Conscious Living: How to Create a Life of Your Own Design

Conscious Living is about how to make a shift to a new kind of consciousness and to embrace conscious living and loving. It goes into a new dimension: the transformation of your inner self. Dr. Hendricks, PhD, is a psychologist, writer, and teacher. In his clinical practice, he left behind a therapy model and began to embrace a learning model, one that emphasized conscious living instead of remediation. In the therapy model, patients focus on the past, hoping that by shifting their perceptions the past will lose its grip on them and free up more creative energy in the present moment. The downside of therapy is that people often remain not only focused on the past but enthralled by it. Dependency on the therapist also becomes a problem. In the learning model, patients envision themselves in the future and design conscious goals for their lives. These goals, if they are committed to them, begin to allow them to take intuitive action as part of their manifestation process. Along the way, old patterns emerge similar to those addressed in the therapy model. The context is different, though; now they are engaged in a forward-looking journey of conscious living rather than a past-focused process of remediation. As a professor, Dr. Hendricks began to teach the learning model in addition to the therapy model, and his students loved it, so did their patients.

When we are scared, sad, or traumatized, we try to distance ourselves from the experience rather than feel it fully, resonate with it, love it, and let it go. We live in a trance of denial in which we put our personality masks and agendas ahead of connection with ourselves or union with others. These masks and agendas of our personas – adopted in childhood for survival and recognition – are preventing us from connecting with our true selves. Our true self is something we can feel in our heart and experience as intuition in our mind. Dr. Hendricks guides further into exploring how we can love ourselves unconditionally, live in integrity, distinguish our true self from our personas, overcome fear and trauma, develop emotional intelligence, and express our full creative potential.

This book offers precise technology for producing inner peace and harmonious, loving relationships. Conscious living offers you a somatic process – one you can feel in your body – for moving through the most important challenges of life. Conscious living focuses on the present, not the past or the future. It shows you how to open the flow of organic good feeling inside yourself and the flow of genuine love with others. Conscious living is the art of full commitment to truth and knowledge, balanced by full willingness to stand in wonder at the irreconcilable or unfathomable. It shows you how to move through pain – whether it’s pain of body, mind, or soul – to experience more freedom. It shows you how you unknowingly create unnecessary pain for yourself and reveals the preventative measures to avoid creating pain in the future. Conscious living shows you how to redesign your life when you feel stuck. It shows you how to channel your energies into what will truly fulfills you. It teaches you how to embrace relationships that inspire your full capacity for intimacy and creativity. It shows you how to live lightly on the earth and how to engage in social action that yields positive results. It shows you how to bring forth your true potential and ultimately the great potential in all of us. At its simplest, conscious living is the art of feeling your feelings, speaking authentically, knowing your life’s purpose, and carrying out effective actions that contribute to your well-being and the well-being of others.

In practicing conscious living, you take charge of your life by resonating in harmony with the way the universe works. Your experience of life is occurring in this present moment within a unified field of consciousness (called the quantum field in quantum physics, or universal consciousness). We are all made of the same stuff as everything else in the universe: energy and consciousness. The shortest path to self-actualization is to turn inward, not outward toward other people’s experiences and ideations of how the universe works. When we go deeply enough into who we are and who others are, we find our organic connection with oneness. We must seek our true selves and discover our soul’s purpose for this life. If you put the highest priority on your inner life, your outer life will thrive because it is rooted in a sustainable and self-nourishing base. There is a great deal of power in finding the space of pure consciousness within ourselves. Once you feel it you can never have any more doubts about the divine nature of the universe and your connection to it. Focus first on who you are, what you are here for, then let your intuitive actions flow from this place of deep self-knowledge.

Purpose is a powerful inquiry. If we ask sincerely, from a place of wonder instead of justification, we can work miracles with the tiniest of shifts. Upon inquiry about your purpose in a particular moment, you may find that you are acting out of an unconscious belief, intention, or program. Because of your painful conditioned history, your unconscious purpose may be to make the other person wrong, to cause hurt, to get sympathy, or to avoid intimacy because you don’t feel you deserve it. Instead, you can choose to take a deep breath, go within, and shift to a conscious purpose of your own intuitive choosing. When we communicate something of emotional significance, we speak with one of two intentions: the intention to be right or the intention to be in harmony. The intention to be right comes burdened with justification and defensiveness. The intention to be in harmony releases defensiveness and carries with it no need to justify, and opens us up to connection.

We are shaped more by choice in the present moment than by our genes or past history. Everything begins with a choice to face something or to avoid facing it. If you are not happy and creative, look first at what you are not facing in your life. At the bottom of our problems is always something we are afraid to face. There may be a feeling that you are not facing. Something that you are not allowing yourself to feel consciously. Look at anyplace that you are not facing the truth. Truths are usually straightforward and obvious. When we don’t communicate the truth clearly, we don’t feel good. Your inner self will keep reminding you, in the form of unbidden thoughts or unsettled body feelings, until you communicate what needs to be said. Another place to look is agreements that you are not keeping. There may be an agreement that you have broken and haven’t cleared up. Perhaps you told someone you would do something and you didn’t follow through, or you told someone that you wouldn’t do something and you did it anyway. These moments of slipped integrity register in our inner selves, and we are charged for them by unsettled feelings and thoughts, if not profound life experiences to learn from, until we handle the broken agreement. If you experience a challenge, you can view it as a plot against you, or see it as an opportunity to embrace curiosity and learn. If you look back over your life, you will find that you keep getting certain lessons repeated over and over again until you learn them. Everybody gets the same challenging lessons, usually every day, and we define our lives by whether we resist learning them or embrace the challenge with passion, curiosity, and willingness. Facing is seeing reality as it is; accepting is harmonizing with it. Once something has been faced, it must be welcomed into the wholeness of ourselves and accepted. By doing so, you become flooded with awareness that enriches your life in unimaginable ways.

Life is fullest when we are most true to ourselves and bring forth our creative desires and gifts to serve others. If you express what needs to be expressed within you, you will be happy and fulfilled. If you don’t, you won’t. Peace of mind comes only with full participation in life. This means being open to the full range of ourselves. In every single life situation, we are faced with the choice to take full responsibility for an issue or blame someone else. Each time we avoid responsibility, we claim victimhood. It takes an evolutionary shift in consciousness to move beyond the fascination with story lines based on victimhood, such as those we are shown on mainstream media. At the moment of being right at the expense of someone else, we can forget about all our other problems. It takes courage to move beyond defensiveness to a heartfelt inquiry into conscious living. A conversation about genuine, healthy responsibility requires being more fascinated with the unfolding of creative possibilities in yourself and others than you are with the perpetuating of your victim mindset. As people master personal responsibility, they eventually take responsibility for the world itself. They see that they create the world through their actions and their interpretations of the world, and both their actions and their interpretations can be changed consciously. It is not the events of life that are bothersome or hurtful, it is the way we think and feel about them. Human beings can change the outer circumstances of their lives by changing their mindset and behaviours. You can make a shift from thinking you know who is to blame to wondering about how things came to be the way they are. There is genuine likelihood of transformation in this, because you shift from the zone of the known, where there is no possibility, to the zone of the unknown, where there is infinite possibility.

You must wake up to the possibly that your unwillingness to commit to something is based on a deep fear of getting too close to something. It is only through commitment that choice becomes real. Beneath every life drama is a choice waiting to be made, and commitment will bring the choice into living reality. We are either committed 100 percent or not committed at all. We all think of ourselves as being shaped by the past, and many of us think we are limited by it. The past only has power over us if we give it power in the present moment. Each moment we are all offered the opportunity to recreate the past or to create a new future. No matter what has happened in the past – no matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done – you are creating your life this moment through your choices. If you think you are your past, you give your power of choice to things outside of your control. The past has already happened and no longer exists, and you cannot do anything about it. Our personalities are revealed by how we handle moments of choice. We may think destiny is a big thing, but it is really created in tiny moments of choice. Destiny is when we take intuitive action to follow our path defined by our soul’s purpose. Fate is when we make choices off our path and find our way through life the hard way. When we are off our path, we can choose to listen to our intuition that is always guiding us back on our path and follow our guidance.

Human beings often choose to withhold the truth about three things – facts, feelings, and fantasies. The act of withholding the truth in these areas destroys our happiness and shapes our fate toward misfortune. By contrast, these same things hold the key to our liberation. The most common fact that comes up in therapy sessions is: you have done something you feel guilty about and you haven’t told the significant person about it. The most common feelings that come up: you are mad about something or sad or scared or joyful, and you haven’t given yourself the time to place your pure attention on it to allow it to resolve. In other words, you haven’t fully experienced it and let it go. We are a living stream of feelings, day in and day out, and a cardinal issue is whether we speak about them openly or repress them. If you hide your emotions from yourself, you are numb and riddled with symptoms. If you hide your emotions from others, no one knows you. Speak about your emotions openly, and your life is lived in waves of authenticity and intimacy. The most common fantasies that come up: you haven’t fully acknowledged to yourself your sexual attraction to someone, and you haven’t told the other person about it. Or you have a fantasy that someone doesn’t like you, you don’t talk to that person about it, and soon you find yourself thinking negatively about them. If you notice carefully, you will discover which facts, feelings, and fantasies are the ones that need to be experienced fully and communicated. Repressing them will only keep them repeating themselves in unhealthy ways. The only way out is through speaking the truth.

It is important to feel all your feelings deeply and feel your way through them to the vast soul space in which all feelings are embraced and released. By facing all your feelings and resonating with them deeply, they lose their grip on you so that you can act from a clear space informed by your feelings but not run by them. It is important to choose thoughts that don’t reinforce your negative feelings. When you let your feelings be free to come and go – when you stop resisting them or clinging to them – you rest in a clear and unwavering perspective from which to take actions that benefits yourself and others. This invites us to resonate with life and to feel our way through to the larger space of our whole selves. If we become sensitive enough, we can hear the silent space at the heart and soul of our instrument, the very source from which all sound emerges.

Your feelings and your socials masks come and go, behind and beyond them is your true self, ready and waiting for you to tune in to it. When you were a child, you learned a personality to get your needs met. To survive and prosper in a family, you adopted the social masks that worked in that particular time and place. If you grew up in a relatively healthy environment, you learned relatively healthy masks. If you grew up in a not so healthy environment, you learned unhealthy masks. As an adult, it becomes necessary to remove all your masks in the search to answer the key question: who am I at my very core? We spend half our life building up a set of masks that allow us to be successful in the world, only to find that genuine success later in life comes only through dismantling our carefully contrived personas. The real sweetness in life is attained only through communication with our true self – our intuition. Most of our masks grew out of the imprints we collected from people in our past. Our imprints affect how we handle every interaction of our lives: whether we tell the truth, whether we act responsibly, and whether we allow ourselves to feel our feelings. We must begin a process of finding any place we are operating from a masked and limited view of ourselves. To create a sound self-esteem, you need to take a careful investigation into any negative forces at play in your life, including around your conception and birth – for example, birth trauma, forceps delivery, illness, being an unwanted child, and having negative parents. Many of our self-esteem problems don’t actually have to do with us personally. You need to look at these negative forces carefully so that you can separate out your self-esteem from the energy that was directed at you from your earliest moments and that may continue to this day. These negative attitudes get embodied – we carry them around inside of our bodies – and we sometimes allow those negative attitudes by others to contaminate our good feelings about ourselves.

All of us need to know who we truly are. If we are out of touch with our feelings, our needs, or our soul’s purpose for our life, we are not happy. Discovering who you truly are is the only way to find and keep a permanent sense of self-esteem. The truth of who you are and what you came here for lies in the awareness behind all that is manifest. It can be discovered by connecting to your intuition in the quantum field. Only a deep and thorough knowledge of ourselves will give us the unshakable sense of self that can stand up to the rigors of life in the 21st century. Self-esteem rests on a remarkable paradox: we can give to others effectively only when we love ourselves deeply, and we can only love ourselves deeply when we contribute fully to others. Self-esteem is paramount, for if we are out of harmony with ourselves, we will contribute to disharmony everywhere. Genuine self-esteem makes a welcome space for both positive and negative feelings so that you will be able to feel good about yourself even when things are not going well. When you wake up in the morning, you get up to face the same problems human beings have awakened to for the past few thousand years: self-esteem, the art of discovering who you really are and expressing it to the world; how to attract a partner with whom you could resonate and grow with over time; how to navigate the problems of living and loving together over time; and how to create a life, career, lifestyle of your own intuitive design rather than relying on the roles and maps of the past.

To find genuine self-esteem, we need to know how to create peace in our mind, our body, and our heart. To release our full potential and develop self-esteem, we need to face and release our fears and trauma. Each time you go through a big transition in your life, you break through into the unknown. Part of you wants to break through into the unknown, into a higher and finer version of yourself. But part of you wants to stay in the comfort zone, the zone of the known. There is a central fear that everyone must handle to live in good self-esteem: thinking we are fundamentally flawed in some way. This causes us to feel an emptiness deep inside, a sense of despair, and a conviction that life will never turn out right. Many of us suffer from this fear, and it keeps us locked in the zone of the known. There are several things we can do to release fear. When you are feeling fear, first you must acknowledge that it’s there by placing your nonjudgemental attention on it. Fear really is just a vibration down in the middle of your body causing a slightly queasy sensation and an energetic imprint in your body’s energy field. When you are feeling fear, keep your mind clear of negative thoughts, and breathe slowly and deeply into the sensation in your body and allow the sensation to disappear. Move your body around to facilitate the movement of fear. Communicate openly about your fear to yourself and/or others. Finally, take a moment to love your fear unconditionally, thank it for the lessons it has offered you, and consciously let it go. The same process, referred to as somatic experiencing, also works with releasing trauma stored in the body. It has immense potential to release trapped emotions and improve healing, resilience, and commons issues related to self-esteem, grief, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Many of our fears are attached to past traumas. Another effective technique for releasing trauma, not mentioned in the book, is holotropic breathwork, which moves us towards self-actualization and wholeness.

A common fear that limits self-esteem is the fear of outdoing others and leaving them behind. Like all of our fears, this fear is deeply rooted in our minds, bodies and energy field. Many people – particularly gifted people – hold themselves back from reaching their full potential because to do so would be to outshine someone. We fear the loss and loneliness of abandoning people, even though we feel a deep calling to pursue our own destinies. Another fear that limits self-esteem is one that causes us to avoid rising to our full potential because it would mean being disloyal to our family or our tribe. Often there is one person in our background to whom we feel we must remain loyal, even though that person may have caused us enormous suffering. This fear differs slightly from outdoing. The latter involves going beyond another person’s achievement, while loyalty involves clinging to a bond formed earlier in life. This fear requires that we not rock the boat by being more successful or thinking more highly of ourselves than the person to whom we are loyal. Another fear that limits self-esteem is being a burden to someone in the past or today, and this sense of burdensomeness pervades our everyday life. As we go through life we feel that we do not deserve to take up space. We feel as though we interfered with someone’s dreams and are convinced it was our fault. Life conspires with us to bring all of our fears up to the surface for us to face. If we acknowledge them and welcome them into the wholeness of ourselves with loving kindness and compassion, symptoms will disappear with the intention and action of letting them go.

One symptom of poor self-esteem is that you doubt that you can fulfill your dreams and visions. A common dark and unexplored place in ourselves is when and where we cease to love ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves, we will always be chasing it from others. If our feelings toward ourselves are tainted with guilt and criticism, our love toward others will be as well. Love is the antidote to fear. Fear pulls us into contraction, while love allows us to expand again. When we don’t know how to love ourselves, we live in a state of contraction all the time. Genuine love for ourselves celebrates ourselves in seamless union with the whole of everything. In order to love yourself unconditionally, you need to be operating with integrity. Integrity always comes down to four specific actions: welcoming all of your feelings, not hiding or denying anything you’re feeling; telling the truth; keeping the agreements you’ve made (or consciously changing them with the other person or yourself); and taking 100 percent of the responsibility for any problem, activity, or life event in which you are involved. When we do not feel good about ourselves, we need to train ourselves to look first for integrity breaches. When the integrity issue is handled, the creative energy and love can flow again. Integrity means being in equal partnership with other people and the universe itself. If we are out of integrity, we are pretending to be masters of the universe instead of in harmony with it. Almost all problems in life can be overcome by being honest with ourselves and others.

We can move from being selfish to being conscious of empowering self and others, as well as the wellbeing of our community. We can make a shift to love: from fear to love, from logic to love, from ego to love, from hatred to love. All we have to do is catch ourselves in the act of doing something foolish or painful, and love ourselves anyway. All we have to do is catch someone else doing something we don’t like, and love them anyway. Boundaries may need to be set; that’s part of love, too. This is why the journey to conscious living is so rich: the possibility exists in every interaction – whether with another person or with ourselves – to navigate from a place of fear or from love. If you cannot change it or you don’t want to expend the energy to change it, you have to let it be. You need all your energy to change the things you can and want to change. We really don’t have control over other people. The moment we acknowledge we are powerless over other people, we are free to do two things: we can let go of attempting to control them completely, freeing them to learn their own lessons, or we can consciously choose to gently influence them. If we choose to influence others, we need to have a goal and a plan along with the commitment to carry it through to completion, as well as their permission to guide them in this way. Most people don’t do it that way, though. They stay in the unconscious zone, wishing the other person would change but not really making a conscious effort to accomplish it. The wheels spin, and nothing changes.

Emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive literacy. Many schools have begun including material on emotion and communication in their curriculums, although much more needs to be done. The following are the most important lessons of emotional intelligence. We must start noticing our body sensations, and use them just as we use our other senses. Your body sensations are expressions of your inner world that offer vital information for navigating your life. Your body sensations are an inner feedback system that speaks its own language and must be carefully tuned into if you wish to understand it. Body sensations are also the gateway to your feelings. Indeed, feelings are simply sensations that occur reliably enough to have names attached to them. Before we can name our feelings, we have to attend to the fields of information swirling inside us all day long. You can learn to name the common feelings and locate them in your body. Making a body map of your feelings can be very helpful. For example, you may feel fear in the middle of your body right behind your navel, or you may feel stress or sadness as a pressure in your chest. It’s important to say something authentic about your feelings to others, which allows you to feel intimate with the person you are talking to. You should express your feelings to the people who triggered them, but be willing to learn that it goes far beyond that person. Human beings are much more sensitive then we give ourselves credit for. We often feel hurt and we often do things that hurt others. If you speak up when you feel hurt, often you will find that hurt was based on a misunderstanding, not on anyone’s conscious attempt to hurt you. You’re seldom upset for the reason you think you are. Many things that trigger us during the course of the day are replays of old dramas, often beginning in our families. By speaking the truth of our feelings, we let people know us better, and resolve any misunderstandings or dissolve old patterns. We also keep from building up unexpressed feelings that may get dumped later or buried deeper.

We must get skilled at spotting the signs of feelings in other people, feel their shifts in energy, and pay attention to them when they occur. You should say something about these signs to people you want to be closer to, and invite them to notice your feelings and shifts in energy. We cause ourselves a great deal of difficulty by overlooking and overriding other people’s feelings or telling them how they should feel. With commitment and practice, you can learn to read the signs and transform your relationships holistically. One of the reasons polite society makes so many people sick is that we have been brainwashed to overlook the obvious signs of feelings in ourselves and others, and to pretend they are not there. We can make a heartfelt commitment to seeing and feeling what’s real. Some people are more committed to feeling good than to feeling what is real. Their feelings start to emerge, and they drown them out with intellectual maneuvers, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or other distractions. People who try to feel good rather than feel what is real often end up feeling bad most of the time. If you commit yourself to feeling what’s real, loving your negative feelings and letting them go, and embracing your positive feelings, you can step out of this trap. There are plenty of times in life when feeling good in the long term requires that you sacrifice comfort in the short term. By attending to reality in a loving and systematic way, we will eventually earn our good feelings, and they will be ours to keep. Keeping our agreements is more important than feeling comfortable. Many people try to preserve comfort by not telling the truth, but this is selfish and destructive. Working on your chosen life goals is more important than feeling comfortable.

We must learn to listen without interrupting people. You can choose to pause briefly after others finish speaking before you rush in with your point of view. People especially like it when you give them an informal summary of what they’ve said. Imagine a world in which people actually listened to one another rather than just waiting for other people to stop talking so they can give their opinion, or worse, interrupt them. When you create a conscious, loving relationship, put some consideration into emotional depth. You must consider your Absolute Yeses and Absolute Nos in a partner. Your Absolute Yeses are not just things you want, they are also things you cherish and wish to celebrate. Your first Absolute Yes should be the most important thing you require in a relationship, from both yourself and your partner. Your Absolute Nos are the things you absolutely will not tolerate. In order to attract genuine conscious love, we have to love ourselves deeply and tenderly, and yet at the same time be demanding on ourselves in our commitment to a new kind of relationship. We have to let ourselves and the universe know that we are ready for a truly satisfying relationship. We’re always getting to what we are committed to getting.

When we don’t love and accept some part of ourselves, we run around trying to get someone else to love us in hopes that if they give us enough love that our unlovable part will go away. It never does. Only loving ourselves unconditionally will do it. Although most of us have spent a lifetime running from that unlovable part of us, when we finally confront it, we discover it’s a fear. Fear from ego and trauma causes us to push away the very aspects of ourselves that need love most. This is our shadow. The dark aspect of ourself that we ignore or deny. If you don’t love and accept yourself, your fear-based ego and trauma remain in control, and you will walk a fateful path to lessons that will illuminate your shadow and allow you to choose your intuitive path. The lessons get harder and harder the more aware you of your shadow and choose to ignore it. People who don’t love themselves attract people who don’t love themselves. When you love yourself unconditionally, for everything you are and aren’t, you attract people who love themselves, and your relationships become partnerships on the path of love – a real playground of limitless possibility.

Relationships are difficult for all of us some of the time, and for some of us all of the time. The relationship journey is even more perilous because most of us don’t get any useful education on the subject. This most significant aspect of our lives is left to default, when the barest attention to design would yield enormous benefits in happiness and wellbeing of ourselves, our families, and our communities. Although we may think of ourselves as individual parts, we are always in relationship to the wholeness of ourselves, others, and the universe. In relationships with others, we must embrace the wholeness not only in them but of ourselves. From conception onward, our lives are about relationship. Relationship is who we are and what we do. The whole universe is actually the sum total of our relationships with one another and everything else. If we become conscious of who we are and what we do in relationship, we have a chance to be happy and to contribute to others’ happiness. From the very beginning the two driving pulsations of our lives are union and individuation, a paradox which continues during our development and throughout of life. Even though we are connected to all that is through the quantum field, we have a singular awareness and life experience that is ours to navigate. Life is not a success for us unless we can resonate in union with others and the universe, and live in full expression of our true selves.

If you are expressing your creative potential, you get to feel good about yourself. If you are not, you don’t. There are dreams that live in our hearts and souls. They are our soul’s purpose. We are called to discover them, manifest them, nurture them, and bring them to fulfillment. There are barriers to accomplishing this task, in ourselves, in our families, in society, and in the quantum field. In many ways, crossing all the barriers to your full creative expression is what life is all about. If the general public understood this, they would be inspired to look within themselves, their hearts and souls, for the source of their creativity and healing, not outside of themselves toward the authorities and those who seek to control them. Creativity also plays a key role in relationships and is the foundation that connects communities in a sustainable way. When we begin to express our creative potential, we may be faced with the choice of too many options, it is important to carefully select those creative endeavours that have the deepest heart connection for us and that will make the biggest impact. Discovering your true self and expressing your creative potential opens a space in which you can feel in harmony with yourself at the deepest level. When we are out of harmony with our true self and our soul’s purpose, genuine self-esteem is not possible. When we are in alignment with our soul’s purpose – feeling and releasing our fear and trauma, expressing the creativity that is within us, and in resonant harmony with our feelings and others – the journey becomes much smoother and enjoyable.

If you are completely authentic with yourself, you’ll stay in a naturally good mood as you walk around in the world. If you tell the authentic truth to other people, you’ll have clear relationships with them. If you don’t, things can get out of control very quickly. If you lead with appreciation – actually start conversations off with appreciations throughout the day – you’ll create a field of positive energy around you wherever you go. The majority of the time, our thoughts are merely reflections of the mood we happen to be in. We must consciously embrace positive thinking, encourage elevated emotions, and increase our vibration.

Manifestation is the art of choosing how you want your life to be and turning those choices into reality. You can manifest experiences in your life that are not aligned with your soul’s purpose, but you must do it the hard way and will always be guided back to your path by lessons and intuition. We attract by default those life experiences that are appropriate to our unconscious programming or our egoic desires. What you manifest will ultimately be successful and satisfying to the extent it is in harmony with your soul’s purpose. Unless you carry positive images and thoughts of your goals in your mind, you are likely to be swayed by negative ones. You can begin to experience the power of positive thinking and feeling what you want, rather than fearing what you don’t want, and moving consciously toward your goals. This is the principle on which visualizations and affirmations work. If done skillfully, it produces positive results.

As you gradually reorient yourself in a more positive direction, you will inevitably hit barriers in the world and in the depths of yourself. The first thing that usually comes up is a stronger version of the limiting belief that you are trying to replace. That is your ego trying to keep you safe in the known. This offers the opportunity to reveal unconscious programming that needs to be addressed. When your positive thoughts are combined with elevated emotions, you can change your expectations and transform them at the vibrational level. You can then see the world differently because you have changed your consciousness and energetic signature at its very source. First, you must love and appreciate things the way they are. The very act of loving them transforms them, and you begin to move in a direction that will bring you more of what you want and need in your life. Ultimately, with enough loving acceptance into the hurt places in yourself and others, you will begin to experience life as a flowing journey. You gradually learn to feel your way into being in the right place at the right time. You let go of pushing with your will and open yourself up to being supported effortlessly by the universe. You relax into your organic union with all creation, and by acknowledging your connection with infinite creation and infinite abundance, you allow yourself to be in the right place at the right time for your optimal enfoldment to take place. The central stepping-stone is letting go of the expectation of things working in a certain way, and at a certain time, and opening up to possibility. Eventually, the universe itself supports you in your full expression. For quantum manifestation to work, you must take complete responsibility yourself, while letting go of control of the creative outcome. If you want to develop a co-creative partnership with the universe, you must work for it, and allow it to work for you. It will take the path of least resistance and get there when it gets there.

We can sabotage our manifestation by getting too attached to the outcome. As attachment increases, play ceases and freedom decreases. Then we will find a way to mess up the game so we can try again. To overcome this, you must question the universe with focused desire and wonder, not with any fear, limiting beliefs, or expectation attached. When you ask the universe in this way, normal mental processes will cease, opening a space for something new to occur. We are always manifesting according to our intentions and attention, whether conscious or unconscious. The problem is that until we choose consciously, our intentions are often unconscious and very limited. Part of the art of manifestation is learning how to see what our unconscious intentions are and how they are limiting us, and choosing new intentions consciously that align with our soul’s purpose and goals. Attention to goals and related intuitive actions, and taking actions to completion are crucial elements of the manifestation process. Honesty with ourselves and others creates a positive energy field around us that attracts harmonious manifestations and support from others. Dishonesty creates a negative energy field around us that eventually sabotages our manifestations and interferes with our ability to enjoy life.

Our manifestations will bear fruit and bring satisfaction to the extent that they represent us at our full creative expression. Only manifestations that come from a sincere place of love ultimately feels satisfying. Visions created and launched out of fear prove unsatisfactory and often disastrous for those involved. Love is the ultimate healer, and it comes into play in manifestation in the following way. Often the act of envisioning a goal brings to the surface issues that only love can embrace. The first thing that may occur is that fears get stirred up. You may be limiting yourself because you have not been willing to challenge the fear of living in an expanded version of yourself. To initiate the path of conscious manifestation, you must lead with your heart and feel gratitude for the event having already happened. To open your heart, you must regard all life’s experiences as learning opportunities, curious adventures, and as a challenge to love the parts of yourself and others that needs acceptance most.

In my experience, we must all align with our soul’s purpose and be fully expressed by our true self. To do so, you must get in tune with your intuition. If you ask your intuition a question with fear in your mind, you will attract a negative response, either from your ego or negative psychic interferences in the quantum field that will misguide you. You likely have no idea that many of the negative thoughts in your mind are not even yours. If you ask your intuition a question with love in your heart, transcending ego and fear, you will attract your higher self intuitive guidance. If you want a clear response, it is important to overcome fear and trauma before trying to communicate with your intuition. Before you connect with your intuition, be sure to cultivate elevated emotions and gratitude to increase your vibration. You can experience your intuition as sensations in your body, as thoughts in your head, as body movements, or vocalizations. It is essential to be able to decipher where these communications are coming from, otherwise you may end up confused and misguided. The more you trust your intuition, the more information you will receive. The less you trust your intuition, the more your fears will be your guide until you learn the lessons they are trying to show you. You have to let go of your fears and trauma. It is possible to transcend fear and be fully guided by intuition. You must learn to accept all that is, and can be. When the fearful thoughts come up, let them go. Do not follow them with your mind. Accept all that is in your heart. In this way, we transcend fear. Fear is not our true nature. Beyond our fear, our true self is fearless. This is our path to freedom.