Law of Attraction: Feeling Disillusioned Because Nothing I Do is Working

 Hi Kelli,  I am having a very hard time at the moment and feel disillusioned about manifesting and the law of attraction.  I hate feeling like this as it usually gives me hope and faith for the future.  I am usually quite a positive person, kind and caring but I can’t see any improvement in my life.  I meditate, visualize, say affirmations etc, which make me feel good but nothing changes. 

 

Manifestation is Not About What We Do

We are very used to the idea that ‘action’ is the level of cause and that what we do determines what happens in our lives. And we bring this action=creation paradigm into our personal growth-energy- manifesting-type work. We are told to do all these things to effect change in our lives, such as visualizing, saying affirmations, writing gratitude lists, making vision boards…the list of tools and techniques is endless. 

We think that these actions in and of themselves have some sort of power but they really don’t. Don’t get me wrong…doing these sorts of things can be very beneficial for people. But the benefit comes from the emotional response engaging in these tools and techniques can evoke. That is where ‘manifestation’ takes place–on the level of feeling. Like I have always said, terms like ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’ are just fancy words for feelings. 

When visualizing a desired outcome, or making a vision board that represents your biggest hopes and dreams, you can create feelings that are very beneficial for you to feel. Doing these sorts of things can muster up positive emotion you may not be able to otherwise given the current circumstances of your life. These tools allow you to focus your attention in a positive way, they allow you to build some positive emotion around subject areas where negative emotion has been dominant. 

Because we are so deeply ingrained to believe action is the level of ‘cause’ doing these sorts of things may create a positive expectation that things will change for you. You may feel like you ‘deserve’ to get what you want because you are making a concerted effort to call it into your life–worthiness and deservingness are not actually tied to what you ‘do’ but what you ‘are’ by the way. 

Technically we wouldn’t have to do any of these things, but most of us will find some value in trying to focus on these subjects in a specific way through the use of various tools. If we are engaging our attention in such focused ways where we are evoking genuinely positive emotion AND we don’t have a lot of crap counteracting it, doing these sorts of things can be quite powerful actually. But in most cases, we are counteracting these good vibes and nothing seems to be changing. And then at some point we end up declaring none of this stuff ‘works.’

 

Misguided Ideas about Positivity

If ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’ are just fancy words for feelings, it becomes quite obvious that improving our emotional state is a core part of this ‘process.’ There is really no way around that. 

But most of us are not going about this in a way that leads to any genuine, meaningful, consistent change in our overall feeling state. What usually happens is that upon learning of the importance of being ‘positive’ and believing certain things, we try to force it all. 

There may be some resonance with these ideas for sure, and on a deeper level, we recognize the truth of them, and a part of us may genuinely be on board. But genuinely embracing these ideas  wholeheartedly when we have believed the exact opposite for so long is probably not happening (and that’s okay actually and nothing to stress about.)

We tell ourselves we now believe certain things because that is what we are told we need to believe to get what we want. But we don’t actually believe them. We try to be ‘positive’ but we are not really feeling genuinely better; what we are usually doing is just trying harder to suppress our ‘bad’ feelings because if we don’t we won’t get what we want. Suppressing negative feelings is not the same thing as actually feeling better, not by a long shot. 

Again, there may be a part of us that connected to these ideas and does believe there is something to it, but we have so much conditioning in the opposite direction, we feel so much negativity about our circumstances now, we feel deeply attached to getting certain things, that that initial spark probably won’t override all of that. 

And if we go into this ‘work’ thinking we are being tasked with feeling amazingly good all the time right from the start, we are setting ourselves up for big problems. We may actually start feeling worse than we did before.

This journey will inevitably start rustling stuff up that may have been laying dormant, that may have been pushed down where it didn’t feel as intense. And if those feelings start rising to the surface and we just try to ignore them because we need to be ‘positive’ we are going to create a lot of obstacles for ourselves. 

So if fake positivity won’t get us very far, there is a very important part of this equation that cannot be ignored. There is something very important you are going to need to do, which is…

Dealing with Your Feelings

If you feel really badly about yourself, about how your life is now, about what you don’t have, that will need to be dealt with. This doesn’t mean you have to find a way to feel amazing every second. This doesn’t mean you have to root out every bit of negativity from your being 

But it does mean you will have to work on getting into a frame of mind where you don’t feel so badly about all these things anymore, where trying to make your emotional pain go away is no longer the main driver for doing everything you do, for trying to get everything you want to get. 

We must break the deeply ingrained habit of operating from pain minimizing mode, which is the egoic mind’s preferred way of navigating this world. There is no interest in cultivating a genuine sense of well-being, there is no interest in receiving what would be in your highest good, there is no interest in healing any of your emotional issues.

 It simply wants to find a way to keep your bad feelings from being rustled up; it wants to find a way to keep them dormant. And it believes acquiring certain things in the world, your life circumstances being a certain way, will accomplish this singular goal. 

And when we go into all this ‘work’ with the intention of simply trying to make bad feelings go away, we will just amplify those feelings. We will stay very locked into the beliefs, stories and interpretations that created them in the first place, which will keep the feelings in place, which will reinforce the ideas creating them–and round and round we go. We will remain trapped in that vicious cycle. 

We will remain very focused on all we don’t want and don’t like. All of our diligent use of various tools and techniques will largely be in vain because any positive feeling they may be able to spark will easily be overcome by the negative feelings you have probably been carrying around for a very long time. 

To me, our painful feelings are like rain on the windshield–they distort everything, they make it harder to see clearly. All that energy inside is distracting, it makes it harder to genuinely embrace new ways of thinking. And if we are unable to more deeply internalize these new beliefs and perspectives, the feelings they have the potential to create within us cannot really gain any traction. 

If we don’t engage in honest self-reflection about how we are feeling and allow ourselves to really feel those feelings, these ideas tend to remain more on the surface in the form of intellectual understanding and acceptance. They will never really become our own. All this knowledge we acquire will have little to no material impact on our life and state of mind. 

I know this isn’t an appealing idea. I know the whole reason you want all the things you want and all the effort you are putting into getting them is precisely to avoid having to deal with these feelings, to experience them. 

But it really isn’t all that bad. By dealing with them, you get what you ultimately want a lot quicker, which is to simply feel better. And changing the outside isn’t the answer anyway, so even if things improved in your life, you would probably continue to feel a lot of what you are feeling right now anyway.

 It might subside for a bit when the ‘stuff’ comes in, but the feelings will rise up again in some shape or form. Even if one area of your life gets completely ‘fixed’ the energy will come out in another way, the mind will find a new problem to focus on, a new reason to feel badly.  The sense of dissatisfaction won’t really go away. The feeling you are not good enough will persist. The feeling of scarcity will remain even if you have no logical reason to feel it. 

Diving into our feelings is also important because it is the best way to uncover what you are currently dealing with now belief-wise. Your feelings are not coming out of nowhere; they are really not based on your circumstance no matter how much that appears to be the case. They are based on what is happening in your mind, and we can’t change what is happening there if we don’t explore it. 

 

Exploring the Root of Attachment 

You hear a lot about becoming ‘detached’ from what you want, and this is not some action-based process. This is not something you can make yourself do. Genuine detachment is something that can only come as a result of exploring your attachment. 

You can’t experience this feeling in any meaningful way until you see that your circumstances are not the cause of your bad feelings. And if our life situation is not the real problem, it naturally follows that changing it in whatever ways you believe it needs to change cannot be the solution.  

The only reason you feel so attached to changing the external is because you have been believing the exact opposite idea very strongly for a very long time. Of course we are going to be very attached to these various wants if we believe they are the key to happiness, they are the key to easing our pain. With this idea, ‘manifesting’ becomes a very high-stakes game. 

The more attached you feel to getting something, the more pain you are looking for the manifestation to fix. You must explore that attachment, you must see what is really going on in your mind. 

Why do you want what you want so much? Why is it so important? What is the story you have around its absence? What do you think will happen if it doesn’t come? What do you think it will give you emotionally? Anyone willing to answer these questions with some real honesty will start seeing pretty quickly that the state of your life right now is not really the issue. It’s something much deeper. 

You may still want what you want, there still may be a part of you that highly values the thing and believes getting it is important, but the burning sense of ‘need’ you feel around it now will start weakening a bit. You won’t feel as much emotional charge around these areas of your life. 

You will have an easier time making peace with your circumstances as they are now. You may not feel great, but at the very least you will feel a bit more neutral about what is happening. You will find it easier to stop operating from pain-minimizing mode.

When you start going down the road of feeling that deep attachment, of telling yourself you need these things to be happy, there will be an ever-growing part of you that knows this is not true, and you will not get sucked in as much emotionally during these moments. 

For any part of you that may continue to believe this is the case, these thoughts will not feel as heavy and intrusive as they might have in the past. Feeling your feelings though will be an important part of this detaching process because when you have moments of feeling upset about not having this or that, it is important to let yourself embrace these moments  so you can get it out of your system. 

 

The Crux of This Work

As I have said many times, the crux of all this type of spiritual-manifesting-personal-growth-type work is conscious choice. While we are often very externally focused, and mainly motivated by changing the various circumstances of our life, ultimately this work is about changing our thinking, our beliefs, our perceptions. This is what needs to happen to make meaningful lasting change in our lives, in our external world. 

And the only way we can change what is happening in our mind is by consciously choosing to embrace the ideas that make us feel better, that bring us greater peace, that would allow us to heal the emotional pain we carry from our distorted self-image, our past experiences,etc.

We get exposed to these ideas through various sources, and it is up to us to decide whether we will make a genuine effort to internalize them deeply enough in our being where they will make a material impact on our lives. 

It is up to us to decide whether we will let this ‘spirit thought system’ as I call it, guide our decisions, behaviors, responses and interactions, or we continue to let ‘ego thought system’ run the show. This thought system has a lot of ‘evidence’ behind it and that part of our mind does a good job of reminding you of it constantly.

That this ‘evidence’ leads us to doubt the ‘spirit thought system’ beliefs is understandable and you don’t need to release it 100 percent to see movement in your life. But we have to be honest about the degree to which we let this ‘evidence’ influence our thinking, and how much we point to it to justify our fearful and limited thinking. 

If ‘manifestation’ is not about what we are doing, but what we are being, we have to honestly assess how much focus we have been giving towards GENUINELY trying to change our belief system and thinking vs. simply trying to attract what we don’t have through the use of various tools, techniques and the like. Remember all that stuff essentially falls under the umbrella of ‘action’ and action is not level of cause. 

You have to honestly ask yourself if you have been ‘doing’ the most important thing of all, which is consciously choosing what you believe in a genuine way. And if you haven’t that’s okay…don’t beat yourself up. You can start fresh at any moment and nothing needs to happen except you choosing to choose. 

We have to have a genuine willingness to have our minds changed. And it would seem like a no-brainer that we would be open to embracing these ideas wholeheartedly, but in reality we often have a great deal of resistance to them. We want to cling to the painful ideas, we actually see value in them. So examining where you may be resisting these ideas and why, examining why you seem insistent on holding onto a painful idea will probably be an integral part of this ‘process’ for many of us. 

 

Some Considerations for Tools and Techniques

Like I said earlier, there is a lot of power in focusing our attention in specific ways and setting intentions. And because of this power, the various tools and techniques often employed in this ‘work’ can be very helpful. But the energy from which we use them typically blunts this effectiveness.

We have a lot of resistance, fear and attachment. Our performance of them can quickly feel rote and empty. And if doing them feels this way, they are not serving their purpose of making you feel better, of ‘activating’ the types of energy that will be more conducive to letting in what you seek. 

Different things will resonate with different people, and if you aren’t receiving an emotional boost from a particular tool, it probably isn’t the one for you. So don’t waste your time doing things that don’t seem to give you any ‘juice’ energetically. 

Don’t make ‘action’ the core of your ‘work.’ Remember it is about what you are ‘being’ and changing what you are ‘being’ requires nothing more than the aforementioned conscious choice about which belief system you will abide by–spirit or ego. 

If you are feeling really badly right now, if the attachment and frustration is really bubbling up, the answer is not in a new tool. The answer is not really in any sort of action. You have to face the feelings that lie at the root of the ‘wanting,’ that are making you feel so attached to getting whatever it is you are trying to get. 

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Have a question and would like my two cents? Shoot me an email at kellicooper1102@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you! 

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