We Need to Talk About Manifesting

Last week, I came across a piece written by the excellent Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi called ‘Manifesting: the problem with 2020’s biggest wellness trend.’ In it, Mahdawi detailed how, thanks to the enormous mental health deficit caused by Covid, a whole new generation was turning to the idea of ‘manifesting’, from TikTokers to YouTubers. From late March to mid-July, she stated, Google searches for the term had skyrocketed 669 per cent in a trend which British Vogue has described as “the materialisation of a thought or belief into physical form, based on the idea that our mind is a powerful tool for creation.”

As with many of the other mainstream pieces on manifesting, the article poured scorn on this notion of aligning with your desires and so making them all the more likely to happen. And the thing is, perhaps a few years ago, I would have agreed with them. This kind of hocus pocus woo-woo thinking was well outside my comfort zone. Like many other Irish people, I had been raised to treat any kind of New Ageism with serious disdain and dismiss it as just another fad pumped up by a load of lost desperados who have too much time on their hands, and not enough sense.

But, as much as I had clung to this approach - to the point that it was a hill I was willing to die on - events caused me to rethink this take, and like many things, it was brought about by a traumatic time. Having gone for therapy in my mid-thirties I had already unearthed the ugly truth that I had a really terrible inner dialogue constantly going on, one that had been running unchecked for decades, and had such a firm hold that it was the only truth I really believed in. As time went on, I also then realised that I was by no means the only one, particularly not as a woman, born in the mid-seventies in a country that was full of shame, insecurity and self-loathing.

While some therapy helped me shine a light on all the unconscious bias I had toward myself, drawing my attention to the shitty inner dialogue, it didn’t fundamentally change how I felt. External successes that followed did, as well as a stable relationship and kids, and just being too busy to think about it that much. But the break down of that relationship challenged all that again and made me realise that while I’d band-aided the situation with perpetual motion, therapy hadn’t really solved the core issue of essentially never feeling like I was enough.

Then, through my sister, I discovered Abraham Hicks, a motivational speaker for want of a better word, who has been professing the merits of manifesting and the laws of attraction for decades. It was her teachings that became the basis for the bestseller The Secret which as Mahdawi points out, is reaching a whole new audience who have become interested in manifesting. The book is also at times used as a stick to beat the philosophy with, with some describing it as “McDonald’s for the mind”, which is as dismissive as it gets.

In fairness, it is an easy target. As human beings, we believe in the empirical, in what you can see, touch and taste as being the only reality. We invest heavily in the idea of the actual, in what is. So our focus is on what has already come to be. But, taking Hicks’ approach, what you have manifested is old news. It serves a purpose in that it causes you to know what you do and you don’t want, something only comes about through experience. Where we can come undone though, says Hicks, is that most of us don’t follow the thought of the desire but instead focus on why we want what we want, and also on the lack of it.

Manifesting, the way Hicks describes it is just like planting a seed. We don’t expect it to be born immediately, but we know it will grow, with time.

For that in-between time, our only job is to not obsess over it not coming to fruition just yet. Which when translated into big life events, is much harder than it sounds. But there is a process in garnering that patience, which brings us back to the idea of that inner dialogue. Our one job, claims Hicks, is to feel good in the anticipation of what’s coming. Our work is to continually marshal that inner dialogue so when the thing we want comes along, we are ready for it.

Hick’s approach involves the continual practice of finding good feeling thoughts wherever you can, and mostly this is about talking yourself, and your environment up, not down. But while Hicks’ method can feel hard to grasp, there are others who do the same thing with a more practical approach. Marisa Peer, a psychotherapist, has pioneered her Rapid Transformational Therapy teaching, which is just about reprogramming your brain to do just that, through meditation and hypnosis. Also a firm believer in manifesting what you want, her process is not to focus on what didn’t work out for you as in more traditional forms of therapy, but on continually positive affirmations. Again for many, this may be a massive turnoff.

And I get it. But the truth is, right now, we are living through a vacuum of positive thoughts and events. Our days have been reduced down to tiny circular movements meaning there is more space than ever for those negative thoughts to take hold. So, despite the woo woo overtones, I would argue that the process of manifesting, of dreaming of better times, with the actual practice being to find good feeling thoughts as we bide our time, is as good a philosophy for surviving this shit show as any I’ve heard.

If for nothing else than for the pure notion that despite all current evidence to the contrary, I do believe we are here for fun. Yes, fun, that thing that seemed to die last March. But it will be back, and I for one want to be fully lined up to drink it all in.

Jessie Collins, November 2020.