It’s not about the stuff
You see, what you want, what you TRULY want is never going to be STUFF, or a situation. It’s always going to be a feeling, the feeling that you think this stuff or situation is going to bring you. You don’t really want a better job; you want to feel empowered, free, successful, appreciated, validated and proud of yourself. You don’t want a hot, amazing romantic partner; you want to feel loved, in love, appreciated, validated, secure, safe, excited, sexy and passionate. You don’t want a million dollars; you want to feel secure, safe, free and empowered.
When you understand that everything is just a representation of vibration, you can begin to wrap your head around the fact that what you’ve always thought of as the WHAT in ‘what you want’ is actually the HOW, as in ‘how what I want will come about’. You want to feel free, and you think that the only way for you to feel free is to win the lottery.
The car or house you want is a HOW, because what you truly want is what you think that car or house will bring you. The qualities you want to see in others belong in the HOW category; you want your boss to be nicer to you because of the way you think it will make you feel. This is one of the hardest elements of this work for people to understand and accept. It often feels to them like I’m trying to get them to give up on their desires. The mind often associates the HOW with the WHAT so strongly that when you try to take one away, it feels like you’re pushing both out the door. When I tell someone to stop focusing on THE ONE (romantic partner) they hear, ‘You will never be loved. Just accept it already’, which isn’t at all what I’m saying.
In the hoodlum analogy you were following the directions to a party and ended up in the wrong neighbourhood. If the party you wanted to go to was ‘love’, someone might’ve told you that you had to find THE ONE in order to experience it. And yet, as you saw in our example, following those directions didn’t get you to where you wanted to go. In fact, you ended up in a painful place. When you insist that what you want HAS TO come in a certain way, you’re making the directions more important than the destination; you’re insisting stubbornly that this is the way, and you will not even consider that you may be heading down the wrong path, even when the evidence would suggest otherwise (the neighbourhood becomes worse and worse). If you’re stuck in an unwanted situation, if you want something that you can’t seem to manifest, it’s almost always at least in part because you’re focusing on the HOW instead of the WHAT.
Letting go of the HOW is NOT the same as letting go of the WHAT. You get to have what you want, and it will manifest in the most awesome way possible (often way better than what you’ve been insisting on). What you cannot do is insist that you know what the best possible representation of that feeling is. You see your mind isn’t built to figure out the HOW. It doesn’t know where all the great jobs and hot men and women are. It doesn’t have the power to inspire all the relevant parties to be in just the right place at just the right time. The human mind simply doesn’t have the capacity to figure out what the path of least resistance, the path that will actually get you what you want, is. The good news is that it doesn’t have to. This is not the mind’s job. Figuring out the HOW is the Universe’s job. That computer is WAY more powerful than our brains, contains WAY more information than we can and can calculate WAY more data. Our job is simply to set the course for what we want and then follow the feedback we get. That’s it.
And yet, people still insist that they will never be happy if they don’t meet THE ONE dude or dudette, find the perfect job, win the lottery, get that promotion at work, or lose that weight. When you do this, however, it’s a bit like a child who’s asked his mother for chocolate pointing to a box labelled ‘Brussels sprouts’ at the grocery store and insisting that this is what he wants. His mother tries to explain to him that Brussels sprouts do not taste like chocolate and that they would be better off going to the chocolate aisle, but the boy, absolutely determined to get what he thinks he wants instead of what he actually wants, throws himself on the floor and has a tantrum. If his mother then gives in and buys him the Brussels sprouts, he will, of course, complain about how this is NOT what he wanted.
What you want is a feeling, an emotion. When you focus on that emotion, thoughts and mental images will come into your mind to represent that feeling. DO NOT get locked into insisting that this representation is what you truly want, just because it feels so good to think about it. Focus on it and let it morph and change as your vibration becomes more and more clear, more and more finely tuned to what you want.
In our example with the sucky job, you can use the statements of what you don’t want to help you figure out how you actually feel. Sit with each negative statement, make space and just allow the feedback to present itself. You’ll begin to feel something, or even have some thoughts and memories (see stage 3 of the Progression of a Manifestation), manifest that you can then focus on to amplify that feeling. Once you’ve acknowledged how you feel, you can then use that information to figure out how you want to feel. When you hit on the feeling you want, you will already experience a shift. You may feel a physical sensation, like a tingling in your stomach or goose bumps, or you may even cry. In some cases, simply focusing on what you want is actually enough to shift the resistance to it.
Once you do figure out what you want, you can then begin to focus on that feeling and let the Progression take you through the stages. Just remember, ALWAYS REMEMBER, that what you really want is the underlying emotion. Stuff is nice, and you’ll have plenty of it when you become a match to the frequency of what you want (and it will be better than you imagined!), but as long as you insist on the stuff over the feeling, you’re actually trying to create a feeling by first creating a physical manifestation. Now that you understand how the Progression of a Manifestation works, you can see why that will never work.
Chapter 10
Using the Progression to Release Resistance
The key to manifesting or receiving everything you’ve ever wanted truly lies in your ability to let go of any beliefs, or automated decisions, currently blocking or negating that goal. Sometimes, simply figuring out what you truly want will already be enough to shift those limiting beliefs. This will be the case when you can already reach the vibration of what you want, meaning you’re not too far from the feeling of what you want on the Spectrum. If you want to love and be loved, and you can truly generate that feeling within yourself, simply marinating in this feeling will be enough to activate the frequency of what you want, starting the Progression of a Manifestation that will match that wanted vibration. Thoughts, memories and ideas, synchronicities and experiences that feel like love will start to show up in your reality.
When there is little resistance to something you want, simply focusing on something that generates the feeling of this thing you want will be enough to make you a match to it and manifest it into your reality.
The problem arises when you can’t fully generate that feeling – when you’re currently in a part of the Spectrum that’s too far away from the emotion you’re reaching for. In that case, you’ll have beliefs that are blocking you from fully achieving resonance with the frequency you want.
The fact that the Spectrum is a Progression means that you can’t jump from ANGER to JOY, or from DEPRESSION to HOPE. You can progress there, but you can’t jump. Keep in mind that incremental change doesn’t have to be slow. You can progress quickly, but you do have to allow it to be a Progression, which is incremental by nature. Even when someone makes what we call a ‘quantum leap’, which is when you make an extreme vibrational change in your life (you seemingly jump from one part of the Spectrum to a much higher part of it), they are still going through a rather large Progression. They’re just doing it very, very quickly. Even though I’ve made such quantum leaps, I don’t recommend them for this reason: releasing that much resistance at such a high speed is usually incredibly uncomfortable. If, however, you don’t care about the discomfort and still want to know how to orchestrate such a
leap, I’ve included some resources to guide your hard-core behind in the right direction at the back of this book (see Appendix II).
The important point to remember is that change always happens incrementally. Techniques that don’t respect this fact, and attempt to move you from one part of the Spectrum to any part that isn’t right next to where you are in one go, will fail. This is why, when you actually hate yourself, you can’t just chant ‘I love myself! I love myself!’ and have it do anything but annoy you. You cannot generate a feeling of love off the back of a feeling of hate. The two are way too far apart. You can, however, progress up through the groups of the Spectrum in order to reach love.
In the analogy with the telescope, I explained why you can’t focus specifically on what you don’t want and then instantly shift to focusing specifically on what you do want without first backing off. You’ve now learnt that you back off by focusing on the emotional essence of what you want, instead of trying to define it. You find the frequency of what you want and then let the Progression bring you more and more details that match this vibration. When you have resistance, however, your focus won’t be ‘clean’. You’ll be focusing on the frequency of what you want (or at least in that direction), but also focusing on something that contradicts (or resists) the frequency of what you want. This creates static, like when you’re tuning in to a radio station, but haven’t quite found the sweet spot. You can hear some music, but there’s also a bunch of white noise. Your vibration in that moment is ‘dirty’ (and not the good kind of dirty). When you first start to focus on what you want, you will never be able to focus on it in a totally ‘clean’ way. You’ll never be able to hit the frequency on the head exactly. The best you can do is to get into the vicinity of it and point your telescope in the general direction (at the part of town that contains the building you’re looking for). You will always have static at first.
I really can’t stress this enough. So many people write to me and complain that they don’t really know what they want, or can’t really envision what that might look, never mind feel, like. They often beat themselves up for not being visionary enough, or feel like they can’t succeed at manifesting what they want because, after all, if you can’t tell the Universe precisely what you want, how can you ever get it? But here’s the thing: you don’t have to tell the Universe what you want, the Universe already knows. Every experience you’ve ever had spawned desires, and this information is being held in your own, personal database. Not a single detail was ever lost. As long as you become a match to the feeling you want to achieve, and therefore a match to the frequency of what you want, the representation of this precise frequency, the stuff or experience that will feel exactly that way to you, will have to manifest.
Remember that your thoughts, memories and ideas, including mental images of what you want, are a result of your vibration. This means that if you are currently a long way away from the emotion you want to achieve on the Spectrum, you CANNOT envision the perfect representation of what you want. It’s not a match to where you are right now. But that’s totally OK. As long as you find the best-feeling representation of what you want that you have access to right now, you will start a Progression of a Manifestation that moves you in the right direction.
By continuing to focus on what you want to the best of your ability (listen for the music amid the static), you’ll continue to activate the frequency of what you want, and you’ll also be activating the frequency of whatever resistance is blocking it.
Let me just take a moment to point out the significance of that statement. You have millions of beliefs (possibly more). All of them are destined to become obsolete or limiting, at some point. There’s no telling how many of them are outdated at this moment. Instead of hunting through all of those beliefs randomly in the hopes of finding and releasing one that will actually make a difference in your life right now (telling your life story and hoping that something jumps out at you or your therapist as a red flag, for example), which can take years, you use the concepts of focus and the Progression of a Manifestation to activate the precise belief system that is currently blocking what you want. No hunting required. How exciting is that?
So, not only will you be starting a new ‘positive’ Progression of a Manifestation, which matches what you want – therefore making it easier to hear the music – you’ll also be starting a ‘negative’ Progression of Resistance, which matches your limiting belief and what you don’t want, so making the static more obvious, as well.
In this way, you’ll be turning up the volume on both the bit of music you want to hear as well as the static. In other words, you will begin to manifest both elements that represent what you want, as well as elements that represent what you don’t want. The goal is to recognize both sets of manifestations for what they are – representations – and attune yourself more and more to the frequency of what you DO want. Of course, when you do this deliberately, you don’t have to wait until both of these Progressions manifests in the physical (although, it’s OK if you do). You can simply allow the unwanted or ‘negative’ Progression of Resistance to build just enough for you to recognize what the belief system is and then change it, effectively getting rid of the static and allowing you to hear the music more and more clearly. The ‘positive’ Progression of a Manifestation, what you do want, will become more and more predominant, until it’s the only thing left. Your manifestations will continue to get ‘cleaner’, until the only thing that’s left is precisely what you want, with no negatives attached.
You don’t have to settle for less. You don’t have to pay some kind of price. You can fully experience the frequency of what you want, and all the manifestations that match it. In other words, you can finally manifest the reality you’ve always wanted.
The Progression of Resistance takes exactly the same course as the Progression of a Manifestation (see Chapter 4 or Appendix III for a quick reminder of the step-by-step process of the five stages). The only thing is, you might not realize it. Because limiting beliefs are dependent on denial (unawareness), and that denial will have almost certainly been going on for quite some time (all or most of your life) – you won’t be able to feel the feedback as acutely. The negative emotions won’t be as apparent. In fact, you may not be aware of them, at all. But that’s OK. Remember, if you don’t notice the messenger, it will knock louder. We’re going to use this Progression to become aware of the resistance that’s currently blocking what you want.
As you continue to focus on what you want, building both Progressions – what you want and don’t want – you could feel some negative emotion (stage 2), but as I already explained, you may not notice it. This means that the first evidence of your resistance that you’ll be able to engage with will often be in stage 3 – thoughts, memories and ideas. It’s interesting to discover that even though you’ll be doing your best to focus on the feeling you want in a general way, the feedback you’ll get will often be incredibly specific. The way in which your resistance manifests will depend on what, exactly, will best represent that energy to you personally.
The ‘yeah… buts’
As you begin to focus on what you want and enter stage 3 of a Progression, you’ll begin to think of or ‘see’ representations of what you want, perhaps a better job. At this point, you may be asking, ‘Wait a minute! I thought you said that the job was a HOW and that I shouldn’t focus on it!’ Let me explain: When you START with the feeling you want, and then let the Progression bring you representations of that feeling, you can use those representations to help you strengthen and stabilize your vibration. In other words, if you start by focusing on the feeling you want and the idea of a better-feeling job pops into your mind (one that actually feels good to you), you can certainly focus on that better-feeling job as long as it continues to feel good (stay on the ‘positive’ Progression) and as long as you don’t insist that this job has to manifest exactly as you’re seeing it.
So, as you focus on that great-feeling job, you’ll a
lso manifest your resistance, which will often show up as contradictory thoughts and statements. These types of thoughts are what I like to call the ‘Yeah… buts’. Whenever you activate what you want, any resistance you may have will show up in the form of justifications for why you can’t have what you want (or rather, the representation of what you want, such as a new job). The great thing is that even if those statements are contradicting stage 3 of your ‘positive’ manifestation (the idea of a better job), they’ll still be pointing you in the direction of your limiting beliefs (your resistance).
Here are a few examples of some ‘Yeah… buts’:
‘I’d love to have a bigger house! Yeah… but I can’t afford it/the housing market is bad right now/people will think we’re showing off/etc.’
‘I want so desperately to be in love! Yeah… but I’m too ugly/too fat/too poor/in the wrong town/not good enough/etc. to get a partner.’
‘A holiday with the whole family sounds amazing! Yeah… but my boss will never give me the time off/we can’t afford it/foreign countries are scary/the garage needs cleaning and I should do that instead/etc.’
‘I’ve always wanted my own business. Yeah… but being self-employed is risky/the economy is bad/I don’t know what I’m doing/it would be crazy to give up my secure job even though I hate it/my family won’t approve/etc.’
Deliberate Receiving Page 16