Manifestation, Self-Worth, and the Energy You Attract

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0:33When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive, on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers.

1:20Here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. This week we're sharing a gem from the Goop Podcast archives. lives.

1:38Lacey Phillips is a manifestation advisor based in Los Angeles, the founder of To Be Magnetic and the host of Expanded Podcast. We'll get to what it means to be a manifestation advisor, but essentially, Lacey takes a different approach to the new age manifestation model, combining psychology, neuroscience, and energetics to expand and unblock subconscious limiting beliefs. According to Lacey, manifesting goes way beyond just thinking positive or visualizing until you are blue in the face. We also talk about her belief that self-worth is really the law of attraction and about what blocks us from getting what we want.

2:12I believe in my own world, the universe's intention or whomever you're speaking to is just trying to guide us back into our most whole, authentic, worthy selves that we were literally born as. We just built up this onion layer of pain and shame that is called an ego. And that's all we're trying to do is crack down and peel down, right?

2:34One other thing, sorry if you hear a tiny bit of background noise. It could be a passing car or even plants playing music because we hosted in Goop Health outside at the awesome Rolling Greens in downtown LA. And yes, we listened to plants composing music, which is the thing. And it was a very goopy scene. Let's cut to my chat with Lacey Phillips.

2:57Okay, so what exactly is a manifestation advisor? How did you get here? Yeah, I think it's a more palatable title than manifestation coach for me is how I came up with it. But I think anybody who's ever listened to the podcast, I say this all the time that I came to LA first, I was an actress and a model and I was broke. And I just wanted to figure out how to have control over my monetary lifestyle. And so I had a family intuitive that was my mom's intuitive that said, go pick up this book on manifestation, read it to a T and you'll manifest everything you've ever wanted. And I guess in essence, she was right, but it was the same messaging that a lot of us are familiar with, which is think positive, visualize, hi, you know, be what you want to be, stay in the frequency, get into the vortex.

3:47And I would try all of that until I was blue in the face. I mean, I was like at the point where I was spiritual bypassing so much that I was so afraid of being negative, of attracting more. And I'm like, I don't want to be more poor. Like I don't want to be more single and all of the stuff that comes with it. And around 25, I started to notice a little bit of patterning that when I would manifest very kismet things, it wasn't ever in the ways that was suggested. I was never through positivity. It was never through visualization. And I started to look at what I was doing and I went, I'm going to throw away everything I've ever learned and I want to watch my patterning.

4:20And that's just how my brain works. It's all about categorizing and patterning. And so I started to notice, wow, when I actually manifest, it's when I'm stepping into my self-worth. And I started to have my own little relationship with it. I was like, maybe I'm just good at this and crazy. But I don't think that the law of attraction has anything to do with positivity. It has everything to do with subconscious self-worth. And so I took the next five years to really watch what that looked like for me. And at the same time, I was just healing a lot of familial patterning that I had picked up growing up.

4:51And I started to notice anytime I did that, I would unlock and clear space for things to come through. And so after about five years of perfecting that, I was private chefing at the time for really big people in Los Angeles. And I would always talk about it. It was just my languaging. I would be like, I manifested this, the universe brought me that. And one of them was like, well, I want to see, like, show me what you're doing here because you do seem to manifest a lot of things. And I was like, I don't know if anybody else can do this, but I'll show you. And they started to manifest and friends started to manifest.

5:21And it was finally one of my clients that said, you're good at this whole holistic shopping thing, but I think this is actually your gift in the world. And so I put it out. I think it's been three years now and it just took off. And it was really an answer for a lot of people. So take us through what that work looks like of it's not just a vision board, it's an examination. So can you give us some concrete examples? Absolutely. So I like to say, I think for people who are very familiar with that old processing, I like to say that there are three things that are fundamentally different. Number one being that I don't think, again, manifestation has much to do with positivity.

5:58I actually think positivity is symptomatic of when we do step into our worth or we do feel more whole or authentic and complete. So that's where I think in the past people maybe associated positivity with manifestation. So number one, I believe that manifestation fully comes from completely your self-worth. And I don't believe we manifest from our thoughts. In fact, I believe we manifest from our subconscious imprintation that we picked up in childhood. So from zero to seven, anything that we witnessed that we were really like accolades that we had or we were loved for, we were admired for, those are things that we manifest very simply or things that we saw modeling of that was very positive and abundant and simple.

6:39We have a lot of space to bring that in. However, things that we experienced in childhood trauma, I know trauma can be a very big and triggering word. However, I think that trauma is a spectrum. I think anywhere you felt shame or you witnessed shame, it created a block, it imprinted a block in our subconscious. So in that perspective, I believe that we're just continuing to project out from those spaces over and over again, manifesting back over and over, whatever that representation is. And so I started to notice a really profound difference in changing that. And I'll get to that in a minute.

7:14A second fundamental thing is I don't really believe in visualizing, essentially. Because I would visualize until I was blue in the face. I mean, I would be an actress, you know, cocktailing at the Laugh Factory on sunset, like visualizing my Malibu home with like a sauna and really beautiful things. And it wasn't coming through. But I did start to notice the patterning that whenever, and you can call them comparisons. since I call them expanders, that's the title of the podcast, the expanded podcast, whenever I would notice somebody that I felt similar to, you know, I felt like there was a lot of similarities in our childhood or upbringing or what we were up to.

7:52So I would say when I would notice somebody like that and they had or embodied or were successful in whatever I was desiring, my subconscious would actually create space and buy into the fact that it would be a reality for me as well. So I call them expanders or comparisons. When we see somebody, we see to believe it's possible. That's far more effective, I found, than ever any visualization I had ever done. And then a third component that's very different is that I believe that, again, self-worth is the law of attraction. And so I do believe, and nobody ever, ever showed me this or taught me this, and it would have really saved a lot of time in this process of manifestation, that we're tested by the universe, God, whomever you know your higher power is, we're often tested before our manifestations come through.

8:37And what we're being tested for is to see if we will continue to settle where we've settled in the past. So wherever we've played small in a relationship or a job or our own relationship with ourselves or the way that we connect with friendships and relationships, when we continue to do that, we block ourselves from getting what we want. So I believe the universe will send through. So say if you're calling in a partnership, for instance, and you've gone through like the calling in aspect and you've done the work through unblocking, which I'll talk about in a moment, and you've expanded, like you've gone out and found these relationships that you can really relate to that embody what you want.

9:15And now your subconscious can see, unlike your childhood programming, that such a thing exists. At that point, the universe will often send you tests. It'll be kind of what you're looking for, but somebody who's emotionally unavailable, or it'll be the whole package, but somebody who, you know, doesn't meet an aspect of your needs that you really need. We're often tested. And what we're being tested for again, is if we will lower our self-worth, if we're not going to be in our self-worth. And after we pass those tests, that's when we tend to connect with what we want. And I think when I sort of came out with this model, everybody was like, oh my God, this is so refreshing.

9:49There's something actionable and this makes sense. And I've seen this before. And I just think it was something that, yeah, it was, Again, it was like a model that was less abstract, like visualizing and being in the vortex. It's like, actually, if you just do A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, you usually get what you want. No, and it's true. And I think it can be paralyzing this idea that we are so superhuman and we have, and I do think we're superhuman, but that we have so much power that we can simply think something and it would happen. Because clearly that's not how life works, or at least that's not how my life works.

10:20I always like to give the example that if we manifested from our thoughts all day long, we're thinking in such polarity that it's like, I'm great. I suck. This is awesome. Look at that person so much better than me. Or I want that. I don't. If we were that powerful, our lives would be a shit show. Right. It would be insane. And the world would be even more chaotic than it already is. Way more chaotic. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's true. So, all right. So take us through. Let's start at this with we can use money. We can use love. Whatever you think is clearest. Absolutely. So if we're talking about money, so if that's your subconscious belief that you will never be safe, you will never have enough, you will never have financial security.

11:00So you're saying until you reparent that out of yourself and soothe that baby, that's what you're creating. So I feel like I can really speak to this one because I come from a huge lack environment, which I think many people do. And I lived in a lack environment for very long. It took me a very long time to get out of that patterning. And once I kind of figured it out, I was like, oh, this is actually quite simple. When you understand the energetics around it, it becomes very formulaic. And so the way that that kind of looks, again, some people, I used to, when I would take clients, I would have clients that would come that came from these very abundant circumstances, but they couldn't find themselves making money.

11:37So a lot of the times there, there would be, you know, subconscious programming that maybe the dad was the breadwinner and the mom never followed through with a dream that she had. and so therefore she was a caretaker. So the imprintation of our limbic brain, our subconscious brain would be like, as a woman, if I was working with a woman, as a woman, I will have a dream, but I'll end up being a nurturer and I can't actually have what I want. And this would be somebody who's gone to like an incredible university who has done great internships, but still can't figure out how to make money. And it's like, if we're continuing and we're not even aware, we're continuing to loop on that and have that projection, there's just nowhere for that to come through.

12:15So again, with that model of money, for instance, and the work that I do, I do it mostly through hypnosis. And it's a little bit of a different process. Traditional hypnosis, I find to be a bit spiritual bypassy as well. It's like just completely reinforce the positive. And my brain, or I like to say, if you have very low self-worth or you initially started with low self-worth, I find that our subconscious brains can be very intelligent where it's like, I still don't believe that reinforcement of the positive. I actually have to get to the root and see where this comes from and actually look and see that it's possible for me to change that and go out and find the expanders that show me that they come from a similar environment and they've gone on to create what they want.

12:56And then some tests will come our way usually. And I'm simplifying the process. But again, this is like a workshop I have for like$68. And so that and then that middle, the expander. And obviously there's sort of the there's how we're programmed by our parents, how we're culturally programmed. I would imagine in terms of what's available or what's possible for women or people of color. And then like an expander would be someone like Michelle Obama for a generation of girls who can say, I can do that. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. So is that an expander or is it a more complex idea? No, it's actually very simple.

13:30You just simplified it perfectly. The whole concept of an expander, may it be whatever you're manifesting, you can have fragment expanders or you can have whole expanders. So a woman of color client comes to me and let's say, you know, somebody who's coming from South Central and they've been over and over programmed over and over that you're not going to achieve this. You're not going to get out of this. You're not going to have better than this. And then they they see to believe through one mentor, one woman in social media, one documentary speaks to them of another woman who has gone through that circumstance and has gone on now to transcend and accomplish this alone.

14:08alone, that already starts to create the space for in your subconscious, for it to open up for you to have space for what you want to come through. And you can find expanders everywhere. You can find them on social media. You can find them again. I love saying that documentaries or movies are great places because when we're sitting there watching a documentary or a show, we're in a hypnotic state, right? Like our subconscious comes forward. We go into theta. So it can't tell the difference between what's real or not real. So when we're tuning out to this movie or this documentary, and it's a comparison that we really relate to or a story or a narrative that we completely identify with, all of a sudden, without us even knowing it on a subconscious level, we're creating that space.

14:48And so it's very simple to kind of look at it like this. Basically, the three components to manifestation, I believe, are that you have to, let's say, here you are, you're subconscious, and you have this imprintation from childhood, may it have been witnessed or may it have been experienced because witnessing shame, say, a parent who constantly is commenting on, you know, body image of somebody else. You growing up, maybe your mom didn't have body image or a parent didn't have body image and you see them just commenting on that other person. That experience shame is enough for you to imprint in your shadow that, oh my gosh, if I ever look like that, I'll never be loved, right?

15:28So I call that a block, right? So here's your block. That's number one. And all I say is like, you have to get down to your subconscious and unlock that. You have to show it a different story. So at that point, you remove the block. But let's say you're not expanded, something you're wanting in your life, going back to money again. You grew up in a lack environment. You still haven't seen your community was in very much lack. Like I grew up in a small conservative town. There's a lot of lack going on there. Had I have not come to LA, I probably wouldn't have seen enough comparisons to expand what would have been potential for me financially.

16:02So that at that point, you need to expand and that creates the space for what you want to come through. And then the last little bit of it essentially is whatever you're calling in, right? Just the human nature of us all, we tend to want something greater than where we are. So it's usually at a self-worth level a little bit higher. I'll go back to an example of partnerships, for instance. Usually you're calling in somebody, for the most part, clients that I work with are calling in somebody who is very emotionally available, has all the qualities they want to embody, is successful, X, Y, and Z, whatever you're looking for, tends to be up here.

16:36However, maybe you've been dating around here. Some of those qualities are met, but there's not emotional availability. Whatever that can look like for you, you're going to be tested to make sure that you can connect with what that is. So it's really literally about unblocking, expanding, passing the test to connect with what you want on a self-worth level. We talked about, you know, you're mentioning documentaries, movies. Once it's unblocked or once it's expanded, can it shut? Like when you see negative things or an expression of your deepest fears, is that starting to muddle those open canals?

17:10I feel like I always like to call manifestation a trust muscle, right? Because the lower self-worth we have initially for whatever we're working towards or wanting or calling in, it's a pretty big leap of faith. That's why the whole visualization thing, like you have to jump off a pretty big cliff mentally to be like, I could have that. You know what I mean? So it's like the more we tend to manifest bigger and bigger things, our trust muscle tends to get stronger and stronger. And at that point, when you start to witness, say, a negative narrative in association to what you want, it's a lot slimmer for you to have something closed down.

17:46But let's say, let's take for instance, you've gone on to manifest the partner, right? You have the partner, it's going well. And then you start to witness a very similar dynamic of partnership from a friend and somebody starts cheating on somebody that can certainly start to create a narrative of fear or that I could lose or insecurity in the relationship. Right. So at that point, you're just kind of counteracting. You're really wanting to, I like to say, curate your subconscious. I'm a big curator of subconscious. And I don't mean this to be like privilege and staying in a bubble whatsoever, but in association to whatever you're manifesting, you'll just want to start to kind of close down that the attention that you're giving to that circumstance and you'll want to move it over and pivot it to more expanders who tend to be in the positive.

18:35So if you experience trauma later in life, you're going to go through that healing process and work with your professional and you're going to want to go out and find the expanders who have overcome that kind of trauma. So I don't know if that feels like it answers what you're saying, but it's like way out more of what you're wanting with more expanders than that one thing you're taking in. Right. You know what I mean? No, that totally makes sense. This is fascinating. You're like a witch. It's like an energetic witch. And you mentioned that you mentioned privilege. So let's say you manifest everything that you feel.

19:08I don't know what you're manifesting or who your expanders are, what you're driving for. But is the idea that if we can all start to manifest from a place of positivity and fill our lives with the things that nourish us, that the world starts to change? Or can you manifest for culture? Can you manifest for the globe? Can you manifest for earth? This is a great question. And I'm a huge proponent that you can't manifest for others, right? Because if we could, my mom wouldn't be an alcoholic. If we could, if I had control of somebody else's destiny, a lot of people in my lives, their lives would look very differently as a fixer, you know, in a child of an alcoholic.

19:48However, what I do feel like we have the most power to be is a vision holder. I like to call it. It's where we can be an expander who can look through somebody else and hold the vision of where they're going for them and build them up. We can also be an expander and be an inspiration to everybody. I feel like that's our goal and our duty on the planet. So I'm a firm believer the more that we, and I believe that the whole intention of manifestation in general, like I believe in my own world, the universe's intention or whomever you're speaking to is just trying to guide us back into our most whole authentic worthy selves that we were literally born as.

20:26We just built up this onion layer of pain and shame that is called an ego. And that's all we're trying to do is crack down and peel down, right? So I believe the more of us that are on this path that are trying to get back into our most whole authentic worthy selves, whatever that looks like for anybody, it could totally not even be on the material plane. It could just be on the energetic plane. The more we're going to expand others that such as possible. And that, I believe, has a massive trickle effect, as well as doing your duty when you see somebody that is so much like a younger version of you or a version of you anywhere that you can go and vision hold for them where you're like, I see where you're going.

21:05It's magical. Not projecting your stuff on them, but also just really finding their qualities, their magic, and really seeing that and pointing it out and building somebody up. I believe that that has like an immense effective capacity, especially in a culture like ours that is so heated. It's so, I don't know, it's so divided in a lot of ways. Politically, there's so much division happening that I think the less that we're calling out and we're pointing fingers at problems and the more that we're inspiring our community and vision holding our community or our algorithm or whatever we have the capability of doing.

21:40I see that being like a transformation on the planet. Yeah. I also just think that the very basic premise of what you're saying is something we hold dearly at Goop, which is that we all have autonomy over our own lives. And I think you see women taking their power back, whether it's in the doctor's office or culturally. Absolutely. And so this is sort of anti-victimhood, right? Or the opposite of, not anti, but the opposite of victimhood and this idea that, and I would imagine when you work with people, part of it is sort of the teasing out of like what is in your life and how did it get there?

22:17Absolutely. And honestly, I used to take clients and I got to a point where I was like, how empowering is it where somebody can go through the journey of figuring that out for themselves? because I know that victimhood, wherever we are in our consciousness, can be a very triggering word for somebody. It used to be for me for years and years and years. But then there's this place that I believe the only way to take your power back is to take your story back and to be like, nah, this doesn't have to be my story if I don't want it to be. In fact, there's a roadmap to have whatever story I want and to create whatever story I want.

22:51Whatever that looks like for you, It's so different for everybody. But I do feel like, yeah, there's a deep sense of empowerment you can have from going on that journey to ask yourself those questions of like, where did I get this imprintation? Why do I have this block? I don't have to. I have like the autonomy, the power. I'm empowered enough that I can go and create whatever story I want.