Confirmed Bias
"I keep calling this in. I must be attracting toxic partners, unhealthy living situations, bad bosses..."
Ah, yet another issue with the conscious-manifesting misunderstanding.
The idea that manifestation has something to do with what we want to experience, something to do with what the world offers us, something to do with our conscious mind. The idea that manifestation is an identifiable event. Something to DO, even.
Manifestation is an ongoing process that is never not happening, like gravity. It's literally the making and maintenance of material reality by observers and interactors.
The universe is not offering you what you are looking for.
The universe is offering you LITERALLY EVERYTHING. You are seeing what you are capable of looking for. You are seeing what you recognize, what you know how to see. You are interacting with things you recognize in patterns you learned.
You are capable of what you were taught, you are able to recognize what you have witnessed intimately, in the smallest moments. A happy relationship on the screen isn't enough because we don't see what happens when the precious china breaks, when they're overtired and someone wet the bed again but nobody moved the other sheets to the dryer.
When I was a kid, I knew for a fact that EVERY family yelled at each other on the boat. When we saw a happy family on their boat, I knew it was just one of the moments when they weren't yelling at each other. Caught them at a good time.
As an adult, I watched my friend cause thousands of dollars of damage to his parents' trailer getting the boat out in a storm, and nobody batted an eye. Not even a conversation. Just gonna fix it, cause it's just a material object, just a bit of money. We're glad you're safe. Great job piloting in the storm, that wasn't easy.
It costs the same whether anyone gets yelled at. In fact, the yelling is a practice with a cost we add on top of the monetary cost, a cost to the spirit of the yeller and the receptive system.
I never knew this was an optional practice, I thought it was just reality, the emotional toll guaranteed to be at least equal to the monetary toll. It makes perfect sense when it's all you know.
And it's slow poison.
Lately I've been using the metaphor of a garden.
When we're "attracting toxic things" and "repeating old patterns" we're eating the fruit of the garden that we know how to eat.
We've been eating it all our lives. It's relatively safe. It makes us a little sick. It's missing a few key nutrients, but nothing that will stop us from makin' a new generation!
Other things in the garden will kill us, or kill us if we don't approach and prepare them right. There's delicious food in the garden, food that will nourish us and never make us sick, if we know what it is and how to prepare it. That food will even be delicious!
But other stuff will kill us, and we don't know what's what, never mind how. The risk of trying something new is great indeed. Better to try a new way of preparing the thing you know, maybe you can find a more nourishing way to consume it.
The internet has opened a vast new world, one through which we can look in many windows, but algorithms keep directing our attention back to the windows of our own souls. We're herded and funneled and tunneled down the track of believing with ever more fervor the things that we already believe.
This algorithm is a fractal of human attention that works in tandem with human neurological predispositioning, that is, confirmation bias, the tendency to see in the world what I already believe. Even if the algo didn't serve it, I'd choose to attend to what resonates with my belief system. I know this about myself, knowing at the very same time it leaves me vulnerable to the downfall of seeing only what I know how to see.
There are women out there who educate themselves on the detective work of determining whether a man is cheating, when they might be learning about partners who don't cheat at all. There are women trying to get great at dating fuckbois, children in juvie planning which prison they'd like to enter as an adult, men trying to minimize the financial extraction of vindictive women. People all over the world trying to navigate abuses and continual misunderstandings within relationships.
We know how to see what we've seen. We know how to engage with familiar problems. We recognize resources from our past experiences, and we respond to the problems we were taught are problems in the way we were taught to respond to problems.
It is hard to believe anything else might even be out there. How could it be, if I haven't seen it?
But I and other practitioners am here to show the positivity, what it is, what it does and can look like. If anything in your life feels not quite right, not because of the emotions of it but because of the alignment of it, please reach out.
We are past the point of solving problems. It is time to live the wholeness of now, with the learnable actions and practices of Devotional Love.