#107: Trying to manifest your dream life? Here's what's missing

Manifestation is everywhere right now, but if the usual advice (be specific, make it easy, just "feel it") isn't working for you, you're not alone.

On this episode of The Embodied Way Podcast, I break down 5 common misconceptions about manifestation and how to actually make it work for you through embodiment, not just wishful thinking.

I also discuss: 

✨ The six spokes of the "Wheel of Manifestation" 
✨ How attachment impacts our ability to manifest 
✨2 different kinds of time and their role in creating the life you want 
✨How to balance visualizing your future while staying grounded in the present

I can't wait to hear about your realizations and the new synchronicities that arrive from this conversation.

Join The Embodiment Collective:
https://theembodiedwaycoach.com/embodimentcollective 

Get The Confident Creator Replay:
https://theembodiedwaycoach.com/confidentcreator 

Join the conversation:

On Substack:  https://theembodiedway.substack.com 

On the Podcast Blog: https://theembodiedwaycoach.com/2026/06/05/trying-to-manifest-your-dream-life-heres-whats-missing/ 

For show notes and helpful resources, visit https://theembodiedwaycoach.com/podcast.

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Transcript

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Speaker 0:00

You've probably been told that if you want to manifest something, that you create it as specifically as possible, and then you add the words or something better. Now, even those words or something better seem to suggest to me that there's a limitation to our imagination. That we actually have the ability to manifest more than we can imagine. And that also suggests to me that maybe our specificity is limiting our ability to manifest. This is The Embodied Way Podcast, where creative people come to reconnect with their soul purpose, identify and release their blocks, heal old wounds, and manifest the life they've always dreamed of. Hi, I'm Natalie Neckyfarow, and welcome back to The Embodied Way Podcast. So I don't call myself a manifestation coach, but I do help people manifest the life that they want. And there are a lot of misconceptions about what manifesting actually is. And so in today's episode, I'm gonna share with you what my understanding is of manifestation from my own 15 years plus years of studying with life coaches, manifestation coaches, my own personal experimentation, and what I have seen work with my clients. So I guess you could say that I am both an expert in manifestation and also not an expert.

What Manifestation is - for me

Speaker 1:47

Ultimately, I believe manifestation is unique to every individual. We can all manifest, and it also works differently for every single person. So to me, manifestation and goal setting aren't actually all that different. They're kind of like two sides of the same coin. And most of us think of manifestation as being super sexy and easy and fun and flowy and magical, and goal setting as something that is kind of rigid and regimented and that is based on hard work and follow through and doing all of these steps. And what I'm gonna suggest to you today is that manifestation isn't just the fun, sexy part, but it's both. And we need that feminine energy, that flowy energy, and we also need structure as well. So let's start with a definition. So I looked this up on Merriam-Webster, technically in my Google search, and Merriam-Webster defines manifestation as the act of making a thought, desire, or unseen concept into a tangible reality, often through focused, intentional thinking, and action. Okay. I'll buy that. Sounds pretty good to me.

Assumptions People Make about Manifesting

Speaker 3:37

And there are quite a few assumptions that most people make when they want to manifest something that can actually do more to block receiving your desired outcome than attract it. So I'm gonna break these down for you. All right.

Manifestation isn't always easy

Speaker 3:55

The first one is if it isn't easy, you're doing it wrong. There's this thing called beginner's luck. You may have heard this phrase before. But I've had this show up in my life many times. I remember the first time I took a writing class, and I took it because an acting business coach I was working with said that the way to get ahead as a performer was to create your own work. And so I signed up for this writing class, and I was so unattached from the outcome. I was so unattached from being good at writing. And weirdly, I was. It was like this weird place where I just seemed to instantly sort of tap into this flow. People were really excited and interested in what I was writing. I didn't put a lot of time or effort into planning what I was about to write. I kind of sat down for an hour or two each week before class, and I wrote my pages and I turned them in. And it was kind of a magical time. But that's not how writing is for me now. Because beginner's luck is just beginner's luck. We all need some kind of craft to support us. And there's a big difference between turning in five to ten pages a week and writing a feature script, or the big difference between writing a first draft and going through a round of edits until something is ready to be produced. So once we get past the beginner's luck phase, then we're in this phase where there are obstacles. There are things that we don't know. There are things that we have to learn. There may be parts of ourselves that we need to heal in order to be able to reach that next level of success with this thing. Now, for a lot of us, when we are working on manifesting something or we could interchange the word creating, if we hit an obstacle, the tendency is to view that obstacle as a sign that something isn't working. And yes, something isn't working. But beyond that, then maybe it's not meant for us and we shouldn't be doing it. But the truth is that the obstacles and resistance that are showing up are signs that you are on the right track. And when you treat the obstacle like a roadblock, which is like, oh my God, stop, turn around right now, instead of a caution sign, which is like, hmm, there might be some things I have to like negotiate out ahead to get where I'm going. If you treat that obstacle like a roadblock instead of a caution sign, not only are you preventing yourself from manifesting the thing that you want, you are actually going to get there a lot more slowly, or maybe not at all. The truth is, if we didn't have to change in order to manifest what we want, we would have already manifested that thing. And so there are different phases in the process of manifestation. If you are in a phase where it's easy and things are really flowing and you're not hitting any obstacles, awesome, that is so great. I'm so excited for you. But it won't always be like that. And that's important to remember because when there are obstacles, that doesn't mean you're supposed to stop.

Manifestation isn't Linear

Speaker 8:01

So the second thing that people get wrong about manifestation is that it's linear and that you need to put one foot in front of the other to climb up the steps, the steps of a ladder or steps of a house. But manifestation is actually about maybe skipping steps on the ladder, or choosing not to get on the ladder at all and going around it, or maybe going over to another house and climbing the ladder on that house instead. And so this is where traditional goal setting, which is very related to masculine energy, traditional goal setting really keeps us in structure. And structure isn't unimportant to manifestation, but most of us get stuck when we're trying to be too linear.

Manifestation doesn't just come from you

Speaker 9:10

All right, the third thing is this idea that if we want to manifest something, it comes completely from your own personal vision, desires, and aspiration. All right, we're pretty egotistical in this way. And, you know, I know a lot of people listening to this podcast have a variety of spiritual inclinations. So you might go to church every week and be a very religious person. You might never go to church and like not even believe that God even exists, be like totally agnostic. And then there's, you know, what I will call, I'm gonna call these universalists. So I personally ascribe to this idea that energy is universal and we can all tap into everything, and that there actually is no one God, that God is something that we each have our own unique experience of, and some cultures describe God in one way and some describe it in another, but all are true. So if manifestation doesn't come completely from our own vision, desires, and aspirations, where exactly does it come from? Okay. And this is the question that I have been grappling with. And the more I get into spiritual work, the more I believe that what I seek is also seeking me. Now that's not my words, those are Rumi, Rumi's words. Rumi is a poet. Um, and use this phrase, what you seek is also seeking you. So the idea is that when you are inspired or have a desire to do something, that that inspiration, desire to do something is coming from outside of yourself and inside of yourself, maybe at the same time. And to sort of facilitate this like awareness opening, because this might be a very new concept or idea for you, there's two different kinds of time. There's kairos time and there's chronos time. And chronos time is the time that we are most familiar with. So you have your watch, and it is X hour and X minute and X seconds, and that on this particular day, and that is time according to Kronos. And in this system of time, we experience things in a linear way, and what exists is what exists right now in this moment when I am talking to you and recording this podcast. And what happened a minute ago doesn't exist, and what I'm gonna say a minute from now also doesn't exist. That is Kronos time. Now, Kairos time is sort of more of a quantum physics idea. So this is the idea that everything that has ever existed exists now and will always exist. It just changes form, which means a minute ago, an hour ago, last week, last month, last year, and an hour from now, a minute from now, you get the point, all exist right here, right now in the moment. So I get to tap into that. And the tools that I teach, meditation, embodiment, energy work, are ways that we can start to experience time in a less chronological way and tap more clearly and more frequently into this universal source. And so if you have an inclination, maybe it's a tiny one, like I was like, I really need to start a podcast. There was plenty of immediate stimulus, right? I listen to podcasts every week. I have things that I want to say. I know that when I speak and people hear me speak, that they respond. And I'm a great writer too, but there's something about when I lead a workshop live that seems to help people understand more clearly what it is that I do, experience what embodiment is in a way that when things are written, it's a little too easy to just engage with your brain, which is just one of the five aspects of yourself. And when we only engage with our brain, embodiment is limited. So seeing as how you can engage with any moment in time, the idea that I suddenly want to create a new program for my business, the idea that that actually might come from the future where this has already been created. Or it might come from somewhere else. And this is a place where proof is not going to happen. So the only proof you might get is if you are someone who frequently meditates and you have a vision about something that is about to happen or that is going to happen, maybe it's months or years from now. And then at some point that does show up for you. And you could have this question well, did I make that happen? Or was it already going to happen? And I just tapped into the knowledge that it was going to happen. And who knows? Right? So based on your frequency, at any given moment, you are going to attract thoughts, ideas, people that resonate with your current frequency. And what if the things that you think you want to create in the world, the world also wants you to create?

Using Embodiment to Manifest

Speaker 16:39

Okay, so we're gonna take a little quick break to talk about what it would look like practically for you to use embodiment to manifest. And so I run a membership called The Embodiment Collective. And it is a space where we show up over the course of a moon cycle. We start on a new moon, we end on uh at the end of that full cycle. So, yes, we hit the full moon, but we're gonna come all the way back until right before the next new moon. And we use that cycle to move through this process that I described to you last week, where we evolve, we move and we manifest through different practices to move through specific themes. And this coming moon cycle, which starts on June 14th, 2026, our theme is unlocking your gifts of manifestation. And as I said before, we all have the ability to manifest. I believe we all manifest in different ways. And so the goal of this uh moon cycle is going to be to help you take the things that you have learned and you've picked up along the way about how to manifest or create or achieve the goals that you have set for yourself. And then we're gonna work on tweaking them, both through me sharing some tools that maybe you haven't experienced before, and also from your own personal inquiry. As you're practicing some of these daily embodiment practices, you're gonna learn what does what feels good, what works for me, um, what feels like I'm faking it, what feels organic, what helps me feel more expansive, what helps me step into that feeling of being a showrunner in the future, or maybe just, you know, finishing my first short film. And I'd love for you to be a part of the membership. So you can find out more by going to the embodiedwaycoach.com /embodiment collective. That link will be in the show notes for you. And if you join by Monday, June 8th, you'll also get 50% off your first month and 25% off your membership for as long as you are a member. So you can go ahead and check that out again at the embodiedwaycoach.com/ embodiment collective.

Do you really need to be specific to manifest?

Speaker 19:31

Okay, so the fourth thing that I think is misunderstood about manifestation is this notion that we manifest or create or attract the things that we want through specificity. And I'm gonna say that sometimes we do manifest through specificity, but and this might be a little bit controversial, it is not always true. Now, pretty much everyone I've ever come into contact with who teaches manifestation says that you have to be more specific about what you want. And that if you don't manifest what you want, you manifest something that is close. It is because you weren't specific enough. And I'm just gonna call a little bullshit on that, and I have some very specific reasons why. So, first of all, in human design, there is a variable that specifies how we manifest. And there are two types of manifesting in your human design chart. So either you are what they are calling a specific manifester or a non-specific manifester. And because I personally know that specificity is not what causes me to manifest things, I'm believing that this is accurate because in my human design chart, my way of manifesting is non-specific. Now, I'm still looking for someone who can give me a really good explanation of what these variables mean in human design. If you know of someone, please send them my way. I do plan to get a human design expert on this podcast later this year. But I feel like not only does this track for me that specificity isn't always the way to manifest, but it also has tracked for many of my clients. And I do think we tend to attract the things that resonate with us. So it doesn't surprise me that I'm attracting a lot of clients who are also nonspecific manifestors. So the first thing I want you to consider is that you've probably been told that if you want to manifest something, that you create it as specifically as possible, and then you add the words or something better. Now, even those words or something better seems to suggest to me that there's a limitation to our imagination, that we actually have the ability to manifest more than we can imagine. And that also suggests to me that maybe our specificity is limiting our ability to manifest. For example, I had a client who I was working with last year who really wanted to play a very specific role in musical theater. And I encouraged her to focus on visualizing herself playing the role. And it was very powerful for her, and that she did actually end up manifesting something very close. So she manifested the opportunity to understudy this lead role, this dream role in a production. Now, it was not ideal. The production values were not her ideal scenario. She would have much preferred to play the role. And there was definitely a cost to her in terms of time and energy expenditure for being a part of this process. But there was a lot to learn from it as well. And so do I think the problem was that she wasn't being specific enough and didn't say, I'm manifesting, playing this role as the lead, as the primary person and not the understudy at only this type of theater. No. Sometimes I think we need to manifest something because there's something we need to learn from that experience. And what we're learning from that experience isn't actually about that pinnacle. It isn't about playing the role and being on stage and having that quote unquote success. It's about what we're going to learn from being a part of that experience, how that's going to prepare us for what's next and what's down the road. And when she ended up booking this understudy, she felt like she was a failure. And I think that can be the danger with manifesting with only specificity. Because when something shows up, and I don't think she would have necessarily defined what showed up as something better, but it was something that was incredibly growing and helped illuminate her values and what was important to her. And she did get an opportunity to do a full run-through of the show. So she proved that she could do it. There was a lot of value to that. And so what I'm suggesting here is that specificity can create too much attachment. And when we are too attached to the outcome, we're just not going to be able to attract what we want as well as when we manifest in a way that allows us to tap into the feeling that we want and then are able to let it go.

How do you actually feel what you want to manifest?

Speaker 26:46

Okay, so that brings us up to the final thing that I think people misunderstand about manifestation. And that is that we need to feel it in order to manifest or create it. Now I'm gonna go into this a little bit more deeply because the idea that we need to feel it in order to manifest it is true, but there's not enough specificity in this. So I kind of was talking about this fake it until you make it idea on last week's podcast episode about confidence killers. And I think that we kind of get trapped in this with manifesting as well. So if ultimately I want to manifest being the showrunner of my own TV show, okay, what is that gonna feel like? Well, on a very basic level, wow, like the expansion I would feel from being in that role. Wow, how huge, you know. I have a lot of people reporting to me. I'm leading the team that is writing the episodes. I am perhaps directing some of those episodes myself or um bringing in the directors and having conversations about that vision. I'm working on post-production. I mean, it's quite an expansive role. There's so many different pieces. And to try to boil that all down into one feeling is quite hard. And I can visualize that future to some degree. There's a lot I don't know, right? I've been on TV sets, but never high enough up the food chain that I really would have been observing what a showrunner does. And so a lot of the ideas I have about that are just that. They're ideas. And so I can only bring in the feeling based on the level of knowledge that I have right now. But when we get into embodiment and we get into this experience of Kairos time, I can get into the energy of the universe, the energy of my future self who's maybe already achieved this. And then I can start to experience the feelings that I would have in the future as a showrunner. And that day-to-day flow and what that feels like and how to create that. But it's just too nuanced to just be like, I'm happy, or I'm ecstatic, or I'm joyful, because in the course of a showrunner's day, yeah, there are going to be moments like that, but they're going to be moments where there's a lot of hard work happening and you're really tired and everyone needs your attention all at once. That's part of creating it. It's not just about feeling good.

The six phases of The Embodied Way Method

Speaker 30:36

So let's talk about the next piece of The Embodied Way Coaching Method. In the moon cycles, we go through evolve, move, and manifest. And those parts of the embodied way coaching method are the how. They're how we go after our goals, they're how we get more embodied. And I'm going to share now the what of the method. So manifestation isn't linear, it's actually cyclical. So each of these six steps that I'm going to share with you are actually more like a spoke on the wheel of manifestation rather than steps that you would climb. And they could come in any order and they repeat again and again. And I might be working on one of these steps or spokes today, and then be working on another one tomorrow. And I might go back and forth, I might go around the circle, I might go in reverse. The idea is that things will come up when you engage with this process, and there's no one right way to do it. So the first spoke is finding inner balance. And for me, this is really about helping you find that place where you feel calm and peaceful, and your nervous system is responsive, not necessarily calm all the time, but that you can receive a stimulus and react to it without overreacting to it, and then come back to a place of stasis again. And we look at physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual when we work on finding inner balance. The second spoke is expanding your dreams. Now, what I've found is that for most people, when you're young, you have no problem dreaming big. You seem to know exactly what you want. Everything seems fun and playful. Heck, you might even want one thing one day and one thing the next, because there's not a lot of attachment to it. And there's also not a lot of fear about what happens if you go after a dream and it doesn't work out. And the longer we're on this earth, the more pressure we receive, whether that's from family telling us that we can't succeed, or that's from people in our industry, or that's just coming from ourselves and our own fear and our own self-doubt. The third spoke is accepting what is. Now, this might be the hardest one because especially if you're a goal-oriented person, you probably spend more time thinking about where it is that you want to go than where you are right now. And when we spend a lot of time focused on the future, we have all these blind spots about what's going on in our life right now and what we need to release or heal or take care of or give structure to in order to get to the next place. And we all want to jump ahead. And that is sort of, I guess, the promise of manifestation that this idea that we can get someplace in a shorter amount of time than we would if we just stair step our way through it. But we have to be careful that we're not in the process of bypassing. You know, if you're feeling sad or you're experiencing a lot of grief, you might have to process that before you can manifest the thing that you want. And the more you ignore the things that you're feeling and try to keep moving ahead no matter what, the more you're creating a separation within yourself and a lack of alignment within yourself. This idea that the person who can be successful can't have these complicated feelings of sadness or worries about failure or fears about not being good enough. So we have to accept what is in order to change it in order to manifest. The fourth spoke is release your blocks. So after we've done all of this accepting of what is, then we can begin to change it, to let it go. And there are a lot of different practices that we do within the embodiment collective or that I do with private clients to help release these blocks. Because in the therapy model, a lot of releasing things has to do with revisiting them, remembering them, analyzing them. But in my embodiment work, we're actually just trying to shift the energy. And everything is energy. And so you might not have to attach to the full memory of something that's happened. You may just be able to do a practice to move that energy and create more space. But if you try to release it without doing the deeper work of accepting it, then it usually doesn't move. So it's this combination of accepting what is and then doing energetic practices to release the blocks that actually allows them to move. The fifth spoke is embodied action. Now I think we all know what action is. That is, I need to make a phone call. I need to send someone a text. I need to write the outline for my short film. I need to schedule an audition on the equity website. I need to apply for a job. Those are actions. And we have so many actions available to us at any moment in time that we could easily take action until we're blue in the face and be no closer to our goals. So when we do all this work to get aligned energetically, to really recognize what our dreams are, to really accept what's going on in our life, to release our blocks, we start to recognize the action that we can take that is most in alignment and is the best possible action we could take to move forward towards our dreams. And that's what I mean when I say embodied action. And the best actions or embodied actions are ones that allow us to stay connected to physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual selves at the same time. And if you're taking an action that gets you in your head or that makes you feel overly emotional, some emotion is good, but there's two sides of the coin. So if you're feeling too emotional about something, it's not going to be super effective. Just as if you're completely disconnected from something emotionally, it's not going to be super connected. So that's where that inner balance piece plays into this. And so we're learning to take action that feels aligned and that helps us really move forward towards our dreams by staying tuned in and plugged in to our full activated self. And then the sixth spoke on this wheel is opening ourselves up to receive. And remember how I said accepting what is is the hardest part. I might have spoken too soon. I think for a lot of us, I attract a lot of people who are driven type A people who are somewhere along this pattern of recovery and trying to learn how to maybe do a little less. Being open to receive might be really, really hard for you. The idea is that we take action and that we trust that the action that we've taken is working. And we don't try to micromanage it or white knuckle it or do more. And I think that the example that is coming most clearly to my mind at this moment is related to this process. I'm in I've been in this process with planning my workshop, The Confident Creator, which, if you missed it yesterday, do not worry. You can still grab the replay for free for the next week. And after that, it is available as a purchase on my website. So I have been in the process of planning this workshop, sending out invitations to people, connecting with people who I partner with who help share my workshops with their audience, sending out reminder emails, sending out replay emails. There's a lot of little pieces that need to be done. And I would be lying to you if I said that this wasn't hard. In fact, for a good year and a half, I was the person that did this for someone else. I was the person who handled all of the operations. Now, I'm a small, currently one-woman business. That will change when the timing is right. And so that means I'm doing all the steps. And so about midway through this launch, for lack of a better word, I was like, oh, someone just signed up for my workshop. I had forgotten even that there was an email going out that day to remind people to sign up for my workshop. And when I'm able to be that much in action, so I was in the moment of what do I need to do next to prepare this workshop, rather than in the moment of, oh, did the email that I was supposed to go out today go out? And that is receiving. I put something out there, I wrote those emails, I scheduled those emails, and then I let it go. And it started coming back. It came back to me. It came back to me. Someone signed up. Someone purchased an upgrade. Someone listened to my podcast. Those are all things, ways that the action that I've taken come back to me. But if I'm trying to make those things happen, then I'm stuck. I'm stuck repeating the same thing over and over, grasping, and it consumes all of my energy. And so part of moving forward means I did this piece, it's done. I've done all that I can do. What's next?

Wrap-up

Speaker 43:25

I hope this has been really helpful for you. I love hearing about your insights and takeaways from these conversations. So come on over to my Substack, the embodiedway.substack.com, or to the podcast blog, and that link is in the show notes. And tell me what your biggest takeaway was from this conversation today. If you're feeling called to go deeper with embodiment and learn how to use embodiment to manifest, you can join The Embodiment Collective at theembodiedwaycoach.com /embodiment collective. Thank you so much for listening to The Embodied Way Podcast. I'm just getting started, and early listeners like you really make a difference in helping other creatives find my show. Subscribe now to be the first to know when I share new episodes each Friday. And while you're at it, please leave a review. Until next Friday, have a restful week.