Dreams are messages from your soul. Learning to understand and act on your intuition is how you can take your dreams and make them your reality. Intuition is the soft, subtle language of your soul. Once more, repeat after me, dreams are a message from your soul. By manifesting your dreams, you are also growing your soul.
In the last few years, I have found yoga to be an incredibly straight forward, efficient method for learning how to manifest dreams. I call it, intuitive yoga. It all works through intuition. The ancient yogis laid out a step by step approach for ‘connecting’ us; yoga helps connect your mind with your body, your body to your breath, your breath to your mind and ultimately teaching you how to connect your life with your soul.
I like to call the process ‘magic,’ but let’s be honest, it is intuitive development.
When I re-visited the ancient yogic text, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras with these wild ideas, what I found was an understanding of yoga that offered me the entire big picture. The more I researched, the more encouraged I became and the more alignment I found. Whether I focused my energy on finding scientific evidence, yogic scriptures or modern day manifestation theories to support my claim, I found them. But more than that I never once found anything to negate or resist this ‘hunch’ I was on. This was the game-changing moment on how I looked at yoga, as well as how I began living my life.
To create the life you dream, you can use these 6 steps for manifesting those dreams into your reality.
Your soul is not here to create suffering, your soul is here to guide you out of your suffering. Your soul wants you to thrive. When we are not living soulfully, we suffer. When we live based on what society wants, our parents want, our friends want from us, we ignore what our soul wants. Many of us spend a majority of our lives merely doing what we think we are supposed to do and telling ourselves that ‘our time will come.’ I am here to tell you, your time is now. This is a little glimpse into how it will all work.
The key to manifesting your dreams is getting incredibly intimate with your intuition. When you start listening to your intuition, you start living a soulful, intuitive life that involves dreaming and manifesting those dreams.
Step 1: create space
Create space in your life by getting rid of what isn’t serving you. Clear your schedule. De-clutter every drawer in your house. Clean out your closet. If you haven’t used something within 6 months then really consider getting rid of it. Learn to let go of your material attachments. Learn to let go of your need for busyness. You are learning to let go.
Create space in your body through yoga. Move and breath with the intention to create space. Open, inhale, flush, and exhale release. Open the heart with backbends. open the back of the legs with forward-folding bends. Open the hips with hip openers. If you tend to be tight in one area, then place extra focus on opening up there. Let go of the emotions, the stress, the tension and the heartache you are holding in the physical body. Let go of the expectations you have when you move into a pose. Exhale and let go. This is how you create space.
Create space in the mind through meditation and pranayama. Create space in your mind by eliminating distractions and busyness. By including these practices in your asana practice, you are creating space in the mind and body at the same time. Exhale the stubborn tense parts of your mind.
Step 2: be here now.
Learn mindfulness through concentration practices. Learn to focus. Learn to know the difference between thoughts and intuition through the daily development of mindfulness by breathing in and breathing out. Stay focused on the breath. When distractions come, return back to the breath compassionately. Distractions happen, don’t create more tension because you expect them to be gone. This does not create space. Watch the body and the sensations as they arise and pass away. Stay in the present on the now. Read “The power of now” by Eckhart Tolle because he explains this step better than I ever could.
Step 3: listen and feel.
Space + mindfulness lead you to awareness. Pratyahara is the yogic teaching for learning to listen to what is within us, our inner self. To do that, we must relax and listen. Stop and listen. Feel the energy moving inside of you with chakra meditations. Feel through the layers of your consciousness in a deeply relaxing yoga nidra session. Learn how to relax on demand with progressive relaxation. The more relaxed you become, the easier it is to hear the messages from your subconscious. This is where your dreams are revealed to you. Practice relaxation and your dreams will appear louder and clearer.
If you aren’t feeling any urges, pings or epiphanies, spend more time doing these first three steps.
Step 4: release blockages.
As soon as your dream appears, there will always be a limiting belief attached to it. Often times this looks like fear, procrastination, or lack of confidence. Blockages sound something like this “I would love to be a surfer, but I have never been that athletic” Or “I would love to start my own business, but I don’t have the money.” or “I dream of spending more time doing art, but I work too much.” The list of excuses you come up with for not living your dream is your limiting belief. It is also causing you suffering. Although these ‘excuses’ may seem logical and very real to you, they often times are merely a deep seeded belief creating a limitation in your brain. Neurologically, through repetitive practices such as affirmations and visualizations, we re-train the brain to see more opportunities.
Living your dream is rarely ‘dreamy,’ because living your dream involves re-training the mind to function in a different way and that takes work. Logic tries to talk your feeling- based intuition out of things. Don’t listen. Dharana is the yogic stage for finding misperceptions in your life and clearing them. Find where you need to unblock your mind and then do just that using affirmations, visualizations and intentional practices for breaking those blockages down. A good starting place is acknowledging the excuses you give for not doing something. Awareness is the hardest part of this step, but you got this.
Step 5: trust and believe.
Once you have done all you can reasonably do in the previous steps through diligent action and determined intention, there is one last lesson that is often overlooked but is very important, which is trust and belief. You must (yes, must) trust there are something bigger than you magnetizing and moving energies. This can be a god or universal energy, but you must believe in something bigger than you that is making everything happen. On one hand, it is going to take a lot of belief in yourself, and on the other, it is going to take just as much support in the energy field you are living in.
In the same way that the air from outside of your body is sucked into you through the muscles and organs of your body giving you life, the energies that surround you are supporting all the actions you are taking towards manifesting these dreams of yours too. It is a combined effort, teamwork even, between you and the world you are living in. Prayer and mantras might help you to understand this stage which the yogis refer to as dhyana, integration.
Step 6: manifest.
Repeat all of these steps regularly until your dream becomes a reality, otherwise known as manifestation. In the yoga texts, they call this ‘samadhi with seed.’ Once your dream has manifested, it has actually merely morphed or changed into another dream, so the process nearly always begins again. The more you practice with this yogic method for manifesting you will begin mastering the steps. Your soul will continue to grow which will lead you to the final manifestation ‘samadhi without seed’ or your ultimate soul freedom.
This whole process isn’t only about manifesting money, love, fame, confidence, and all the other things you might be dreaming about. This whole process is ultimately about soulful freedom and the ultimate spiritual manifestation of enlightenment.