Is Manifestation the New Therapy?

Change your thoughts, change your life. From neuroscience to physics, research has proven that practicing manifestation can, indeed, improve your life. Manifestation teaches us how to go after what we want, focusing on increasing our self-worth in the physical world.While traditional therapists have balked at any detraction from psychotherapy practices, calling them new age or lacking of empirical evidence, embracing manifestation as a self-optimizing tool and the science behind it has a history. As a health and food therapy specialist, I have observed a variety of reactions to the idea of traditional therapy. Most of the patients I work with have tried traditional talk therapy. And, while some found it helpful, for many it failed to pinpoint the root of their problems in a way that focused on the belief of connection.

The societal stigma around the idea of talking to a therapist turns folks away from ever trying it out in the first place.

Many of my patients were perfectly fine calling me to identify their health issues -- such as a thyroid disorder or a genetic concern -- and had no issue pursuing my suggested food therapies. However, when I suggested talk therapy, using the very word “therapy” often warranted a defensive reply, as if I was suggesting a mental problem may be present. They later identified that the idea of therapy they believed in made them feel bad about themselves, not encouraged. About 10 years ago, my colleagues were beginning a new practice in neurolinguistics that focused on identifying and changing limiting beliefs through the use of belief-based manifestation tools. As I began suggesting this approach in lieu of talk-therapy I found it was vastly more successful. Because it takes anywhere from 5-10 years for research to be published and disseminated into health care practice, the science of manifestation has only recently begun to surface in mainstream society.

Social media, podcasts, and online articles have undoubtedly helped advance the exposure of studies and discussions on manifestation and the science behind it.

To understand some of the science, let’s consider a collective manifestation to reveal how beliefs become cemented: Science shows a stimulus that arranges energy into the physical world is derived from our thoughts and thought patterns. Some general manifestations humans agree on are “the grass is green” or “the sea is blue” -- two examples of well-cemented beliefs. It would be very hard for anyone to change your mind that the grass is candy-stripe colored or that the sea is white. Now think about the program you run every day in your mind. Have you considered that it’s based on your beliefs? Beliefs that were cemented into your brain from birth and throughout childhood by your parents, family, and teachers? Day after day you operate and live based on this belief system. Quantum neuroscience says all that we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and feel has been created from the data received by our sensory organs. Our perceptions of the world around us are the mental images constructed from that set of data. Consider the bystander effect: You and three other people watch while a woman walking her dog gets her purse stolen by a man. All three of your accounts of the man’s height, the woman, and even the dog will be slightly different based on the mental, belief-based data you have cemented in your mind and arrived at that situation with. This cemented data is what we use to perceive as real in the physical world. Neurolinguistic psychology (NLP) -- an important subset of neurolinguistics and neuroscience that utilizes its own system of manifestation techniques -- helps us look at our cemented beliefs and determine what to do with them when they no longer serve us. To manifest successfully, we need to understand what’s driving our beliefs. NLP suggests we ask ourselves the following five questions: 1 | What belief is holding me back or blocking my self-worth? 2 | Why do I believe that? 3 | Have I considered what would happen if I didn’t believe that? 4 | Whose belief is it anyway? 5 | What can I choose to believe instead that will positively serve me to replace the belief that is holding me back?So now that we’ve considered our beliefs and the new ones that will serve our self-worth upgrade goals, we need to adopt the tools. Most manifestation experts refer to this process as reprogramming -- or upgrading to new, more optimized software that helps us do life with clarity and focus. Evidence-based manifestation is summarized by the following six active, neural re-networking principles: 1 | Get clear on what you want, and be specific. 2 | Visualize.3 | Write out your goals.4 | Believe you are worthy to receive.5 | Acknowledge resistance (frustrations, anxiety, fears, and regrets) and let them go.6 | Show gratitude in your goals journal, and keep evidence of your goals that have been realized.Have you switched from talk therapy to manifestation? How have you experienced your self-worth evolve? Please share with The Fullest community below. Christine Dionese, co-founder of flavor ID is an integrative, epigenetic health and food therapy specialist, as well as a wellness, lifestyle, and food journalist. She has dedicated her career to helping others understand the science of happiness and its powerful effects on everyday human health by harnessing the power of the epigenetic landscape. Christine lives, works, and plays with her family in Southern California.