What Do You Exactly Want?
I was reading a book about manifestation last week and the author gave a breakdown of her process.
One of the steps was: Identify exactly what you want.
This one really annoyed me, right off the bat, (which is typically a sign that something deeper is being triggered!). It seemed like an obvious given. Of course you have to know what you want before you can manifest it. That’s like saying: before you head out on your drive, make sure you know where you’re going and plug the address into your GPS.
Duh, I thought.
But as the day went on and I marinated with the author’s teachings, the concept of identifying exactly what one wants started to feel less like a given and more like a profound instruction.
I started thinking about the connection between Chronic Frustration (something I think of as ‘the compulsion to break your own heart’) and Not Knowing Exactly What We Want.
They feel inextricably linked.
The thing is, we think we know exactly what we want. Just like I think the keys are in my black hole of a handbag or I think I turned the heat off before going to bed but the precision of that knowing is loose.
Whenever we’re working with mental vagueness, we’re setting ourselves up for trouble.
There is significant focus, intention and coordination in bowling a perfect strike or hitting a bullseye. These kinds of wins don’t tend to just casually happen. And yet we get deeply hurt, angry and frustrated when the things we want for ourselves, to which we have not applied a great deal of focus, intentionality or coordination, don’t come to fruition in our lives.
Our lack of clearly understanding what we actually want creates the circumstance for us to miss it. This will happen over and over again if we don’t make the conscious connection between the two. And the more it happens, the more likely we are to say: “See, I’m cursed!” But we’re not cursed at all. We’re just unclear and unconscious.
If you “exactly want” to be in shape but you find yourself habitually eating carbs and sugar and resisting your workouts, then you don’t actually, exactly want to be in shape. You actually, exactly want, on a deeper level, to sabotage yourself because losing the weight may feel unsafe and being in shape may feel like a type of power that is unauthorized within your own psyche.
We hide from our exactly-wants. Because they don’t always make rational sense. But if your exactly-want isn’t crystal clear, conscious and honest, its satisfaction will elude you. Just as a discrepancy between numbers in the GPS won’t lead us to the right address. Accuracy matters.
Order matters, too. First we have to address the real, true, exactly-want. In the example I gave above, the exactly-want is to feel safe and comfortable inside our own power. If we know this clearly, we can start to explore what safety means to us, what it could look and feel like to trust that we’re safe. We could work with a healing practitioner around it, read, use affirmations and begin to build up a higher threshold to tolerate the change within ourselves.
As we feel safer, we can address the next exactly-want, which might be: feeling physically strong and sexy and secure.
We live in a state of subconscious sabotage much more of the time than we realize. But as we begin to know ourselves more deeply, we begin to shift from treading water to swimming toward the shore of our best lives.
Till next time, beauties : )
