If you’ve followed Living Intentionally for a while, you’ll have no doubt noticed that much of the information presented here involves nutrition and lifestyle. It’s not just about Law of Attraction and manifesting reality. This is, if you’ll excuse the pun, intentional. It’s my firm belief that you can’t create abundance or well-being without involving your physical body.

In Western culture, we tend to think of our thoughts and mind as being elements that reside entirely in the mind. As such, we’re encouraged to live cerebral, “thinking” lives. Westerners live mostly in their heads, and many of them are so far “north” of their bodies that when asked to describe what they feel in their body, they have no words. From their perspectives, they don’t feel anything.

The fact of the matter is that thoughts are not localized to the head. While it’s true that our brain is the clearing house of bodily control and thought, thoughts and emotional response to thoughts radiate throughout the body. Our nervous system, central channel and acupuncture meridians act as pathways of intercellular communication. When you experience a thought, physical processes are triggered in accordance with the thought and, importantly, emotion that follows.

Think about it for a moment. Have you had your heart broken? If you’re like most people, the answer is yes. And, if you think about it, why would we phrase it as having your heart broken if love were a cerebral experience? We wouldn’t. I can’t speak for you, but when my heart was broken, I felt it in my heart space. It was horrible and heavy. In fact, my heart wasn’t broken, I was.

The point is that regardless of how we culturally like to define thought, our bodies resonate and reverberate with the thoughts we think and our emotional reactions to them. When thoughts become chronic, i.e., beliefs, we create chronic patterns of physical response. This is a crucial fact in understanding stress response in the body and how it can create illness. If you’re chronically stressed and do not find healthful ways of releasing that stress, the chemical processes and energy patterns represented in the body will create areas of dis-ease. Illness will manifest.

The connection between our thoughts and our physical well-being is becoming much better understood. It wasn’t all that long ago that some of the best teaching hospitals in the United States endorsed the idea that as much as 90% of physical illness was derived from stress. We understand that our mind is not separate from our body. The mind-body-spirit connection is inextricable and unavoidable. Nothing happens in one realm that doesn’t happen in another.

Manifesting Abundance By Way Of Good Health

Pretty much all the Law of Attraction and Manifesting Reality teachings I’ve read focus almost exclusively on the nature of our thoughts. It’s been pounded into us (and I teach the same thing) that if we can improve the nature of our thoughts, we can improve the nature of our experience. It’s true, it’s undeniable and, yet, it’s incomplete. It’s not just about your thoughts. Why?

You can’t create a whole and abundant reality from an incomplete and unwell body. If you think it’s only a matter of thinking the right thoughts, you’re doomed to being one of those folks who end up frustrated that this stuff just doesn’t work. In fact, it does, but you need to recognize that manifesting and LoA answer to the sum of the mind-body-spirit balance.

Our focus needs to be on quality, I think. Quality of thought, quality of sleep, quality of relationships, quality of health … Quality is crucial. If you’re living in a Supersize Me world in which you’re concerned with quantity, it’s my opinion that you’re missing out. Quality is something that makes us feel good in a very long-term way. It’s been my experience that the pleasure derived from quantity is very short-lived.

The first element of improving the quality of physical being is happiness. If you’re struggling with health issues, feeling physically good can be challenging. In such cases, the best thing to do is to laugh. Find things that make you laugh. Whatever makes you giggle and feel joy, even if it’s just for a moment, will make you release feel-good hormones that stimulate healing and reduce inflammation.

Successful thinking is paramount, but we need to back it up with nutrition and lifestyle choices that help bootstrap our physical and spiritual well-being. When you pump up all areas of your life, you become a manifesting powerhouse. If you’re focused solely on your thoughts, but are filling yourself full of junk food, alcohol, drugs, or are engaging in turbulent relationships, your body and spirit will be offsetting the work you’re doing at the thought level. In such cases, people might be tempted to think that LoA isn’t working for them. In fact it is, always at all times, but the different parts of you aren’t working together to achieve your conscious goals.

So, work towards tuning up the whole system. Improve your thoughts. Find your joy. Do things that make you feel both emotionally AND physically good. Tend to your body’s health and well-being as much as you can. Understand that the more you recognize yourself as a whole and not as a head, the quicker you’ll get a handle on creating the life you want to live, in all regards.

Namaste,

trane