This article is for people who are using the Law of Assumption to consciously create their lives.

(You can read my first article on mental diet here. )

In this second article on the topic of mental diet, I’m going to talk about an aspect of your mental diet that is worth considering: what you are consuming throughout your day, in terms of media. I’m going to recommend some tweaks you can make to your daily routine & activities that can yield big results for manifesting.

Neville Goddard & Mental diets

Neville Goddard often talked about the importance of a mental diet for aligning with the reality you wish to create. Here are some quotes from his 1955 lecture “Mental Diets.”

“Talking to oneself is a habit everyone indulges in. We could no more stop talking to ourselves than we could stop eating and drinking. All that we can do is control the nature and the direction of our inner conversations. Most of us are totally unaware of the fact that our inner conversations are the causes of the circumstance of our life.”

“A man’s mental conversations attracts his life. As long as there is no change in his inner talking, the personal history of the man remains the same. To attempt to change the world before we change our inner talking is to struggle against the very nature of things. Man can go round and round in the same circle of disappointments and misfortunes, not seeing them as caused by his own negative inner talking, but as caused by others.”

So in these quotes, Neville Goddard is saying that our inner conversations (i.e. what we say to ourselves in the privacy of our own minds) direct the course of our life.

Ideally our inner conversations are not going to be negative. The problem is that negative stories are all around us in our culture (in social media, in the news, in songs, in books, and in movies & TV) and we do consume them in a passive way without even thinking about what it is doing to our subconscious mind, and this can negatively affect our inner conversations. 

We are wired for empathy. When we see or hear about someone else having a negative experience, the mirror neurons in our brain are activated, and we unconsciously imagine ourselves in the situation(s) we are hearing or reading about. Then we have thoughts and feelings that align with these situations. Some of this occurs on an unconscious level, and different people are affected to different degrees by this (- if you are an empath or know you have a suggestible subconscious mind, then you will be affected more than most.)

Therefore, when we are engaging in a process of manifesting our desires, it helps to eliminate any negative input that could lead us down an unfavourable pathway in the mind, and see us unwittingly imagining unfavourable situations for ourselves or others.

The subconscious mind is just like a computer, and everything we take in, in terms of what we think, we what say to ourselves, what we say out loud, what other people say to us and what we hear around us, programs this computer (and creates our life), for better or worse.

The fact is, we can spend 30 minutes doing great work in terms of reprogramming the subconscious mind towards something favourable, through affirmations or visualisations, or just resting in the state of the wish fulfilled. And we can undo all of that good work in just a few minutes by passively consuming something really toxic. We create everything in our lives according to the contents of our subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind is really easy and quick to reprogram, which is great when we want to use techniques to reprogram ourselves for something favourable, but it’s also not so great when we accidentally take in information that reprograms the subconscious towards something unfavourable. 

So I recommend that you become aware of the potentially negative sources of information in your life, and eliminate them while you are going through this process of creating a desired outcome through manifesting. Otherwise you may be sabotaging yourself. 

Here they are:

Conversations about things you don’t wish to see more of in your life

Sometimes people are working on manifesting a particular intention, for example, more money, but then they find that they keep having conversations with their spouse about how they don’t have enough money. If you’re manifesting money, you don’t want to be hearing people complain about money nor do you want to be affirming “we can’t afford that” or “we don’t have enough money.” Do what you can to avoid these conversations as much as possible. 

Therapy

This also applies to getting psychotherapy or counselling. I think therapy is often helpful, but it may not be helpful in a situation where you are manifesting something in a particular area of your life but then talking negatively about that life area in therapy. For example, you are manifesting an improvement in your relationship, but you’re often talking in therapy about what is going wrong in the relationship. When manifesting, I prefer to use therapy strictly for problem solving and not to vent. Otherwise, I’m focusing on something I do not want to see more of in my life.

News

I highly recommend not reading or watching the news while you are in this process. I don’t think many people reading this article need convincing that news is toxic. We all know this already. It is a run down of the most horrible and sensational things that are happening or have recently happened on the planet today. Studies show that consuming news triggers the limbic system of the brain and raises stress hormones in the body, like cortisol. Raised cortisol can cause your immune and your digestive systems to function less efficiently. There are many other side effects of elevated cortisol, too, that I won’t go into here, but suffice to say news is bad for the mind, bad for the body, and can steer your inner conversations in an unfavourable direction, undoing your previous good work. 

An example of this is if you are currently working on manifesting a higher income, but you keep seeing news stories about rising inflation, high house prices and people experiencing poverty and hardship. This is going to trigger the limbic system of your brain that is tasked with your survival, and you will be taking in the message that “it is hard to get ahead and normal to struggle.” How is this going to help you to “live in the end” of having more prosperity in your life? It is doing the exact opposite.

So, if there’s one change I can recommend you can make to manifest more of what you want, I would say give up news altogether. Your life will become more peaceful overnight. 

I recommend asking a friend or family member to notify you if there is any news that you really should know about, and then stop reading or watching. 

Social media/online forums

The same goes for most of the spaces where people gather online. If it’s on a social media website or it’s an online forum, the algorithms are geared towards strong emotions, such as anger. If you can evoke a strong negative emotion in someone, the more likely he or she is to react and engage with the social media content, and the longer the person spends on that website and the more likely they are to share things and bring in other users. The longer they spend on the website and the more they share the content, the more ad revenue the social media company or forum will make. 

So social media and online forums make money off our negative emotions. They are like vampires. The less time you spend on them, the better.

Reading or watching stories about triggering topics

If there is a cause that is dear to your heart, but also triggers negative emotions in you, be careful about engaging with it while you are in the manifesting process.

For example, if you’re an animal lover, don’t read or watch stories of animals that have been neglected or abused, even if that story has a happy ending. Know the triggers that are going to upset you or make you feel negative emotion. This can cause you to slip into an undesirable state while you’re in this process.

Songs

When I was first getting into manifesting and I was doing the DNRS program (which is actually a program for applying the principles of the Law of Assumption for improving health, although it doesn’t present or market itself that way) I was encouraged to only listen to uplifting music, and no sad lyrics. 

So, I went through my YouTube playlists and I found that many of the songs I had in them were sad and depressing. I was a sucker for a sad love song, in particular. I started to observe what these songs were doing to my state of mind when I listened. 

I found that when I listened to a sad love song, it would activate memories of times when I listened to that song when I was sad, such as after a break up. In a flash, it put me into that old self that was suffering. Activating such memories was bittersweet.

Be careful of the lyrical content of the songs you listen to. Read the lyrics. Feel the energy. Your subconscious is taking this stuff in and receiving info about what kind of reality you’re living in right now (which is what creates your future), so don’t listen to anything with negative undertones, when you’re in the conscious manifesting process.

As an example, if you’re manifesting money, you don’t want to be listening to stuff like this or this.

Instead, listen to positive, uplifting music.

Note that this isn’t about repressing emotion. If you already feel bad and need to have a cry, sad music can be a great way to get it out of you and it’s fine to cry. I’m not talking about that. Instead, I’m saying that if you already feel OK, don’t listen to music that may elicit a change of state in the negative direction.

(As an aside, remember that negative emotions on their own don’t manifest our lives – what manifests are the negative emotions and thoughts we actually identify with consistently, day after day.)

TV and Movies

Similarly, when manifesting be careful of what you watch. Don’t watch violence, or stories where people are struggling or depressed. Some of this will be specific to what you are manifesting. For example, if you’re manifesting an improved relationship, don’t watch a movie or TV show about an unhappy couple. These stories can plant unfavourable seeds in our subconscious minds or cause you to focus on an existing unfavourable story that you’re running inside your mind, that you really need to take your focus off. 

True crime

Stay away also from true crime. I’m a fan of true crime so this one was hardest for me. Darkness and sickness are the underlying energies associated with most true crime stories. These are not energies you want entering your subconscious mind while you’re consciously manifesting a positive outcome in your life.

In summary, don’t feed your mind garbage while you’re manifesting. What is going on behind your eyes is what you will see in your life maybe several weeks from now, and what is going on behind your eyes is powerfully affected by what you consume.

Here are some ideas as to what you can consume instead of the above:

• Gaia.com documentaries – I particularly like the Dr Joe Dispenza Rewired series on there. They do a free 7 day trial.
• I find that cooking shows and travel documentaries are always very “neutral” in terms of how they affect my state, so I watch a lot of travel documentaries on YouTube.
• I love watching this YouTube channel: Scenic Relaxation, which combines beautiful music with panoramic drone footage of various countries.