Some Magic for the Coming Year
Seven Steps to manifest what you desire in the coming year:
First: what is your current dominant emotional state? Fear? Anger? Excitement? Joy? Love? Defeat? Grief? Ambition? In
terest? Awe?
Second: Breathe into that dominant emotion. Expand around it. Give it space.
Third: What is at the root of that emotion? What’s the first thing that comes to mind?
If it’s fear, what are you most afraid of? Write that down.
If it’s anger, what are most angry about? Write that down.
If it’s excitement, what are you most excited about? Write that down.
What ever the dominant emotion is, get to the root and write that down.
Four: What can you build from that? How can that spur you on?
But Thorn! Some of these feel negative! Aren’t we supposed to release our “negative” emotions in order to manifest what we desire?
Sometimes. Sure, if we’ve been holding onto old fear or anger for years, it might be time to let it go. But we don’t let go of things by pretending they aren’t there. We can’t release things by being in a state of denial and covering it all up with hearts and rainbows.
Fear. Anger. Grief. They are all pointing to important things. And sometimes, our biggest growth and greatest inspiration comes from those places, usually, if we find a way to combine them with love.
For example, I would guess that almost every freedom fighter and justice advocate comes from some combination of anger, grief, and love. The anger or grief is the seed that tells them what direction to head in. Love gives them the impetus to act.
This returns us to the process of manifestation, we were at Four: What can you build from the kernel at that dominant emotion? How can that spur you on?
Five: What is the first or next action you can take toward manifesting what you desire? Write that down. Does it feel too big? Too daunting? Too terrifying?
Look at it again. Can it be broken into even smaller actions? Or does something need to happen alongside your main next action? Maybe you need to learn to act and learn to call a therapist. Maybe you need to learn to act andget more training.
We don’t need to wait until things feel perfectly ready, or we feel perfectly healed, in order to manifest what we desire.
For example, when fiction came knocking at my door after I’d closed that door years before, the first thing I did? I started writing. I wrote to the best of my ability. I wrote out of order. I wrote where the energy led me. Then I figured out how to edit that mess into a cohesive story. Then I asked friends to read it.
Then I started taking classes with a couple of long-term professional fiction writers to hone my craft. And while I studied, I published that first book. I wrote short stories. I planned more novels. I studied and studied and studied while I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I learned as I went.
And that’s how life occurs, doesn’t it? We learn as we go. We make mistakes, repeatedly, and if we persist? We grow.
So that’s part Six: Figure out what else you need as you take that first action. Gather resources, friends, or education.
Part Seven of manifesting what we desire?
Keep going. Don’t let failure stop us.
One of my writing mentors, Dean Wesley Smith, has a great dictum I return to again and again and that is: “Fail to success.”
We set goals or have aspirations, and we stumble. Life events get in the way. Or some of our emotional states stall us out. Or we make mistakes because we are learning, and that’s part of the process.
But when we look at that failure or those mistakes, what are we left with? What do we have?
We have something we did not have before: we have more words, a bunch of wobbly pots with streaky glazing, a half finished class, a project that only got part way off the ground, an attempt to help a whole community that only helped two people.
All of those are successes we would not have had without trying, without failing to reach our stated goals or desires.
We are no longer starting from zero.
We have something more to build on.
So, step seven leads us to the totality of manifesting what we desire:
Take what is at the heart of you and act.
Keep breathing. Keep reassessing.
As soon as we act, the future changes, and therefore, so does our goal. Our task is to remain present and adaptable.
Our task is to continue to try.
Wishing you all good things.
If you learn best by watching and/or listening, I made a short video to talk about the lessons in this essay. You can find it here: Seven Steps to Manifest Your Desires. More videos in the series will be coming every week, so make sure to subscribe!
Both this essay and the video were made possible by the generosity of my Patreon supporters. Thank you, everyone!