Awesome Dudette’s Burning Question: “How can you tell the difference between a manifestation that is there to bring you what you want, or a manifestation that is there so you can release a limiting belief? Let me explain.

In several posts, like the post about your water heater, you say that a manifestation we perceive as negative (for example, your heater breaking down, or you losing your job) is a means to giving you what you want (a gas heater, or your dream job). There are also ‘negative’ manifestations that are there to show you that you have a limiting belief that you need to release in order to get what you want. I understand from your posts that both kinds of manifestations could evoke negative feelings. Is there any way to tell them apart? Because I sometimes get manifestations that don’t feel positive, but I can’t seem to find a limiting belief. Does that mean they are ‘necessary’ to get what I want?”

Dear Awesome Dudette,

Ah yes, the old Water Heater story. I really enjoyed re-reading that. For those of you who don’t want to or don’t have time to click through and familiarize yourself with the story, let me recap it for you:

In June 2011 (when this blog was still all new and shiny), my water heater decided to burst all over my kitchen late one Friday night. Big hassle. I stayed positive for a long time, using thoughts such as “This might lead to that gas heater you’ve been wanting all along” to keep me focused in a good feeling place. But then, issues ensued and I ended up taking cold showers for 3 weeks (not pleasant). My mood dropped and I finally had to admit that I wasn’t having fun anymore. I sat myself down on a Saturday, did the work to shift my energy, and my Monday, the solutions came flooding in.

In this case, my water heater busting like that was clearly a sign of resistance, designed to get me to finally face a limiting belief I’d been ignoring (in this case, the belief was a need to be perfect and a fear that if I wasn’t, I’d look like a fraud. Silly, silly past version of Melody…) But what if it hadn’t been? What if, as I originally thought hoped, the water heater had only broken down in order to make room for a better one? How could I have known the difference?

Negative emotion = Resistance

I know. This stuff can get really confusing. It’s not always black and white. But in this case, it’s actually quite easy. Follow this rule: If there is any negative emotion present, the manifestation is, at least in part, about resistance.

Let’s break this down a bit, shall we? In the case of the water heater story, let’s say that I had been a match to a new water heater, but didn’t have any resistance that the experience of a break down could help me shift. In that case, the water heater might’ve still broken down (in order to make room for a new one), but it wouldn’t have done it at the worst possible time: Friday night. It also would’ve been resolved quickly and easily. Now, I might’ve still had a twinge of negative emotion, but this would’ve been due to not trusting 100% in the fact that this seemingly inconvenient event was actually something really positive. If that belief wasn’t very strong, though, I would’ve easily been able to soothe it and the whole experience would’ve probably been over within a day.

Now clearly, I was a match to a new water heater. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten one. However, I also had some resistance that was holding me back in my life, which a water heater breakdown could perfectly help to highlight. My resistance wasn’t to the water heater per se, it was something more general that affected multiple manifestations and my happiness overall. The Universe could’ve used any number of experiences to mirror this limiting belief back to me, but this one was the path of least resistance. So, it got the job.

When the water heater burst, I had an initial reaction. But, being the happy shiny puppy that I am, I chose to ignore it and just deal with the situation logistically first. No big whoop. I even felt proud of myself for not flipping out. And, at first, it looked like the situation would be resolved quickly. Only, then it wasn’t. The longer I went without hot water, the worse it felt. In other words, my belief and the associated feeling, was given a chance to get bigger and bigger, until I finally couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Beware of Denial

To put it more bluntly, when the water heater first exploded, I went into a slight bit of denial. “This isn’t that bad”, “I can handle this”, “I’m sure this is happening for a reason”, were my mantras. And while there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these statements, in this case, I was using them to gloss over the fact that I was, in fact, experiencing negative emotion. The resolution didn’t come until I finally threw down the gloves and admitted that I wasn’t feeling nearly as good about the whole thing as I was pretending to and then delved into that. I had to own the feeling before I could release it.

By the way, the “I’m sure this I happening for a good reason” justification has gotten me into trouble on several occasions. In an attempt to be all Zen and shit, I’ve glossed over my subtle negative emotions more than once. But don’t worry, when we don’t face our negative feedback, it gets bigger. So I always end up resolving it in the end. How can you know when that sentence (or any other) is actually bringing you relief or is just helping you stay in denial? Why, by the way you feel, of course. Only, you have to be honest about how you feel. Of course, none of us is dishonest on purpose, but we do have a real tendency to lie to ourselves, particularly when the discomfort isn’t all that bad.

To illustrate this point further, let me give you another example. I’ve seen this pattern many times in people who have physical ailments. Meet Susan, who has been suffering from horrible migraines for years. These severe headaches are tied to Susan’s deep seeded fears of losing control (which also make her a total control freak). She feels quite powerless and has no trust in the process or the Universe. Subsequently, everything is a huge struggle for her. The tension of trying to keep everything together with her own two hands has translated literally into tension headaches. And they’re getting worse.

When the migraines finally get too painful for her, she “gives up”, spends a couple of days in bed and manages to manifest a healer who gives her some herbs that, in combination with the rest, actually help a great deal. The forced bed rest also give Susan an opportunity to see that not everything depends on her. Her family have the ability to fend for themselves and could actually be doing much more to help than they usually do, if only she ever let them. She vows to change her ways, take better care of herself and delegate more. Susan emerges from her rest feeling tons better. The headaches have decreased and are clearly on their way out. Oh happy day.

But, free from the pain that “forced” her to change, Susan soon returns to her old patterns. She takes over all tasks, has no trust that anyone else will do as good a job as her, and places the fate of the whole freaking Universe squarely on her own shoulders again. Until the headaches come back, that is, and she’s forced to remember her lesson. This will continue until Susan is so sick of the cycle of pain that she finally decides to change for good.

The point of this story is this: Many of us are unwilling to make any kind of change until it becomes too painful NOT to, even when we are consciously aware that making that change will make us feel better. We need the incentive the discomfort provides to spur us into action. And no, this isn’t part of human nature, it’s just a deeply ingrained belief, but it is pretty prevalent and the main reason why we insist on manifesting so much crap into our lives. We need the crap as an incentive to move away from whatever it represents.

How the Universe gets our attention

Now, back to your question and the water heater story. The Universe used my water heater manifestation, to which I had no or very little resistance, as a means to help me shift my vibration upwards in a way that would benefit me in much bigger ways. Of course it did. How else would it go about showing me my resistance?

The Universe has to use something you’re already a match to, something you’re already able to manifest, to mirror back anything to you. If you weren’t already a match to that something (the water heater in this case), it couldn’t manifest at all. You’d have to manifest something else in order to help you become a match to the water heater. So, the only manifestations that the Universe CAN use to smack you in the face with your limiting beliefs are the ones you’re already able to allow. It will then choose from amongst all the stuff you already have access to, and find the experience that is best able to represent a particular limiting belief and trigger you in just the perfect way. The experience (aka the water heater blowing up and not having any hot water) is able to elicit the exact same emotions that the underlying fear (not being perfect, being ousted as a fraud) does. This is how you figure out that you have such a belief – you ask yourself how the experience felt, what exactly bothers you about it and you keep asking until you find answers. And don’t worry, if you can’t figure it out, the manifestation will grow and give you more emotional information until you have enough of a picture.

Everything is necessary

You ask in your question if a negative manifestation is “necessary” to you getting what you want. But this question is redundant. Everything is necessary to you getting what you want. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be in your reality. Everything that manifests for you is a match to your current vibration. What you experience and how you do so is determined by your beliefs, your perspectives and how closely aligned they are with Who You Really Are (the vibration at which you constantly get everything you want in perfect timing). Nothing ever manifests by accident or coincidence. It all means something. Now, before you run off and make yourself crazy trying to figure out what EVERYTHING means, keep in mind that if something is important for you to take care of, it will get your attention in a way that you eventually cannot ignore. If it’s not important, if you’re not hanging on to something in a detrimental way, if a simple manifestation you weren’t even all that aware of causes you to shift, it will just gravitate out. Not every problem needs to be solved consciously. In fact, your conscious mind can’t solve any problems at all. It CAN totally get in the way, though. Any deliberate work we do serves the purpose of getting the conscious mind out of the way so that it will allow the shifting to take place.

So, when ANYTHING happens in your reality, anything at all, you can safely assume that it happened for your benefit, whether it seems positive or negative in the moment. The more allowing you are of that, the more you can get into this positive viewpoint, the faster you’ll be able to figure out what’s being mirrored back to you. When you push against the event, you may be doing so from the belief that bad things just happen to you (or something like that), which is probably totally unrelated to the actual belief that caused the manifestation. After all, you can’t go looking for the underlying cause when you don’t truly believe in a cause and effect scenario. If bad things just randomly happen to you, there probably is no cause. If that’s your belief, the underlying belief will never be found.

When you can allow anything to happen in your reality without freaking out, when you trust that even though you may not yet know the reason something happened, there definitely is one, you open yourself up to finding it. Keep in mind that this process isn’t necessarily instantaneous. In my story, it took me 3 weeks to finally figure it out, mostly because even though I stayed open to finding a solution, I was a little too adamant about feeling good and therefore had to get well and truly annoyed before I finally broke down and admitted to the negative emotion I was feeling.

This is why the belief that everything happens for a reason, that we are not powerless, that no matter what a positive solution is possible, is such a powerful one and a requirement to becoming a truly effortless manifestor. It opens us up to even being able to find those root causes (you can’t find a root cause if you don’t believe it exists), and also keeps us from experiencing any more trauma than we need to. If I’d freaked out about the water all over my kitchen, I would’ve had that negative experience PLUS the three weeks of cold water. I could’ve easily complained the entire time, creating more negative momentum unrelated to the original cause of the event, attracting all kinds of other crap into my reality. As it was, because I was able to keep myself in a happy place, the experience was rather gentle. I still had to have the experience (it was the path of least resistance for this particular belief), but it didn’t have to get any worse than necessary. On that note, I just want to point out that I was the one in charge of the time frame, not the Universe. It took me 3 weeks to face my emotions. That was my choice, even though it wasn’t a conscious one. It took me that long to be ready to have my epiphany. The Universe didn’t make the experience last even a second longer than it needed to. My water was restored within 48 hours, an absolutely unheard of time frame where I live, so basically, as fast I could possibly allow given my beliefs.

Bottom line

There really is no difference between manifestations that are there to bring something about, and manifestations that are there to show you something. It’s all the same. If a manifestation is bringing something about in a way that doesn’t feel good to you, you have resistance. If a manifestation of any kind doesn’t feel good to you, you have resistance. Just because manifestations can serve double duty (bring another manifestation about AND mirror your resistance back to you) doesn’t mean they’re different in this respect. In fact, just about all manifestations are serving not only double, but multiple duty. When you take a good look at co-creations, you’ll start to get the idea of just how many purposes one single manifestation can serve. The perfection of how everything is connected is mind-blowingly beautiful. And complicated as hell. I’m so glad that we don’t have to be in charge of orchestrating all these connections using our puny little conscious minds. That’s the Law of Attraction’s job. All we have to do is set our intentions, relax, and know that whatever happens is there to get us closer to what we want by either taking us someplace we want to go (in which case negative emotion would indicate resistance to where it’s taking you or a general lack of trust in the process), or by blatantly mirroring back some piece of resistance that’s blocking you from going further. Do you see how it’s really all the same? In either case, simply ask yourself what it is that you’re feeling and why. Find the stupid decision you made or adopted from someone else and make a different one. Oh, and don’t forget to enjoy yourself. Because, really, that’s the whole point.

For further reading on this topic, you can also check out: Dear LOA: How Can I Tell What My Random Negative Manifestations Mean?