The Miracle Way

My model for both coaching and manifestation has three basic parts:  choose, align, receive.  Choose, bring your thoughts, emotions and actions into congruence, and that choice will become manifest.

Conversely, if what you’ve chosen does not become reality, you are either in conflict with your choice or your thoughts, actions and emotions are not congruent with each other.

This can be a hard conclusion to accept.  When we don’t get what we’re trying to manifest, it’s often more comforting to look outward for an explanation:  the economy, the weather, other people, traffic, lack of exercise or poor diet, birth order, astrological indicators, politics, personality type, parents, kids, etc.  And there will always be more than sufficient external reasons why the struggle continues.

Yet no matter how much energy we apply to resolving, or coping with, or conquering the external, the miracle will manifest only when we achieve internal congruence.  The primary challenge will always be dissolving the barriers and obstacles we generate for ourselves.

Of course, we do rarely create obstacles consciously.  You’ve probably never woken up in the morning wondering, “Okay, how can I impede my best good today?”  You’ve probably never gone to bed thinking, “Ah, how satisfying it’s been to keep myself stuck for yet another day.”

Consider that any emotion laden with negative or destructive energy is a form of resistance.  (Refer to Victim or Interpreter emotions on the Emotions List.)  Victim emotions are the most immobilizing.  They are never ambiguous; when in their thrall, you feel powerless.  Interpreter emotions are more elusive.  Sometimes they might nag and chafe and spur you to positive action; other times they lie buried deep within, strangling good intentions with silent tentacles.

Your results are always the best indicator such resistance persists–and there will always be an emotional component.  In the areas of your life where you feel contented and successful, your positive and creative emotions flourish and bear fruit.  But in the areas of your life where struggle persists, so do forms of buried resistance such as ambivalence, confusion, fears, false beliefs, past injuries, etc.

Always assess your results.  If you’re not manifesting what you want, look for the block within.  Perhaps you’re willing to recognize it and release it, yet have no idea where to start.  So let’s consider what you may be dealing with.

Beliefs: Beliefs about the way the world works begin in infancy.  To a baby, everything is fresh and unknown.  As the receptive new brain starts putting the pieces together, it draws conclusions simultaneously with gathering data.

One of the primary goals of a human being, even as a newborn, seems to be resolving the unknown.  We want to know what we don’t know, and we can create answers with very little information.  Once we decide the answer, we tend to adapt further data to comply with the model we’ve adopted.  We take the pieces that fit and say, “Ah, yes, I thought so.”  If a piece doesn’t fit, we’re likely to toss is out.  When we are comfortable with an answer, even if the answer doesn’t serve us, holding on to it is easier than challenging it.

Fears: Where beliefs arise from our efforts to resolve the unknown, fears tend to arise when we can’t.  When looking into the unknown, it’s much easier for most people to imagine the worst than to imagine the best.  Anything you can imagine has creative power.  Imagining the best comes from and/or evokes positive emotions; imagining the worst comes from and/or evokes negative emotions.  It’s always difficult to determine which comes first, the thought or the emotion, but since they become inextricable entwined it doesn’t really matter.  When the unknown looms, dread often follows.  Fear can’t settle in without our permission, except many of the fears that inhibit manifestations took root during the formative years when we didn’t know enough to be discerning.

For instance, a child who overhears parents arguing about money may inhale the fear of disaster radiated by the adults.  With no way to evaluate the validity of the parents’ feelings, and trusting them to know the way the world works, the child associates the emotions with the subject. The parent’s fear of the unknown influences the child’s belief about money.

The fears acquired by way of personal experience can be easier to identify because we often adopt them consciously.  We don’t know what the future will bring–the unknown emerges ahead of us like a great dark cavern – yet we want to be prepared for it.  If we knew the darkness was temporary and on the other side was a beautiful sun-lit garden, we would stride forward confidently.  But we don’t know.  Therefore, we assume it’s just good sense to be ready for any eventuality.  So we prepare for the worst.  If we could stay detached and focus on preparation, all would be fine.  If dread sets in, however, we tend to cringe away.

Injuries: No one gets through life unscathed–from bumps and bruises to dismemberment; from wounded pride to deep emotional betrayal, from minor colds to life-threatening illnesses, we are fragile creatures.  For most of us, the will to survive compels us to heal, to keep going, to transcend, and to prevent such assaults (even minor ones) from happening again.

We bring the past into the present by identifying the circumstances, analyzing relationships, looking for cause and effect, etc.  Once we think we have a clear picture, we put safeguards in place, and then we project the past into the future.  In the past, when A happened, B followed.  Since we don’t want B in the future, we will avoid A at all costs.

Conflicting inputs: If three people witness an event, chances are high they’ll provide three different versions of what happened.  However, when the three people are all in a group and discussing the event, they tend to influence each other to bring their details or observations into accord.  If you are one of the people involved, you may find yourself adapting your version to correspond more closely with the others.  And this may cause you to doubt your own experience.  Did you see what you thought you saw?

This happens all the time, with ideas as well as observations.  When you listen to others more than yourself, you will likely learn to mistrust your own intuition.  This tends to cause confusion,  ambivalence and insecurity.

Erroneous inputs: Information comes in all shades of accurate or false, especially in this era of the Internet.  Lies, assumptions and propaganda are often presented with the assurance of truth.  Closer to home, sometimes people we know and trust mislead us – perhaps casually, perhaps purposefully.  When wrong thinking is represented as truth it causes victimization and injury.  If loyalty to the other person is allowed to further confuse the facts, the injury of the lie deepens, and bitterness, insecurity, dejection, misery, etc. take root.

While understanding the above conditions can be a good way to dismantle them, it’s fully possible to simply dissolve the barriers they create.  Consider the following strategy.

Become the Observer: Getting out of your own story can be very challenging, but if the story itself is keeping you stuck, it’s essential to trade the old story for a new one.  Here are some suggestions:

• Detach: Take three paces away from your life and watch it from a distance.  See yourself and the other people in your life as characters in a movie.  What do you see when on the outside looking in? Are the behaviors well-motivated and consistent?  Is the dialogue interesting or banal?  Do you want to cheer for yourself?  Can you see the emotions fueling your choices?  What would you advise yourself to do differently?
• Dismiss judgment:  Everyone in your life is doing the best they can with what they’ve got.  We all operate with some combination of insufficient information, strong beliefs, doubts and fears, past hurts, mis-information, exhortations from others, and ambivalence.  To balance the scale, we all have talents, intelligence, inner strengths, proven abilities, and past successes.  Accept your assets without pride, your weaknesses without judgment, and other people with compassion.
• Laugh at your resistance:  All forms of resistance gain in strength and tenacity when we take them seriously.  Certainly, you came by them naturally and honestly and you’ve probably done an excellent job learning to accommodate them.  You can still relax and laugh them away.
• Ignore them:  The less attention you give to impeding beliefs, habitual fears, past injuries, or conflicting inputs the less strength they have.  Refuse to give them a presence in your thoughts.  The more you think about them, the more your emotional attachment swells in response; your emotions give them energy, and when you give them energy, you give them power.  Take away the energy by choosing different thoughts.  Your emotions will follow, and different emotions will create different results.

Choose what you do want: As the observer, you gain an ability to choose, an ability unavailable to you while in judgment.  Think of judgment as a mud hole, keeping you stuck.  When you become the observer, you gain solid ground.  With a solid base under your feel, you can explore possibilities, and you can launch yourself in any direction you choose.

Choosing is an amazingly powerful tool.  If you don’t want illness, choose health.  If you don’t want poverty, choose prosperity.  If you don’t want conflict, choose peace.  If you don’t want confusion, choose wisdom.  Once you have chosen, decide the type of energy that will help bring it into your life, and embrace that energy.  Adopt it.  Make it yours.  Evoke it and live it.

Refuse what you don’t want: Remove what you don’t want from your slate of possibilities.  This isn’t about denying the current situation, or ignoring indisputable facts, or punishing the messenger.  Acknowledge what is, because today it is.

Tomorrow, however, can be different.  What if you decided the old belief could stay in the past?  What if you decided to not let fear create the future?  What if you ignored everyone else’s agitation?  What if you could believe that what you want wants you?  What if what you don’t want simply drops off your radar screen?  Change your mind; change your heart; change your reality.

Sometimes the barrier to what you want can be as simple as an unwillingness to receive.  Of course, this takes us back to the beginning, to the original intention.  If you retain an unwillingness to receive, it’s not a true intention.  Perhaps it’s not true for you, perhaps you believe you should want it, perhaps you’re not willing to release your resistance.  Whatever the reasons, you won’t get what you’re not ready to receive.

If you are willing, open your heart, your mind and your life and invite what you want to come on in.  (If what you want doesn’t accept the invitation readily, you’ve probably got some lingering resistance.  Look for any embedded Victim or Interpreter emotion, and continue working with the above strategies.)

Use a powerful welcoming emotion such as enthusiasm, eagerness or compassion.  Let the emotion you choose well up within you until you can feel the energy humming.  Using that emotion¸ bring what you want into you life with your imagination, and make a place for it.

For instance, if you want peace, and you’ve decided to create it with compassion, infuse compassion into your daily activities and overlay each activity with peace.  View all the people in your life with compassion and imagine them smiling and laughing instead of growling and complaining.  Apply compassion to yourself and imagine harmony with yourself, your tools, your efforts.  Extend compassion to your challenges and let peace reign over the situation.  Project compassion into the future and acknowledge the benefits that will spread out from you to others as a result of receiving peace into your own life.

And finally, be grateful in advance.  Give thanks for what you want as if it were already here, already yours.  Count the blessing that make it possible:  your talents, your intentions, your willingness, the partners and helpers who will appear and ease your way, etc.

And one last, final thing.  Use this phrase often:  “I release all resistance.”  Say it out loud and feel what happens to your body.  Review it regularly and see what happens with your manifestation.