8 Manifestation Tips Via Miklautsch's "Inner Voice" Method

I took part in an intensive retreat that combined Kabalah, Alchemy, and other mystical traditions at Villa Gaia a while back. The focus of the retreat was visualizations to help activate and manifest positive thoughts. In keeping with what some call the “Laws of Attraction,” “The Inner Voice” was a refreshing departure from hyperbolic, infomercial-driven approaches to manifestation a la brands like "The Secret." At worst, it brought a greater awareness to the process of how thoughts become reality, at best it contributed to improving my life in certain areas.

International spiritual advisor and conflict-resolution expert, Patricia Miklautsch, led the group through a number of visualization "journeys" and empowerment techniques like embodying and integrating the elements (earth, fire, air, water), and simple, practical observations like how time is spent on a day-to-day basis as clues to what stops us from making our dreams a reality.

We followed up with a couple of meetings that aimed to put into practice what was shared at the retreat.  At the time, each of us went round-robin with our visualizations and received support and feedback from the collective. Here are some manifestation pointers from my impressions of the follow-up meetings:

1. Being there is everything. One common misconception about visualization is that you ask for something as if you don’t already have it. Try to support a perception shift, by employing a visual as if it is already in effect. “Be in the moment of having it happen,” instructed Miklautsch.
2. Visualizations benefit from a natural state of harmony. If experiencing fear, phobia or doubt, clear the mind by redirecting concentration on the details and results of what's to be visualized. The fear on its own can become a source of negative attraction.
3. Note how your body reacts. Relish the moment in which you are creating the vision, be present to your body’s sensations and note your reactions to them: are you experiencing joy? duress? physical pain?
4. Be as clear and simple as possible. Specificity in the mental visualization itself, down to the last detail of your surroundings and the sensations felt, helps with realization. Put a finger on what you would like to happen. 
5. Avoid asking for dollars. Rather than asking for money, ask for abundant resources to support the vision—consider what money can provide instead of asking for hard cash.
6. Don’t get carried away by the story behind the vision. This can dilute the energy of what you are trying to achieve. Focus on the fundamentals of what you see rather than the logistics.
7. Keep developing your vision. Often, once a visualization becomes more clearly defined, it will shift and refine itself. A written log containing revisions of the manifestation in progress is an important part of the process.
8. Put service first. Finally, I experience that those visions linked to service and support of humanity tend to have stronger momentum and provide greater long-term rewards. Some masters believe that service-oriented visualizations can improve longevity, and repair “bad karma” which may have built up over generations.      

Patricia is currently in the process of establishing a silent retreat center in Bali. To contact Patricia, go here. For more information about the Inner Voice, read an article about the retreat:

Should We Be Suspicious of All Stories or Just Certain Ones?

When Tyler Cowen says we should be suspicious of stories, he comes across as either an enlightened being or a total hypocrite. I don't buy a lot of his premises--because he adds caveat after caveat in his Tedtalk, and the fact that he's using Tedtalks to share his message, arguably one of the most potent storytelling technologies out there, is tellingly inconsistent in and of itself.


Cowen, an economist by trade, says that storytelling makes life too simple. He uses words such as "self-deceptive," "manipulative," and "predictably irrational" to describe those who harness or are too susceptible to the power of stories.

He may have a point, especially when it comes to societal conflicts and how we add layers of hurt to our lives through certain stories we tell ourselves, which we become attached to over time.

I noted the dangers of clinging to certain stories in a post about September 11th ten years on--but the reality is that human beings have been and always will be fascinated with stories. The man of the millenium is William Shakespeare, not a priest or an economist, or a political leader, but a bard-- a storyteller. Research is showing that the vast majority of people base their view of the world on their values, which may be reflected in stories, and then cherrypick stats, info and evidence when it suits them to support their values-based pre-conclusions.

We are not automaton machines, therefore we can never escape the very things that exist to animate our lives and our souls. Furthermore, many stories can empower us, bring us hope, and teach us about compassion: they reflect our desires, perceptions, and the human condition. In this way, stories are not necessarily the source of self-deception, but rather possible reinforcers and context builders of who we believe we are, and who we can strive to be. In which case, Cowen's ire should not be aimed at stories but rather the content of certain stories.

What might better serve Cowen is a talk that discusses how we sometimes need to trade in the stories we buy into that may decieve, manipulate, and hold us down for ones that are more reflective of simple acceptance and the development of a more mindful lifestyle or higher consciousness.

Here is a nice excerpt from an article by Jungian and Shadow Psychology expert, Jeremiah Abrams, that expands on this point:

We are many-storied creatures. Every morning, we wake up and tell ourselves into our story. When you study a life, as I have many times as a therapist, you realize that how we tell ourselves into our story generally determines how things will go for us. As American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says, “We can tell stories that lead us to greater suffering and desperation, blame and fear, or we can use stories to open the heart of compassion. We can use stories to support the generous impulse that’s there in us. We can use stories to connect us to one another.” The problem is that much of our personal story is unconscious to us, a jumble of scripts generated by the imprints of our experiences, often running and ruling us from underneath.


The places where we run into trouble and suffer in life are the places where our stories have gone awry, where things have gone badly and where we have chosen inappropriate responses or just avoided the powerful emotions and effects attending such events.

Which kind of story would you want to live by?

September 11th's Inner World Influence

Here are excerpts of my edited article about the ongoing influence of the most influential tragedy of our age: 9/11. The full edit can be found on Margot Anand's Blog and the longer version was published in Europe's NewsVoice.

To me, the shamanic elements are clear in that 9/11shows how persons and societies may generate stories that justify behaviors, that can keep us bound to the past. Throughout life we are challenged to let go of stories that inhibit our personal growth, but the stories that rule the collective subconscious are the most difficult to release and can be the most damaging:

TEN YEARS ON: THE SUBCONSCIOUS POWER OF 9/11
We each recall the stark images of planes flying into sky scrapers; the heroism, the villainy, the suffering, the imagination slipping into what it could have been like for the senses to experience the fire, smoke, and collapsing rubble. Every society has versions of its own 9/11 and Ground Zero.


Are We Stuck in a Story?
On the personal side, I believe that if such tragic forces are not converted into platforms for conscious awakening and compassion, they will soon become a heavyweight distraction.

In their book, “Spontaneous Evolution,” American scientist, Bruce Lipton, and political scientist, Steve Bareman, discuss the limitations and sabotaging influences of the collective subconscious experience, “We are storymaking creatures…in order to make meaning of the world, we create stories”—

The urge for victims of violence is to instead develop a story that creates a self-serving struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, hero and villain. Yet Lipton and Bareman and others like Eckhart Tolle remind us that we are meant to move beyond our stories. Why?

If a person is to transform and awaken to their gifts, then it becomes nearly impossible to do so when still clinging to a recurring cycle of past hurts and injustices.

when it gets in the way of identifying with a positive meaning in a big-picture context, then it can be hypnotizing to allow cultural belief to dominate our lives.

Bare explains in more detail, “We often find people who have a wound, or an affliction, or problem. And their entire lives become about this problem and then to let go of that problem they would lose all of the meaning in their lives. This gets played out in cultures…Each time one side does something bad to the other side, that enhances the story and it builds the story one more storey high.”
Dropping the Story to Celebrate Life
After 9/11, “national security” arguably became the dominant political and cultural story in the US and many parts of the world, and the values of strength and valor against terror (as well as their ugly shadows) took center stage.
If you still think that it’s worthwhile to cling to the shared experience of those violent images from 9/11, consider Lipton and Bareman’s rationale that it empowers our conscious capacity to participate in the world when beliefs that are limiting are reprogrammed.

This way the heavy coat of armor that preserves the ego from fear of violence can be replaced with a radiant mirror reflection of a responsible vibrant and more complete being; free to avoid storybook dramas that come and go in life.

Healing Essence Level Of Story

I wanted to put this in a section by itself so others can easily find it. I've also made a few clarifications....

Levels of story, and we heal at essence level:

Story: A person is given two bottles of water, one from the pure runoff of an ancient volcano. The other, blessed by a holy monk known to pray 20 hours a day.

Possible Symbols: container, water, intermediary, purity of nature, prayer, purity of spiritual life, lava.

Essence: Powerful, clear nourishment of what we are all made of as a blessing/offering. Those essences are needs of everyone. They bypass the judgement (prayer, bottled water, etc...) of the story, and even the hidden prejudices of symbolic interpretation -- "something is about to erupt in your life, you need to go to a mountain to heal, you were a monk in a past life, etc......:-)".

Healing at the essence level bypasses all that can get hung up, and since there is nothing to get stuck on, releases the fullness of the life force/chi within the symbol.