Featured Image by John Johnston Under Creative Commons License

Your self-concept directs everything in your life. There isn’t a solitary action in the mundane or spiritual realm that isn’t influenced by how you see yourself.

And similar to how you cannot out-exercise a bad diet, no amount of spellwork or visualization will compensate for a poor self-image.

You may be able to put a lot of power behind your workings, but your ability to hold on to what you manifest – or bring it to be without unwanted side-effects – will be limited until you do the inner work.

There are no shortcuts here. You will need to face your shadow. Process your emotions. Integrate and nurture the inner child. Be vulnerable with safe and supportive people in your life. Talk to a professional, where applicable.

It won’t look the same for everyone, but healing and integrating the different parts of the self through reflection and mundane action is vital to any true shift in your identity.

You have to go deep, otherwise it’s just the ego convincing itself it has overcome that which is uncomfortable to face.

But – magick, manifestation and affirmations can make this process monumentally easier than it would be otherwise. When these are done properly, it’s like gaining root access to a computer system – you can alter many, many things at will.

There is no sidestepping the work. When you’re successful at using these techniques, the first thing that will happen is everything within you that prevented your desire from being your current reality will surface and you will have to deal with it. If you’re doing it right, however, it will be easier to move through and process whatever you need to face. You will begin altering your self-concept in a way where your emotions are not as crushing as they otherwise would be and you don’t instinctively see the tug of war inside your head as a game you can’t win.

Going to the Source

Firstly – most affirmations fail because they emerge from surface level thoughts and if they stir feelings, they are surface level feelings.

Your thoughts do not actually originate at the point you think them. They are part of the created world. They make you aware of what is going on at a deeper level and they serve as a guide for where your energies are generally directed, but they have no direct influence over anything.

Thoughts can become part of a feedback loop that winds back around to the place they emerge from – the place from which created reality, including your sense of self, comes from.

But it doesn’t work that way by default.

If that makes zero sense to you, don’t worry. It’s something you have to experience, and once you do, things will click into place.

The important thing is – most thoughts are words, and words are form lacking substance. If you want to imprint on the deepest parts of your consciousness or directly influence reality, you have to first tap into what is beyond words.

Visualizing the Void

Begin by entering a meditative state. Take deep breaths. If there’s a particular rhythm you like – specifically one that makes it easy to enter a trance – use it. Focus on each part of your body individually – starting with the head and shoulders – and breathe out with the intention of releasing all tension.

Once you have become as relaxed as you can possibly be, see the world around you fading away into pure blackness. You are now floating in the void – the unmanifest where all creation rises and the wave that is you emerges from the ocean.

Focus on the intention to tap into your divine spark. You will likely see it around the point of the solar plexus. How you see it, whether as a single point of light or as a fountain overflowing with energy, or anything in between? That will depend on you and your makeup. Your divine spark is unique and you will not perceive it exactly the same way someone else perceives theirs.

This is the part of you that is connected to the infinite and that is infinite in itself. Everything that you are springs from this. Every potential that exists inside of you is contained within this spark.

I would do this many times before bringing any intentions into this meditation. Don’t rush it – the first and most important thing to do is to connect with that core essence of what you are. Envision energy flowing in and out of it like the breath of the universe. Invite what it brings forth. This will bring you deeper into a sense of who you really are, and simply connecting to it may alter what you believe you should intend or ask for.

You can’t touch the divine part of yourself without experiencing a change in your priorities. Don’t fight this. Become practiced at slowly dropping this meditation, seeing the spark fade into your body, seeing the void fade into your environment, and bring back as much as you can to journal and meditate on.

This part of you will be entirely removed from your mundane concerns so you can’t take everything from these sessions and apply it without thought or alteration, but – the more deeply you connect with yourself, the more you will learn that alters your perspective on your life and opens avenues you previously didn’t consider or weren’t aware of.

Meditating With Intention

You can bring any intention you like into this. It’s your mind and your own divinity you are working with, drawing from, and using to imprint upon reality.

And while this article is about the self-concept, understand – EVERYTHING falls under the umbrella of self-concept. When you’re trying to manifest something, more often than not you are not just trying to bring that thing into being but transform your entire relationship to it so that you easily draw and hold onto more of whatever it is without continuous effort.

You can get specific if you like. With my forays into this, I’ve gone as broad as I’m able.

Words are form without substance, so to use affirmations in this context, what you script has to draw forth images and feelings while you enter or sustain a trance state. It doesn’t have to be deep to work, but the thinner the barrier between the conscious and subconscious, the better.

For me, I work best with run-on sentences that evoke feelings and concepts and flow in a way where my mouth will, with some repetition, form the words without my conscious thought.

This is an example from one of my own scripts:

“I am permanently and unshakably connected to and aware of that perfect love which springs from my divine spark and its connection to my source, and that love is reflected by and manifests through an abundance of love – friendship, familial and romantic”

So what’s the logic here?

Beyond the structure – love is the fundamental creative force of the universe. Putting aside all associations it has with feeling and ego constructs, it is the force that creates and sustains order and gives rise to the conditions that allows self-aware consciousness to expand and evolve.

And the connections you have are not a result of other people and how they feel or act toward you but are an extension of your own being.

The only perfect love that exists is at the intersection between self and the place your soul springs from. The only form of love that comes remotely close to that is a mother’s love for her child; all other forms are imperfect, conditional, and transactional in some sense.

And if it IS possible to craft a perfect love between two people, it can only be realized once each person has connected to it within themselves.

This love that springs from the essence of who you are is necessary to bring all parts of yourself into alignment toward a singular purpose. It is the only force that can bring an end to internal conflict (although it will require time; it has to be done at a pace the self can withstand).

The love which comes from your source is not a delusional love; it doesn’t support you in your false notions of self. It isn’t a love that always makes you feel good. It isn’t a love that negates all hardship or “negative” emotions.

It IS a love that serves as a fundamental pillar of the self and can overwrite self-hatred/self-sabotage with diligent repetition.

The world looks very different when you’re approaching it from a standpoint where you always have your own back.

Manifestation Begins Within

How would the above play out?

You’d probably become less concerned about rejection. Some people might fall out of your life, but you’d likely have an easier time connecting with new people. People already in your life might start acting differently toward you – in a good way.

The exact manifestation will depend on you, your circumstances, and your makeup. The key point?

It begins with YOU. Your intentions are all about YOU. You are not giving anyone or anything else control over what you receive or experience in life, and neither are you trying to impose your will or notions of what YOU think is best on anyone else. You are shifting your basic assumptions about reality so that this is your baseline expectation, and in so doing, you are changing a part of who you are.

And this is not in defiance to observed reality. It will take time for reality to reflect what it is you are imprinting upon yourself, but you’re not fighting it.

Think of it like this – someone whose identity is so firmly rooted in having all the resources they need will not be shaken if their circumstances shift toward the worse and they have to charge a major expense like a car repair. If their assumption about life is that they will always have or be able to acquire anything they need, then even being driven into bankruptcy isn’t going to shake them.

“I have built up wealth before – I will build it again. I will always have what I need, and this will pave the way to something even better.” That’s what their self-talk would look like, and without any hint of ego or delusion.

The key part is that it’s congruent – trying to tell yourself things like this when you are stuck in your head and feel nothing but resistance only builds layers of denial. You can’t fake that sort of mindset. Producing that kind of shift in your self-concept would be extremely useful in a situation like that, but it’s usually a bad idea to start with anything where you have deep attachments and are desperate to bring about a result.

You need to have compassion and patience for yourself, and understand that even if you can reach deep into the layers of yourself and reality, you will not be able to produce massive change or drastically alter every circumstance right now.

And that’s okay.

This isn’t a matter of morality like a lot of gurus make it out to be. The person on the street has not failed, morally, because they’re struggling. Even if changing their self-concept would radically alter their lives, this is not a simple thing to do when there are traumas and abuses and rigged systems layered over top of them, shaping their identities and their circumstances.

You cannot force yourself to feel something or internalize what hasn’t taken root yet. What you can do is keep working on imprinting things into your subconscious and be patient with yourself as you actively work to shift your perceptions of your circumstances.

You WILL have to process emotions before you can complete the transformations you set in motion. This will not bring up pure pleasant white noise. Be ready for that when it comes, and don’t run from it because it’s “low vibe.” The cost of any form of transformation will be getting triggered – and sometimes VERY triggered. Denying and avoiding this part of the process is what kills most people’s results, and having to struggle at times isn’t a sign that you’ve failed; it’s often a necessary prerequisite to getting what you want.

In communion with my daemon, this thought floated to mind: “Whether you act like you can’t fail or like you already have and you’ve nothing to lose, the outcome is the same.”

The difference between someone who comes out better when they hit choppy financial waters vs someone who capsizes has nothing to do with their circumstances.

The one who succeeds isn’t going to accept their lot passively. They aren’t going to look at their credit card statement and think, “All will be well” while doing absolutely nothing about it.

Sure, there are people who could literally manifest whatever they need out of thin air in those circumstances. But they’re a percentage of a percentage, and it takes a massive amount of work to hit that level for most people unless life already works that way for them. (When it does? It’s usually been from the time they left the womb.)

What this is – without the fluffy new age spin – is tapping into the will of a warrior that fights when there’s little hope for victory.

A soldier on the battlefield who is outnumbered and outgunned is not delusional if he only entertains thoughts of victory and only envisions scenarios where he comes out as the winner. He’s dead if he doesn’t fight. They’re not taking prisoners. If he succumbs to his fear and he thinks of all the ways he can fail, he’s going to hesitate at a key moment or expose his location when he can’t defend himself.

It is only by focusing all of his energies on coming out the victor that he can make a miracle happen.

This is taking that mindset and that principle and applying it at-will at the deepest level of your Self. With practice and repetition, this will make you unstoppable.

It doesn’t mean everything in life will go your way. The aforementioned soldier isn’t guaranteed to come out in one piece. But – his focus on his own victory, if he is reaching deep enough, will heighten his awareness of what could kill him. It will put him in touch with his intuition. If he fails, he will cause more casualties on the opposing side than they would have ever expected and leave a mark they won’t forget.

You’re going to have bad days. You’re going to get passed over for promotions. You’re going to lose things you believed would be permanent fixtures in your life. You’re going get sick, and maybe even wind up in the hospital at some point.

But if you’re focused with dogged persistence on where you are going and who you have to become in order to get there and stay there, there are few limits to how far you can go – IF you are able and willing to undergo all of the challenges this will present at an ego level. You can’t be defined by your limitations or pain – and you will discover how much you define yourself by those things when you begin this work.

So take it slow – but do it with the love and awareness of who you really are, and do this with awe and gratitude as many will never come to this realization and it’s truly what this life is about.

And – if you care about this world? About the coming generations? You have a duty to take hold of your own power, take up space, and craft a world within and around you so that the bastards can’t set up shop in your back yard. Changing the world at scale begins on your home turf. If you feel completely powerless, taking on the machine will only reinforce your helplessness. Even small actions to change your self-concept and empower yourself can make you a force to be reckoned with when needed. Remember – a small seed grows into a mighty tree. Never underestimate the impact of the small improvements you make today.

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