 So guys, I'm going to talk about the law of attraction based on the book, The Secret. I'm sure you're aware of that. It's sold millions and millions of copies worldwide and loads of people out there trying to manifest probably generations of people at this point who have attempted to become manifesters of their own life experience. And I suppose really it's weird maybe for me to be talking about this as a therapist because this is associated with sort of spirituality or maybe new age spirituality but there's nothing wrong with having a place for spirituality as a therapist. But the point of it is really I'm not here to show you how to be a manifester or how to be a good manifester or how to get it whatever it is you want because as you might be able to see here I'm talking about the law of attraction and I'm going to talk about a good thing about it but bad things about the law of attraction. Okay, because I'm actually not taking away anything from anybody. If you love the law of attraction, if you love the book The Secret and you're out there and you're trying to work on it, that's absolutely fine. But for anyone who has had different experiences there are some problems around this and I'm actually going to show you something else, something better than that. So maybe we should just dive straight in here and talk about what the... What's that about the good thing? The good thing about the law of attraction is this, sold millions of copies and well actually the first thing I should mention for anyone who doesn't know the law of attraction basically the principle, the theory behind it is you have emotions good and bad and basically you want to raise your emotional set point is what it would say. Jerry and Esther Hicks have a book called Asking It Is Given and compared to The Secret it's ten times better than The Secret but it still has this manifestation, trying to get external things in the world approach. But they all have the theory behind them all is that if you're constantly in a negative emotional set point you will start to have experiences in the world you will start to manifest things externally from yourself that are also negative and alternatively if you can work on it, you do enough work on yourself you raise your emotional set point from shame, despair, the low ones all the way right up to joy and positive expectation and then sure enough you will start to manifest things differently good things in your life externally so that's the outline of it. And the good thing about this before I get on to what I don't like about it and something else you can try instead is that it raised awareness about the importance of being aware of what's going on in my inner world not all externally focused just problem solving externally in the world. So that's fantastic, that's a good thing and that's something I totally endorse. We do need to switch our attention from the external to the internal but there are problems with it. I have five of them here, I probably have more issues with it but okay it increases awareness I'm going to start here actually I think it kind of misdirects us it does direct us back here into being aware of our emotions but it kind of devalues your emotional reality or what you're going through emotionally because it's basically saying that you're going to start to work on and fix and manipulate your emotional set points to get them higher in order to get the external thing. So it's really saying your emotions are a means to an end okay fix your emotions and then you'll get what you want which is the reward so it's basically saying your emotions are secondary that's really what it's saying okay so the truth is that your emotions are your reality the quality of your life is completely the emotional quality of your life or at least how you are with your emotions not the quality necessary of the emotions but how you the relationship you have with your emotions in your life and how do you live with them so that's a big problem okay now the other thing it does is it creates this huge conflict within ourselves why is that the case well you have a nervous system you're and a nervous system it's kind of like your immune system fights off the the bacteria virus gets into your body and your immune system goes to work on that you have a nervous system your nervous system is basically all the things that you've gone through in your life your nervous system has reacted and kept you safe and come up with effective strategies things that work for you on an emotional level the psychological level that has a set point now it's like it has a a fixed posture and the law of attraction basically says yeah no that's that's irrelevant okay you just need to fix the emotions that are there without ever trying to say hold on my my set point my emotional set points are based on a hugely complex and sophisticated series of events and factors that all came together to form my nervous system my disposition as it is right now so the law of attraction kind of undermines that whole process it doesn't really seek to understand well why do i have these low emotions why are they present why are they here i'm worse than that it makes you judge yourself if your emotional set points are are generally low if you're typically anxious or if you're maybe depressed over a long period of times or you're pessimistic it's all due to your nervous system and your past your past conditioning there's nothing inherently wrong with that in fact your nervous system the the posture it is taken up based on probably all the horrible things and all the good things that's happened to you in your life has kept you safe that's what has worked to guide you to this point so for us to come along and say oh well let's just use positive thinking or visualizing and uh that'll fix it you know it's not going to happen guys and it shouldn't happen it shouldn't happen because there's nothing wrong with you there's nothing wrong with you if you have these bad emotions that we hear about okay they're there for a very good perfectly fine reason that's the real work all of this stuff i'm talking about here by the way i'm moving into kind of a new approach to this which is ending conflict within ourselves because the conflict in ourselves is the problem the negative feelings aren't the problem believe it or not it's wishing them away wanting to get rid of them needing them to change being in despair for the fact that they're here okay that's it's the thoughts about the emotions that are really the issue so it sets up this huge inner conflict and it's not good guys it's not good at all what it does i've written down personally here what this book does the secret or anything about the law of attraction it's it's basically telling you to just know forget about the negative stuff okay forget about all those bad horrible emotions that are probably tried to trauma tied to trauma and let's just visualize positive stuff all this is doing for you is is feeding into your persona it's you being a spiritual person or you being a successful person or whatever okay any approach any psychology any spirituality that does this is a waste of time let me speak frankly about it it is a complete waste of time and again all it does is it perpetuates inner conflict so you know we want to go deeper than a persona we don't want to have a good persona we want to kind of drop the masks a little bit and get more authentic with what's actually going on within ourselves what's my reality like you know it starts off with the third thing i'll talk about here is the assumption that there's something wrong with you and you are broken you know i mean if that's the premise we're starting with here how is how we ever even going to manifest anything even if it is true you know i'm broken so now i'm going to get to work on fixing my emotions and hopefully i'll manifest something good when really if that's the premise every time you're going to do that into a session a manifestation session you're just reinforcing the idea that i'm broken i'm defective so let's get to work here and fix this you know you see how kind of subtle this is you're not broken your defense mechanisms your your past your conditioning are all there for perfectly understandable reasons to not fight against those reasons it's to be a little bit more compassionate to ourselves and then when we're not compassionate to understand why we're not being compassionate you know it's it's everything it's allowing everything like the book talks about allowing um yeah well i think it probably talked about allowing good stuff but what about the bad stuff you know we allow everything we give respect and reference to every inner experience that's there all we're doing is bringing presence to those feelings when they come up so i think i've talked about pretty much everything there um the last one is not a small one either the law of attraction doesn't work right it just doesn't work the idea that if you have these emotional set points and you're working and raising your your your emotional levels and then you'll you'll manifest things that are in accordance with those it's simply not true and there's loads of ways you can think about that i mean how many things have you been afraid of in your life and most of us like well maybe not most of us well i would say most of us but a lot of us have anxiety and low level fear or big fears or phobias and how many of those things we're in an emotional set point with those things but do they manifest no they don't and thank god the law of attraction doesn't work because can you imagine what our lives would be like if it actually did work what it really does is the the the element of truth that is in it is that the the thoughts we have and the beliefs we have and the intentions we have they do shape our perceptions of the world how we experience and how we see the world so in that sense they are important absolutely but this thing of manifesting externally first of all you shouldn't even be thinking that way because it's it's misdirection to what's real but it's just not true okay the fears we have they don't manifest themselves almost all the time any any therapist that works on anxiety will tell you this you probably hear people saying all the time 95 percent of the things you worry about don't come true and isn't that great the other thing is there's another few ways you can think about this like relationships opposites attract all the time someone yet you are completely not in a vibrational match with that's the person you might be attracted to the most you know something else actors okay actors embody the role of someone who is a very very different vibrational level to themselves their own personalities now do does it happen in their lives that they start to manifest the things that are similar to the characters they're playing of course it doesn't okay not in the least doesn't happen like that people play in drug dealers or murderers or gangsters or whatever you know that's not what happens in in their private lives thank god so the point of it all again it's just so great that you can see it doesn't work because then you can just let yourself off the hook if you think you're giving something up because you're not giving up anything the only thing we're giving up is inner conflict and we're gaining everything by bringing the focus back to where it should have been all along which is on understanding ourselves understanding any emotion that's present within myself and realizing there's nothing wrong with me there is nothing wrong with me the way i am i'm actually i'm actually okay i'm actually okay now we will talk here about being progressive with this about growing with this and how to work with that inner conflict and that resistance that we always run up against when we're trying to create something in our lives something new something different to the past conditioning and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that as well but the way we do that is to work with ourselves to stop fighting everything that's coming up and labeling it and trying to change it and fix it and to go with it allow it to go with itself and then that conditioning starts to be less defensive starts to feel less under attack and change comes more more naturally and we're going with what Lao Tzu called the you know being with the flow of life life has a flow and all your past all those things that happen to you that was the flow of life and the thing that brought you here is the thing that will bring you home as as Rumi said you know it's just to go with that flow of life rather than fighting against ourselves so it's not about saying you can't do certain things because of your conditioning you can absolutely do things you can do anything really in truth but it's to it's to not fight against our past and condemn ourselves as being broken and stuck and never been able to change ourselves you know that's all the story that's all the story and it's not real it's not authentic so there it is guys five five flaws as i see it with the law of attraction i'm sure some people will think i'm wrong but i'd love to really get your feedback on this and let me know what you think also if you would like to work with me you can in terms of law and this resistance in your conflict because that's practical it's practically applied to every aspect of your life and also i'm making a course on my on my website i already have a video course there for self-sabotage and procrastination but i'm making another one of this in terms of how to integrate ourselves fully and end in our conflict so go to my website and keep an eye there as well if you're interested in that course which is on the way so guys i'll leave it there for today thanks so much for watching and uh there's nothing wrong with you you're fine and you are capable of change that's gradual and has self-regard from where you currently are right now take care of yourself