting us the opportunity to cultivate greater faith and trust in the process. But we have to be ready, that’s key, there is a process that we must go through, to step into our place of becoming, to begin again, for the new to enter our life in true alignment.

Love Emma x