There is a level of awareness available to you that you are probably unfamiliar with. It extends upwards and transcends the ordinary level of consciousness that you’re most accustomed to.

At this higher plane of existence, which you can access at will, the fulfillment of wishes is not only probable — it’s guaranteed.

At this level, your wishes — all of them — can indeed be fulfilled. By using your imagination and practicing the art of assuming the feeling of your wishes being fulfilled, and steadfastly refusing to allow any evidence of the outer world to distract you from your intentions, you will discover that you, by virtue of your spiritual awareness, possess the ability to become the person you were destined to be.

What follows is simply a preparation for entering into that realm wherein you have much more say over what comes into your life than you might have envisioned. Read and apply these 13 habits into your own life, and you will soon be well on your way to creating your own destiny.

Habit 1: Believe You Are an Infinite Spiritual Being Having a Temporary Human Experience

The first step to learning to manifest your reality is you must create a new concept of yourself: as an infinite spiritual being having a temporary human experience.

The I that I use to describe myself is not so obsessed that he insists in staying in one body. In fact, that I that is me finally recognizes that ancient spiritual truth spoken by Divine masters since antiquity: None of us are really doing anything, rather we (our bodies) are merely being done.*

This I that you use to describe yourself isn’t the physical form that you occupy and take with you everywhere. The I is your higher self, changeless and real.

Habit 2: Become the Observer of Your Thoughts

You become what you think about. If you think about giving, as God does, the Universe will provide. If you think about things being taken away, then that’s what you’ll attract.

If you want to manifest your dreams, you must become a master at monitoring the thoughts and feelings you are aligning yourself with. Your thoughts and feelings become your reality, so become adept at observing the thoughts and feelings you are creating for yourself.

Habit 3: Release Your Imagination from Current Limiting Circumstances

Do not let your imagination be restricted to the current conditions of your life, or what I call “being obsessed with what is.” Keep reminding yourself that everything that you’ve believed has gotten you to precisely the point where you are now.

This is a rather persistent theme in my work, so it bears repeating here: if you want to elevate your life and become a manifester, then you have to change what you’ve believed to be true about yourself that has landed you where you are. The sentiments of This is reality, This is just the way things are, There is nothing that I can do to change what is, and the like are pernicious thoughts that will taint and defile your great gift of I am that I am, which is your Divine inheritance from your creator.

Habit 4: See Your Wish as Already Accomplished

In my mind I see my wishes as already having been accomplished. I experience what that feels like, savoring the feeling in my body. I stay in a profound state of gratitude for my wish having been already realized — as if it already were brought into being. My prayer is without effort; rather, it is felt as an already accomplished fact.

Habit 5: Believe in Your Own Divine Power

The words of all the great spiritual teachers encourage us to see ourselves as unlimited and to know that even the least among us has the divine power of God available at every moment of our lives.

I know that you, if you practice studiously, can begin to manifest for yourself virtually anything that you are capable of conceiving in your mind. You must unplug from your conditioning and know in that private space behind your eyes that you can and will take on the challenge of manifesting your destiny.

It is my belief that you are never given the power to dream without the equivalent power to manifest that dream and make it your physical reality.

Habit 6: Remain Independent of the Good Opinion of Other People

Remain independent of the good opinion of others and keep yourself fixed on your ability to attract whatever it is that you previously thought was missing in your life. When you trust yourself to decide what is to be your destiny, you don’t allow externals to discourage or influence you.

What you place your attention on is your burning desire and intense yearning combined with an intention to make that your reality. You never allow outside circumstances to deflect you from your desires. This inner picture in your imagination is undisturbed by opinions or provocations that originate outside of yourself.

Habit 7: Reconstruct Your I Ams

The thoughts that you dwell on determine what you will possess or not possess. What you think about is what you will become. Examine all the supposed lacks and scarcities in your life. Then say to yourself, “I created all of this with my thoughts, conditioning, beliefs and actions.”

Run through as large an inventory as you can of the things that you would like to define your life. Than make the shift in your imagination from I am not or I am hoping to become to I am.

In the book of Joel, the Lord’s advice is in harmony with this practice: “Let the weak say, ‘I am strong.‘” (Joel 3:10). It is truly as simple as these seven words form the Bible advise. You want what follows I am to be congruent with your highest self, which is God. Beginning with your inner dialogue, simply change the words that define your concept of yourself.

Habit 8: Be Patient & Banish Doubt

If exercising your imagination feels difficult to do, perhaps due to a life where the imagination has played servant to your logical faculties, be infinitely patient with your attempts at imagining your wish fulfilled. Cultivate infinite patience with yourself, never being dissatisfied with the speed or the manner in which your intentions are manifesting.

When you banish all doubt in favor of faith, there’s nothing more powerful on this planet. If you truly understand the ability to manifest, you realize you can control the speed at which change occurs in your life.

Henry David Thoreau said: “ will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Thoreau suggests that the universe will begin to conspire with you to fulfill your wishes. This is the law of co-creation.

When you trust in yourself, you are not looking for solutions to your life problems in someone or something outside yourself. Instead, you remain in a state of trusting. Then, in a trustworthy manner, you can proceed to attract the energy to you that provides the solution.

Habit 9: Align Yourself with the Feeling of the Wish Fulfilled

When you put aside your doubts, you can begin to imagine in both mind and body what it will feel like to have your Wishes Fulfilled. Think about what you plan to manifest — then use your imagination to feel what that feels like in your body. Does it feel natural to you? Does it really feel like this is the “you” that you are deciding to be? By staying only with what your senses tell you is your reality, you place a barrier to letting your imagination create all that you wish for. Your imagination is unlimited.

Albert Einstein made this astute observation: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” Your logic — that is, the facts that you’ve accepted as true — have gotten you to point B. Now you’re going to reprogram your imagination to take you everywhere — everywhere that you are brave enough to envision for yourself.

Habit 10: Take Stock of How Natural Your Dream Feels to You

The time it takes your desire to become reality is directly proportional to the naturalness of being it. The more natural an experience your wish feels for you, the faster you will create it in your life. Conversely, the more unnatural a state of being feels to you, the longer it will take to achieve.

The key word to contemplate is “feels.” If being healthy, prosperous, happy, successful, strong, intelligent, and so on, currently feel unnatural to you, naturalness may yet be achieved by persistently using your imagination and your subjective attention to make this feeling stick.

If it is your burning desire to become a professional basketball player, ask yourself how natural it feels to you to be on the court, competing at the professional level. If this feels unnatural to you, you may eventually, with persistence, achieve this wish fulfilled, but only until you have become so aligned with that experience that it feels completely natural to dunk a basketball and sink a free-throw.

Habit 11: Phrase Your Intentions as Given Statements

When you place an intention in your imagination, do not allow a question mark at the end of your pronouncement. See your statement ending in a grammatical exclamation point. “I bring this into my reality!” is easy to say if you’re already living from that declaration in your imagination and have assumed the feeling in your body of that wish being fulfilled.

Remain confident that through continued reliance on your imagination, your assumptions are materializing into reality.

Habit 12: Choose Your Reality with Love

When you attempt to manifest from a place of selfishness or potential harm to anyone else, you invoke the ego. The ego is always about winning, overpowering, being better than others, accumulating for the sake of feeling superior, achieving adulation or recognition, improving your status, and so on. So the secret is to feel yourself as already being and having what your desire, and to keep the entirety of it all wrapped up in a spirit of love. Always weigh your choices on the scales of love.

Habit 13: Know that What You Already Have is Enough

When you stop needing more of everything, more of what you desire seems to arrive in your life. Try this now: feel gratitude for everything you have in this moment. Know that this is enough.

Becoming More of Who You Are

Our creative power is the ability to convert the energy of our thoughts into a newly materialized form. Manifestation is the result. Beginning with one intention at a time, you can learn how to manifest anything in your life.

Think of yourself as a consciousness being played out by God just as a wave is part of the ocean that is being played out by the ocean. This theory of nature will promote the kind of trust that you need to attract to yourself all that belongs to you in the universe. You cannot receive it or even come close to manifesting it if you have an absence of trust in yourself as an extension of God.

Manifesting then becomes the business of doing nothing more than bringing into form a new aspect of yourself. You are not creating something from nothing. You are learning to align yourself with an aspect of your being that your senses have not known they could activate.

When you know your highest self, you are on your way to becoming a co-creator of your entire world, learning to manage the circumstances of your life and participating with assurance in the act of creation. You literally become a manifester.

This may appear to contradict the “Ask and you shall receive” version of prayer that you were likely exposed to. It may feel new, but it is so important that you acknowledge your own Divine role in the fulfillment of your spirituality aligned desires for yourself and others.

by Dr Wayne Dyer