How to Manifest When Affirmations Don’t Work
- Brainz Magazine
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Tara Swann is an Emotional Empowerment & Embodiment Coach and three-time Author who guides women to alchemise emotional patterns, reclaim their inner power, and manifest a life that reflects their deepest truth.
Feeling your emotions is what gives you the power to manifest the life of your dreams. Do you believe in manifestation? I didn’t. When I first heard the term “manifestation,” I thought it was absolute nonsense, and that we just had to work with the cards we’d been dealt, and that there was no way we could create our reality. But the truth is, without embodied manifestation practices, I wouldn’t be writing this article, nor would I have stood on stages to inspire others, written three books, or called in the love of my life.
For seventeen years of my life, I struggled with chronic anxiety, and speaking was one of my biggest fears, so much so that some days I wouldn’t leave my house in fear of running into someone and having to talk to them. When I first started my business, I avoided using my voice in every possible way. It took me six months to send a voice message. It took me another six months to post a video of myself, and even after twenty takes, I still judged myself harshly, believing people would think I was stupid.
The moment everything shifted
About eighteen months into my business, I started working with a business coach. She suggested that I hold a free online masterclass. I agreed and announced it on my socials. Immediately after announcing it, I started pacing my house thinking, “What have I just done? I can’t do this, I cannot speak live to people online.” I wanted to pull the pin. Thankfully, I could reach out to my coach, and she said these words that will forever stay with me:
“Your thoughts are attached to feelings. When you release the feelings, the thoughts will disappear as a byproduct.”
Releasing emotion changed everything
So, for the first time in my life, I went and sat with what I was feeling. I could feel the tightness in my chest, and I breathed into it. I could feel it move up into my throat and out of me. As it did, I cried. I released the emotion that had been blocking me for years, and then clarity. I realised where the fear of speaking had stemmed from in the first place. That was my older sister challenging what felt like everything I said growing up, and as a sensitive little Pisces, I formed the belief that it wasn’t safe to use my voice. From that moment, I knew I didn’t have to believe that anymore.
This one powerful experience led me to show up to my masterclass with no fear, with clarity, certainty, and confidence. And I thought, “If I can release this lifelong fear of speaking in just fifteen minutes, what else can I do?”
Why mindset alone doesn’t work
A lot of us are taught to “do manifestation” by repeating affirmations, visualising, positive thinking, and creating beautiful vision boards, but these practices will only get you so far. When you’re forcing “positive” thoughts that your body is contracting against, then you’re opposing and ignoring the very energy that actually creates.
Manifestation happens through the body
Manifestation doesn’t happen from the mind, it happens from the body.
When your body does not believe what you’re repeating, and when your nervous system does not feel safe to receive love, success, or abundance, no amount of affirmations or pretty pictures will override what’s held beneath the surface. This is why so many give up on manifestation, believing it’s nonsense, which I can totally relate to.
I used to repeat the affirmation “I am confident” over and over again, but my lack of confidence didn’t budge, and I certainly didn’t break free from my comfort zone. My body knew the truth at that point, that it simply wasn’t true.
The subconscious holds the key
Your body holds stories and emotional imprints from the past. Your past experiences determine what beliefs you have instilled about what is possible for you, what is acceptable, and what you’re worthy of achieving. This is the subconscious, which dictates 95% of your behaviour and is mainly formed before the age of seven, but this doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Actually, what is stored in the subconscious, when made conscious, is the gateway to liberation, to higher vibrational states, and to more aligned manifestations.
From shame to embodied confidence
My experience of releasing shame around speaking led me to continually delve into the body to release other stored emotions from the past, and deeper, ingrained beliefs in my subconscious, which created space to call in beliefs and feelings that were aligned with the life I knew I wanted to create, and the woman I wanted to become.
It eventually led me to being asked to speak on stages, where I again had to release fear and shame through the body. In doing so, I created space for the embodiment of a grounded, confident woman, one who could stand on stage with calm clarity, caring less about how she was perceived and more about those in need of the transmission.
This method of exploring the deeper layers of the subconscious (the body) and releasing what isn’t you to make space for what is, applies to everything in life, including love and relationships.
Embodied manifestation in love and relationships
My past is full of painful relationship stories with men who would lie, cheat, and manipulate. I called it love, believing this was just how love was, painful and inconsistent. After all, this was what was modelled to me as a child.
A few years after separating from the father of my two boys, and doing a lot of inner work, I reached a point where I was ready for a relationship. I decided at that point, no more half-in-half-out men, no more settling for anything less than amazing. I wanted the real deal.
Why wanting keeps us stuck
I was ready for real love, and I wanted it because I was tired of feeling lonely. I wanted connection, love, and safety. Until I realised that “wanting” itself is the frequency of not having. If you want something, it means you do not have it, and the Universe responds to your energy, not your desires.
Wanting to escape loneliness only amplifies loneliness (and makes you settle for anything that helps you feel less alone). Wanting a man to help me feel whole only emitted the frequency of not yet feeling whole. And needing a man so I could feel love, connection, and security, only made it conditional. As in, if he leaves, he takes with him my source of love, connection, and security, which would make me anxious, needy, and insecure in the relationship. This is not the energy I wanted to start my love story with.
Becoming the source of what you desire
So, I went to work again. I released the belief that love meant pain, and I replaced it with ‘love gets to be love.’ I released my fear around opening my heart by finally grieving past heartbreak. I softened my loneliness through radical acceptance. And I finally embodied the fact that no man was coming to complete me. I had become the woman who was complete within herself.
How? I released every belief that had me feeling incomplete and unworthy, and I started giving myself everything that I was craving from a man: love, connection, safety, play, touch, and emotional containment. I connected to my heart daily, I played by myself at the beach, I touched my body sensually as if it were a lover touching me, I created love and safety within myself through my own emotional containment, my own inner masculine holding my feminine with love and non-judgement. I became my own lover.
When the body can hold what the heart desires
This process took me from need and want to having it all before he physically arrived, and it made it clear who I was willing to settle for and who I wasn’t. I raised the bar. And that’s when he appeared. Not only because I became the vibrational match of that kind of relationship, but I also became the woman whose nervous system could hold that kind of love.
You don’t get what you want, you get what you are.
3 truths about embodied manifestation
Here’s what these experiences, from speaking to relationships and everything in between, taught me:
1. You manifest from the body, not the mind
Your body decides what you allow in, and if you haven’t embodied what you say you desire, your nervous system sees it as foreign and unsafe. If you have emotions in the body, such as suppressed grief and fear closing your heart, you will struggle to allow anything in. The door is closed.
2. You must release what’s in the way
Stored emotions block your frequency. If you want a clear channel, you must allow those emotions to finally flow. You cannot manifest expansion from a body that feels tense, anxious, and closed off due to old, suppressed grief or anger.
3. You must embody the frequency of your desires
Every emotion has a feeling, and each feeling holds a frequency. For example, fear feels constrictive, love feels open and expansive. Lack feels unsafe, and abundance feels like trust and flow. What do you desire? And how would it feel to have that? Feel that now.
Living from coherence
Don’t live for the future, waiting for someone or something to give you what you want so you can feel what you want to feel in your life. Don’t live in the past, don't let your old stories dictate what is created in your current reality. Live and feel your desires now, right now. Every feeling is available to you now.
Your desires are within you because they’re entirely possible for you, they are invitations from the person you’re becoming to let go of the old and step into the new. You’re not here to chase, force, or control outcomes, you’re here to magnetise. You do not need to try harder, let go of trying, align deeper. When thoughts, feelings, and actions are in coherence, everything that is not in alignment in your life will fall away naturally.
When you release the emotion that blocks you, when you embody the frequency of what you want, when you decide to become the person who has it before they have it, your entire reality begins to shift around you.
“This isn’t magic, it’s embodiment”
If you’d love to explore this work further, my book, "Becoming Her – The woman you’ve been taught NOT to be," is available on Amazon, directly from my Bookstore, or find me on Instagram.
Visit my website for more info!
Read more from Tara Swann
Tara Swann, Emotional Empowerment Coach & Author
Tara Swann is an Emotional Empowerment Coach, Author, and Speaker known for helping women alchemise emotional patterns into personal power. She guides women into deeper confidence, clarity, and self-connection through her unique blend of emotional mastery, feminine embodiment, and manifestation work. Tara is the author of You Don’t Have Anxiety, Becoming Her, and The Ocean Is She, and is currently deepening her expertise through formal Tantra Practitioner training. Her mission is to help women remember who they are and consciously create lives that feel aligned, expansive, and unapologetically alive.
