A guide to manifesting everything you want in your 20’s
One miserable Tuesday afternoon on a full train during rush hour, back in Febuary 2022, I sat on the floor of the carriage on the way back to my small village from college. As I usually do, I browsed through my favourite podcasts trying to find an episode that would amuse or interest me, until I laid my eyes on ‘Roxie Nafuousi – talks manifesting your best life’ by Private Parts. Roxie’s story on how she fell in love with manifesting resonated with me at the time, as she transformed her life from a space of darkness to one of light. From then on, I wanted to know everything about manifestation and use it to transform my life.
Roxie described her life before manifestation as a decade of depression and living her life with an idea that she will forever be unhappy, stuck in a cycle of addiction to alcohol, drugs and cigarattes. She had no job and no money, and envisioned marrying a rich man because she felt like this ongoing cycle of misery would never end. She went on a month-long yoga retreat thinking this would change her mindset, but only 24 hours after returning to London she spent two days of her life drowning in past addictions. Her friend told her to listen to a podcast on manifesting, and since she did, her life had never been the same.
The first thing she wanted to manifest was unconditional love. Just one week after listening to the podcast, she matched with Wade Briggs on a dating app. Three months later, she found out she was pregnant. Then, exactly a year after she met Wade, her baby was born. As Roxie says in her book: ‘There it was – unconditional love’.
One thing that is important to mention is that not everything fell into place and not all her dreams came true straight away. Roxie suffered from post-natal depression to the extent that she describes it as ‘the darkest depression I could ever imagine’. Throughout her pregnancy, she invisoned that as soon as her baby was born, she would turn her life around. And that’s exactly what she did.
Sitting on the train floor, I felt a strong connection to Roxie’s story, because my mental health had been suffering at the time and this felt like the sign to move forward. As soon as I got home, I bought her book ‘Manifest – 7 steps to living your best life’. And just a day later (thanks to Amazon Prime), I started my own manifesting journey.
So what is manifestation? It’s the ability to use the power of your mind to change and create the reality of your experience. Some people view manifesting as just wishing and dreaming, and thus making things happen. However, this is not what manifesting is. For example, you cannot manifest winning the lottery, as it is out of your control and comes down to pure luck. But you can manifest getting a pay raise at work by working hard, while also removing your subconscious doubts about your ability to achieve this goal.
To manifest, you need to know what you really desire. See it as if you were planning to get to work. When would you leave? What would you wear? What would you need to do before you leave? Would you need directions? How would you get there? When you think about one of your goals, you need to create a plan on how you will achieve this.
Visualizing needs to not just be the end goal, it needs to have all these steps. For example, if your goal is to fall in love, you need to imagine yourself meeting someone, getting ready for a date, receiving messages, and falling for them. You also need to immerse yourself in the feeling you want to feel when you’re with them. Ultimately, we attract what we feel.
Mind-set is another essential element of manifestation. Every human has self-doubt and challenges in embracing self-love, but in order to manifest, we need to challenge this pattern. Roxie mentions creating a vision board with everything you desire and then making the vision board again by removing your doubts about what you believe you deserve, versus what you do deserve. For example, if someone asked what your dream pay check is, most people would put what they think is relalistic and not what they truly desire. So when you re-do your board, remove those subconscious doubts until you truly believe you can and will achieve everything on it.
Be active in your manifestations. Once your goal is set, you need to work in order to reach the goal. For example, if you want to get the highest mark in a upcoming exam, you need to go to every lesson, revise outside of school, and practice exemplar questions.
Trust in the universe that it will happen. If you constantly believe the world is against you then it will be. For example, say you really deserved a promotion at work and had put tons of effort in to get this promotion, yet someone else gets it. It’s easy to blame the universe, but you need to trust that the role was not for you and something better will come along. In the ‘Friends’ episode, ‘The one with the lottery” (season 9, episode 18), Chandler gets worried on the phone call when he does not get the position at his marketing apprenticeship, and says “he is not to mature”. But then his boss says that he was the best person in the programme, and they are offering him a higher paid and more advanced role. This is a clear example of the fact that what you truly deserve will come to you.
Since February 2022, I have manifested myself into a place I could not see at the time. One example is manifesting my A- levels. I wanted to achieve AAA. So I wrote it into my vision board, did affirmations, trusted in the universe, worked very hard academically and tried to remove all the doubts I could. I received an A*AB and an A in my EPQ, which was equivalent to an AAA. I remember crying from how proud I was of how I managed to work so hard in a time of darkness. If I did not believe in myself and did not work so hard, I may have been on a very different path now.
Another one of my manifestations was that I wanted to be in love. I wrote it on my vision board, and then throughout the spring and summer I worked on cultivating self-love by not putting as much pressure on the gym and taking every opportunity to spend time with my friends, such as saying ‘yes’ to nights out and holidays. Then I got into a relationship with someone I had met at the beginning of summer, who was a true friend. I felt my doubts circulate at the beginning as I was used to getting treated badly, but I would tell myself daily it was going to be the best decision, and a year later, it ended up being just that.
I hope you now see manifesting as a way to make the best life for yourself in your 20’s. Whenever I feel low or unhappy with my life, I once again pick up Roxie’s book and get inspired on how I want to change my present and future.
Edited by Sonja Stojiljkovic