Several years ago when I found myself feeling at a low point, I got into meditation, as many do. I was just tired of feeling like no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t figure out how to make things work in my life.

This isn’t to say that nothing was working but it just didn’t feel like it was working. I wasn’t happy, and I was stressed far beyond I could handle.

Some people change because they’ve felt the value in feeling how they want to feel, and others need to feel how horrible it is to feel how they don’t want to feel — I was one of the latter.

Early in my search for healing, I was introduced to the idea of manifestation. It was mystical and magical — and something felt off. I tried the way they teach it. I imagined feeling how I would feel if I had what I desired. I imagined what it would look like if I had the relationship, job, house, lifestyle. I wrote lists and dreamed as big as I could. Then, I noticed what was actually manifesting: things I had listed but that didn’t fulfill me. I was manifesting from a place of dissatisfaction and disorganization.

After some time I had mixed results with manifesting. The manifesting wasn’t working out, and so it was time to turn further inward. I still felt miserable and I was now acutely aware of it. I needed to feel good in my current life.

I worked tirelessly, digging into my motivations driving my behaviors and I started to feel lighter and happier. I felt less resistance to myself and life as it was. I was starting to feel ok.

Then, as I started to have a more clear mind and heart, things I didn’t expect started manifesting. Things I needed. Things I had only had a fleeting thought about, rather than meditating for hours over.

Manifesting is taught, and mindfulness is taught, but their intersection is what produces actual results, and the power of this lies in the nervous system.

Physiologically, the human nervous is designed to provide safety and needs. It does this by storing information about experiences that are safe or unsafe, or meet your needs or don’t. That information is then used to inform your actions, desires, emotions, and thoughts to support keeping the things away that trigger you, or produce anxiety, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, etc. — essentially it keeps the stress away.

So when you want something new that you’ve never had experience with, you imagine you want a particular thing, but this doesn’t consider your fears, triggers, and other obstacles that your nervous system has been trained to respect and support. If you manifest without consideration, you manifest in the narrow field of what you think you want, and end up with what your nervous system will allow you to have safely, and this isn’t usually as satisfying as you imagined it would be.

On the other hand, if you focus on your needs and zoom in on your fears, anxieties or other obstacles to having what you need, your nervous system can let go of the very things that are blocking you from what you need, making the process simple, effective and quick. No more hours of meditating to ‘joy’ your way over and around your nervous system as it just tries to do the job you assigned it to.

But I don’t mean that the process of identifying fears and your self-imposed (or trauma-imposed) road blocks is quick and easy — it is a process of sitting through the reactions of fear and emotion, identifying them, being comfortable with them being there, and then being really honest with yourself about what is really going on when you’re triggered or blocked.

For a long time, I asked myself “why am I doing that?” as I attempted to unwind the complicated mess of anchors and the past inside of me. It worked for a while, but it didn’t get me deep enough. Just like people who heal themselves through meditation and ultimately end up ill again once they fall into an old pattern or are triggered by a strong emotional response or fear, I regressed when I was stressed too. I lost my quiet mind, my tolerance for meditating, my love of time alone with myself, my power of manifesting and synchronicity, all the concepts and ideas that had become a part of my being after hours of reading and experimenting — all gone.

When you ask yourself why you are doing something, it implies to your nervous system that you’re the issue and narrows the focus of your investigative attempt. It shuts you down, in a way, to save you from the stress of being responsible. Good luck finding the root cause once your powerful nervous system kicks in. Asking why can anchor you in self-blame and the solution becomes ‘fixing’ rather than acknowledging and letting a new perspective heal you.

But what about asking what? Asking what is happening with you lets the issue be the issue, without you being the issue. It lets you see the broad picture, which helps you get a more accurate read of what your obstacle is to having what you need or want. When you get to the root of the resistance, the obstacle clears and what you want can finally come in.

Next time you want something that isn’t coming your way, try being clear about what you need out of the situation — is it to have safety, is it to be heard, is it to feel secure by way of steady income — and then as yourself ‘what is going on with me that could block this from happening?’ Sit and evaluate what emotion you feel — is it fear, anger, sadness, worry — and what the emotion is about — I am stressed about the effort it will take, I am afraid that if we live together, we will have more strain on our relationship, etc. Sit and be patient, honest and present and see what wonderful things you can manifest then.