Go Through, Not Around.
If you try to create a life you want by using manifestation tools to bypass experiences you're afraid of, you'll be sideswiped by them. Instead, expect to face fear and train your body to alchemize it
In today’s article I will share with you
👉🏻 Why, when attempting to manifest, it’s better to expect facing your fears & insecurities & train your body to alchemize them rather than try to manifest your way around them.
👉🏻 A big misunderstanding people have about the whole point of pursuing a fulfilling life.
👉🏻 Insight into the dual nature of transformation and how to restore the faith you lost in yourself when you tried those stupid manifestation tools that didn’t work.
Let’s get into it :)
Isn’t it funny that we wish transformation to be smooth sailing..
.. when every real life adventure teaches us that true calm is earned only when you’ve prepared for the worst?
I’ve come across a lot of people who like to stay in the visioning stage of imagining a fulfilling life they want to have one day, and are terrified of taking steps on the actual journey. Why? Because transformational journeys ARE a terrifying process, but NOT because they inherently are a terrifying process…
No, the reason why it’s terrifying to pursue your deepest desires of a fulfilling life, is because our culture lacks education in the art and science of transformation, and therefore vastly under prepares us for such rites of passage.
And it’s being underprepared in high-stakes situations that is scary… not the actual journey itself.
When I went out on my first overnight sailing trip this weekend, I was chillaxxxeddd AF. But not because i knew anything about sailing, and not because it was a smooth ride either.
I was relaxed because I was surrounded by experienced sailors who spent YEARS learning about weather, and water, who understood maps, and navigation tools. Who knew when to pull which line based off of what kind of wind. Who practiced staying calm docking 300,000 dollar boats that could possibly crash into million dollar boats.
Their bodies exuded a confidence and calm that was forged not because they’ve only ever experienced perfect weather conditions and never had to face their fears of getting lost. They earned it precisely BECAUSE in the past they had repeatedly lost control of the boat and had to train their minds and bodies to prepare for such situations.
As a result, I got the privilege of relaxing too, because I was in the hands of masters, who earned their relaxation. Without their mastery, my sailing trip would have been a complete anxiety-ridden disaster. I would not have even been able to manage getting out of the harbor by myself.
Most of us don’t apply this logic when it comes to the journey of pursuing our deepest desires for a fulfilling life.
We don’t understand there is a whole holistic art and science to transformation that needs to be mastered. And if you think it’s going to be a cake-walk, you are going to be scared shitless when you are vastly unprepared for the journey ahead.
A lot of people, for example, think that goal setting, discipline, and pure willpower are going to get you to where you want to go. But I promise you, if you have trauma and unresolved behavior patterns, no amount of goal setting and willpower is going to help you get to where you want to go.
When people don’t understand that, and think all they need to prepare for a transformational journey is willpower, they are going to be quickly discouraged, and even find themselves in dangerous situations.
It’s like thinking all you need on a backpacking trip is sleeping gear and you forget food and a water purifier. Again the journey itself isn’t inherently scary. The lack of proper preparation and ensuing overwhelm is what’s scary.
We see other people manifesting the lives they want, and think “hey, how hard can it be? if they can do it, so can I” without realizing the years or decades of hard work those people have put into becoming a master of sailing/master of transformation. OR we don’t realize how much inherent transformational knowledge they had the privilege of inheriting from their families. These two things can make peoples’ transformational stories look like smooth sailing.
People want to manifest a perfect partner without re-living their family trauma.
People want to start a new business without facing their self-worth insecurities.
People want to have vibrant health without facing their fear of death.
Which is exactly like someone saying “I want to go on a sailing trip, but only if it's perfect weather the whole time, and only if I immediately know how to sail without spending hundreds of hours of my time on instruction, and only if there are no other boats on the water that might crash into me.”
And then they’ll think to themselves, “Oh I know what I’ll do! I’ll use manifestation to circumnavigate my fears. I’m going to rent a sailboat and rather than prepare for the challenges, I’m just going to try to ‘manifest’ a perfect weather day, or ‘manifest’ a waterway free from other boats.”
Then of course when they inevitably get lost, or collide with another boat, they get all disheartened and come to the conclusion that manifestation is bullshit, or that it’s better to suppress their desire to become a sailor, rather than face the adversity that comes with being forged into one.
A lot of transformational programs unfortunately market manifestation to us in this way that I believe to be very misleading. While I think MindValley has some valuable life-changing content, I also have noticed it is a stereotypical example of this kind of marketing.
They insinuate that if you visualize your dream job or dream person in the right way or if you follow their proven protocol, you will avoid undesirable results and attract the right circumstances to you that will be free of any adversity whatsoever. EASE is emphasized in this ad. Wouldn’t it be nice to get everything you wanted… easily?
Well, I can tell you after a little over a decade of experimenting with transformation and manifestation myself, and watching other people do it… that it’s easy for some and incredibly hard for others. It can be easy like riding a bike can be easy once you go through the hard process of learning how to do it.
Because there is a curious dualistic nature in manifesting that a lot of people don’t want to talk about, either because they don’t understand it, or don’t want to believe that it exists. It’s also highly unmarketable because people buy solutions to their problems, hoping they don’t have to go THROUGH them.
But I’ve learned that if you come to expect that you will face your fears along your transformational journey, much like a sailor hopes for good weather but must also prepare for bad, that is when you will earn transformational mastery. If you only want to manifest the light without the dark, you will be unpleasantly blindsided and pummeled by your unconscious fears.
I’ve watched people manifest free housing or living situations, still only to be riddled with scarcity consciousness. I’ve personally manifested my most ecstatic dream partner and worst nightmare in this very same partner simultaneously. My ex literally had a split personality (it was like being in a relationship with 2 completely different people from one moment to the next). I’ve watched people manifest dream jobs only to not enjoy them because they felt completely insecure.
I’ve worked with big name New York Times best selling author type coaches who publicly let people know how they manifested their dream partner and millions of dollars…
…but then behind the scenes, revealed how they also promptly lost those millions of dollars and almost got divorced.
We need to talk more about the dualistic nature of manifestation because something deeper is happening in the process that most people don’t want to acknowledge, which is a SOUL-FORGING process.
Our deepest desires and hopes are married to our deepest fears.
I think we all subconsciously know that pursuing our desires will subject us to our fears, which is why many of us decide to not pursue them in the first place.
But the universe likes to dangle carrots in front of us for the purpose of integration.
If you don’t pursue your desires, which will inevitably make you face your fears, and go through the soul forging process of integration, you will suffer a cold death of never really having lived. If you do pursue them, you will also suffer another kind of death, but its the kind of death-rebirth process that makes you feel unbelievably alive and proud of yourself when you come out the other side.
Want to inspire and impact thousands of people? Great, you’ll be able to do that when you integrate your fear of being a worthless imposter. Want the love of your life? Great you’ll be able to have that when you digest your daddy issues.
What most of us DON’T KNOW about pursuing our dreams, the cosmic joke so to speak, is believing that we will get fulfillment from ATTAINING OUR DREAMS AS WE IMAGINED THEM. ..
We mistakenly believe that fulfillment comes from having ARRIVED. Which is emphatically NOT where fulfillment comes from…
…Fulfillment comes from the INTEGRATION of your desires and fears. Fulfillment comes from the SOUL FORGING PROCESS that happens WHILST you pursue your dreams.
Fulfillment happens when you have learned how to heal the split between your psyche, when you become WHOLE, when you have dissolved the polarity between your fears and your desires to the point that you don’t care if you fail, and you don’t care if you succeed, because you are completely content and loving towards yourself no matter where you are at in the journey!
And then ironically, when your soul has been forged enough to exude this ‘content unity’ within yourself that neither desperately grasps at your deepest desires or repels your deepest fears… guess what.. that is when you get EXACTLY what you want without the strings attached and hidden fees.
There are people who manifest exactly what they want quickly, without catches, and without much effort…
…They are doing it because there isn’t a trauma or split in their psyche around that area of life or around having that particular thing.
For example, it’s been easy for me to manifest amazing meals that people want to make and share with me for free, because I never had any hangups or traumas around food being provided to me. It is very different for my friend who grew up in a situation where her next meal wasn’t guaranteed.
Contrarily, it’s been harder for me to manifest trustworthy people, because I had hangups and traumas around betrayal. I know people who have zero hangups around trusting people, and walk in the world like it’s the safest place in the universe. Guess which one of us kept manifesting untrustworthy people? Guess who needed to work harder to heal her psyche to manifest people she could trust? Muah.
People who manifest exactly what they want quickly can unfortunately often be horrible teachers at transformation and manifestation, because they think that simply writing down your manifestations, or creating a vision board is going to be enough to get what you want.
Well, when you have a unified psyche, manifesting what you want CAN BE as simple as just remembering to ask for it, creating a vision board, or just focusing on receiving it as if it has already happened. But these people won’t know how to teach you how to manifest when you’re psyche is split and warring with itself.
They don’t know how to teach the unification process that needs to happen before you manifest.
I remember coming across a teacher who created absolute miracles in his life. Like out of this world miracles you think would belong in a fiction book. He tried to teach the people around him how to replicate his success. He realized his methods only worked for a small handful of people. When he further inquired as to why it worked for some people and didn’t work for others, he discovered some people held too much grief and trauma in their hearts.
So he just recommended that people go and heal their hearts before they took his workshops.
I found that utterly fascinating. As if “go and heal your heart” is a simple straight forward thing to do, and we can just find people who know exactly what that means, how to do it, pay them to do it, and come back next month to his workshop when we are all better.
*eye roll*
In my 8 years as a dance teacher, I had to swallow my pride tremendously when I realized that a one-size-fits-all protocol to teaching dance was never going to help everyone. There was always someone I was leaving behind in that approach no matter how basic or comprehensive I thought my curriculum was.
I thought it would be easy peasy to get students to focus on a basic 8 step combination. Welp! Wasn’t easy for my ADHD students. I thought it would be easy to teach them how to memorize choreography. Welp! wasn’t easy for my students who had traumatic home lives that inhibited their cognitive function.
One-size-fits-all manifestation and transformation protocols WILL work… but only for a SMALL HANDFUL of people.
If they don’t work for you, it’s not because manifestation or transformation doesn’t exist. It’s because that curriculum is not tailored to your blueprint, or designed to meet you where you are at.
It is my firm belief that the best educators need to move away from these one-size-fits-all educational models, and get good at personally attuning to and customizing individual learning paths for each unique student.
There is another group of people who manifest exactly what they want quickly, and my theory is that they had a family who somatically transmitted their knowledge to them via osmosis at a young age.
Much like me being on a sailboat around sailing masters allows me to get a relaxed and intuitive transmission of sailing that I wouldn’t need to earn the hard way (i.e. find a course, sign up for it, pay for it, go through the arduous process of asking questions, and trying, and failing, renting my own boat to continue practicing etc.)…
…there are people who come into families where the adult caretakers’ psyches are more healed than most, who are good at manifesting, and their children somatically inherit their wisdom. They grow up knowing a certain way of being that is second nature to them that they don’t even have to think about. The less they need to think about it, the less there is a need to articulate how it works.
I surmise that some souls get this head start in transformation and manifestation knowledge because their life path isn’t meant to waste time learning how to manifest. They’re meant to learn in this lifetime how to wield and manage the huge things they are manifesting.
Kind of like how some people are born with a musical gift because their soul’s path is to learn how to wield group consciousness via music in massive sold out stadiums. They don’t have to go through the process of overcoming their fears enough to just perform at an open mic, while others spend their whole lives learning how to do just that.
The innately gifted rockstars therefore, aren’t the best teachers of music because they haven’t struggled with it enough to articulate it. Instead, they serve a another important but different role, which is inspiration.
The best teachers of music are the ones who have struggled with it up, down, and sideways. Because of their struggles with it and persistence to master it in spite of adversity, they can empathize with the whole shmorgezborg of hangups their students come to them with, and can expertly customize a learning path for each one.
That’s kind of how transformation and manifestation were for me. I struggled with it up and down and sideways. I didn’t inherit a unified psyche from my family that was passed down to me.
I would watch people left and right surpass me in their transformation and manifestations with half the effort, absolutely infuriated with the discrepancies in energy/time input —> output/ result ratio.
These discrepancies caused so much confusion for me as to whether manifestation was even real, and why people got such different results than I did, that it made me want to study it tremendously more than most people even cared to bat en eyelash about it.
So if you my dear, like me, have been frustrated by manifestation and transformation, please know that nothing is wrong with you. You most likely have been educated… or rather miseducated… by people who don’t understand how to unify psyches, or who don’t know that one-size-fits-all protocols will not work for everyone.
I advise you, in any educational endeavor you pursue actually, to seek out the teachers whose craft did not come easy to them, who nevertheless had a fiery passion to understand it, and stayed long enough to develop real mastery with it. They will disseminate and customize information to your learning journey the absolute best.
I hope to be one of those teachers for some of you!
Which brings me to reiterate my main point again.
When you initiate a manifestation process, the dualistic nature of reality WILL manifest both the light and the dark to you. The desires and the fears. If you EXPECT this soul-forging unification process is going to happen…
…if you EXPECT that fulfillment will be attained not by what you hoped would happen exactly happening, but that fulfillment is attained in the process of becoming WHOLE…
Then you can then happily, confidently MAKE SPACE for the fears and obstacles to arrive, with confidence and a deep knowing that they are PORTALS for your transformation, integration, and unification process. You won’t have to waste time wallowing in the misconception that obstacles are a sign from the universe that you’re doing manifestation wrong, or that you’re not meant to have what you want, or that you should just give up.
Like a sailor prepares for their real world journeys by learning how to master ‘bad’ weather conditions, you will master the art of alchemizing ‘fearful’ experiences until you have learned how to integrate them. And it is my job to train the people I work with how to become a master of alchemizing fears along with other intense sensations.
That way, on the journey of pursuing your desires you can meet your fears with a smirk saying “Hey trouble, I was expecting you! I’m so grateful you’re here, I just can’t WAIT to learn what you have to teach me… I am so excited that I’m about to become more whole!”
When you know you can expect to face your shadows (because that’s simply how the dualistic nature of our universe works), you can trust you’re still on the right path and surrender when these fears greet you. You can trust that true fulfillment happens in the soul-forging integration process. That even if you don’t get exactly what you thought you wanted, there is still a VERY good reason you have those deep aching soul desires embedded within you that scare the shit out of you and nudge you forward…
And that you are ABSOLUTELY meant to pursue them.
Because why else did we come here? I believe we ultimately came here to split apart only to then again BECOME WHOLE.
So how does one become a master of alchemizing their fears?
Well there are many tools designed to fit many different blueprints. You can unpair your stories and judgments of emotions from actual bodily sensations, you can learn to let your nervous system discharge, you can kinkily embrace the unconscious shadowy desires that your conscious mind hates, you can remove yourself from your identity and become pure presence, and many more tactics.
I will release more blog and podcast classroom episodes in this DIY Substack school over the next few months and years that will detail these tools so you can try them for yourself.
In the meantime, if you’re someone who likes to learn from experienced sailors so to speak, is tired of one size fits all programs and is ready to be held in the process of transformation through customized attunement…
I provide 1:1 three month long somatic transformational programs (that you can re-up in 3 month increments for as long as you would like) to help you transform ANY area of life that causes you trouble.
It doesn’t matter what area of life it is (health, prosperity, purpose, relationships, etc.) these transformational principles are universal and apply across the board.
You can read about the program details HERE
You can schedule a free 40 min call with me to see if we are a good match for working together HERE
Alright that’s all I got for you today.
Now Go fly :)
<3
Annika
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