Tips for Manifesting with Mental Illness.

I used to think that my mental health diagnoses were the biggest things holding me back from manifesting the things I truly desired, until I learned that they weren’t.

And then I learned how to manifest the things I desired despite my mental health status, even during times when I was experiencing mood lows or anxiety. When you’re dealing with mental illness, “thinking happy thoughts” is the thing that people tell you that makes you roll your eyes so far into the back of your head that it gives you a headache. It’s the— “just don’t worry about it” when you tell someone you’re experiencing anxiety, as though that sentiment immediately cures you, as though you’d never thought to just NOT be anxious; to just NOT be depressed! To just NOT have bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or PTSD…

If only it were that simple, right?

When you deal with mental health issues, sometimes the “think positive thoughts” part of manifesting can seem overwhelming, because it almost feels like a mockery of what many of us go through on a day-to-day basis. How do we ensure that we’re raising our proverbial vibration by thinking these positive thoughts when we’re overcome with negative ones? For me, this was difficult in a few different ways. I struggled with the logic of manifestation. I could watch a million hours of videos and read a thousand books, yet my brain still needed a walkthrough of what to do, as though I wasn’t providing enough of an exemplary account of what to do and how to do it. Even when the information clicked, I still struggled to put the pieces into place day after day, as though they were literally going in one ear and out the other from one day to the next. I remember spending a lot of time over one summer reading publications from Ester and Abraham Hicks, specifically. I was enamored by their teachings, but I felt disconnected by them at the same time because I struggled to “get into the vortex” and stay there. I didn’t know how to feel the feelings, because I didn’t know what it felt like to feel what I wanted…

I was in search of abundance, but I felt as though I couldn’t feel those feelings of abundance because I didn’t know what abundance felt like. What I came to realize years later when I revisited manifestation was that abundance isn’t one solid state of wealth; it isn’t a specific number or a specific place in time. I could feel abundance because I had experienced it, and I was experiencing it every day. I experienced abundance in many forms, I just had to take the time to recognize and appreciate them. For example, I began to recognize every little thing in my day-to-day. I’d wake up in the morning and recognize the bed that I slept on, and the comfort that it provided; I recently got a new mattress and have been sleeping so much better. I’d sit for breakfast, rather than rushing out the door and hitting up a drive-thru. I could make a matcha at home, spend some time with my partner, enjoy the morning, be present in my day. I wasn’t rolling from bed and trudging into a job that I hated. I enjoyed my place of employment again, and I loved the people I worked with. Even on days when I wasn’t feeling my best, or days when I was more symptomatic than others, I still tried to find the tiniest things to recognize in each day.

Identify where you’re at right now and reach for a better feeling, even if it’s just an improvement of 1%. That better-feeling thought then creates a better-feeling emotion, which helps you increase your current state at all times.

This mentality helped me from falling into old habits and succumbing into poor mental caverns, the abyss of negativity where I had lived for so many years because I didn’t know how to get out, how to crawl from the darkness towards the light. For example, one of my primary symptoms is that I experience what I call the void; it’s a place of emptiness that I often find myself stuck in for days or weeks at a time. Some people call it sadness or depression, but for me it’s just a lack of feeling anything at all. I’m sort of just going through the motions, robotically moving from one day to the next until it passes. Sometimes it lasts longer than others. Some periods feel like they go on forever, like they’ll be endless, like there’s no way out.

You can see where manifesting from the void might be difficult.

It’s what I struggled with for years. I gave up trying for a while, because I didn’t see the point in trying to re-wire my brain. It wasn’t until I got properly diagnosed with the mental health disorders that I knew more appropriately outlined the symptoms I had been experiencing that I felt as though I could focus on my symptoms and how I could manifest with them. I started medication to manage my mood, worked on therapeutic modalities like journaling and meditation to help work through some trauma and old beliefs, and began to break into some of the roadblocks that were preventing me from getting what I wanted.

Here are some of the things I learned:

1. The Universe responds to your current state of being and responds to your current energetic state. This meant that I was staying in a place of lack and loathing because that was where I was constantly existing energetically. When I felt bad—which was most of the time—I did things that perpetuated the negative feelings; I engaged in negative compensatory behaviors that, as a result, made me feel even worse. It was a vicious cycle, and I was trapped in the middle of it. To get out of the cycle, I had to focus on shifting my energy. This is where that 1% increase in energy came in. Even when I was having a terrible day, I would catch myself having negative thoughts or feelings and reach for something just a little more positive, a little more abundant. I’d find myself taking extra time for a meditation or some journaling, both of which were positive coping skills that I had developed, to help me manage any big feelings or thoughts that I was experiencing that I felt that I needed to get out of my mind in some way or another. I could think of what I wanted until I was blue in the face, but if I was constantly living in a place of negative energy—a place where I felt as though I was not worthy—then I would not be worthy and would not experience the things I was looking to experience.

2. Stop waiting for an outside event to occur to change your experience. This one was an eye-opener for me. “Don’t wait for the wealth to feel abundant; don’t wait for the healing to feel healthy; don’t wait for the relationship to feel love.” Joe Dispenza says the moment you feel the feeling you experience the effect. I used meditation to do this because it was one of the only ways I could truly focus on what I was feeling or thinking in any given moment. It was an excellent way for me to experience the feeling of gratitude for the things that I had in my life that I wanted to duplicate, rather than thinking of the things in my life that were missing that I wanted to attract. For example, I felt grateful for my home and my space, the ability that I had to buy fresh produce and cook for myself, the ability to spend my days off how I wanted. I felt gratitude for day trips with my partner and dinner dates and surprise date nights. Because of this gratitude, we experienced more abundance that let us have these things and more—we were able to take weekend trips and vacations, buy the more expensive produce and foods that we wanted, eat at the restaurants that we wanted to, when we wanted to. It was small changes at first, but significant changes came as I became more efficient at experiencing the feelings associated with my gratitude.

3. How you think, feel, and act make up your personal experience. This was hard for me to hear, because it meant that many parts of myself, I had to rewrite. How can I feel abundant when all I know is bad luck and trauma? How can I feel loved when all I know is neglect and heartbreak? How can I experience health when all I know is illness and pain? These were the questions that spun in circles in my brain any time I tried to learn more about manifestation or utilize the tools in my own life. This is why things never changed for me. I had to understand that I wasn’t bad luck, and my trauma happened to me, but it wasn’t mine. I had known a lot of neglect and heartache, but I also knew that I could love hard. I knew what it looked like to be loved hard, I had seen it modelled for me before in other relationships. On the other hand, I knew what it looked like to not be loved, and I knew what I didn’t want. I had to understand that I was experiencing health, just in different ways than others, maybe. There were times when I wasn’t experiencing these illnesses or this pain, and I knew what those times felt like. The underlying theme here was that I knew, in some way or another, what these things felt like—even if I thought I hadn’t experienced them personally. All I had to do was focus on changing how I was thinking about how I thought, felt, and acted towards abundance; I had to change how I thought, felt, and acted towards love; I had to change how I thought, felt, and acted towards health and wellness.

In doing this, I knew I would lose people in my life who weren’t happy with my decisions, but that was something I learned to be okay with, too.

I knew the things that I wanted were going to be life-changing, which meant that in order to achieve them I needed to change my life. I focused on building better habits and refocusing my mind on things that were within my control, rather than focusing on the things in my life that I had no control over. I spent time off of social media and in the real world, with real people. I spent time evaluating my priorities in life and truly deciding what it is I want out of this life, and what is just fluff that comes from trying to keep up with everyone else and everyone else’s expectations. I’ve developed coping skills that have helped me manage my mood fluctuations and trauma triggers. I’ve utilized meditation as a way to keep myself out of the void, even during times when I might not be overwhelmingly happy or robust—I am still at least grateful to be alive. That alone is progress.