Update: When I wrote it, I originally titled this article “you must do this to manifest your desires” but I have since concluded that this principle does not apply to everyone. So, you may or may not find this helpful in your manifesting process. I find this principle applies the most to manifesting better health outcomes when we have a health problem that really affects our quality of life. 

Before I get started with this article, please be aware that when I talk about manifesting on this blog, I am referring to manifesting through the Law of Assumption, which is a spiritual principle from the New Thought author Neville Goddard’s teachings.

I have had big success through using the Law of Assumption over the last year or so, turning my life around from something I was not enjoying, to something I very much am enjoying. Due to my experiences, I can’t help but share about the Law of Assumption on this blog!

In this article, I’m going to cover a step that you need to be aware of, if you have set an intention to manifest something, and that’s the concept of importance (i.e. putting your desire on a pedestal and making it important.)

In order to successfully manifest your desire, you must be at peace with the idea of not having your desire.

The more you want something, and obsess over having it: worrying, pushing, striving, hoping; the more it will slip through your fingers.

You need to have a light touch when manifesting — not a death grip!

This is probably the number one obstacle on the path to manifesting. If you have waited a very long time for your manifestation, and you’re no closer to seeing it in your reality, the most likely scenario is that you have attached a great deal of importance to it. You cannot change your reality when you’re very attached to it being a certain way. You have to take your goals and desires off a pedestal. 

Quantum physicist and author of the amazing book ‘Reality Transurfing’, Vadim Zeland, goes into this in a lot of depth in his book.

Vadim Zeland talks about the difference between walking on a plank on the ground in your garden and walking a plank that exists between 2 high rise buildings, with no safety net. 

If you are very attached to your manifestation and feel you can’t be happy in your life without it, you’re essentially walking the plank between 2 high rise buildings. You’re going to get nervous and you’re more likely to fall off as a result.

If you’re trying to manifest something and you feel like you’re walking that plank between two high rises, what can you do?

You need to get a safety net.

Here’s how:

You come up with an alternative scenario where you haven’t achieved your desire, and you make peace with it. 

Let ’s look at an example. Let’s say that you want to conceive a child, and you’ve been trying for some time but it hasn’t happened. You have always felt that you are here to be a parent, and the idea of this not happening is devastating to you.

To increase the likelihood of seeing your desired reality, you have to concoct a plan B — a scenario where you are happy without having had your own biological children. 

You plan how your life will be if you never have children. How would you deal with the grief? What would be on the other side of that? What hobbies, projects or plans would you have in the absence of that? Or would you adopt a child? Spend a lot of time with your nieces and nephews? You plan something where you would survive and you would eventually thrive in the absence of your desire.

You must come up with a scenario that feels bearable to you. If it feels unbearable, work out how to make it more bearable.

Don’t focus on it too much – just enough so that it feels like it could be a viable alternative, if push came to shove. 

If you do this process right and really make peace with your plan B, you won’t ever need the plan B.

It’s all about accepting your current situation and no longer resisting it.

The other way to reduce importance is to practise the techniques I wrote about in these articles: affirmations & visualisation.

The purpose of using these techniques is not actually to manifest something in your life. Their purpose is to create the feeling of the ‘wish fulfilled’ inside you – for you to carry a sense within you of your desire already having been fulfilled. If you persist in living in this state, the side effect of this is that your external reality shifts according to what is going on in your internal world, and your desire shows up in 3D reality. 

As you practise these techniques, you will fulfil your desires in imagination, and this will naturally enable you to let go of any burning desire to have them. You’ll already feel like you have them. (Sometimes it can take weeks or months of doing techniques before you begin to feel this way, and other times you don’t even need to do techniques to capture the feeling of the ‘wish fulfilled’ – every manifestation is different.) 

Let’s look at another scenario as to how importance can show itself in our lives, and the best and worst ways to deal with it.

Let’s say that you have a 7 year old son who wants a bike for his birthday. You have chosen the bike together from an online store. His birthday is in 2 days and you realise to your horror you forgot to actually order the bike online. 

You go online and order the bike. You choose express shipping so that it will arrive on his birthday, but at the same time you know there are delays with the postal service right now in your area.

The worst thing you can do in this situation is envision it as really important to your son’s happiness that the bike arrives on his birthday, and worry that the present won’t arrive on time. Or ruminate about what a bad parent you are to forget your child’s birthday present. Or freak out and email the online shop, telling them how important it is that the bike arrives on the day you have chosen.

These are all behaviours that attach importance and as a result, something will happen to thwart your intention. The likelihood is that the bike won’t arrive on time.

The alternative scenario would be to trust that the bike will be delivered on the day you chose, and to also let your son know there’s a small chance it won’t arrive on his birthday, because mum/dad messed up. That’s your plan B that takes the pressure off. Releasing the importance clears any energetic obstacles and this makes it more likely a wave of probability will be collapsed, that means the bike will arrive on time. 

Let’s have a look at another scenario:

If you have a chronic illness that you want to release, you must come up with a plan B as to how you will live with this illness forever, if it never left you.

In addition, if you see symptoms in your body, you do not pay attention to them or assign importance to them. You treat them with indifference. This doesn’t mean you don’t obtain relief through some means if it is available to you (or see the doctor if that is what is required) but you stop making it be really important that you be symptom free or illness free.

If you are always researching and trying new things to heal your illness, or maybe you’re on a special diet, you stop assigning importance to those things. You tell yourself that you’re doing these things because you choose to, not because you have to. You tell yourself that there is One Primary Cause — which is, you and what you focus on. If a special diet is on your Bridge of Incidents towards your goal of being healed, so be it, but you don’t assign importance to it like it’s your only path of getting there. Hold it lightly. Don’t keep searching for the next big magic bullet that you think will solve your problem. 

Reducing Importance through humour

Humour, laughter and cheerfulness are another way to reduce importance. I have a friend who I used to call occasionally if something went wrong and I was having a meltdown. I don’t have meltdowns anymore (I’m on a mental diet!) but he used to get calls from me catastrophizing and freaking out when something went wrong. I remember he would often crack jokes and although I never expressed it, it sometimes annoyed me because the situations didn’t seem humorous to me at all.

Now I know that humour is a natural way to reduce importance and he was helping me out in more ways than one.

So, if you have a problem, bringing cheerfulness to the situation and laughing about it will also reduce importance.

If you’re interested in learning more about importance and why when we attach importance to something, it is less likely to manifest, you may enjoy quantum physicist Vadim Zeland’s book ‘Reality Transurfing’ (Chapter 4 of the book explains in a lot of depth why having a death grip on your desire leads to bad outcomes). This is truly one of the best spiritual books I’ve ever read. It’s a very long book and will probably appeal the most to spiritual yet highly analytical people. 

In summary, here are the steps to use the ideas in this article and apply them to your manifesting process:

• First ask yourself, have I attached excessive importance to my desire manifesting? How would I feel if my desire never manifested?
• If you don’t mind if your desire never manifests, excellent — you’re in the best place you could be
• If you have quite a negative emotional reaction to the idea that you might not get what you want, concoct a plan B in detail. Face your fears. How would you live your life if your desire never manifested? — write out a plan
• Use techniques (affirmations and visualisation) to affirm and visualise your desires, until you stop caring about whether your desire manifests in 3D. Enjoy the fulfilment of living out your desires in imagination
• Release your grip on the idea that an unwanted situation in your life needs to be different – don’t resist it.

Here are some choice quotes from Vadim Zeland on the topic of importance:

“The only obstacle on the path to fulfilling your desires is the projection of artificial importance.”

“When trying to solve a problem, follow one golden rule: before you even start considering where the solution might lie, first reduce the level of importance you associate with the problem. That way, balanced forces will not get in the way and the problem can be solved quickly and easily.”

“The root of illness is importance. Reduce importance, then you reduce mental tension, which reduces physical tension.”

“To eliminate stress from your life, wake up and reduce importance.”

“Don’t fight to negate importance — just release your grip.”

“As soon as you start projecting importance onto certain things; onto anything, you better be ready because that’s when problems start coming your way.”

“All unbalanced feelings and reactions, such as dissatisfaction, anxiety, worry, fear, remorse, admiration, worship, disappointment, pride or resentment are all manifestations of importance in one form or another.“

Further Resources:

• You can find the next article in this series here: The Importance of Self-concept for Manifesting

And you can find Neville Goddard’s books on the Law of Assumption here: Neville Goddard: The Complete Reader