02 Sep Manifesting…
Are you old enough to remember self-help books on affirmations and manifesting?
It’s a large pool of thought that suggests you can have what you want in this life if you engage in positive self-talk, visualization and acting as if you already have what you want.
I was surprised to learn that the hashtag #manifestation even this past May was used as a tag over 34 BILLION times.
Gulp. That’s a lot of times.
I think about the power and poignancy of longing…and disappointment… especially in terms of clients who do “everything right” and yet, still, the “thing” they want, the “relationship” they desire, the attunement or abundance they long for – aren’t there.
I’m thinking of a therapist I talked with at a conference. She said she’s tried everything and still the love she wanted hadn’t come into existence.
Or the professional wanting to be valued in her work but always seeing others get the applause that she so dearly longed for.
Oddly enough, our personal and collective experience with longing and change… is coming to mind as I prepare a new course I’m teaching in the fall on Embodying Attachment.
One of the key elements of the course is changing our Internal Working Model (Bowlby’s words): research in this area shows that adults keep their old attachment style in place throughout their lives 77% of the time.
Bowlby also reminded us that what shifts our IWM is an older, wiser person who helps us break down the developmental tasks into manageable bits.
Joseph Campbell saw this in the myths of old, that someone would show up as a guide or a mentor to help us shift the pattern.
Which had me noodling why, when we want to “manifest” something or bring “it” into existence… why don’t things change. Why don’t they change for the better?
Or, maybe it’s more fair to say, that “things” didn’t change in the period of time we wanted it to.
Maybe the ultimate question is…. why does it seem to work for some people and not others?
There’s limited research on the idea of manifesting. The few studies I read indicate positive thinking may help people stay optimistic.
On the other side, if people are using positive thinking as a means to subsume or pave over deeper negative orientations in life, well, then it might do them less good.
Maybe it’s why I’m committed to helping people build a SOLID STEADY SECURE SELF that can be with life no matter what happens.
It’s why I’m consistently developing practices that acknowledge the past and the pain while using self-compassionate embodied approaches to truly shift old patterns.
So… whether you have the external love relationship you want,
or the financial “success”,
or the number of followers or whatever … you can have a more solid, steady, secure self.
It’s also true when we look at trauma and attachment wounding.
Really crummy things happen to people regardless. Carol Dweck’s research on Mindset helps us here. It’s our orientation (our mindset) to what is happening that makes a difference.
The last few years I’ve been saying that healing trauma and attachment wounding is an Olympic endeavor. Healing takes practice. Enormous practice. It requires perseverance, consistency, willingness to navigate challenges.
Take a look at your own life – or the lives of your clients:
- Were there things you/they wanted – that never came?
- And were there things you/they wanted that showed up?
- What was different? Why one and not the other? Or both?
Thinking back into my own life I have enormous self-compassion (alongside bits of embarrassment and shame) about things I did, ways I was, how my Internal Working Model pre-oriented me.
There’s grief for sure. Deep sadness.
I’ve also realized those times (over decades) allowed me to do and be who I was, then. Grateful for that.
It also made me strong enough so when I had a few conversations with dear friends I was able to see the pattern of my life fall into place (without dying of shame).
Dealing with life in this way has, over time, allowed me to open to what the 13th century sage, Patanjali, wrote in the 2nd Yoga Sutra: “clearing the modifications of the mind.” And orienting to an embodied nourishing opposite.
Letting them flow in, through, around me.
Rising. Cresting. And thankfully falling, easing away.
No matter what happens, if we’re fortunate to have our basic human needs met and be in a position to focus even a little on healing… the absolute essential component in healing is to take life as it comes, allowing it to carve away what isn’t us so that the being that has always been there has room to grow, develop and flourish.