***DAYDREAM YOUR WAY TO MORE LOVE (AND ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT!)

“Christy, stop daydreaming!!”

I heard these words a lot when I was a little girl. For me, daydreaming wasn’t about idly staring out the window; it was a way to make life more fun! While doing homework, I’d pretend that I was a travel agent… my completed papers itineraries to exotic destinations. While brushing my hair in the mirror, I would imagine being a singer or dancer, and picture myself performing before a crowd of thousands. Sometimes I would imagine wonderful things happening in my day-to-day life: acing an upcoming exam, becoming friends with someone I had admired from afar, or making captain of the drill team (which I did, by the way, in my senior year . And of course, when things in “real” life weren’t exactly to my liking, I would use my imagination to picture those circumstances changing for the better.

Of course at the time, I had no idea that by imagining a more positive outcome I was actually magnetizing that outcome into my experience. I was just a kid, and there was nothing planned or calculated about conjuring these images. “Daydreaming” served only one purpose: it made me feel good.

It wasn’t until my early 20s, when I began reading Shakti Gawain, that I was introduced to creative visualization as a spiritual tool. Over the following ten years, I learned how to use visualization to clarify and manifest my desires with more and more joy, and far less effort. And in the process, I discovered a really valuable “shortcut,” which I have since taught to thousands of clients and coaching students, and which I would now like to share with you:

The power of visualization has nothing to do with how clearly you visualize your goal! Conjuring an image of what it is we want to create is nowhere near as important as paying attention to the feelings those images evoke within us.

This is because the art of manifestation does not hinge on intellect, logic or careful planning. It is the process of becoming energetically in tune with whatever it is we desire, and then allowing that energy to magnetize to us people, experiences and circumstances that are energetically similar.

Our emotions are powerful conduits of energy, which explains why we can often sense another person’s mood just by being near them, regardless of whether they ever say a word. The energy created by our thoughts and emotions is broadcasted like a radio signal far and wide – invisibly but effectively bringing into our experiences things which match the signal we are sending out. When you think about something you desire and you feel excitement, enthusiasm, or happy anticipation, it means that you are energetically aligned – and therefore actively attracting to you – whatever it is that you’ve decided you want.

Visualization is a useful tool because it helps us to more clearly picture the changes we are committed to creating: the lighter, better-feeling body, the closets cleaned out and organized, the vacation we’ve been saving so diligently for. In this sense, visualization is a great jumping off point. But to ramp up our manifesting powers –and speed up the rate at which our desires are fulfilled – we need to take it to the next level. This requires us to focus not so much on the “thing” itself (the slimmer body or less-cluttered closet), but on the way we imagine that we will feel once we’ve made those changes.

In a nutshell, the key to attracting anything you want is to generate within you the feeling that you already have it.

So, you say, how do we go about generating the feeling of being satisfied that we’ve created something which we have not yet, in fact, created? We trust the process. We remind ourselves that we live in an energetic Uni-verse that always gives back to us experiences which match the energy we are sending out. And, in the word of my friend, Arielle Ford, author of a fabulous book called The Soulmate Secret, we learn to “savor the waiting,” which means that we do everything in our power to feel good now, content in the knowledge that even more good-feeling things are on their way. Manifestation is a bit like online shopping: you daydream about the infinite number of experiences that are available, notice which ones you naturally gravitate toward, visualize it in order to be sure that it’s the thing you want, and then – with the click of a button – you place your order. The thought that your package is on its way to you brings you joy, and that very joy hastens its delivery to your door.

So, my best advice? Visualize the outcomes you desire – whether it’s to have more love, more money, more free time, or create more of an impact on the world. Daydream about these things as much and as often as you like – just as long as doing so makes you feel good.

Love,

Christy