The Scent Of Creation

How To Practice Manifesting 24/7

Just like any other endeavor, manifestation becomes easier the more time you spend working on it. Someone who practices for two minutes a day won’t progress as quickly as someone who practices for two hours a day.

This creates an obvious problem though. There’s a hard limit on how much time anyone can spend doing active techniques throughout the day. It’ll differ from person to person, sure, but still, nobody can be doing techniques for 24 hours per day while also living a normal productive life. To be doing SATS or an active visualization, you truly need to be doing nothing. Even to repeat affirmations, you have to be doing some activity that requires no conscious thought — walking around, folding laundry, etc. You can’t be repeating your affirmations while doing thought-intensive work.

In a perfect world, we should be able to do one session of SATS and have our desired state “stick” in consciousness permanently. Because that’s the ultimate goal of SATS, visualization, and affirmations — to embody a new state completely, all of the time. But the world isn’t perfect, and we all have lots of practice being in undesirable states. Even worse, when you’re in a pattern of negative thinking/feeling, every second you spend not in your desired state can work to “undo” your practice.

But there’s a solution to this.

By creating non-thinking “cues” or “anchors” associated with your desired state, you can trick yourself into embodying a new state of consciousness more often, but with less active effort.

Here’s what I mean: While something like an affirmation requires thought, something like a bodily sensation doesn’t. So, if you can link a unique and specific bodily sensation to the experience of being in your desired state, you can “tie” yourself to that state by triggering the same bodily sensation during your normal, everyday activities.

Next time you do SATS, try tying a little piece of string tightly to your wrist (not so tightly that it cuts off circulation, of course, but tight enough that you notice the tightness). This is a unique physical stimulus. Take a week or two, and every time you do SATS or visualize, repeat this ritual. Tie the string to your wrist, do your visualization, then when you’re finished untie the string and take it off. Then, once the physical stimulus has been “linked” to your desired state, try tying the string to your wrist when you’re doing something that isn’t related to manifestation (working, studying, talking on the phone, etc.). The incorporation of this physical stimulus into your daily routine should serve to “trigger” your desired state, even though you aren’t using any visual cue to get there.

A couple of things to note: It’s best to spend a good chunk of time connecting your stimulus to your desired state. As in, don’t tie a string around your wrist tonight while doing SATS, then wake up tomorrow and put the string back on and wear it all day. Part of this process is connecting your stimulus to your preferred state. If you don’t take the time to build that connection, then the stimulus won’t be effective, as you’ll associate it just as much with your undesired state as with your desired one.

Secondly, make sure the physical stimulus you choose really is unique. Anyone who wears a watch knows that a mild stimulus will very quickly come to be ignored. You have to pick something that’s distinct, but not distracting. A piece of string tied to the wrist, a wrapped-up icepack placed under your foot — even sitting/laying in a position you never would normally sit/lay in will work.

You can also go outside the realm of bodily sensation (which brings us to the title of this essay). It’s been well established that the sense of smell is more closely linked to memory than any other sense perception (you can read about that here). You can use this fact to your advantage.

Next time you do SATS, spray a new perfume on your shirt, dab an essential oil on your wrist, light a uniquely scented candle in your room, chew a very aromatic flavor of gum, etc. Do this repeatedly, just like you would with a bodily sensation, then introduce your new stimulus to some other activity and let it trigger your desired state.

These kinds of cues and anchors are pretty common in secular self-help circles because they’re very effective. And, given that they’re effective, we might as well use them in our own pursuit of manifestation mastery.

As always, good luck.