You’re doing the work to manifest – visualizing, scripting, practicing affirmations, and meditating. You’ve been sitting on this manifestation for a while, but you’re not seeing any signs it’s on its way to you.
The less progress you see on it, the more anxious you become and the more doubtful you are about it. You try to keep a positive mindset, but internally, or subconsciously, you’re not feeling positive.
When you’re trying to force positivity and when manifesting becomes a challenge, it’s time to ask yourself – Why don’t I feel positive? What am I actually feeling?
And how can I honor what I’m feeling?
When we’re feeling doubtful about a major, life-shifting manifestation, it is not the time force positivity. It is time to ask ourselves where the doubt stems from, because forcing anything only creates further friction within us.
The Most Common Manifestation Blockage: Self-Doubt
It’s not enough to write down your goals, envision them, or repeat them to yourself if you don’t deeply (or subconsciously) believe in your ability to achieve them. (Although, when you do believe you are capable and deserving of receiving your manifestations, these are useful tools to check in with yourself and refocus your vision.)
How can you defeat self-doubt when it’s something ingrained so deeply into your conscious and subconscious mind? For some people it’s easy- practice meditation, gratitude, and positive thinking, and you can disrupt unwanted thinking patterns.
For others, self-doubt is ingrained so deeply, and by so many traumatic life events, that it takes more than positive thoughts to disrupt the negative ones. It takes going within, breaking down where you learned these thinking patterns, and recognizing that if those fears have been learned, you can also learn to think in a way where those fears have no power over you.
Overcome Manifestation Blockages to Manifest What You Want
If you don’t know you can rewire your thinking, you will continue living with the same self-doubt and limiting beliefs you always have, and if you don’t confront your limiting beliefs, you can’t change them.
For example, if you’ve always thought of yourself as shy, you may have never tried going up to someone at a bar, asking for a raise from an employer, or sharing your thoughts in a group. In some cases, you may have not even considered the possibility of doing any of these things, because that isn’t what you, or anyone who knows you, would expect you to do. In other cases, you may have considered it, but convinced yourself why you can’t or shouldn’t.
Assuming in this scenario that you feel self-conscious about being shy, if you continue letting “shyness” rule over your interactions, you’re going to keep feeling limited by it. When manifesting big, life-changing scenarios, we cannot be limited. We have to know, see, and recognize our own power.
If you want to change a characteristic you have, you need to know that the possibility of change is an option and be comfortable enough to not only acknowledge, but also embrace your shyness as a quality of who you are.
The Key to Manifestation – The Subconscious Mind
I know I just said you can “change” a fundamental part of yourself, but what you really want is to change your feelings around this part of yourself. This characteristic will always be a part of you, but it does not need to define you.
The issue is, when we want to change a quality about ourselves, we tend to outright reject it and feel shame when we demonstrate that feature. The goal, or the “change” you’re actually looking for is to free yourself from the binary expectation to either never feel shy again, or to live the remainder of your life being shy. You are far more complex than that!
Some moments you will feel shy, no matter what you do. When you’re doing the work to become conscious of how shyness governs you however, you’ll recognize when it creeps in and ask yourself, what about this situation is making me feel this way? Does this feeling connect to a previous experience I’ve had in my life? Is the power this situation holds over me valid?
It will take time, in the same way your current beliefs and traits have taken repetition throughout your life to develop. While you may have been predisposed towards having a shy personality, what solidifies shyness as a part of your identity is people reiterating “you’re so shy”, your parents ignoring you when you spoke up, and even people complimenting your quiet nature. You start to recognize your shyness as an expectation, and the older you get, the stronger the association becomes.
When you realize your personality has been partly learned, you can work to gain power over it while also embracing it without any shame. You learn (consciously and subconsciously) that you are deserving of your dreams, regardless of any characteristics or fears you see in yourself.
Once you begin seeing your qualities in a new, fluid way, your brain will be primed for rearranging your relationship to yourself and the world. In rearranging your relationship to yourself, your manifestations become much more vivid and tangible than when using manifestation methods with the weight of self-doubt still floating around the back of your mind.
Remove Manifestation Blockages with Shadow Work
So how can you confront your subconscious self-doubt and limiting beliefs? Shadow work.
Shadow work is a term coined by 20th century psychologist Carl Jung, which in short, is about confronting the aspects of yourself that you try to keep hidden from the world. The parts of yourself that make you feel sad, weak, useless, and even angry, are a part of your shadow. The most obvious ones you carry may have come to your mind now, but there are also deeper shadows that we avoid confronting as much as possible.
Most of these shadow selves develop from childhood or adolescence through interactions we have with others. In these interactions we discovered that a quality we carried garnered a negative reaction, so we hid it away.
Shadow selves can also develop from situations and experiences we witnessed that taught us a characteristic we never wanted to see in ourselves, yet unfortunately for us, we do see. Even more unfortunately for us, when we don’t confront our shadow selves we often develop self-destructive habits, illness, and mental health issues to cope.
On a separate level, shadow selves also create limiting beliefs that cause us to block ourselves from receiving our manifestations. We’re trying to manifest money, but we still believe money is hard for us to make. We want to find that one person that checks all of our boxes, but we’ve never seen a good relationship in action and struggle to envision one for ourselves. Our shadow selves can run through so many facets of our life that most likely, if something has been exceedingly difficult to manifest and is something you’ve always struggled with, you probably have a shadow surrounding it that you need to deal with.
Your shadow self can create self-doubt and make it difficult for your subconscious to accept that your manifestation is truly your reality. Your subconscious wants to revert back to what is comfortable, even if what you’re experiencing consciously is uncomfortable for you.
How to Do Shadow Work for Manifestation Blockages & Healing
Here are some of my favorite resources for learning about the shadow and performing shadow work:
What Is SHADOW WORK? [5 Effective Ways To Do It!]
If you are new to shadow work, this video by Christina Lopes provides an encompassing overview as well as techniques to identify shadow selves and journaling prompts for exploring the shadow.
Shadow Work Library
If you’re looking to explore the range of shadows that exist + how to handle and incorporate them into your life to create balance, look no further than the Shadow Work Library. These bite-sized snippets are easy to listen to while packing a wealth of practical information.
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
For those interested in the science behind the subconscious mind and the brain, Joe Dispenza’s 2012 book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself provides an easy to digest look at how our thoughts effect the world around us, and how to reprogram them.
25 Heavy-Duty Shadow Work Journal Prompts (PLUS FREE Printable Workbook)
One of the most common and effective ways to do shadow work is through journaling. These 25 prompts by Kelly-Ann Maddox offer useful thinking points to break down and free yourself from limiting beliefs.
Ep. 133 – Working with Shadow, The Four Steps to Magnetism & Manifesting Opulence with Lacy Phillips
This conversation with Lacy Phillips on the Almost 30 podcast offers some eye-opening ways of thinking that I carried with me for weeks following my listen. Shadow work is a life-long process but there are ways to hit the big shadows holding you back right now.
To Be Magnetic Courses
If you want some hands-on guidance and questions to consider, or if you want to focus specifically on what you are having trouble manifesting, I absolutely have to recommend the To Be Magnetic courses and services. Doing these courses and continuing shadow work has completely altered my relationship with myself and how I view challenging moments from my past.
Keep in mind during your shadow work process that uncovering and coming to balance with your shadow selves is a lifelong process. Have patience with yourself, and forgive yourself for those challenging days, because that will get you farther than demanding more from yourself.
Do you have any shadow work or blocked manifestation tips? Leave a comment letting us know!
