Suppose you set a positive intention, focus your energy on its manifestation for the highest good of all, see the promising alpha reflection, and then watch your results completely stagnate. Why did your intention fail to manifest as quickly as you desired?

Whenever this happens the root cause is that you failed to become a vibrational match for your intentions. Probably without even realizing it, you remained stuck in a pattern of intending for your desires NOT to manifest, thereby sabotaging yourself from making progress.

What creates this drag? The answer is your fears. Most of the time, your fears are subconscious. You aren’t even aware of them, so they sabotage you from the shadows. Your fears act as intentions which keep your desires from manifesting. The more you resonate with fear, the worse your results will be when consciously trying to apply the Law of Attraction. The LoA is still working fine, but you’ll be inclined to think it doesn’t work because your fears will cause you to keep manifesting more of the same. And the harder you push, the more your fears push back.

In this article I’ll offer you a process for bringing your fears to the surface and getting them out of your way, so you can stop them from interfering with your positive intentions. This will allow you to manifest your desires faster and more easily.

Intentions are a package deal

When you set a goal or an intention and begin moving towards it much more slowly than you’d like, the drag you experience comes from your fears, not the external world. If you put all your energy into changing your external circumstances without addressing your fears, your progress will be extremely slow, if you even move at all.

How can you identify the fears that interfere with your positive intentions? Here’s a fairly straightforward way to do it:

First, imagine you’ve already manifested your intention in its entirety. Sit quietly and just imagine it as being real right now. Don’t imagine it happening in the future — imagine it right now. You’re already there. It’s a done deal. Take a few minutes to make it as real as possible.

Now do some role-playing in your imagination. Mentally act out a few different scenarios to get a feel for what your life will really be like once this intention has become your present reality. Consider the major side effects. How will the achievement of this goal affect your health, finances, relationships, career, spiritual practice, etc? In what other ways will it change you? No change occurs in isolation, so how will this change ripple outward and create other changes? Try to get a clear sense of the whole package of changes, and see if you can figure out where your life might re-stabilize after the initial change.

For example, if your intention is to manifest a million dollars, imagine how that extra money will affect the other parts of your life. How will it affect your family, your friendships, your living situation, your career, your taxes, your eating habits, your spending habits, your spirituality? How will this one change create a tidal wave of other changes? Where will you actually end up when the dust finally settles?

Don’t idealize or demonize these side effects. Do your best to imagine the most realistic results you can.

Manifesting a million dollars, losing 50 pounds, getting married, moving to a new city, or switching careers are significant changes. A common mistake we make when putting out new intentions is that we consider those intentions in isolation, failing to account for the complete package of side effects.

If you spend even 10 minutes doing this exercise (longer is good too), you’ll notice there’s a lot more to your intentions than you initially realized. But if you don’t consider these side effects when focusing on your intentions, then your intentions will have little power to manifest because deep down, you’ll know they don’t represent a realistic, stable situation.

If you want your intentions to manifest, then you need to understand that they’re a package deal. You have to accept and intend the whole package, not just the convenient parts.

Uncovering hidden fears that sabotage your intentions

When you consider the whole package of your intentions, you’ll notice some internal resistance. Some parts of your visualization will be wonderful, while other parts will seem undesirable. For example, if your intention is to manifest a million dollars, and you know deep down that one of your close friends simply won’t be able to handle it because s/he responds negatively to anyone with that kind of money, then you may feel some resistance about manifesting the money. You want the intention, but you’re unhappy with the side effects.

Any undesirable elements that come up during this exercise will be pointers to your fears.

What holds you back from being totally congruent with your intentions isn’t the total package itself, since that package is (so far) only in your imagination. What holds you back is the fear that arises when you consider the total package. Going back to the example of your friend who responds negatively to financial wealth, your friend isn’t holding you back at all. It’s the fear of your friend’s reaction that’s the real culprit. Even if you never told your friend about your intention to manifest a million dollars, you’d still suffer the intention-blocking effects of your fear. Both your fears and your desires exist only within your consciousness at this point, not in the physical world, so the entire conflict is an internal one. But a lack of internal congruency is all it takes to kill your best intentions.

As you explore your visualization of the total package, take note of which parts you resist, and try to express them in words. For example, here are some fears you might list when you think about manifesting a million dollars:

• fear that you’ll lose the money foolishly after putting so much energy into manifesting it
• fear that your life will become too complicated trying to manage the money
• fear that you’ll be stingy with the money, thereby having to admit you’re a stingy person
• fear that your accounting and tax situation will become more complicated
• fear that the money will strain your relationships
• fear that the money will distract you from what’s most important to you
• fear that managing the money will be stressful
• fear that having more money will create more responsibility
• fear that the money will isolate you, distancing you from your peers
• and so on

Make a list like the one above for your own intentions. What fears arise when you imagine the total package? Where do you experience resistance?

One good fear is all it takes to keep your positive intentions from manifesting. Fear keeps you from becoming a vibrational match for your desires.

From fear to acceptance

If you want your intentions to manifest, you must eliminate the fears that conflict with your intentions. Once all the fear is gone, your intentions will manifest quite easily. But as long as you fail to address your fears, no amount of force will permit your intentions to manifest.

One of the simplest ways to eliminate your fears is to accept them. Stop feeding your fears with intentional energy, and just allow them to be. For example, if you simply accept that if you manifested $1 million, that yes, your tax situation would become more complicated, then you’re no longer turning that drawback into a fear. You’ve downgraded the fear into a consequence.

The difference between a fear and a consequence is acceptance. A fear is an outcome you resist. A consequence is an outcome you accept. When you fear part of the package that surrounds your desire, you effectively resist your desire, meaning that you intend it NOT to manifest. But when you accept the total package, you allow your desire to manifest without resistance. This is what it means to become a “vibrational match” for your intentions.

If you aren’t ready to accept the total package surrounding your desires, then you aren’t ready to manifest your desires.

This was a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn. Once I understood that if I wanted to manifest a new desire, I had to accept the whole package of side effects without resistance, I began getting noticeably better results with the Law of Attraction.

Lately I’ve been testing the LoA in the financial area of my life because it’s easy to measure the results to assess how well it’s working. When I began intending greater financial abundance with the Million Dollar Experiment kickoff in November 2005, I made some early progress, but I wondered why the money didn’t manifest instantly if the LoA truly works. Why should the LoA require the passage of time to manifest anything? Eventually when I tried the above exercise of visualizing the whole package, it became obvious that I was resisting (aka fearing) the side effects of having a million dollars. Even though my intentions were positive, my fear was still creating a lot of drag.

One by one I’ve been working on those fears by acknowledging and accepting them as consequences. Once I release my resistance, I create an empowering belief to replace the fear. This just means I take the same consequence and find a way to interpret it as a positive instead of a negative (via Creative Observation). For example, if I fear having a million dollars because it will complicate my tax situation, I first accept it as a consequence by letting go of my resistance. I admit to myself, “OK, so more money will mean a more complicated tax situation. That’s just a fact to be accepted, not something dreadful I need to fear. I can deal with it.” Then I shift it over to an empowering belief by saying, “If I have more money, I can hire a good accountant to handle my taxes, so even though my situation may be more complicated, I’ll be able to afford all the help I need.”

As another example I worried that some people would react negatively to my attempts to attract greater financial abundance, misjudging my motives and assuming I’m “just in it for the money,” especially as I reach beyond the survival income range and into the abundance range. But I realized this is totally my issue, not anyone else’s. If my motives are honorable and genuinely focused on serving the highest good of all, then I needn’t worry about anyone’s opinion of me. The very fact that I’m so concerned about this issue indicates that I care far more about service than I do about money anyway. My external reputation is out of my control because it exists purely in other people’s minds, so I can’t allow myself to become attached to it. I can only do my best and accept the consequences. I choose to focus on the good I can do with more money, including finding new ways to explore and express my purpose.

Has this process of working through my fears been effective? I have no doubt that it has. I can feel how much my energy has shifted over the past year. Consider that today this website generates more than 10x the income it did a year ago, and my expectation is that it will generate at least $500,000 in 2007 if I simply continue doing what I’m already doing. Moreover, I can envision a clear and unobstructed path to an income of $100,000 per month. This money isn’t flowing because I’m forcing it — I’m simply allowing it to arrive. The real work isn’t what I do with my business — it’s what I do with my consciousness.

I absolutely, positively must credit this financial increase to working through my fears, accepting them as consequences, and replacing them with empowering beliefs. In the past several months, the money has been flowing in such avalanches it’s almost ridiculous how easy it is… easy from a business standpoint, but still a challenge to work through those fears.

This process requires some deep self-assessment and introspection, so it’s not an overnight fix by any means. For me it’s been extremely eye-opening though. I’ve been amazed at just how many fears came up that I needed to deal with. I realized that in order to overcome a fear, I must first identify it. It’s become abundantly clear that the more I work though my fears, the faster my results improve.

I still have more internal resistance to deal with, so I’m certainly not done yet. But I know that this process works.

The really insidious part — the part that keeps me up at night thinking about it — is whether the intention of the Million Dollar Experiment itself is responsible for my discovering that I needed to work through my fears to allow the original intention to manifest. Will a powerful intention actually manifest the very tools necessary to help it manifest? Consider that this website is the central hub of the Million Dollar Experiment. If I can successfully manifest $1 million via the experiment’s intention, then I’ll surely explain all the details here and offer whatever insights I can into how to accelerate the process, thereby potentially enabling thousands of other participants to use the same process to generate their $1 million as well. Could it be that the mere intention is all it takes to get the ball rolling — and keep it rolling — even in the presence of deep-seated resistance?