If you are in the manifestation waters, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard phrases like:

• What is desired by you is destined for you
• Your desires have been placed in your heart because you are meant to have them
• When you desire something, it’s because an alternate timeline where you have your desire already exists

The bottom line is our desires are within us for a reason. And that reason is that we are meant to experience them in our lives.

I’ve always resonated deeply with this.

When it comes to true heart’s desires (not the ones that stem from the ego), there is this magnetic pull far stronger than anything I’ve ever experienced – it’s undeniable, remarkable, and something so vastly different from the usual set of human sensations that it has that taste of something grander to it.

Now often, I also heard that our heart’s desires are safe guidance. Meaning that it’s safe to follow them.

But did it always feel like that?

No, it unfortunately did not.

Because it really damn hurt to have a desire rooted within me, while at the same time I seemed to be unable to actually bring it into my life.

A week ago or so, however, right after a manifestation unfolded in the most beautiful and effortless way for me (which we’ll get into a little bit later), I literally woke up riding the current of a breakthrough.

It was one of those moments where clarity just comes pouring in, and all you can say is OH MY GOD IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW over and over in your head as all the pieces fall into place.

This breakthrough took me to a much deeper level of understanding how our desires actually work, why those above statements are absolutely true, and what my blind spot was up until that point.

I also felt an immediate call to share this with you in case you find yourself in a similar spot, so I started pouring things into this article that very day.

(I know at least someone reading these words needs them, otherwise I wouldn’t have received the nudge to type them out. If that is you, yay, I’m so happy you found your way over to Joy & Serenity!)

Okay, first let’s throw it back just a little bit to get clear on what I mean by the true heart’s desires I spoke of earlier just so that we’re all on the same page.

Heart’s desires are those that don’t come from some shallow place or from influence, they don’t grow from logic, nor are they formed through societal conditioning. When I’m talking about heart’s desires, I’m referring to those you feel from somewhere deep within the body.

While ego desires can (and often do) of course spark an emotional response within us, I see heart’s desires as the ones that are born right alongside the sensation. They are entwined and inseparable.

For me, it feels like they originate from the heart space, the solar plexus, and the sacral chakra. Most commonly, though, this sensation starts somewhere between my heart and solar plexus, then expands into my sacral. This is where I feel something that I can’t even name bloom when a true desire enters my field of awareness.

The sensation is unmistakable, and I always know when something is a true heart’s desire because of that.

It somehow feels…bigger than me.

So while I did have that part of the process down this entire time, I was still left with a quite serious misconstruction around desires that my mind created – and it had a whole lot to do with the “wildness” of the desire.

Some desires seem totally normal to receive. Some, on the other hand, are so “out there” that it feels kinda crazy.

That’s where belief work and nervous system regulation comes in.

I’m a huge advocate for both and they are definitely core parts in manifesting your dream life. You need to get your beliefs and your nervous system on board in order to experience something in your reality.

However, because I sometimes still have a quite strongly rational-driven brain that likes to operate more scientifically – and have (or at least had) some old wiring on having to work for achievements still lingering in my system – my mind got a bit too hooked on the science behind it.

It turned this fairly straightforward process into a whole ass task that lost sight of the goal.

What is the goal?

Simply to believe in the manifestation.

That is quite literally it.

This whole process of rewiring beliefs and getting the nervous system on board is done with the intention of us fully believing that something isn’t just possible for us, but that it’s also already unfolding.

It is also why we are taught to let go of the how.

How a manifestation enters our lives isn’t our job to figure out.

I’m pretty sure that if you look back at your life, you can find quite a few examples of things happening in ways you never could have predicted. That’s the Universe working behind the scenes, orchestrating events and aligning things for us.

We aren’t meant to take on this part of the co-creation process, and yet we so often do – sometimes in ways that aren’t easily recognized as us getting in the way of the how.

If you’re reading this and feeling a bit confused, no worries, it’ll all start to make sense as I share my example.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of healing work around my books and reconnecting with them in a healthy way (if you want to learn more about the broader picture, I spoke on it in this 10th anniversary video).

One of the key parts of the healing journey (that I didn’t go into detail in the video, because clearly I knew on a subconscious level that it would come up through another channel) was my relationship to the Black Werewolves series, the first novels I’ve ever written.

At some point in the past, as I released more and more books, I took on this belief that the newer books were so much better than my older ones. Which led to me wishing readers would only stumble upon my latest works, especially if it was their first time connecting with my stories.

I wanted them to read The Dark Ones and the rest of the books in the Black Werewolves series only once they were already fans of my work, because I believed that it was the only way someone would ever love the very first novels I have written.

As a side note, but no less important – our subconscious mind generalizes things.

Me wishing people wouldn’t find one series ended up spilling across all of my books, and no matter how hard I tried, visibility seemed impossible to get. I even worked with an incredible advertising, marketing, and writing expert who always gets results (she only takes on clients whose work meets her standards), and despite my books being bestseller material, she was stumped as to why none of the ads were converting the way she expected them to.

My case was a mystery. An impossibility, even.

But that’s the power of beliefs for you.

Because I tried so hard to hide what I thought wasn’t up to my standards, my reality constructed itself in the way that all of my books were as invisible as possible.

It took me until recently to see that, but that wasn’t even the biggest breakthrough in these past few months…just an opening act.

So let’s fast forward to me deciding to work on my relationship with my books and specifically diving deep into the Black Werewolves series.

The moment I did that, the moment I truly allowed myself to see these books and reconnect with the content, I couldn’t help but acknowledge the grand, epic storyline I put into these novels.

It all came flooding back to me.

The magnitude. The character journeys. The way I wove Slavic mythology into modern day. The romances. The growth.

I realized I had been mistreating my books, the Black Werewolves specifically, so damn badly.

I realized that I really, truly loved them precisely as they are.

And at some point, I felt it deep in my heart space that this series deserves a BookBub Featured Deal.

If you’re not familiar with the indie author space, let me quickly explain that BookBub run these highly sought-out promotions. They are definitely on the pricier side, and because they are highly curated, they only accept a small percentage of submitted works. Actually landing a BookBub is still something you celebrate. For acceptance chances, it usually helps if you aren’t in Kindle Unlimited and if you have hundreds (or better yet, thousands) of reviews.

My reviews on the Black Werewolves aren’t nearly there, and I’m also in KU.

But the moment the BookBub thought entered my mind, that deep sense of it happening bloomed to life within me – precisely in that spot that signals my true desires.

I didn’t question it.

I submitted the series box set, and I knew – I knew I would see the “You’ve been selected for a BookBub Featured Deal!” email in my inbox.

Now here’s the main point:

I didn’t do anything.

For the first time in a long while, I simply held on to the knowing that this was happening.

Yes, clearly my beliefs and nervous system were aligned with this outcome, but the important piece is that I didn’t do a single thing beyond submitting my title.

The submission was the one action step I took (because inspired action definitely is how you bring your desires from the energetic realm into the physical one), but I did nothing more.

I simply checked in with the vision of me receiving that email around once per day, and felt into that certainty. A little nod to myself that, yes, this is happening.

And that is also where my involvement in the manifestation process ended.

In the past, even when my entire being was on board with something, I felt like I needed to do so much more in order to deserve the manifestation.

What do you mean I should just put the desire out there and that’s it?

I’ve been so conditioned to work for the things I want that simply accepting something was happening was so far out of my realm, that it was fucking with my manifestations.

Now here…here is the true juiciness of the situation.

With those somewhat more wild and out there desires, the situation often did call for additional action. Action in the sense of if I couldn’t really believe in that reality, I had to rewire beliefs.

Years ago, when I healed my depression, I did have that same strong sense of knowing I could enjoy my life, but my mind and body were so wired into being miserable that I had to take conscious steps to rewire them (because I also knew that while being happy was possible, it wasn’t possible with the way I was at that time). So I went all in with my healing work, like practicing gratitude, finding beauty and things to appreciate every single day, doing affirmations, hypnosis, somatics, etc. It was a long process – a worthy process, absolutely, and also one I needed for this specific cause.

What I failed to see at that point, however, was that healing my depression and becoming the version of myself who is in love with life was a unique transformation. It was work, yes, because I had decades of beliefs, moods, and body patterns to rewire.

But like I said, the subconscious mind generalizes.

So instead of seeing this as the process I applied uniquely to my mental health, it took it as the blueprint for manifesting my desires in general.

I began to overwork.

I began to overwork to the point where I would believe my desires wouldn’t manifest unless I did enough. Unless I didn’t throw my whole weight into manifesting them. Anything less than being all-in meant I wasn’t doing enough, so of course I wouldn’t get what I want.

I’d thrown my true, innate worthiness under the bus and replaced it with worth based on how much effort I put into manifesting a desire.

How I didn’t see this until now?

Because it was easy for my ego to convince me, especially when so much of our society is also wired in the sense that success doesn’t just fall into your lap. When the narrative is that you need to want something so badly that you’ll do anything to get it or that good things don’t just happen, it lures you into the trap of rejecting ease.

For me, that showed up as getting so caught up in being perfect in my manifestation process that I started blocking myself from actually manifesting.

Looking back, whenever I somehow didn‘t fall into this pattern of overworking and overachieving, I’d manifest things with such immense ease.

A desire would spring to life, and within days or a month max, I would have that desire in my reality.

Instead of seeing those occurrences as an invitation to change my views on the manifestation process, though, I wrote them off as being simple because the desire was simple…

Although…could manifesting a gifted 14k for buying a new car really be considered simple? Yeah, kinda ridiculous when you put it that way…

Still, my mind kind of shoved that into the “simple” bracket for some reason, and that’s why it was easier to be gifted that amount of money for a car versus…let’s say regularly earning 1k in month through book royalties.

Simple vs. difficult. A one-off versus a whole system that needs to be in place for things to consistently happen that way.

But the Universe doesn’t really differentiate between desires.

It’s us who see some as simple and others as challenging.

And the ones I made challenging?

They rarely manifested.

Through believing I had to do all this work instead of trusting that the reason I have a specific desire is because I’m meant to have it, I pushed away the manifestations that could have come to me with ease.

The BookBub deal?

I received the exact acceptance email I knew I was getting the night before these big breakthroughs.

Okay, since this was quite the journey, let’s sum up the biggest takeaways:

Yes, nervous system regulation and rewiring beliefs are most definitely called for when you’re manifesting something you can’t quite fully get behind.

If you feel your body reacting in so called negative ways when you think about your desire, that right there is an invitation to delve deeper.

If your mind screams there’s no way in hell something can happen, please do your belief work.

But when you have that strong sense of knowing something is happening, that’s all you need.

Stop questioning it. Stop wondering whether it’s true, especially if the people around you express doubts.

That inner knowing is the most powerful thing in existence.

All you have to do is trust it fully.

And as for the actions you take?

The Universe will guide you. Sometimes it’s a series of steps. But sometimes it can be a single, simple action.

You job here is to know that that is enough.

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