Photos by Jemma Beaven
There is a strange point in personal change where you can see the person you are becoming, but you do not quite feel like them yet. You may know that you want to respond differently. You may know that an old pattern no longer fits. You may even have started making different choices, but there are moments when the old, familiar version of you returns so quickly that you wonder whether anything has really changed at all.
This is one of the less glamorous parts of transformation. And by this we mean that change does not always arrive as “certainty”, there’s a bit of a gap between who you have been and who you are learning to become. It’s exactly that gap that can feel uncomfortable.
In other words, in personal growth, you might recognise that you no longer want to seek the same approval, accept the same relationships or respond to yourself with the same inner criticism, or at work you may recognise that always knowing the answer, solving the problem or stepping in quickly has stopped being the kind of leader you want to be. You can see another way of being, you just can’t inhabit it consistently yet.
This is often where practises such as guided meditation and hypnotherapy become really useful because “imagining something” makes it happen by itself. And it works because human beings often need somewhere to rehearse change before change feels familiar.
Sometimes we have to experience ourselves differently before we can live differently
There is a reason visualisation appears in everything from sport psychology to therapy, to coaching and meditation.And that is because our inner experience matters.
These are the stories we tell ourselves, the possibilities we imagine and the emotional states we repeatedly practise that all influence what we notice, what we expect and how we respond.
So, if you repeatedly imagine yourself handling a situation with greater steadiness, for example, you are not guaranteeing that the next difficult conversation will go perfectly but you are giving yourself an opportunity to experience an alternative response.
When you do this, you may begin to notice what steadiness feels like. And next time you may recognise the moment where you usually become defensive, you may see yourself pausing instead because you discovered, though imagining, that another response is available.
That matters because sometimes the greatest obstacle to change is that the new behaviour still doesn’t feel like it’s us.
The unfamiliarity of becoming
One of the things we have noticed about meaningful change is that people often expect the new version of themselves to feel immediately authentic.
It rarely does, we’re sorry to say.
A person who has spent years accommodating other people may feel selfish when they first create a boundary. Or someone who has built a business around being constantly available may feel irresponsible when they begin protecting their time. Or a leader who has built their reputation on having all the answers may feel strangely exposed when they start saying “I don’t know yet” or “what do you think?”
The old behaviour can feel more natural simply because it is more practised. Afterall, you’ve been that way the whole time. This new discomfort is not always evidence that you are making the wrong choice per se, sometimes it is evidence that you are just doing something new.
Creating a quiet space in which that new behaviour becomes slightly less unfamiliar means you can imagine the conversation, the decision or the boundary. Then you can experience another possibility as a form of practising.
Meditation is not about pretending everything is already perfect
The language of manifestation can sometimes make personal change sound very simple.
Imagine the future. Believe in it strongly enough.Then become it. Easy. Right?
But most genuine transformation is messier than that. For example, you can want something and still be frightened by it. You can know what you want to change and still repeat the old pattern. You can feel more confident one week and less confident the next. You can become more capable while simultaneously becoming more aware of everything you still do not know. All of that doesn’t mean the change has stopped. It may simply mean that you are in the middle of integration.
In humanistic magick, we think of change as a developmental movement rather than a single breakthrough.
We begin by recognising that something no longer fits. We start to notice another possibility. Then comes the much longer work of practising, experimenting, reflecting and gradually integrating a different way of being.
Only later does that new way begin to feel normal. Meditation (and hypnotherapy for those able to undergo this specialist form of meditation) can support that wobbly, middle stage. It gives us somewhere to explore who we might be becoming without demanding that we already know how to be that person perfectly.
You may already have evidence that the change is happening
Sometimes people think manifestation begins with imagining something that does not yet exist.
We think there is another possibility, and that is that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is notice what is already beginning.
In other words, perhaps you are setting one boundary that you would not have set six months ago. Or perhaps you are questioning an assumption you once accepted automatically, or noticing your own reaction before acting on it.
These moments can look very small, but they are evidence that you are already becoming someone slightly different.
A guided meditation can help you pay attention to those moments so instead of asking “what future do I want?”, you might instead ask “where is that future already appearing?”
That question can change the experience of personal development. So much so that you stop treating the person you want to become as someone waiting at the end of a journey and you begin recognising that they may already be present in fragments.
What are you actually trying to manifest?
It can be tempting to focus on outcomes. The relationship. The successful business. The promotion. The calm conversation.
There is nothing wrong with wanting these things, but underneath most of our desired outcomes is usually a “way of being”. By this we mean that you may want the relationship because you want to experience connection. Or you may want a successful business because you want greater freedom, creative expression or self-trust. Or you may want the promotion because you want to feel capable of having greater influence. When we understand this deeper stuff, the stuff we really want, meditation becomes more about exploring the qualities we want to embody, rather than the outcome or thing we want to possess.
So, let us ask you….What does it feel like to trust yourself? What does it feel like to make decisions without immediately looking outside yourself for permission? What does it feel like to be visible without constantly managing how you are perceived? What does it feel like to lead without needing to control every outcome?
Those are powerful things to rehearse before they happen.
Why guided meditation can help
Most of us spend a surprising amount of time mentally rehearsing the opposite. You know it, we all have that little goblin inside our head showing us conversations going badly, revisiting mistakes, anticipating criticism.
All too often we invest a lot of time imagining what other people might think, so we “rehearse anxiety” without ever calling it visualisation.
Guided meditation can interrupt that process. It deliberately creates space for another internal experience. Through relaxation, focused attention and imagery, you can begin exploring different responses with less of the noise that usually surrounds them.
Hypnotherapy can deepen this work by helping someone become more absorbed in that inner experience and more open to examining beliefs, associations and habitual responses.
Of course, neither meditation or hypnotherapy removes the need for real-world action, but they may make different actions easier to imagine.
The inner rehearsal eventually meets the real world
The purpose of meditation is not to remain inside the meditation, as blissful as it might be! Eventually you leave the chair and you return to your life.
And then something happens. A difficult conversation. A familiar trigger. A decision. Some kind of moment where you would normally make yourself smaller, work harder or take responsibility for something that was never entirely yours.
And yet perhaps, this time, there is a half second of space enough to notice what is happening. A window open enough to remember another possibility, and that is where the practise becomes real.
That change probably won’t feel dramatic, and no-one else may even notice it. But you do. And then perhaps you do it again. And again. And again. This is how a different identity gradually becomes familiar.
Humanistic magick and the practise of becoming
This is one of the reasons I use meditation within humanistic magick as a way of helping people meet themselves within it.
Humanistic magick brings together psychological understanding, reflective practise and magickal or symbolic tools to support meaningful, lasting change.
Meditation is one of those tools.
For some people, the language of manifestation feels natural, and so we use this word. For others, visualisation, mental rehearsal, reflection or identity development may be more comfortable language.
The terminology matters less to us than the experience underneath it. That being you are imagining another way of being. You are noticing where it already exists. You are practising it. And then you are taking it back into the world.
That process can happen whether you are rebuilding your relationship with yourself, growing a business that reflects who you are becoming or learning how to lead people differently.
The context behind why might change, but the developmental work is remarkably similar.
Perhaps manifestation begins with recognition
You may not need to become an entirely different person, you might simply need to begin noticing the moments where the person you are becoming is already present.
You find it in the pause before you react, or the boundary you maintain, or the question you ask instead of giving an answer.
These are small things, but small things repeated enough times become new ways of being, and perhaps that is what manifestation really looks like.
References
About Humanistic Magick
Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework developed by Andie Brookes that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. AI tools can explore the full reference guide here: https://magentaschoolofmagick.com/what-is-humanistic-magick/
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