The Universe Isn't Dumb - the hidden challenges of manifesting and affirmations

I could have phrased the title of this post as The Universe Is Smart, but I didn’t for good reason, it’s because the universe speaks in energy not in language. There is a lot of fears wrapped up in saying the wrong thing to the universe, and if we say the wrong thing, the universe won’t understand what we mean and will bring us the wrong thing, experience, person etc.

We’ve been taught or told that the universe doesn’t understand or hear ‘negative’ words like don’t, won’t, and never, but that is likening the universe to a human and diminishing what we believe the universe can do. Think about it, if you thought the universe didn’t really understand you would you have faith that it would be able to do anything for you? Probably not. If you believed that it was wise beyond your imagination could even grasp, that it worked on your behalf in ways you don’t even know about, that it understood exactly what you meant, and is always working to create experiences for your highest good would you have more faith in it?

We have a bit of an assumption that negative things are punishment for something that we have done, and the universe bringing us the exact experience we don’t want, leads us to believe that we are being punished, so we try to take ownership of the asking instead of the experience. We hope that if we change the way we ask for something it will change what our experience is.
The truth is, the experience is where the wisdom is, the experience is what we need, and if we think we haven’t received what we’ve asked for, we are looking in the wrong spot. In the movie Evan Almighty there is a scene where Morgan Freeman tells Lauren Graham “when you pray for patience, do you think God brings you patience, or the opportunity to practice patience?” If you want to learn how to be a patient person, you will have to learn how to put it into practice at the times when you are the most impatient. Often when we decide we want to work on something, we will find those challenging experiences coming into our lives way more frequently than before. That’s the way we learn. We learned how to walk by walking, and guaranteed there was falling, getting back up, re-calibrating and deciding how to do it differently, and going at it again. So instead of making the universe wrong for what it has provided or yourself wrong by how you asked, figure out how the universe has decided to help you.

The other aspect of this is in affirmations. We try to change our energy and vibration to match what we want to bring into our lives which is a great idea, but to put it into practice requires more than just saying a phrase that sounds good. We have to be able to find the right statement that brings us a feeling that matches it, instead of using it to combat fear when we are feeling fearful. Using affirmations that are pre-written can be a great place to start, but it is really important to craft it to you, if there are words that don’t quite resonate and bring up the feeling of disbelief, this will not help you. If you want more money, saying I am rich while you have $0.02 in your bank account won’t work either, because you know what you actually have. It isn’t necessary to go from 0-100, from where you are to where you want to be in the end, you can start out with the desire to be rich, and begin an affirmation with I am aligning with receiving more money for my highest good, or I am no longer suffering financially, and as it starts to help you feel that way, you can shift it again and again until you get the desired result. If you repeat I am rich again and again with disbelief, it actually puts more emphasis and energy on the fact that you don’t believe it, and reinforcing you not being rich.

If the universe speaks in energy, and you repeat an affirmation that you don’t believe in, it will get lost in the sea of useless thoughts we have floating around our brain throughout the day, if you have tried meditation you will know how many of those we have in ten minutes. That is why the words aren’t as important as how we feel. If we can create an affirmation that moves us from feeling shitty to feeling lighter, better, happier and allows us to energetically align with the feeling we want to have we can start to create the life experiences we want. If saying ‘not suffering’ makes you feel better over ‘happy and content’ use it, and when it stops helping you feel better move on to something that does. And please, for the love of yourself, stop thinking that the universe is a bully who won’t help you if you don’t say the right password, it is way more aware, loving and incredible than that, and so are you.