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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
We are all just looking to feel more alive. And the biggest block for feeling alive for almost every single one of us is that we are not letting ourselves feel our feelings because we've been conditioned that it is not safe or productive to do so. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host Kate Northrup and together we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty.
Kate Northrup:Let's go fill our cups. You know how people say good vibes only? That sort of drives me crazy, and I'll tell you why. Today, I wanna talk about manifesting without performing. We've talked on plenty before about why I don't like the phrase fake it till you make it, and so often we've learned manifesting, and I thought this too.
Kate Northrup:I used to think that manifesting meant doing my vision boards perfectly, policing my thoughts, repeating the same journal affirmation 55 times, only ever being happy and positive and upbeat, until I actually learned that I had misunderstood what manifesting was. And the study of magnetism and resonance actually helps us to debunk the myths about manifesting. So if you've been out here trying hard to get what you want by being positive and happy and peppy and good vibes only all the time and policing your thoughts, I think you're gonna enjoy this episode. So perhaps you've made the vision boards. Perhaps you've been trying really hard to change your thoughts.
Kate Northrup:Perhaps you've actually been avoiding feeling negative emotions because you've thought, uh-oh, if I feel anything other than quote unquote good, then I'm going to manifest something bad. And unfortunately the way that sometimes manifestation is taught is really shallow and not actually in relationship to our true experience of being humans. What we know about the law of attraction, what we know about manifestation is that we attract who we are, not what we want. And we attract what we think we deserve as well. But it's not really even a thought.
Kate Northrup:We attract how we are vibrating. And I'm going to tell you what that means in case you're like, I don't understand what you're talking about, right? So if you've been doing all the right things, if you've been trying really hard to get it right, you're going to love this new paradigm of manifesting. So what we know is that our behavior creates our results. Right?
Kate Northrup:In life, you do certain things, and then you get a certain result. However, there's a couple of very important missing pieces because life is not quite as three d as that, and you can have one person who's doing all the right things, and another person who's doing all the right same things, and one of them may be getting an incredible result, and the other one may not. Now I can never do an episode on manifesting without addressing systemic issues, right? So there are overlying systems of oppression that make it so that we do not all have an even playing field, and so that some people have a much easier time because of unconscious bias and so many things that are baked into our thoughts, our systems, our institutions. And this episode is not about that, but I do want to address it.
Kate Northrup:Now, the way that we all do things actually is going to determine the results that we get. And my grandfather, who I never met, he passed away before I was born, but he was, everyone says, my mother always says, he said, The way you do it No. No. He said, How you do it is what you get. And that is a quote from Wilbur Northrop.
Kate Northrup:So how you do it is what you get. And so it's not always what we're doing. It's the way we are being as we do the thing we're doing. And most people are asking the wrong question when it comes to what they want. So let's say you want to have, you know, $500,000 a year in your business.
Kate Northrup:Most people will then say, okay, what do I need to do in order to get that? And that is not the right question, and and I'm sure you've heard people say this before, the the quality of our life is determined by the quality of the questions we ask. So how do I do it is the wrong question. The right question or a more powerful question, a higher quality question is, who do I need to be in order to be a match for that result? Now the missing piece for most people is a process that I call emotional metabolism or stress metabolism.
Kate Northrup:They're very similar. I'm actually about to teach this in Relaxed Money. It's module two. It's all about emotions and money, and it is the biggest missing piece. I grew up in the power of positive thought movement.
Kate Northrup:I will never forget when I was 14, and my mom had been passed a cassette tape from my granny, Edna, who was Wilbur's wife, and Edna, my granny, had somehow found out about Abraham Hicks in the nineties, like the early nineties before compact discs were a thing, before CDs. So my mom had a subscription on cassette tapes to the Abraham Hicks lectures, like, a million years ago. And I'll never forget, she would pick me up from school or pick me up from her friend's house, and she'd be listening to Abraham Hicks on her, you know, cassette player in her, I think she drove like a like some sort of a Mazda minivan. And I would always kind of roll my eyes, because I was like, mom, can't we just listen to music? However, when I was 14, she told me about the power of pure positive intent.
Kate Northrup:The thing that I didn't understand literally until a couple of years ago is that what she was sharing with me, the magic of the power of pure positive intent, is the same as the magic of resonance. And we have to unpack this for a minute, because most people make the mistake that I made at 14. And what she had told me was if you can hold a thought of pure positive intent for seventeen seconds, then you will activate the law of attraction, and you will manifest a match to that thought. What actually is true is that we need to learn to hold a vibration, a frequency for seventeen seconds or more, and it has a lot more to do with the actual coherence of our system, our heart coherence, because we know that the heart has an electromagnetic field that's like 65 times the size of the electromagnetic field of the brain. And this is from the data from the Institute of HeartMath.
Kate Northrup:So what I had misunderstood because of the way it was taught to me and because, you know, we always oversimplify things is and because our culture is so obsessed with the mind, with the conscious mind, I thought I had to hold the actual thought. And to be honest, if you try to hold the same thought for seventeen seconds, it's actually, like, really hard. Our brain is like, squirrel, now I'm thinking about the groceries, now I'm thinking about something else, oh, the color blue. Like, we are just all over the place. So have holding one thought for seventeen seconds is really hard.
Kate Northrup:However, what was actually underneath what my mom was trying to teach me, and really what Abraham Hicks has been going on about since the nineties, or I don't even know when, you know, when Esther started channeling Abraham. But anyway, what is underneath that is actually the truth, which is frequency, which is resonance. We cannot exclusively think our way into a frequency, into a vibration, into resonance. Actually, resonance, frequency, vibration is a byproduct of something going on much deeper within our full body, which includes the brain, but is not exclusive to the brain. So yes, does our brain have brain waves?
Kate Northrup:Absolutely. But I just told you that the electromagnetic field, the waves that are going out from our heart, are actually 65 times more powerful than those of our brain. And so if we are exclusively trying to manifest with our conscious thought, we're missing like 99% of our manifesting power, and we're actually making it way harder for ourselves than necessary. Now how do we actually achieve coherence? How do we actually get our whole being ness?
Kate Northrup:Right? Who do I need to be in order to get that result? How do we get our being ness to be a match for what we desire? It's not just feeling good all the time. So it's not just thinking positive thoughts, because you cannot think your way into a feeling exclusively, especially if your nervous system is dysregulated.
Kate Northrup:So we live in a world with a lot of stimuli, right? And we have trillions of pieces of stimulus at any given thought that's available to our brain to take in, and our brain whittles it down and whittles it down and whittles it down so that we are only holding in our consciousness about seven pieces of information at a time, and our brain just doesn't have the capacity to be able to hold onto a positive thought for that long. And what people miss is then they think, Okay, well if it's not just positive thought, then it must just be that I need to feel good all the time. And that means that if I feel angry, if I feel sad, if I'm experiencing grief, if I'm feeling jealousy, if I'm feeling overwhelmed, if I'm feeling any other way other than happy, positive, hopeful, enthusiastic, then I'm screwing it up, then I'm doing it wrong. But what's actually true is that let's say you had a pipe, right, and your pipe on the one end of the pipe was what you wanted to manifest, and on the other end of the pipe was like where you are now.
Kate Northrup:And what needed to happen is you needed to get like water through the pipe in order to get to the end where you want to manifest. And our our emotions, all of them, positive, negative, right, emotions are actually neutral, we just label them as humans, our emotions clog the pipes. And especially the unprocessed ones. So the whole idea here is to metabolize our emotions and metabolize our stress so that they are not blocking the pipe. And we have gotten this wrong by thinking we need to either think our way out of a negative emotion or repress our way out of a negative emotion, right?
Kate Northrup:Like a lot of people grew up in a household where it was, you know, don't cry or I'll give you something to cry about, or go back upstairs and don't come down until you have a smile on your face, or any sort of rejection of anything that was not happy, compliant, and positive. But we're meant to experience a full spectrum of emotions as humans. That's actually part of our superpower, and actually what we know, there's some significant data that shows us that unprocessed anger, unprocessed grief, unprocessed emotions, meaning repressed or suppressed emotions, cause disease in our body, dis ease. It clogs up the pipes. And not only does it make it so that our bodies become ill, it also is a lot of kinks in, now I'm using a new analogy, but like it's a kink in the hose.
Kate Northrup:So now we've moved from a pipe, now we have a hose, but either way, we're trying to get peak energetic flow. Our emotions, when we don't feel them, cause a kink in the hose or a clog in the pipe. It's like a giant hairball. And unfortunately, traditional forms of manifesting taught that we needed to be good vibes only and positive all the time, and no one ever came certainly not our parents and not society, no one came and told us how to actually process our emotions in healthy ways. I taught a workshop last fall, and we did in person some practices around processing healthy anger, processing healthy sadness, processing healthy joy.
Kate Northrup:And what happened, what was so interesting with some of the some of the participants, they said, I'm afraid to express my anger because I'm afraid that if I express my anger, I'm going to hurt someone, that I'm I actually will become dangerous. Or I'm afraid to cry. I'm afraid to begin to even break the seal on the amount of sadness and grief I feel in my body, because I feel like if I start to cry, I will go down a hole that has no bottom, and I will never stop crying. It will never end. That's what it can feel like because we've been taught to be afraid of our emotional landscape instead of to be curious about our emotional landscape.
Kate Northrup:And for many people, it was not actually safe to feel their feelings in their childhood home. So you may have actually been abused for feeling your feelings physically or emotionally. You may have been yelled at. You may have been shunned. You may have received neglect because of healthy emotional expression.
Kate Northrup:And most of our caregivers just didn't also have the support, the tools, the training to feel their emotions in healthy ways. And so we developed these compensatory strategies, which are to suppress or repress our feelings. And suppressing your emotions means you, like, you didn't even know you felt it to begin with. Like, it is so far deep down in there that, like, it's not even registering. Repressing is, oh, I'm aware that I'm feeling sad right now, and I'm going to do something.
Kate Northrup:I'm going to quickly get to work. I'm going to pick up my phone. I'm going to scroll. I'm going to have a drink. I'm going to, you know, go on social media.
Kate Northrup:I'm going to shop. I'm going to distract myself, so that I don't feel that feeling because that feeling doesn't feel safe. Now if you're listening to this, chances are good that you are no longer living in an environment where your safety depends on the emotional tenor of someone else who's a caregiver. Right? And so at this point, now it's actually safe to learn how to feel your feelings because you no longer need to suppress or repress them in order to survive.
Kate Northrup:But it takes a minute. And for many people, the nervous system patterning is so deep in repression and suppression that they don't even know they're doing it, and they may be experiencing all sorts of symptoms or things coming out sideways, like an example would be your, everything's going great, and then your child breaks a glass and you completely lose it and snap, like your response to the stimulus is out of proportion to the stimulus itself. When that happens, you may have heard this phrase before, if it's historical, it's no. If it's hysterical, it's historical. Meaning when our response to something in our current present day life is out of proportion to that thing itself, it is because we're unearthing stored emotions from our history that need that are coming out now because they've been so backed up that it's it's now time.
Kate Northrup:Now I know that we are talking about manifesting, and now I'm talking about feelings, and you're like, I'm not sure what's happening right now. What I am trying to say to you is that your years of unfelt feelings are creating a kink in the hose or a clog in your pipe, or let's say you are trying to receive a radio signal, but your antenna is broken or all tangled up, all of those are the same thing. Unfelt feelings get stored in our nervous system, and they block our ability to manifest what we want, like a clog in the pipe, a kink in the hose, or a tangled antenna, because our ability to allow energy to flow through our bodies happens through our nervous system, because our nervous system works according to electricity. And electricity, light, comes through us according to our neural patterning. And our ability to allow more light to come through our bodies depends on us metabolizing old emotions.
Kate Northrup:So I have a couple of tips for you around this. Our Relaxed Money students go much deeper on this particular topic, but for today, we're just gonna go hot and fast. Okay? Number one, most feelings will pass after about ninety seconds if you let yourself go all the way in. So the other day, I was watching a video.
Kate Northrup:It was a case study of one of our Relaxed Money students, and I was so moved by what this person had shared that I burst into tears, and all of a sudden, I had all this grief come up, and I was like for real crying. Like not, oh, I have tears in my eyes, I need to dab them. Like I was for real having a guttural sob that was activated by watching this video. I turned away from my screen, I walked across my office, and I just allowed myself to have that full experience of the guttural sob. I did not start to attach a story to it.
Kate Northrup:I did not go into why am I crying? What's wrong with me? What is this about? This is so unexpected. Why would this video make me cry this way?
Kate Northrup:I did not go into my mind. I just allowed my body to have the full emotional experience. It lasted about ninety seconds. Then I went into the bathroom, and I dabbed my tears, and I went about my day. For some people, if emotional expression doesn't feel as safe, and that's not something you're well practiced in, and you feel an emotion coming up, you can actually use a nervous system tool as the emotion comes up to signal to your body that it's safe to feel, and then after expressing the emotion in a small, doable way, you can use titration, small, doable pieces over time, you could then use another high payoff nervous system tool at the end after you've expressed that emotion to the degree that feels safe to do so in that moment, so that you're then essentially book ending that emotional expression with signaling to your body, I am safe, and then you have emotional expression, and then re regulating with a nervous system healing tool.
Kate Northrup:One nervous system healing tool is called havening. If you listen to plenty, you've heard this one before, but if you're new here, welcome. And havening is simply taking your hands and rubbing them against each other slowly, and then maybe using one hand and going over your forearm, and then using the other hand to go over your forearm very slowly, so you're just having the experience and you can tell even if you're just listening on the podcast, even if you're not watching this video on YouTube or Spotify, you can tell that my voice just slowed down and that the tone of my voice just changed, which is a signal that my nervous system has just come into greater resonance or regulation. I'm just now signaling to my body, you are safe. And I'm in an activated state.
Kate Northrup:I'm recording all day, right? So I'm gonna be in a more sympathetic dominant state, which is appropriate for being in a higher activation, like I'm here to deliver to you and be articulate and have my face on and the whole thing. But even in that state, when I add in havening, suddenly my peripheral vision just opened up wider, I feel more fully present, I actually can't talk as fast when I'm doing this practice, so it's really fascinating to use these tools and notice what happens in your body. So that's one example. You can do a tool before, then some emotional expression, then a tool after.
Kate Northrup:Now for me, I've had years of practicing full emotional expression, so I don't get scared when I have tears come up or when I have anger come up. I express them, and then usually it really shifts pretty fast within ninety seconds, and then I'm able to go about my day, integrate the experience, take some breaths, maybe do havening, do a washing machine, which is another tool I teach, and then go back. And what that has done is that's essentially like the Roto Rooter, or maybe that's the wrong, I don't know. Anyway, it's like Drano. Right?
Kate Northrup:It's like Drano for your manifesting pipes. So you just clear it out, and then you go about your day. We do not need to know the content. We do not need to have a story about the feeling we're feeling in order for it to pass through our body. In fact, attaching meaning and going into story can often take us out of the embodied experience of feeling the feeling.
Kate Northrup:We actually want to just let our body feel the feeling all the way in and all the way through as much as we can, and then move on. It doesn't really matter the why, because what we're going for is a frequency and a vibration. And the vibration of authenticity, the vibration, the frequency, the resonance of truth is the most powerful frequency there is. So I learned from my friend Josh Pice, who's the founder of Committed Impulse. I went to his acting class for like eight weeks in New York City.
Kate Northrup:I had no intention of becoming an actor, but I did want to learn how to tell the truth with my body as an entrepreneur, as as someone who does public speaking, who communicates for a living. And what he taught was so profound, because he teaches actors to stop quote unquote performing, because what ends up happening is actors and speakers and all sorts of people, we go in to any kind of scenario in which we're trying to impress someone, or communicate something, or a sales situation, or, you know, a monologue, or whatever, and we start to put on all these layers of performance. And now we're lying, because we've practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced doing it this one certain way, and we do it in a way that we think the person on the other side wants us to do it. We are very well trained to do that, of course, because as children, we were trying to get our parents to love us. And for a lot of caregivers, they required children to be a certain way in order to deliver their love in a certain way.
Kate Northrup:So for a lot of folks, love was not unconditional. It was conditional according to are you showing up the way that is convenient and comfortable for me, and I will only love, adore, and care for you in this certain way if you're showing up in the way that makes it comfortable for me. So of course we end up as these little automatons as as adults still doing those performances, and then for those of us who are in communication careers, it continues. So back to Josh's class. He taught us that when you are watching a play, if you go to live theater, when an animal, so like when a dog walks on stage or when a young child walks on stage, all of a sudden it does not matter what else is happening on that stage, all eyes are on the dog or the child.
Kate Northrup:Why? Why are they so magnetic? Because they are always telling the truth. They are always they don't have all the layers of performance and trying to be what you want them to be, and therefore you can't take your eyes off them. That's why we are so captivated by animals and children, because they're always telling the truth with their whole being.
Kate Northrup:That is magnetism. That is the frequency that I'm talking about. That is true resonance. Now if we want to, as adults, become magnets for exactly what it is that is in our highest possible experience, we need to master the process of emotional metabolism so that we can clear out the pipes and so that we can be operating in a resonance, in a frequency of truthfulness. Not in a resonance or frequency of good, but actually in a resonance or frequency of of truthfulness, of authenticity.
Kate Northrup:And what's so fascinating about the experience of telling the truth with our bodies, meaning I am in an embodied experience of being in exactly what I'm in, whether it's grief, sadness, joy, excitement, boredom, whatever. What's so cool about that is on some level, like you know how when you're crying, or when you're really angry, it kind of like hurts so good? Right? Like when you have a really good cry, when you have a really good scream, when you've really like let it out, it actually feels really good. That's resonance.
Kate Northrup:That's the frequency and the vibration of being a match for what we truly desire. Because what all of us truly desire is that which makes us come alive. And aliveness is the experience of feeling the full spectrum of human emotion all the way in, all the way through the highs, the lows, the in betweens, like actually being fully present here for it. And on some level, that's really what every single one of us is here for. It's not really actually about a house or a car or any kind of level of achievement or gold star or award or love match or anything.
Kate Northrup:We are all just looking to feel more alive, and the biggest block for feeling alive for almost every single one of us is that we are not letting ourselves feel our feelings because we've been conditioned that it is not safe or productive to do so. The manifesting world, some of it, has taught us that we have to feel quote unquote good all the time, which has only furthered the repression and the suppression of emotions, that it's really time that we break that cycle. So in summary, if you would like to take your manifesting to the next level, you need to learn how to metabolize your emotions, and it is something you can absolutely do. I've given you some tips here, and if this is something you wanna dive more deeply into, my friend Emily Fletcher is teaching a class. I think it's called Audacious Magic, but all you have to do is go to katenorthrup.com/magic, and you can learn all about embodied manifestation from Emily.
Kate Northrup:She's the founder of Ziva Meditation. She is an absolute lighthouse, powerhouse, and she has an incredible methodology for, she doesn't call it emotional metabolism, but she calls it whatever she calls it. And she and I are very much sisters on the same path, teaching similar things in different ways that are totally our own. So if you want to dive deeper over there with Emily, go to katenorthup.com/magic. And if this was helpful for you, please share it.
Kate Northrup:Go out there, feel your feelings, become a vibrational match for that which you desire, which is to truly feel alive, and I will see you next time.