The Pressure of Positive Thinking: When Manifestation Becomes Another Way to Blame Ourselves

In my new(ish) job working at the Health Energies Studio in Collingwood, I have the opportunity to meet many different people and hear about their lives and health problems. As someone who has been deeply committed to wellness and learning about wellness on all levels for the last 20 years, this is an incredible opportunity.

Something I noticed recently is the pressure people put on themselves to be positive, think positively and manifest a good life.

I have been there too.

In this age of information and within the growing communities of metaphysical learners, non-denominational spirituality and esoteric teachings, we are often taught that “you are what you think” and that “everything you experience in life you have created for yourself.”

Sometimes, it’s a simpler belief around wanting to be positive for others and not wanting to be a drag. An elderly woman experiencing severe pain that was causing insomnia made such a comment to me recently.

Another woman, experiencing symptoms of depression and brain fog, had studied and practiced many metaphysical arts and wondered why she “couldn’t just snap out of it.” Well-meaning friends and healers had told her that she was creating her reality and simply needed to think and manifest differently. She shed tears of frustration and despair because the actions she had taken had not yet given her the results she sought.

I understand some of this personally.

I have experienced periods of depression myself and have felt profound guilt over not being able to control my negative thinking. At times, I was overcome with fearful thoughts about the future. Then, on top of the original fear, came another fear: if my thoughts create my reality, what am I creating by thinking this way?

It’s quite a lot of pressure to put on the mind.

And, interestingly, many of the things I was afraid of never happened.

How often do we do this? We can spend days, months or even years fearing something that never comes to pass. And then, at other times, something completely unexpected happens that we hadn’t been thinking about at all.

This alone makes me question the amount of power we attribute to our surface-level conscious thoughts.

I do believe that our thoughts matter. I believe consciousness influences our reality and that we participate in the creation of our lives. But I think we have greatly exaggerated the power of conscious thought.

We are not creating in isolation. We are living amongst billions of other people with their own free will. Our bodies and biology affect us. Our subconscious minds affect us. Circumstances affect us. Perhaps karma affects us. And then there is God, Divine Intelligence, Existence, whatever words we want to use.

And there is simply Mystery.

I think we need to maintain some humility in the unfolding of life.

Finding the fulcrum

Then there is the other side of the spectrum.

In accepted mental health support, there can be an opposite belief that mental health issues are “not your fault.” I’ve seen therapists and self-help books begin discussions on depression this way: “Firstly, you have to know it’s not your fault. It’s your brain, your brain chemistry, etc. But it’s not you.”

I understand the compassion behind this message. It is an attempt to relieve someone who is already suffering from the additional burden of guilt and self-blame. But, in my personal experience, I haven’t actually found it very helpful.

There is something disempowering about it for me.

If my depression is simply something happening to me—if it is my brain, my brain chemistry, and “not me”—then where am I in the experience? Where is my power to participate in what happens next?

To me, “it’s not your fault” feels like another surface-level answer to a much deeper question.

On one side of the pendulum we have:

I created this. I am responsible for everything that is happening to me. I should be able to control my mind and therefore manifest a different reality.

This can lead to amazing pressure and a sense of despair and failure when full control is not achieved. In some spiritual circles, people even end up gaslighting others who are struggling with this kind of thinking.

On the other side:

This isn’t me. This is happening to me. It is my brain, my circumstances, something outside of my control.

Neither has felt completely true or helpful to me.

What interests me is the pendulum itself.

Personally, when I see this type of pendulum conundrum in life, I try to find the fulcrum—the center point from which the pendulum is swinging.

When we find ourselves between two opposing beliefs or thought concepts such as yes/no, I should/I shouldn’t, it’s all my fault/it isn’t my fault, I have complete power to change/it is all out of my control, I believe we need to step out of that dual dimension and look for something greater.

The fulcrum of a pendulum sits above the swinging object. It isn’t another place along the pendulum’s path. It isn’t a compromise between the two sides. It remains centered while the pendulum swings beneath it.

I believe there are fulcrum truths awaiting us when we find ourselves swinging between thoughts that make us suffer.

Of course, this opens up quite the can of worms around Free Will and the limits of our own individual power versus Divine power. Humans have been working out these questions for thousands of years and I certainly don’t expect to solve them in a blog post.

But my present-time understanding is that the fulcrum lies beyond the surface level of the mind.

What are we actually trying to manifest?

There is another part of manifestation culture that I have been thinking about.

The whole practice is, in some ways, based on craving positive experiences and outcomes. We want health rather than illness. Abundance rather than financial struggle. Love rather than loneliness. Success rather than failure.

Of course we do. There is nothing wrong with wanting these things or taking action toward creating them.

But negative experiences are also part of this existence.

There will be disappointment. There will be grief. There will be illness, uncertainty, fear, failure and loss. We will not always get what we want.

So what happens when our spiritual framework doesn’t leave much space for these experiences?

If we interpret the positive experiences as evidence that we are aligned and manifesting well, what do we make of the painful ones?

Did we manifest incorrectly?

Were we not positive enough?

Did we fail to maintain the right vibration?

Perhaps the problem is not wanting positive experiences. The problem comes when we become so attached to those experiences that we believe life should not contain the other side.

We begin craving one end of the pendulum and resisting the other.

And we are still on the pendulum.

Awareness and equanimity

In the Vipassana meditation practice that I learned last spring during a 10-day silent meditation retreat, the practice is to observe reality “as it is” with awareness and equanimity.

Awareness allows us to see and remove some of our blinders, whereas the practice of equanimity—remaining centered despite the fluctuations of sensations in the body, neither avoiding nor craving any sensation—allows us to remain centered no matter what that awareness reveals.

In the meditation practice, one develops these skills within the confines of the body. Over time, we can begin applying them beyond the body to our experiences of life.

This is where I see the fulcrum.

Interestingly, Goenka, the main teacher in the Vipassana tradition I studied, gives a strong warning about craving the positive outcomes of meditation itself. If we are meditating because we are grasping for a particular experience or outcome, we have lost equanimity.

The point isn’t to make every experience positive.

And it isn’t to make every thought positive.

In fact, we aren’t giving the thoughts all that much attention.

For me, when thoughts arise during meditation, I sometimes say to myself, “Let it go, it is not important to think that right now.”

Another thought arises: that too.

Another: that too. Let it go. Back to the breath.

Back to the sensations.

Eventually, with practice, the mind relinquishes some of its control and relaxes.

There is space.

Not positive thinking. Not negative thinking. Not even trying to find the perfect place somewhere between the two.

Space beyond the swinging pendulum.

Maybe this is why so many spiritual traditions contain practices that take us beyond thinking rather than teaching us simply to think better.

There is something very powerful about making room for non-thinking. For silence. For the Void.

We spend so much time trying to fill the mind with the correct thoughts that perhaps we forget to leave some empty space for something else to arise.

This doesn’t mean doing nothing

I think this part is important.

Equanimity is not passivity.

Finding the fulcrum doesn’t mean that we stop dreaming, creating or taking action.

We can work toward healing. We can change our diet, take supplements and receive the help and care we need to become physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually better. We can work on our relationships. We can change jobs. We can create things. We can pray. We can dream and manifest the life we would like to live.

We do our best to take action toward our goals.

But perhaps we can do that without holding so tightly to the outcome.

We can leave some room for God’s hand to work.

We can recognize that sometimes what we wanted will happen and sometimes it won’t.

Sometimes something entirely different will happen. Sometimes an experience we would never have consciously chosen will become deeply meaningful to us later.

And sometimes something difficult will simply be difficult.

We don’t always need to explain it away.

I think there is freedom in saying: I participate in the unfolding of my life, but I am not the sole creator of everything that happens within it.

My thoughts have power, but they are not all-powerful.

I have agency, but I do not have complete control.

And perhaps I don’t need to decide whether an experience is “my fault” or “not my fault” before I can meet it, become aware of it and participate in what happens next.

I can work toward what I desire without requiring life to give it to me.

And I can practice remaining centered through both the experiences I wanted and the experiences I didn’t.

You don’t have to be positive today

As for the ladies I encountered at work, I was grateful to be in a grounded place where I could feel deep compassion for their pain without getting lost in it.

Others have provided this for me in the past.

Perhaps, sometimes, we can even hold the fulcrum for one another when someone else is swinging.

I held their hands and told them:

“You don’t have to be positive today.”

I know they are more than their pain.

They are more than their thoughts.

We can forgive ourselves when our minds are thinking negatively. We can observe those thoughts with awareness and equanimity rather than becoming afraid of them. Perhaps, in doing so, we actually give them less power.

We can dream and manifest without strong craving, leaving space for Mystery and for God’s hand to work.

And when we create more space within our own minds, perhaps we have more energy available to actually participate in the world—to take the actions that are ours to take.

Bless you brave humans!