Law of Attraction: If the Manifestations Ultimately Won’t Make You Happy, What’s the Point?

Hi Kelli, What would your advice be for dealing with apathy, not feeling depressed or hopeless but more uninspired to put forth effort to make changes because you know even if you get the desired outcome, you’ll still be left empty?

This question is really near and dear to my heart because one of the most ‘troubling’ things I realized on my own journey of conscious creation is the manifestations never gave me what I believed they would. I got so many things I wanted, and wasn’t really any happier than I had been previously.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed many of the things I manifested. Many of them were perfect reflections of the core values and feelings I desired to see in my life experience. I enjoyed my life very much.

But that all-pervasive feeling of happiness and well-being, peace, wholeness, completeness, that everything is perfect and right with the world that we crave so deeply, that we are so certain will come when we get the money, the relationship, the family, the better body, the improved health, the new job…not so much. Not by a long shot.

In fact, this course of events left me feeling even more unsettled because if those things didn’t make me happy, then what would?

Did I now to have expend even more energy and effort trying to manifest something else? Was I incapable of being happy? Was I just one of those people that was destined to suffer with all my ‘stuff?’

I feel like I could talk about this topic for days and days, and trying to put to ‘paper’ all the thoughts I have on it are just not possible; there are feelings and intuitive understandings that can’t be verbalized or fleshed out in a way that can be digested and understood on an intellectual level.

Intuitively we know exactly how we can navigate this paradox, yet it can require so much explanation.

But I’ll give it my best shot.

Wanting Without Needing

If we had no desire for anything, nothing would exist. I believe we are here to create, to enjoy this physical experience in whatever ways resonate with each person.

We are the Universe experiencing itself, we contribute to its expansion–perfect example of a thought that might have intuitive understanding and resonance, but as for logically making sense of it, good luck.

Desire is what makes the world go round. It’s natural to want money to maximize your experience, to share your life with someone, to have a family, to do meaningful work about which you feel passionate, to be physically healthy and free of disease and pain.

We all have our unique passions, talents, interests, and those leanings can be very helpful signposts guiding us towards what would make for a happy, fulfilling life for us personally.

We can pursue these things, not from any sense of ‘need’ but merely because we want to. It would seem fun, interesting, a good way to spend our time, fulfilling, meaningful.

And in each of us doing this, we create this experience we are all living.

I personally feel passionate about personal development so I have this blog and pursue it professionally in the form of coaching. I have a desire to see the world and learn about new cultures, so I travel.

You’ll want to be in a relationship with someone because you like this person and enjoy being around them, you are compatible.

It won’t be because you are looking to them to make you happy or whole, heal the pain of your past relationships, or give you the love and validation you didn’t get from your parents. You are no longer seeking the relationship from the typical space of looking to it to heal every emotional wound and fulfill every emotional need we have.

Nothing we do on the outside is absolutely necessary for our happiness, our well-being, our wholeness or our completeness.

So all the things you may want…you don’t need them. They can’t fill the void or heal the pain. They can’t give you the happiness or the peace or the security.

They can certainly enhance your experience, give you pleasure, make life more fun or interesting, offer pleasant ways to pass the time. But giving you those deeper feelings and states, like pure joy…nope.

But this is something we don’t really grasp, until we get the ‘thing’ and have the very disheartening realization we aren’t much better off emotionally. We may feel better on the surface; we may get some sort of temporary boost,  but that’s about it.

We may experience relief from certain negative feelings, but that doesn’t automatically translate to feeling significantly better.

We may not feel the crushing loneliness of our single days, but we aren’t much happier with the boyfriend. We may be free of the stress we once felt when we were perpetually strapped for cash, but having more money really hasn’t made us feel any differently day to day.

So if the manifestation isn’t going to make us feel better, then what is the answer?

What is going to give us all those warm, fuzzy feelings we so desperately crave, for which our desire drives this whole journey of personal development and conscious creation in particular?

Something I talk about a lot on here, something that a lot of people really don’t want to hear…

But repetition is a key part of changing our belief system…hearing something once is certainly not enough, not even a hundred times probably. Our limited thinking and fears can cast quite the long shadow.

So…sorry, not sorry.

You Must Deal With Your Shit

You lack certain things in your life, and this makes you feel badly. From a logical perspective, getting the ‘thing’ is clearly the solution to this emotional conundrum.

I feel badly because I don’t have money, so getting more money will make me feel better. I feel badly because I don’t have a boyfriend so getting a boyfriend will make me feel better. I feel badly because I am overweight so losing weight will make me feel better.

Makes perfect sense right? Wrong. The thing missing isn’t the problem.

It’s the story, the meaning, our mind has constructed around its absence.

It’s what not having it says about you as a person–your worth, your deserving, your capabilities, your intelligence, your attractiveness.

It’s all the crappy beliefs that are proven ‘true’ by your circumstances that feel so badly to believe, but you have no choice to believe, because well, look at your life.

To your mind, the only way to change this narrative is to manifest these things. Then all those terrible things you think about yourself are not true.

If you have a boyfriend, you are attractive, you are lovable, you are worthy of someone else’s time and affections.

If you have a lot of money, you are successful, you are smart, you are not a loser, you are not a failure, your father wasn’t right about you never amounting to anything.

If you are willing to start feeling all these gross feelings, being honest about what is really driving your desire to manifest the things you want to manifest, you can start chipping away at the true roots of your discontent.

Then you can move from wanting what you want because you couldn’t possibly be happy without it to simply because you think it would be cool to have, cool to do, cool to work towards.

It isn’t as if your only option is to live with the sobering realization that nothing outside of you can ever make you happy, so what’s the point in even pursuing anything, and we are all just destined to live unhappy, unfulfilled, pointless lives.

Talk about depressing…that is not what we are here to do; that is not all there is to it.

What we are here to do is….

Be Happy!

The word ‘happy’ can be a bit loaded for me, and it can mean different things to different people. It has seemed to become the ‘catch-all’ word for the positive emotion we seek, and that is the way I am using it here.

If we see our ultimate ’purpose’ here as being happy and nothing more, this can be a real game-changer as far as how we live our lives, the types of goals we set for ourselves, and how we go about achieving them.

If our ‘purpose’ is to be happy, that typically leads to a much different definition of ‘success.’

We just do things because they seem enjoyable. We may still want money and a ‘successful’ business, for example, but we only take actions that feel light, right, easy and fun.

Ideally, the enjoyment of feel-good and inspired actions is its own reward, and we aren’t always acting to ‘get’ something, to advance from where we are in the present moment in some way.

You can think about the future, you can have a particular vision, but you will go about pursuing these things in a much different way. Dissatisfaction with where you are now no longer needs to be the ultimate driver of change in our lives.

If being ‘happy’ and how we feel is really the only thing that matters, it really simplifies our decision-making process. You come to realize all the things your mind thinks matter, that cause such confusion about whether to make certain changes in your life, walk away from certain people and situations, don’t matter at all.

For example, you know making a lot of money, or people being impressed with your status, won’t really make you any happier than you are now, so it is easier to walk away from the super high-paying prestigious job. You don’t need any other reason or rationale except you don’t think you would like it.

When we realize the only thing that matters is being ‘happy’ it is easier to steer clear of pursuing goals and trying to manifest things from a space of ego, only to come up emotionally empty-handed at the end. We can finally break free of the tendency to travel a bad-feeling path to a destination we believe will feel good–this just isn’t possible.

We realize many of the goals we set are completely arbitrary and achieving them won’t do a lick of good for our emotional well-being, or make us feel any more accomplished or fulfilled.

Let’s use a business example since that arena tends to be very action-oriented, and we really can get caught up in trying to make things happen that ultimately do nothing for our happiness or improving our assessment of self.

You might set a goal to double your income in the next 6 months, or grow your email list by 50 percent in the next three. You might achieve that goal but then what? It means nothing, so you’ll probably feel nothing, so you’ll just likely set a new arbitrary goal. And the vicious cycle continues.

But what if you only grew your income by 25 percent and your email list by 15? You will beat yourself up for failing to meet a goal that means nothing anyway, that was completely arbitrary in the first place.

It’s okay to want to make more money or reach a larger audience with your work, but ultimately, like anything outside of yourself, it’s not going to contribute to your happiness in any real way. When those goals become the sole reason for doing what you do, you’ll never feel satisfied.

The better way is doing things for the pure enjoyment, and the ‘ego’ wants tend to be natural byproducts of this energetic alignment.

The real key is just doing our best to take actions from a space of enjoyment; feeling okay as we are now, and pursuing the things we want from a more detached space, not from a space of thinking these things are the answers to all our emotional woes, to all our problems.

Work on prioritizing emotional transformation and healing, and overall well-being over specific manifestations. Be more open to how the energy you crave can show up in your life, rather than always insisting the things your mind wants are ‘it’ and you must have them, things must go exactly as it wants them to. Make peace with your circumstances now, whatever they may be, and once that inner turmoil starts to die down, see what you feel inspired to want, inspired to do. 

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