Several weeks ago I sent out a survey to my newsletter subscribers and asked them if there are any topics they’d like me to write about or questions they would like to ask.

One of the questions I got was: “does using the Law of Assumption to manifest a new outcome take a lot of work?”

I am going to answer this question in this article. The answer is: it depends.

As you may know, I have been studying Neville Goddard’s work and the law of assumption (which I abbreviate to the LOA in this article) intensively for 2 years now. I’ve read dozens of books. I’ve hung out on message boards. I’ve tested the law in my life on everything from creating change in the behaviour of people around me to manifesting a partner, to manifesting better health. I’ve made notes on the manifesting techniques I’ve used and what the results were. I’ve worked with clients in my law of assumption strategy session. I’ve observed their results.

My biggest success has been that I clawed my health back from the brink 2 years ago. I was disabled and sick with a serious autoimmune disease that was attacking my brain and my joints. I was also sick with lots of other health issues. This decline in my health happened slowly over a period of 12-15 years before it culminated in what seemed at the time like a complete loss of health and functionality.

I made a lot of progress in my health over the 2 years and lost most of the diagnoses I had. I became asymptomatic without pharma drugs. I’m not 100% asymptomatic. I still have the odd day where I feel tired or get a bit of mild pain. However, I can stop symptoms in their tracks when they do show up.

I also manifested a house in the location I wanted, using the Law. I know it works, but I’ve come to believe it’s more nuanced than 90% of the contemporary LOA content creators out there say it is. And also more nuanced than Neville Goddard said it was.

In the last 2 years I’ve seen a lot of people fail to use the Law successfully. Through my experiences and all I’ve learned, I believe some people who use the techniques of the Law of Assumption or the Law of Attraction to create change will not succeed. 

Here’s why:

We are all starting off from different points and need different approaches. Most contemporary law of assumption/attraction teachings don’t address this.

When I started my journey, my spirit guides told me that I was paying off a kind of “debt” in my health that I talked about in detail in this article.

I didn’t really understand at the time what they were talking about. They told me that it would take 2 years to pay off this debt. I assumed maybe they were talking about the damage done to my body by the illness and the ways I’d abused my body over the years. I thought maybe it would take me 2 years to repair the damage to my body and then when I got to zero, I could start building health. That’s how I interpreted their guidance.

I now understand they weren’t just talking about body damage, they were talking about karmic debt. By karmic debt, I mean that I had negative patterns and garbage that I was carrying with me from childhood, and I believe those patterns actually had their origins in past lives. Those patterns partly caused my illness.

Over the course of 2 years, I had to do a tremendous amount of inner work to pay off that debt and release those patterns.

If we talk in monetary terms just as a symbol of energy, you could say that I was $1000 in debt 2 years ago. Recently I got to $0 and have started saving money (aka generating good health and good karma.) It now feels like I’ve got the wind at my back on a beautiful, sunny day whereas 2 years ago it felt like I was walking up a windswept hill in the pouring rain and the wind was blowing in my face and slowing me down.

What I’ve observed working with people is that in terms of karmic debt, some people come into practising the Law of Assumption with -$4000 (so, deeply in debt) and others come in with $100 (so, slightly in credit but still a bit poor.) Just to give two contrasting examples of where people can be at coming into this.

Those two people are going to be on completely different paths when it comes to manifesting and will need different approaches and techniques.

The more in karmic debt you are, the less likely it is that you will be able to create big changes in your life straight away with the Law of Assumption or Attraction.

The people who don’t have negative karma and are not carrying negative patterns from childhood or past lives will usually have no problems putting the techniques of the Law of Assumption to work and succeeding at it. They can succeed with SATS, affirmations, and more.

The people who have negative conditioning and patterns won’t succeed at those techniques quickly and instead will need to do specific types of inner work to change (such as revision and other types of inner work I detail in this article), and sometimes this inner work that is required may be extensive. Once those people have done the inner work to get to “$0”, they will see more success with manifesting techniques.

I think the Law of Assumption should be called the law of reflection.

Your 3D world is reflecting you back to you. We all receive vital life force from the Creator/Source and that passes through our auric field, and our subconscious mind (which is a part of our auric field). The contents of our auric field condition that vital life force. What we assume and believe conditions that vital life force (that’s the Law of Assumption at work.) Then the law of projection causes that conditioned energy to go out into the quantum field and the law of attraction causes that energy to attract like circumstances in the 3D.

The contents of our auric field is the sum total of our thoughts and beliefs up to this point. It is what we were taught and how we were conditioned in childhood. It also contains our past life karma and patterns (which I believe govern what our soul chooses as our childhood in the first place). It’s how balanced our chakra and nervous systems are.

We attract all of that back to us in our 3D circumstances. We see reflected back to us who we are unconsciously being.

For obvious reasons I’ve become fascinated with stories of what medicine calls “spontaneous remission” — people who had terminal cancers and degenerative diseases who healed from these and then led normal, healthy lives.

One of the things that became clear in studying “spontaneous remissions” is that the people who successfully healed a health condition that threatened their life were people who healed their identity. They had to deeply change who they were being on the level of their auric field and become someone new. If you are in karmic debt (i.e. weighed down by the past) you can’t just change the way you behave, think or how you feel on a dime. Those are all downstream consequences of who you are being; who you identify as and how you see yourself.

In my opinion, to create change through the law of assumption in any area of your life, when you are in karmic debt, you have to become a new person. Once you become a new person, then your thinking, feeling and behaviour changes.

In essence, Neville Goddard was teaching the art of change and transformation, although I do sometimes feel he didn’t go deep enough with it. He said “there is nothing to change but self.”

When you change the self, you change your health, your relationships, your finances, and more.

Many people are coming into the Law of Assumption community and expecting to see change when they have karmic debt. As an example, maybe they are in a toxic relationship, with poor mental and physical health and financial problems.

In situations like those, you are not going to create massive change with techniques like scripting, affirmations and SATS in a short period of time.

If you’re in karmic debt, the work often needs to go deeper.

You need to change who you are being. But how do you change yourself? You can’t just make a switch overnight. You can’t even do it all by your (human) self. Basically you need prayer (a dialogue with the Divine) and you need grace.

I believe that you need to set an intention and then be ready for what shows up on the bridge of incidents. You essentially pray to your higher self or soul that this is the outcome you want. You give your higher self the coordinates “I want to improve my health” or “I want to earn X amount per year” and your higher self has to track a course to take you there.

Your higher self sees a lot further than you do. It knows what your blocks are and it knows what your childhood/karmic patterns and wounds are.

It knows what you have to overcome to reach your destination.

Your higher self is a branch of the Divine “tree”. It’s a piece of God energy and if you set your intention in this way, it will create miracles. Grace will be at work in your life. You will get there in time.

BUT if you are in karmic debt, a lot may be required of you on this journey that goes way beyond a bit of scripting or saying some affirmations.

There needs to be more honesty about what the journey can look like

Depending on how big your karmic debt is, your bridge of incidents can occasionally involve the complete opposite of what you asked for.

Let’s say that you are manifesting a partner but you have in the past attracted abusive partners because of your childhood traumas.

Your bridge of incidents may involve attracting yet another abusive partner so that you can finally heal from this pattern. It may bring you to your knees in the process.

If you set these intentions in earnest and you have a karmic debt, you will unleash forces that could ask a lot of you and you should be prepared for anything.

You may need to lose something before you can gain the thing you want.

This is mostly glossed over in the Law of Assumption/Law of Attraction community. Or it’s treated like a temporary inconvenience and people are told to “persist”. People often feel shame that they tried so hard at the techniques but they got the opposite of what they asked for and another disaster. But it’s not uncommon for people with karmic debts to be sent adversity as part of their process of healing an old pattern which is keeping them stuck in their lives.

This happened to me in the last 2 years. In fact, something terrible happened to me in the last 2 years; something I consider one of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life. This was a profound healing opportunity that healed my ancestral line and was a key part of my transformation.

It takes grit to work through the crap that may show up. There are opportunities in the crap — you have to to see the opportunity to change and heal an old pattern. You have to look for the lesson.

What many people choose to do is become a victim to whatever happened and say the LOA doesn’t work because it brought them the opposite of what they wanted. It does work, but if you pray for patience, you’ll manifest a line at the bank.

If you pray for something significant that requires you to essentially become someone new in order to get it, you’ll get an opportunity to change or heal yourself and it may not be pretty. You may end up on your knees with your face in the dirt.

So reason #1 for not using the Law of Assumption to transform your life:

Do you really want change? What if creating change means your soul brings you adversity as an opportunity to change? Do you still want it? What if creating change means losing your relationship? What if it means losing your job?

All of these things can happen on your bridge of incidents if you are creating massive change. Don’t set an intention to create change through the LOA unless you’re prepared for things like that to happen.

Note that it doesn’t happen to everyone or even most people on this path, but this sort of thing can happen and it did happen to me.

In addition, the amount of work I’ve put in to change has essentially been a part time job for 2 years.

I’ve had to heal my core wounds in a process that felt deeply humbling and painful.

I did long water fasts, which were gruelling and brought me face to face with my biggest insecurities.

I revised 100+ memories from childhood, but again, it was hard going.

I lost some of my friends on this path, including a dear friend I’d had for several years.

I had to cut out family members. (Some of those people were toxic or just living in a chaotic way, and the stress leaked into my life.)

I had to move house.

My worldview has changed profoundly. I don’t see the conventional medical establishment the same anymore. I’ve lost the sense of safety and security I once had in the government and authorities (especially health ones). I am more disillusioned with the world than I was before I began this process of manifesting change.

I don’t prioritise money or profit anymore. My ambitions for my material life have gone out of the window, beyond having my basic needs met.

In the end, I had to become a new person and live differently.

It probably would have just been easier to go on medication and carry on my life as it was before, like so many other patients do (or have to do because of their responsibilities like taking care of children and full time jobs.)

I am not about to take meds, and I don’t regret my path, but my point is that changing the self in this way, in order to create big change in the 3D is not for everyone.

Don’t set big intentions unless you’re ready for this.

There are no shortcuts if you’re deep in karmic debt. You have to do the work.

I realise that not everyone using the LOA is using it to fix something as big as a degenerative dis-ease. And what I’m saying in this article probably does not apply to all things you’re trying to manifest (and especially not smaller intentions like a small increase in income or manifesting a seat in business class on a flight.) But I think it particularly applies to manifesting a good relationship when your personal life has been a dumpster fire for years. Or manifesting yourself out of a serious health diagnosis. Or manifesting financial abundance when you’ve never experienced anything other than lack.

Where are you on this karmic scale? How much work do you need to put in? Read this article to find out. If you’ve had a lot of ups and downs in your life — cycles where things go well and then they turn to crap, then you undoubtedly have bad karma to clear.

I also want to say that although it can feel like a slog, the payoff of clearing bad karma can be fantastic. I have more abundance, more authenticity, more joy, more love in my life and more connectedness since I’ve been on this journey. I feel like I am now the person I was always meant to be.

Let’s have a look at the second reason for not using the Law of Assumption:

You may not be able to keep what you manifested.

I did a write up on my blog of an interview with Cynthia Stafford who manifested $112m on the lottery in 2007. Like many lottery winners, she later went bankrupt.

Here’s another problem with manifesting: in order to keep what you manifest, you must be worthy of it. Or more accurately, you must not feel unworthy of what you manifest. 

You are the only one who decides how worthy you are. Whatever you believe about your worthiness is what will be reflected back to you in the 3D.

The world or your caregivers growing up may have taught you something about whether or not you’re worthy, but essentially if you were given past negative messages about your worthiness in the area of love, finances or health, you must heal them in order to keep what you manifest.

Worthiness is less likely to be a problem for people who were brought up by loving individuals. But it can be work for lots of us who weren’t. If this applies to you, this means that somehow, in order to keep what you manifest, you have to find a way to love yourself and consider yourself valuable. You must treat yourself the way you would treat a dear friend or your precious, beloved child. You must awaken to the fact that you are a branch of the Divine and you have the Divine creative power within you, to shape your world. This is what self-esteem is — you esteem yourself as a creator and you understand the power you have. And to know yourself as a creator means you must practise using the Law. This usually means that you return to your true nature and knowing who you really are on the soul level. You may have to release earthly illusions and lies about yourself; lies you may not even know you believe in, and if you don’t know you believe in them, how do you uncover them? That’s a journey in itself.

If you think this applies to you, you might want to take my self concept quiz in this article. If you agreed with many points, you need to do some work on worthiness and self-concept.

So, if this does apply to you, this is one more reason not to bother with the Law of Assumption, unless you are willing to work on self-love. Are you willing to do that, on top of everything else?

I have been in the process of creating a Law of Assumption online course teaching people to manifest money but I’ve become disillusioned with the scale of the task at hand for all of these reasons…

1. Practising the Law of Assumption takes a lot of work for some people for the reasons I explain in this article. People may need to revise or work on themselves extensively to reach their desire — and they may need to do it on their timeline, not on mine or the timeline I set for the online course.

2. Keeping the money you manifest is another issue. How do I teach people who lack self-worth to love themselves enough to keep the money they manifested? Many of my wonderful clients have worthiness issues. This is a whole other course in itself.

3. Do people know that if you want massive change your higher self may choose to blow up your life? What happens if people require support through those changes? What happens if they regret it?

4. How do you teach all of this to people who may have no sense of spirituality outside of believing in the LOA and who use it like a magic trick to get what they want? (Loads of LOA YouTubers and people in LOA communities are coming from that standpoint.)

People who have no beliefs at all who are coming into LOA communities and treating (and even teaching) the LOA as if it’s the only thing in God’s creation. It isn’t. It’s a law that intersects with many other laws. It’s not separate from the law of oneness, the law of karma and the law of natural rhythms (which means that your manifestation “has its own appointed hour”, as Neville Goddard put it, and may take 24 hours, 24 days, 24 months or even 24 years.)

You also need to be self directed, self motivated, persistent and intuitive to use the Law of Assumption successfully. You may need to be like a detective when it comes to assessing your subconscious thinking (most of us have no idea what we’re broadcasting subconsciously). You also have to have resources (like time) and you need to be spiritually open. If you’re looking for a teacher to just tell you what to do and you don’t trust yourself and your own intuition, you are more likely to fail. Your higher self needs to be your teacher. I don’t think I could have succeeded without my intuition guiding me the whole way.

On top of this, if you really succeed in creating deep change in who you are being, what you are thinking and how you are feeling (and this is often required to change your 3D reality), you might get some pushback from your ego and body. Did you know that the body becomes addicted to the neuropeptides created by your dominant states and emotions? Joe Dispenza goes into this in depth in his book ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’. If you are someone who has been angry and bitter, or depressed and down on yourself for years, your body expects to feel the emotions associated with those states. So, when change comes, the body may rebel and try to get you to go back to how things were. When you take those habitual emotions away, some people feel anxiety, panic or sadness because of the changes. So there’s also that to contend with for some. (I experienced this, too.)

I feel guided to support people in this area but I am wondering if instead of creating a manifesting money course I will be teaching self-love or holding revision groups to support people in revising their past. Or maybe I will end up creating that money manifesting course but it will be a massive undertaking like some of my other online courses.

I know that I have many Law of Assumption practitioners in my audience. I’m interested in hearing peoples’ views on whether there is something they’d like to see from me.

I hope this article isn’t too negative but I wouldn’t be in integrity if I didn’t present my experiences as a conscious creator authentically to you. I may be overcomplicating things, but my experiences have shown me that for people with karmic ‘baggage’, creating change IS complicated.

If you resonate with this and you’re interested in releasing your karmic complexes, use this article to help you.