Besides, right now, I had other priorities. Like wolfing down these enchiladas and digging into The Aspirational Action Plan.
THE ASPIRATIONAL ACTION PLAN
INTRODUCTION
Get Ready to Evolve
Psst.
Hey, you.
Yeah, I’m talking to you. The woman reading this book.
I see you, sweetie.
I see right straight into your heart. There’s hurt there, and disappointment. Hidden longing and dormant ambition. Echoes of your past struggles and shadows of your unmanifested dreams.
I see how desperately you want to make a change, and how utterly impossible you think it is to do so.
I know you want to be better. I know you can be better.
Because—and here’s where I’ll let you in on a little secret—I used to be you.
I used to be the woman who wanted greatness, but never achieved it. I watched everyone around me move onward and upward, yet I stayed still as a stone. I allowed my past to weigh me down and my negative thoughts to hold me back. I made excuses for my multitudinous failures.
Then one morning, I woke up, drew back the curtains, let great golden beams of sunshine stream into my bedroom, and declared, NO MORE.
I would stop making excuses.
I would move forward.
I would achieve greatness.
In that moment, I resolved to manifest my aspirations into being.
And it worked.
Now I’m ready to share the secrets of my success with you. Contained within these pages is a system for recalibrating your entire existence. You’ll learn all about my four-step manifesting process, including:
1. DEFINING YOUR ASPIRATION
Use creative visualization to meander through your subconscious mind and decide what you want your new life to look like.
2. SENDING YOUR DESIRES OUT INTO THE UNIVERSE
Construct a tangible representation of your aspiration with a vision board and cement it with positive affirmations.
3. CLEARING AWAY NEGATIVE ENERGY
Explore rituals such as sage burning and fire ceremonies to banish destructive thought patterns and cleanse your physical spaces.
4. RECEIVING YOUR ABUNDANCE
Open your heart, mind, and spirit to the wonders that are coming your way.
The Aspirational Action Plan >will help you put your past in the past and guide you toward an extraordinary future that’s brimming with possibility and abundance. By reading this book, you’re choosing to walk the path toward happy.
But first, a warning: you’ve got to want this more than anything you’ve ever wanted in your life. You’ve got to believe this will be yours. And you’ve got to know you deserve this, deep down in your soft, spongy marrow. Because energy follows thought. And if you tell the universe, “Hey, I want this, and I know it will be mine!” then it’ll obey.
You may be thinking, This is too hard, Demi, my dreams are too big for this one small woman. But the truth is, sweetie, no dream is too big for you. And if you’re having trouble believing it, then fake it.
Fake it until you make it your reality.
Your life doesn’t manifest out of nothingness. It is born of thought, energy, desire, craving. Tune your emotions and attentions to the frequency of success, and the universe will dial right in. The universe will listen and the universe will deliver.
In other words, pretend you already have what you want, and eventually it will be yours.
So...are you ready?
Then buckle up, sweetie. It’s going to be a wild ride.
You’re about to #EVOLVE.
Chapter 6
There was a funny sort of swirling in my brain. Thoughts came at me fast, spinning in circles and generating sparks. A jolt shot down my spine and out toward my fingers and toes, making my entire body vibrate with a rare and welcome feeling: validation.
Call me crazy, but it kind of felt like Demi DiPalma was speaking directly to me. Like she really could see right straight into my heart. All those struggles she’d described sounded achingly familiar. Especially the feeling that everyone else was moving forward, while I was standing still, mired in the quicksand of past failures, old boyfriends, dead and deadbeat parents.
It was a short book, more of a glorified pamphlet, so I devoured it in under an hour. True, there were certain parts that made me raise an eyebrow, like the chart detailing the essential oil and crystal combinations that would assuredly help me “manifest abundance,” whatever that meant. Perhaps I would have been less skeptical had she not included a discount code for ordering the sets, dubbed “Prosperity Packages,” on demidipalma.com.
For the most part, though, I was into her whole spiel. The focused ritual of creating a vision board, the confidence-boosting power of positive affirmations, the cathartic symbolism of throwing all your negative experiences and energies into a fire and watching them burn. It sounded inspiring. Though I wasn’t exactly sure how it was going to change my life.
Because I kept getting tripped up on the first step: defining my aspiration. That was the crux of my whole problem, right? I had no idea what would lead me on the path to happy, no clue where it started or which direction to walk in to get there. No passion I was aching to pursue.
I tried using that whole “creative visualization” technique, but when I closed my eyes, all I saw was an Instagram feed scrolling through my brain. Pictures of kittens and beaches and enviable thigh gaps flew by on an infinite loop. Apparently, social media had zapped me of my ability to generate an original thought.
Then again, maybe I was—as Demi would put it—“meandering through my subconscious mind.” Even though I had no interest in being an Instagram influencer, I certainly wouldn’t have minded if my life looked like one of those perfectly curated feeds. And according to Demi, aspirations were all about what you wanted your life to look like, not about what you actually did.
Which somehow didn’t seem right. Shouldn’t an “action plan” be about taking action?
The more time I spent on this, the more ridiculous it seemed. The universe wasn’t going to dial into my desires, no matter what frequency I tuned them to. That didn’t even make sense! Besides, right now my only desire was to chuck this book across the room and take a leisurely scroll through Instagram.
But if I gave in to that desire, I’d be letting Natasha down. She’d asked me to follow her advice. To read this book and to take control of my life. There was no way I could ignore her, not after everything she’d done for me. And honestly, it’s not like I had any other solid plan to turn my life around.
Obviously, there was no other choice. Even though I didn’t believe in Demi DiPalma’s four-step manifesting process, I was just going to have to fake it.