This post is a biggie. I started writing it over a year ago but kept putting it aside and shying away. Some of the concepts might trigger you. Ultimately, though, understanding what I’m about to share could be the key to living a more intentional life.
I’ll cover manifesting, personal responsibility, and what I call ‘reverse manifesting.’ Let’s get into it.
I’m curious to know who here knows what manifesting is. As in the less spiritual side of manifesting. The more logical explanation.
I want to explain it as I understand it so that you have a baseline before I launch into the rest.
Have you ever heard someone say they manifested their dream house, relationship, or career? The word gets thrown around a lot, but manifestation is nothing more complicated than creation.
To manifest something in your life is to create something in your life, and usually something quite specific. For example, to manifest a dream relationship, you might picture your future partner, make a list of their attributes, and then take steps towards meeting them. (This is the action part.) Your action might include using dating apps, going on dates, doing the self-work to feel worthy of the relationship, and creating space in your life for another person.
Granted that you’re clear on what you want, and especially if you understand a few of the other nuances of manifesting (regular visualising, behaving and feeling like you already have the thing and feeling content and grateful without the thing – a bit of a paradox), the chances are that you’ll manifest it. Sometimes with startling accuracy.
Here’s one of my manifesting stories:
I once did an online course on manifesting. The one thing that I wanted to change was my health. I wanted to be fit and healthy and energised. I did a vision board, started taking small steps and expected to wake up one day with HEALTH, DAMN IT!
The part I was missing was feeling like I already had it. Indeed, I mostly felt a lack of health and was regularly frustrated by my progress. Last year, when I overhauled my life, I finally nailed this part. I started to feel like I was already healthy, fit, and energised, and my health, fitness, and energy quickly followed.
I can’t stress this enough. It VERY quickly followed. I started wearing crop tops in November 2023 as if I were already thin, and in March 2024, I was. I felt beautiful without the thing, and then my outside quickly matched my inside. It was a massive lesson in the power of creation, flow, and EASE in attracting my goals.
You might have tried manifesting. You might not have. You might be very good at it. You might have never *quite* nailed the nuance. Either way, manifesting works because it tricks your mind into believing you already have the thing, and then the thing is magnetised to you energetically through your thoughts.
Now, I want to discuss the concept of personal responsibility. This will set the tone for ‘reverse manifesting.’
I first learned about personal responsibility at a Kerwin Rae conference in 2018, right at the start of my mindfulness journey. Personal responsibility is the idea that we have created our reality—the good parts and the bad – through our own beliefs and choices.
At the time, I was riding high at the peak of my influencer career, and I found it empowering to believe in personal responsibility. I hadn’t yet faced the fact that I had no real friendships, a trauma bond and shallow romantic relationship with Dreamboat, terrible health and an unsustainable work addiction. All of that juicy stuff was coming.
A coach I worked with in 2022 framed the concept of personal responsibility differently. She asked, “What must you believe about yourself to have created your current life?”
You’ve probably heard me talk about that moment before. It was a watershed moment for me. I was 42, pregnant, unemployed and without a business. I leaned on no one, asked for nothing and felt very lost.
I did some digging and realised that my beliefs about myself, success, productivity, and money had become my identity. I didn’t know who I was without them, and I felt unworthy of love.
It would have been much easier to blame my business partners, Dreamboat, the pandemic, my pregnancy, or even my mum for my circumstances. Blame deflects. It feels more comfortable. It would have been infinitely better than admitting that my choices led to my position.
But I started to unravel, bit by bit, every choice and action that had gotten me there.
I had poor boundaries. I didn’t speak up for myself. I settled for less than I was worth. I made choices out of fear. I made choices out of scarcity. I gave too much of myself and expected too little in return. A lifetime of conditioning had made me this way.
I examined the beliefs behind these choices. They were hard to look at.
I believed that I was worthless without success, that nobody would love me if I didn’t have money, and that people only liked me if I could somehow further them.
Subconsciously, I had solidified those beliefs in a million different ways, collecting evidence for them throughout my life, because this is how beliefs are formed.
As children, our minds develop, and we see the world from an egocentric perspective. We believe that everything in our world is connected to us. We form ideas about the world and our place in it from what we are exposed to—our parents, caregivers, siblings, and the media. Those ideas become beliefs over time as we gather evidence for them.
We gather a million different beliefs this way, many in our formative years between the ages of 2 and 7. Some of mine include:
“I need to be productive and helpful to earn love.”
“I need to do everything myself; nobody can do it as good as me.”
“I can’t rely on anyone but myself.”
“Money makes me worthy (of love/ acceptance).”
“The world is a scary place.”
“There isn’t ‘enough’ (money, time, resources, love, etc) to go around.” (Scarcity.)
These beliefs became foundational for me for many reasons, many of which stem from the fact that I was raised by a single mum who regularly said things like, “You can’t rely on anyone, Lauren. Make sure you always look after yourself.”
I’m sure she didn’t mean for me to take it so literally and make it the cornerstone of every relationship in my life, but that’s what kids do. We then conveniently block it out. It becomes subconscious, only appearing when it’s time to influence our decisions and reiterate what we already believe.
Personal responsibility isn’t about blaming ourselves for disempowering beliefs inflicted on us as children. Instead, personal responsibility is about doing the work to reverse the damage once we recognise we have these disempowering beliefs.
Consider yourself informed if you weren’t already.
This concept is the beginning of a new world. How can you change if you don’t think you’re doing anything wrong? How can YOU find the motivation to do things differently when you believe that other people, external circumstances, or the economy (for example) are responsible for your life?
Being the victim is easier on the surface. You can lament that you didn’t start your business because you didn’t have time, or you don’t have a partner because it’s impossible to meet people where you live, or you’re unfit because you can’t afford a personal trainer. But these are all excuses. Somewhere along the way, you’ve formed beliefs that sabotage what you want. So what are they?
If you’re unintentionally single, you can ask yourself, “What must I believe about myself that I can’t find a partner?”
If you’re unintentionally unfit, you can ask yourself, “What must I believe about myself that I don’t exercise?”
If you’re stuck in a job you hate, you can ask yourself, “What must I believe about myself that I don’t find a job more deserving of my talents?”
If you’re broke, you can ask yourself, “What must I believe in myself that I repel money?”
If any of the answers above come back as “I don’t have enough time”, ask yourself, “What must I believe about myself that I’m not prioritising my time for this?”
This brings me back to the topic of this email – reverse manifesting.
Ask yourself this: If I am not intentionally creating (manifesting) the life I want, how am I creating it?
Your choices and actions have created every bit of your life. Consciously or unconsciously.
If unconsciously, then you are reverse manifesting.
That is, you are unintentionally creating your life from your subconscious beliefs. AND I CAN EXPLAIN TO YOU EXACTLY HOW YOU’RE DOING IT.
Every night, when you sleep, your subconscious comes out to play in your dreams. Your dreams have themes, emotions, and narratives that illuminate your subconscious beliefs. Dreams are an amazingly underrated way of accessing what is below the surface.
When you wake up from your dreams and enter a state of consciousness, the line between the two worlds is blurred. And then you start to form thoughts.
Your first thoughts of the day will often contain a hangover from your dreams. If not, they will come from your subconscious beliefs. Most thoughts are subconscious. This will trigger an emotional response in your body.
Here’s how it works. The body cannot distinguish between a real threat and a perceived threat. So, if your first thoughts are stressful, your body will follow suit by releasing stress hormones that create emotion.
Emotions are physically felt. They are not an obscure concept. Your body releases hormones in response to external stimuli or thoughts, which are physically felt in the body. If you wake with anxious thoughts of everything you have to do today, your body will feel the emotion of anxiety as your body responds to the perceived threat.
Your insides clench, and your heart starts to beat a little faster. You might feel a heaviness or constriction in your chest.
These physical symptoms can pass quickly if an emotion is acknowledged and expressed. Intentional breathing, some intuitive movement or a physical release can all shift the heaviness of anxiety in less than a minute. The sensation can’t HURT us. When it is gone, it leaves only peace and certainty behind.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t give our emotions that space. Why? Because of the meaning we have given that emotion from our formative years. Just as we have formed beliefs about the world and our place in it as children, we have also learned that some emotions are safe and some are unsafe.
If you were taught as a child that emotions are unacceptable, didn’t have a secure attachment to your primary caregiver, weren’t taught regulation or were shamed for being “too much”, you’re now going to have feelings about your state.
These feelings are expressed as more thoughts, and the thoughts feed back into the emotion and keep you feeling that particular way.
Your nervous system can be activated at any stage of this process, including before you even wake up. As arousal increases, your nervous system goes from parasympathetic (safety) to fight or flight to freeze.
Just like emotions, a dysregulated nervous system is physically felt in the body. And it can be very uncomfortable.
You might start breathing even more shallowly, and your mind might become so unfocused that you can’t think straight or execute simple tasks. These responses will trigger more thoughts, emotions, and feelings (interpretations) that can keep you stuck in a state for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years.
Then, you might get out of bed and start your day.
Heightened.
Emotional.
Unresolved.
Dysregulated.
Your actions, habits, and behaviours will stem from here.
It is my experience that the way I begin most days is a familiar pattern from childhood. It is an unconscious, addictive feeling that is familiar to me.
I often have very anxious dreams. I might be running late for a flight or behind on a deadline. I might be trying to access information on my phone, but the buttons aren’t working. There is war and danger.
I usually wake up feeling activated, breathing shallowly and part way into fight-or-flight mode. My first thoughts are almost always, “What time is it? What do I have to do?”
Anxiety is usually present.
In the past, I would rush to get up and start doing things, not stopping to address my state or regulate. Not questioning where the thoughts came from. I would spend the day in that heightened, reactive, stressed out state, NO MATTER WHAT WAS GOING ON.
When I was working, it was understandable. Once I stopped, it became a little curious. Why am I so stressed about getting to the markets on a Sunday?
My rushed, anxious, stressed state (that came from my subconscious) created my reality. I was successful and got a lot done. My productivity in business and life was always on point. However, I felt like shit and just about every other pillar of my life suffered for my success.
I see a lot of people caught in shame cycles, too.
Subconsciously, they don’t believe they’re worthy of love. That they’re good enough. They don’t think they have anything of value to offer the world.
They wake up every morning lamenting everything they didn’t do the day before. They didn’t go to the gym. They didn’t work on their business. They didn’t eat well.
They feel guilty about bad habits, such as spending too much time on social media, spending money online, or eating too much sugar.
These depressive thoughts activate hormones that feel like shame in the body. They make themselves small. They disconnect from their body because it feels too uncomfortable in there. They use their phone to self-soothe, drink coffee to feel alive and use any means to distract themselves for every minute of the day.
This is surviving, not thriving. And I’ve been there, too.
What I wished I knew then, that I know now, is this:
- Subconscious beliefs aren’t real. Once you’ve acknowledged them, you can reverse them.
- Thoughts are not real. Thoughts keep you in cyclical, repetitive, old states. They can be scrutinised and changed through awareness and mindfulness.
- Emotions are simply messengers. They are not who you are – you are not anxious, though you might have the emotion of anxiety currently present in your body. You are not depressed, though you might have the emotion of sadness in your body. You can stop feeding it with your thoughts and interpretations at any time, express it and find PEACE in your core.
- Your nervous system is there to protect you, but it’s not very smart. If you recognise when it is dysregulated, you can come back to parasympathetic STUPIDLY EASILY – sometimes with a minute of breathwork.
- You can change your behaviors and habits at any moment. The second your thoughts say, “Quick, you’ve got to check your emails and get into work”, you can say, “Hrmm, wouldn’t I feel better if I did yoga first and checked my email after I’ve eaten?”
If you don’t do this work and continue to operate unconsciously, you will reverse manifest your life based on the above.
You might be in a terrible relationship because you don’t believe you deserve more. You might be chronically unhealthy because you don’t think that you’re worthy of love, so you don’t love yourself.
Unconscious beliefs create the circumstances of our lives.
When I realised all this, I woke up one morning and sketched out a diagram called the infographic. It’s the cornerstone of my Awareness Journal Practice and why working on awareness is the foundation for change. I will share it at the bottom of this email so you can sit with the concept and let it land for you.
It’s not a perfect representation. The different factors can happen in any order – sometimes the behaviour activates the emotion, or the nervous system creates the thoughts. Sometimes, you’ve just got poor breath quality and have been in constant fight or flight, resulting in anxious thoughts that you interpret as not being strong or good enough.
Regardless, I’ve figured it out, and it explains the layers of human drama surrounding my truth. My truth is the peace that lies beneath—the knowing that I am perfect as I am and exactly where I need to be.
I witness these cycles playing out every day in my own psyche. Only I don’t choose them anymore. My awareness has given me a path to change.
If you can understand this, you have the keys to the universe. We humans are so complicated but achingly simple. Ultimately, it is all a facade. Underneath it all is peace and power. Certainly and knowing. Pure love.
I’m going to leave you with my favourite notes from the universe, which I keep on my computer:
“Courageous is the soul who adventures into time and space to learn of their divinity. For while they cannot lose, they can think that they can and the loss will seem intolerable. And while they cannot fail, they can think they have and the pain will be unbearable. And while they cannot ever be less than they truly are – powerful, eternal and loved – they can think they are and all will seem lost. And therein lies their test. A test of perceptions: of what to focus on, of what to believe in, in spite of appearances.” – TUT (The Universe Talks).
I love you.
Lauren
NB/ The Awareness Journal has since launched and is on sale until the 23rd of April, 2025. Check it out here.
**Originally published to my email database on the 4th of March, 2025**
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