78. Decolonizing Manifestation, Part 3: The technology of reality creation

This is part three of the Decolonizing Manifestation series, and we dive into the "how" of reality creation.

If manifestation is a collaboration with your ancestors — not a solo act of willing things into being into a blank canvas — then, that raises new questions.

How much of your life is actually yours to shape, and how much is already decided? 

And of the part that you do have control over — how do you actually work with it?

This episode dives into all of that.

Transcript

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to my podcast, Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

So this is part three of a three-part series on manifestation, and we're getting into the techniques — the actual how. By the way, if you haven't listened to parts one or two, I highly recommend you go ahead and listen to those first, because the ideas really build on one another. So I give you permission to abandon this episode right now and go back to parts one and two.

Okay. Now, if you have listened and you're with me — so far we've talked about how manifestation isn't just you thinking about what you want and willing it into existence. It's a relationship. It's answering the call of your ancestors. And the next natural question is the how-to of actually doing that.

First, a tension we have to resolve

But before we do that, I think we first have to resolve this tension.

There's this idea that certain things are already in place for you, right? Your manifestation is relational. It's contextual. It's not just you being able to create whatever you want for your own purposes. You have a certain design. Certain things have been willed for you, so certain things have already been determined. And that naturally raises the question of where your agency comes in.

If it's all been determined and you just have to answer the calling, then don't you just sit back and let your ancestors do their thing? How much of your free will plays into it? What's actually yours to desire, to call in, to claim, to create?

So that's a tension I want to speak to directly, and it's something I've been contemplating for a long time. Like, what really is free will, and how much of our lives is ours to shape?

What my mother-in-law taught me about saju

I recently had a conversation with my mother-in-law, who is a practitioner of saju. Saju is an ancient Korean philosophical and divination system that goes back thousands of years, and it's very closely related to what a lot of people know as BaZi, which is the Chinese Four Pillars. They're mathematically the same, even though there are some differences in the Korean system.

My mother-in-law has been reading saju charts for people for about three decades now. She's very respected by her community, and she has deep, deep experience and lineage in this art. And I was telling her, "You and I both obviously believe that saju is real — like, it means something. Certain things are written into our birth charts, and we can't escape them. But do you ever see someone live a life that seems to contradict what their saju says?"

And she said, "Yes, absolutely." She's seen — I don't even know how many — countless people over the years. And she told me she's seen people with really gorgeous charts, but if you actually look at their lives, they haven't cashed in on any of the goodness in their chart. And you look into why, and my mother-in-law says it's always because they're just sitting on their couch, not doing anything.

It's kind of like you could have bars of gold strewn all over your neighborhood, just sitting there — but you actually have to walk out the door and pick them up, right? That's what you have to do. If you don't do that, if you just sit in one place and stay totally passive, then you're not going to be able to seize the good fortune that's been placed there for you.

And on the other hand, she said she's seen people with really difficult charts — a lot of challenges built in. And some of those people meaningfully change their fortune. And she said the way they do it is by the way they think and by changing the way they act. They choose to be around people who are doing the kind of things they want to do. They choose positive thoughts. They help other people. They give off positive energy.

The 40/20/40 of your destiny

So over decades of practice, she concluded that your destiny is about 40/20/40. It all adds up to 100%. She said 40% of your life is determined by your saju — your birth chart, and the cycles of fortune that change every however-many years. Another 20% is determined by your face and the lines on your palms, which can also meaningfully modify your chart — that's another East Asian tradition. And the remaining 40% is your attitude, your beliefs, your actions — what you actually do with your free will.

This is the paradox we need to embrace every time we talk about creating what you want. There's a design to the way that you're made. That's real. And there's enormous power in how you choose to live with that design. Both are true at once, and I think when you can hold this duality, that's when you become the most powerful.

So the work of this episode is: how do you work the hell out of that 40%? Now let's get into the how.

We start with belief work

We start with belief work. And by belief work — which I'm going to use interchangeably with mindset work — I mean deliberately changing what you believe. Gaining awareness into the deep assumptions you have about yourself and how the world works. For most people, most of the time, these never get examined.

So for example, a lot of people think, "Oh, I'm not good at math." And someone who thinks that doesn't think to themselves, "I have a belief that I'm not good at math." They just think it's the truth. "I'm just not good at math." The work is about recognizing that these are words that are constructing my experience of reality. So obviously, we need to be intentional about it.

Okay, so I'm going to assume that most of you listening have some kind of familiarity with this idea, and that you've tried some form of it before — being intentional about your thoughts, changing your thoughts in order to change your reality.

The thing almost nobody tells you: there are levels

So I'm about to tell you something that might make your entire work with manifesting through belief work, like, a thousand times more effective. Get excited. I wish someone had told me this 30 years ago.

The thing with working on your beliefs is that, for the most part, people are almost always working on only one level — without knowing that there are actually multiple levels at which you can move reality.

Most of the time, in a conventional sense, when people talk about manifestation, they talk about the things they want to see happen. Like, "I want to manifest the perfect partner. I want to manifest the $1,000. I want to manifest this house." It's all about what shows up in the world that you can see and point to. Okay, that's great. That's totally legitimate, and I want you to manifest things like that. But what happens in the world that you can point to and see and touch is just the most surface layer of things. And there's more than the surface level.

Level two: who you believe you are

The second level, the one below the surface, is the level of your identity. For example, you can think, "I'm a pretty smart person." That's something about your identity. "I'm a lucky person," or "I'm an unlucky person." "I've always been pretty creative." This is all about who you believe yourself to be.

And I think your understanding of yourself actually changes over time. Even if you're the same person, I bet who you thought you were when you were 17 isn't who you think you are now. Your sense of self is always changing, so there's actually a lot of flexibility and malleability there. And that's the level of belief work that should be happening a lot more — shifting who you think you are before you try to change what happens to you.

The metaphor I like to use is: you can try all you want to grow potatoes out of soil that's optimized for growing cactuses — cacti, whatever. It's not going to work. You can try all you want to grow seahorses, which obviously only live in the sea. You can try to grow them in fresh water, but it's not going to work. They're going to die. They need the salinity in the water to live and to grow. But if you change the soil, if you change the water, the things you want can grow so much better — because the new soil, the new water, actually supports what you want to grow.

So changing beliefs at the level of identity is like a shortcut to manifesting things and events. It gives you a lot more leverage.

Level three: the bedrock

Now, there's a layer even deeper than beliefs at the level of identity, and that's beliefs at the level of cosmology. That's a big word, but I'm just talking about your beliefs about what the universe is, how it works, what you hold to be true about the nature of reality itself.

If you believe, for example, that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, that's a belief at the level of cosmology. If you believe that ancestors are real — that they're a real shaping force in your life — that's a belief at the level of cosmology.

This is the deepest level of belief, because all the other beliefs — even beliefs about yourself and who you are — sit on top of these beliefs about what the universe is fundamentally like and how it works. I'm going to call this the bedrock underneath the soil.

And the tricky thing about the bedrock is that because it's the deepest layer, it's the hardest one to notice. For the most part, we never see the literal bedrock on top of which we live. And if you're on the wrong bedrock — you have the right soil, but because of the bedrock the water isn't reaching the roots of the plants you've planted — then even the best soil isn't going to grow the potatoes you want.

When all three line up

The deeper the layer of belief you work on, the more leverage it gives you. Because the deeper it is, the more you have sitting on top of it. You have to start treating all three levels as a stack. And when the three are in harmony with each other — when they all support each other — that's when manifestation feels like sailing with the wind behind your back.

Manifestation stops feeling hard and elusive and frustrating. It feels like ease. You can feel everything's lined up. You get momentum from everything being pointed in the same direction.

Borrowing your ancestors' eyes

Okay, so you might be wondering: how do we make them all point in the same direction? A huge chunk of the work is just figuring out the identity piece. And the way you articulate that is you picture a future version of you — the version a little further down the road, who already has this.

The way I do this is, you can use your own imagination, but I also like to ask my ancestors to show me what that version of myself looks like. I ask them to access the future, or a future possibility, and show me what it looks like when I'm already the person who has that, with ease, in a natural way.

This feels very different to me from just trying to imagine a future version of me. What I can imagine on my own is going to be limited by what I can already conceive of. No matter how big the vision is, it's always going to be constrained by the conditioning and assumptions I carry over from my past experiences. So my own imagination has a limit. But when you ask your ancestors to show you the future version of you that already has XYZ, usually what comes back is so much bigger and truer and more resonant than what you would've reached for on your own.

So then you look at that version of you and you ask: okay, what are the discrepancies? What do they believe that I don't believe yet? How do they take up space in ways that I don't yet? How are they moving through life? How are they making decisions in ways that I don't yet?

An example: "I'm extremely beautiful"

So let me give you an example of belief installation at the identity level. Years ago — this is going to sound funny, but whatever — years ago, I intentionally decided to install the thought I'm extremely beautiful, because this is how my ancestors see me.

When my grandma saw me when she was in this world, she was like, "Oh my God, that's our baby. She's the most beautiful thing in the world. She's so freaking precious." And she wanted to parade me around town to show everybody what a beautiful baby we have. And if anyone was nonchalant about it, she'd get really offended. Like, "Why aren't you freaking out over how beautiful my baby is?"

So if my ancestors see me that way, why wouldn't I see myself that way? "Okay, I'm extremely beautiful" — that sounds like a silly sentence, but it's also not, because let me show you the power of that one sentence.

It cost me $0 to decide to install it into my brain, and it changed the course of my life in very real ways. There's the most obvious level: if I believe I'm beautiful, it's nicer to look in the mirror. I notice more of what's beautiful in myself. Whereas prior to that conscious decision, I was nitpicking for my flaws all the time — I couldn't look in the mirror without noticing something that's not perfect. Now it's just a pleasanter experience to look in the mirror.

And downstream of that, believing I'm extremely beautiful makes me very confident. I assume everyone will think I'm super cute, and I assume the way I look is going to bring joy and delight to whoever looks at me — which is extremely useful if you're working on being visible, as I was at the time. It made it easier to just show up and take up space.

Believing my face is very pleasant to look at made me not just show up more, but show up with a kind of great, confident energy. We can all tell the difference in how someone shows up. You walk into a room and you see someone, and from their posture, their facial expression, the way they talk, you can tell — does this person want to be here? Do I want to go near them or not?

And because of this belief, I'm exuding this energy of I'm confident, I enjoy my own company, I like myself, I'm happy to be here, and you're happy for me to be here. You're happy to see me. That energy was, and is, so magnetic. I believe it's a huge part of why people were attracted to me and wanted to come near me and buy from me. It literally had so much to do with cold, hard business outcomes.

And the other thing is, I always think about how much time I used to spend feeling bad about myself. I grew up in the same millennial conditioning as everybody else. I thought I was too fat, and this part doesn't match the ideal, because I'm an Asian woman and there's no way I'm going to look like Paris Hilton or whatever. So much time I spent just feeling bad about how I looked, trying to engineer how I could change the way I looked so I'd look better, because I felt so terrible.

I got those hundreds — maybe thousands — of hours back. All that time, I can spend just creating things and doing fun things and enjoying my life.

Someone else could look at me and be like, "No, she's just whatever. Average. Is she crazy?" Or someone else could think, "Simone is straight-up ugly." But that's everybody's opinion. And everybody's entitled to their own opinion. But the only person's opinion that can really deeply change my life and my reality is my own. So why wouldn't I be really intentional about what I believe about myself, regardless of what other people think?

That's the power of belief. Which sounds so corny — but that's the power of belief.

Whose eyes do you want to borrow?

So here's the question for you: whose eyes do you want to borrow? Ask your ancestors how they see you. Ask them to lend you their eyes, and ask for help stepping into that version of yourself.

And the same kind of work happens at the deepest level — at the level of cosmology. When you hear a sentence like "the universe loves me," your instinct might be to run it through the logical part of your mind that says, "Is that true? What's the evidence for or against?" Don't fall into that trap. Because if we're asking whether the universe is actually benevolent — that is a huge, loaded, philosophical question that sages and philosophers have been debating for thousands of years, and you're not going to settle it by arguing with yourself.

So instead, when you feel the urge to debate whether something is true or not, redirect and ask yourself: "What is the lens that I want my reality to be shaped by?" If you want to have the experience of living in a universe that loves you — if that sounds good to you — try the belief on.

Cosmology-level beliefs I recommend

So I already told you two beliefs I highly recommend. One, that I'm extremely beautiful. Whoever you are, it costs nothing, and the potential upside is enormous. Two, I'm a lucky person — that's another good one.

Some other cosmology-level beliefs, bedrock-level beliefs that I highly recommend you try on: My ancestors love me. I'm their favorite. I'm so blessed. I'm protected. Invisible allies are always working on my behalf. Everything happens for me, not against me — and I don't always have to understand how that's true. I'm being held by so much more than I can see and understand. I'm a gift to the world.

These are all cosmology-level beliefs, and I highly recommend them.

Common pitfalls

Now let's get to the common pitfalls.

One pitfall is giving up too early. A lot of people do this. They try to work on a new belief, and after a day or two it feels a little awkward, it feels unreal, and they just abandon the effort. But the thing is, in order to become someone new, you need time.

For one, belief is a muscle. The more you practice believing something, the more normal it feels — everything becomes more normal with practice, like anything. And secondly — this is the part that doesn't get said often enough — you need to give your ancestors time to send you new signs and opportunities and ways to practice your new belief.

It's not all going to happen in the next hour. Sometimes you decide to try out a new thought, and it feels a little awkward the first week. You're like, "Oh, I don't know about this. It doesn't feel true. I don't know if it's for me." And let's say the next week you have a conversation with somebody that super-duper confirms the belief you're trying to work toward. The other person says something, and now you're like, "Oh, wow. Now that I heard this, what I wanted to believe feels so much more possible."

That's your ancestors helping you out. They send signs. They send things, people, events your way that aid you in the process. But all of that requires that you're aware this actually is a process. Give yourself time.

Ladder thoughts

The second common pitfall I see people fall into — it's kind of related to the first, but a little different — is reaching for a thought that feels way too big. Like, "I attract money easily," or something. And you want to believe it, but every time you think it, there's a little constriction. Like, "Yeah, right. Who am I kidding?"

Then what you want are what I call ladder thoughts. You're climbing a ladder, and you're reaching for the next rung. You're not trying to leap to the top in one step — that sounds highly dangerous, right?

So I have specific suggestions for this that work really well. If "I attract money easily" feels like "yeah, right, no way" — a shutdown in your nervous system — try, "It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that at some point I could learn to attract money more easily." Do you see how much scaffolding I built there? Or, "I'm becoming someone who attracts money easily." Or, "I'm opening my mind to the possibility of attracting money easily."

Notice how undramatic these are. The undramatic, incremental quality is what lets you open the door. Find the sentence that gets you to the next rung of the ladder. And if you just work on it one rung at a time, a sentence that felt totally impossible to believe one day is going to feel reachable. In weeks, in a few months, in a few years, you're going to be like, "Oh yeah, of course this is true. I can't believe I had a hard time believing this."

If you have a hard time with marketing, try on, "Marketing is fun for me." If you want to improve your sales game and it feels scary, try, "I love sales and sales loves me," or, "Sales feels good because it always comes from my heart, and people love to buy from me." One that I actually practiced for years is, like, "People are thrilled to give me money." That one really worked well for me, and I loved seeing examples of it again and again the more I committed to the belief.

One last technique: write it down

Now, I'm going to end by sharing one last favorite technique of mine for mindset work and manifestation.

When I want something and it still feels too hard to believe I could have it — in addition to, or instead of, working on the ladder beliefs — I write it down. And it has to be with pen and paper. It has to be the physical act of writing it with your hand. When you type it, it's just not the same. I don't know why. Don't ask me why. I don't make the rules.

So the important thing is you write it down. You just write it down, with zero pressure to have to believe it or do anything about it. And then you just put it away. You're not going to think about it. It shouldn't be in front of your face. Just put it away and forget about it.

I've done this consistently for years. Years ago, when I was just starting my business, I wrote, "My clients find me easily and pay me joyfully," and, "My body of work is out there and helping thousands of people all the time." At the time, nobody knew who I was. I had like 83 followers, I had made $0, and I was actually scared of everything. So the idea of my clients finding me easily and paying me joyfully — that felt about as believable as writing, "I'm going to Mars tomorrow."

But I believed in this process. So I wrote them down when they felt totally fake and made up. I put them in a drawer and forgot about them. And now, years later, I found this note while I was looking for something else, and I just went, "Oh. That's my life now. That came true."

When I wrote these sentences, it's kind of like declaring to the universe, "This is the possibility that I'm opening the door to right now. Ancestors, help me out. Put the right things in my path. I don't have to know the how. I don't have to know the timing. I will follow one step at a time." I'm just opening a door by writing it in my little journal.

Back to the 40/20/40

Okay, so I'm actually going to give you some manifestation homework. But before I do, I want to point something out.

Remember how I started this episode? I started by talking about what my mother-in-law taught me — the 40/20/40. 40% of your destiny is in your birth chart, 20% is in your face and the lines on your palms, but the remaining 40% is just you, and your free will, and your imagination, your beliefs, your attitude, what you do with your life. And I set it up as: this whole episode is about working the hell out of that 40%.

So everything I've talked about so far — the belief work, the three levels, borrowing your ancestors' eyes, the ladder thoughts, the writing it down — all of that is you working your 40%, the 40% you have power over.

But here's the thing. When you go back through every single one of these techniques, you'll notice that every one of them, at some point, involves you turning to your ancestors. You're not just going to imagine the future version of you from your own brain, based on what you already know — you're asking your ancestors to show you who that is. You're not manufacturing the belief that "I'm extremely beautiful" — I was borrowing it from the way my grandmother saw me. You write down what you want to manifest, and you put it away in the drawer and forget about it — and as you forget about it, you're saying, "Ancestors, please put the right things in my path. Send me the signs. Work with me on this process."

So your 40%, the part you're in charge of, is spending the whole time in conversation with the 60%. And I think that's such a beautiful thing to notice. This is how we do manifestation in a way that honors the complexity — the beautiful complexity — of how the universe actually works.

It's a call and response. It's a conversation. It's a dance. And I think that's really beautiful.

Your homework for the week

So here's your homework for the week. Think of something you want to manifest. And then ask your ancestors to show you a version of you that has that naturally. Who are you as a person that this kind of thing happens to, and it's normal? How does that version of you think? What do they believe? What do they know? Ask your ancestors to show you.

And if you feel moved — and I hope you do — write it down on a piece of paper. Put it away. Forget about it, and live your life, and pay attention to what your ancestors put in your path.

Okay. I hope you have fun playing with this. My wish and prayer for you is that you manifest a life of beauty, meaning, abundance, and joy beyond the wildest dreams your current self can even conceive of. And may your ancestors show you the vision and the way.

I'll talk to you next week.