Step into Your Power and Manifest Your Dreams
Call it luck. Call it prayer. Call it manifesting. Just don’t call it magic. If you were to pick up a book on manifesting, you might think that all you need to do is visualize what you want, then keep visualizing it, and visualize some more, and then—poof!—it appears. But in the world of Lacy Phillips, who has built her life and career around this skill, it is simple psychology. It involves understanding your childhood programming and your shame and reprogramming your subconscious beliefs; it requires work and action and vulnerability.
Granted, when you do meet someone who stands in their power, who asks for what they want and says what they mean, who is authentic and humble, it does seems a lot like…magic. But with the right tools, Phillips believes it’s a type of magic we can all master.
A Q&A with Lacy Phillips
Q
How does a person become lucky?
A
In my practice, I study my most magnetic clients. We’re talking about the person who’ll say “I have this company, and wouldn’t it be cool if Vogue wrote about it?” And then Vogue emails that night. They’re so magnetic, and everything they want comes to them.
The most major commonality lucky people share is that they’re incredibly vulnerable and honest. It’s a kind of humble, authentic honesty. They are fully in their authenticity, meaning they’re not hiding. Nothing’s owning them.
Lucky people don’t do the ego dance, which is when we go out into public or we’re around somebody new and low self-worth leads us to question: “Who should I be? Will they love me? What do I say for them to love?” Magnetic people don’t do that. They share a dissociation from that ego dance and they’re just presently, authentically, vulnerably themselves.
There is also the very rare unicorn who grew up in an environment where they were incredibly loved, believed in; there wasn’t any shame. Things come to them because they are whole.
“What we don’t own owns us. Anywhere we have shadows still, where we are judging or projecting, it’s just where we’re wanting to be loved.”
At the other end of the spectrum, narcissists make some of the best manifestors because they confidently, wholeheartedly believe that they’re worth it. They’ll encounter something bad for them and they’ll think, Nope, I’m worth more than that and I won’t settle for less.
Q
What is manifesting?
A
My process of manifestation is essentially an exercise in getting back to our authentic selves and learning to live a life that reflects that.
From the moment we’re born, every single one of us receives societal programming: parental, media, peer. Very few of us have a true idea of what our authentic essence is and what it truly desires to thrive. Manifesting starts with taking deep inventory of that programming we’re raised with, then getting into your authentic essence and asking yourself what you truly want—and, finally, breaking the mold of what limits you from achieving that.
Q
What are some misconceptions about manifesting? How does it actually work?
A
When I was seventeen, an intuitive told me to pick up a book on manifestation, to read it and follow it to a T, and that I’d be able manifest everything I want. So I read the book and did what I was told. Nothing happened. I read The Secret and the Law of Attraction books that we’re all sort of peripherally familiar with…and still not much in that realm was helping me. A lot of it was: Think positive; your thoughts control your reality. Visualize.
But through following my intuition and developing my own process, I was able to manifest incredible things. First it was an apartment in Echo Park for $300, then a partner with crazy specificity, like a photographer with long blond surfer hair and a Parisian mom. I realized I had a gift with this, but I needed to drop everything I’d learned about manifestation. I began to crystallize my formula, the pattern I witnessed, which is in a nutshell: Our thoughts don’t determine anything about manifestation; our subconscious beliefs do. Our childhood imprints, from zero to twenty-four years old, create the patterning of what we project and bring back to us.
“The most major commonality lucky people share is that they’re incredibly vulnerable and honest.”
A huge component of what creates that force, that pull, magnetism, if you will, is self-worth. Anytime I would step into my power, and no longer settle for things where I had been really small or insecure in the past, and say no—and claim my power—what I wanted would connect with me. Thinking positive had nothing to do with it; it was standing in my power and strength and worth and not settling for less that mattered.
Q
What are some tools anyone can use to manifest success and good fortune?
A
Even if you never step into this process, there are a few things you can do to create magnetism in your life, the first immediately and the second more gradually:
1. START SAYING NO. This applies to anything that’s not a “hell yes” in your life. Anytime you’re people-pleasing or doing something because you think you should be, or settling, what you’re communicating energetically and projecting is: “I’m not worth doing what I want” or “I don’t feel valuable enough to do what I want, therefore I’m going to keep staying small.” Whenever you’re in that mode, you’re just going to keep attracting the same lessons over and over and over again. Create boundaries and say no to what’s not a yes. That’s the number one thing somebody can do right away.
2. TAKE UP MORE SPACE. Look at anywhere in your life where you’re being small right now. Where you know you desire more and you’re worth more inside. Maybe you’re still in the job you hate. You’re still dating that person who treats you like shit or you’re still going out with the emotionally unavailable person. Wherever you’re small, you’re not able to create; it’s a block in your life. There’s no magnetism. To feed your magnetism, start accepting only what makes you feel big and true to who you are.
Start with the small stuff. If you ultimately want to leave the job that you hate, that’s going to take time, and there are tools to support you. But some things may be easier, like choosing not to hang out with a friend who makes you feel like the sidekick. Start to distance and create boundaries and call people in who make you feel great.
Q
How does re-parenting come into play?
A
Childhood is such a huge component. I don’t care if you had the best childhood on earth, the most charmed, the most abundant. You still felt shame somewhere, even if it was the fourth grade teacher who made you stand up in front of the class and created shame in you. Shame is what creates blocks. The objective of re-parenting is to break down your life, from pre-utero until twenty-four, phase by phase, and identify what you missed and what you need to pick up to become your most whole authentic version of yourself. And to see that authentic and magnetic version of you, and to reprogram all the experiences that are shameful and start to turn them into positive self-worth experiences.
My online re-parenting series takes people through that dissection process step by step. It’s a twenty- to thirty-minute process each day for a little more than a week. People can do it in their own time, and they have incredibly profound experiences when they start unpacking their childhoods. When I hold a re-parenting workshop, I take people through a very simple process of finding a block. They’ll have a trigger in their life and say something like, “I keep attracting these types of friends, but they really don’t have my best interest at heart and they’re jealous when…” And I say, “Okay, let’s take a look at that.” I’ll have them do a journaling exercise, and then I take them under what I call “deep imagining,” which is a hypnosis process I’ve customized. Within moments they can see where they picked up their block in childhood, and they begin to understand everything in their reality is a projection of what they imprinted in childhood.
What we don’t own owns us. Anywhere we have shadows still, where we are judging or projecting, it’s just where we’re wanting to be loved. The moment we integrate that and take our power back, anything that was making us feel insecure no longer exists. We’re in our worthy selves, and we can attract the thing that we’re wanting.
Q
Can you work on manifesting in tandem with therapy?
A
Yes. I highly recommend it, especially for clients who have experienced trauma. When you’re doing this work, it can upheave so much. If you are triggered and you’re having deep, unsettling emotions, please work with your therapist or your support group or whoever can really hold that space for you as you’re processing your past.
Q
Can you ever manifest things for someone other than yourself?
A
No, that’s the worst part. You can’t manifest for other people. We all have our own subconscious programming, our own projections, our own free will. It’s our experience.
But one big thing that I try to tell everybody is: Anybody can manifest. I don’t care what background you come from. Everybody has their own programming, and everybody can chisel away at it.
Lacy Phillips is a Los Angeles–based leading manifestation advisor with a formula that’s radically different from the New Age “think positive” model; her process combines psychology, neuroscience, and energetics to expand and unblock subconscious limiting beliefs.
