Manifestation Magic
Hello friends,
I want to thank you for joining me on my journey every week. I appreciate you.
Since it is end and start point on the calendar most of us reading use, I’ve been making plans for the next year. What do I want to create? What are my health and productivity goals? What new things do I want to learn and try? How will I continue to seek out enjoyment and contemplation? How will I make space for joy?
This brings me to the magic of manifestation. Part of that is mindset, which is why one of my new ventures for 2023 is to revive my languishing YouTube channel with fresh weekly content in a series called The Magic Mindset. My amazing Patreon folks are helping fund this work, the way they help with all of my ventures.
The video series starts with an essay, and the essay ends like this:
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.
You can read the whole of the essay here: To Manifest What We Desire. It’s worth going through all seven steps, I promise. And for those of you who prefer to listen and/or watch? I riff on this essay in a short video here: Seven Steps to Manifest Our Desires.
As we come to the close of another year on the Gregorian calendar, I wish you every good thing and hope you join me in the coming year as we all manifest more of what we desire in this world.
Thanks for being here.
— Thorn
A perfect writing for this week. I'm 12 hours ahead of the East Coast of the U.S., so it's already late morning of New Year's day. I did a good deal of reflecting and journaling yesterday and was quite surprised to discover that as crazy and awful a year as it has been for much of the world, for me, personally, it has been on of my best years in a very long time. It started off terribly with the typhoon that wiped out so many homes on this island here in the Philippines. My own rental house was damaged and needed about a week of full-time work to fix the roof and a couple of other things. And then there was no electricity on the island for about three months. Living without refrigeration is NOT easy, and I got pretty sick three times and lost more than 15 lbs. But then, once the electricity came back, I started making changes. I decided to live instead of just hanging around waiting to die. I had a major heart attack 5 1/2 years ago and the cardiologist told me I had about a year left to live. Ten months later I had surgery for cancer and we decided not to do chemo or radiation. Last spring, I had a bunch of tests done and when I saw my cardiologist she was in shock. There was no sign of cancer and although my heart is still greatly damaged and weak, the rest of my test results indicated an otherwise very healthy person She suggested I might be a cat because I seemed to have many lives. That's when I decided to push aside this notion of dying and get on with actually living. So, over this past year I've made changes...small increments that have added up to huge changes. My diet is about 70% overhauled. I don't use sugar or any fat other than olive oil. I eat lots of fruit and vegetables and am still working on bringing healthy beans and legumes into my diet on a more regular basis.
Over two months ago, I started a free Psychology course through Yale University called The Psychology of Well-being and through that course I began to incorporate other good habits into my daily life: drinking more fluids throughout the day; taking two, fifteen minute walks each day (my cardiologist' limit setting); adding writing a list of five gratitudes in my journal every morning; meditating 1/2 hour in the morning and another 1/2 hour in the evening (before the heart attack I did meditation regularly). Once that first psychology course was over, I signed up for two more: a Classical Music Appreciation course through Yale, and a World Literature course through Harvard. I've got six weeks of the music appreciation course done with only three left to go, and I've got a very solid "A" so far. The World Literature course is at the half-way mark and I'm doing "A" work in that as well. I can't tell you how much taking these courses has changed my life. They give my life structure and purpose. I've always loved learning, but there's a different texture to these courses than there was when I was slogging through college and graduate school while raising a child as a single parent AND working full time to keep a roof over our heads. Back then, I simply took the courses I needed to get my degree and did whatever was necessary to pass. Now, I have all the time i need to actually savor the course material. What a difference! I'm loving it. So..yes, 2022 certainly started out with lots of huge challenges, but out of that dung heap grew such wonder that I hardly believe it! I'm not just alive, but thriving.........and for that I am VERY grateful. I do hope that we all can manifest whatever our heart truly desires during this new year. That is my wish for us all.