I recently gave one of those viral wealth manifestation meditations a shot. You know the type—ten minutes of visualising bank account numbers, affirming abundance, and telling yourself the universe owes you a payout. I approached it half-amused, half-curious, since I’ve been working through InnerAlchemy frameworks lately and wanted to see how it landed somatically.

Spoiler: my nervous system didn’t get rich. It got anxious.

After about four minutes of forcing myself to "feel" financially secure while literally paying rent on a one-room flat in Singapore, I noticed my shoulders creeping up to my ears, my breath getting shallow, and a weird static buzzing behind my eyes. It’s classic somatic overload. When you cognitively override your baseline reality with a high-stakes fantasy, your amygdala doesn’t care about your affirmations. It just flags the mismatch as stress. I keep skimming papers on predictive coding, and this was a textbook example of your brain screaming "this doesn’t match sensory input" until you literally feel wired like a short circuit. (Fitting, since I spend my days actually wiring buildings.)

None of this is to say manifestation is useless. The problem is when it gets flattened into toxic positivity—treating spiritual practice like a vending machine where you drop in good vibes and expect material goods to drop out. Real contemplative traditions, whether you’re looking at Carl Jung’s active imagination or actual Buddhist shamatha, are about meeting your nervous system where it is, not white-knuckling it into a fantasy. Tarot keeps mirroring this back to me, too. When I pull the Eight of Pentacles, it’s rarely about "manifesting a windfall." It’s about showing up, doing the craft, and trusting the slow build. That’s the inner alchemy that actually holds weight.

Lately, I’ve been leaning into MoonRituals and local community circles to ground the metaphysics. Tracking the lunar cycle forced me to slow down and stop treating spirituality like a productivity hack. If you’ve tried similar meditations and felt that weird disconnect between the "vibes" and your actual body, I’d love to hear how you navigated it. How do you keep the practice without letting it become another form of self-judgment?