Most conversations about manifestation focus on changing your thoughts. But what if the real reason your affirmations aren’t working has nothing to do with your mindset?
In this solo episode, Kate Northrup shares the missing piece she believes is absent from nearly every manifestation conversation: the body. Drawing on decades of studying manifestation—from listening to Abraham Hicks cassette tapes as a child to her work in neuroscience and nervous system regulation—Kate explains why lasting change doesn’t come from thinking differently, but from feeling differently.
She explores why your nervous system determines what you’re able to receive, how stress keeps you stuck in familiar patterns, and why trying to force a higher vibration often backfires. You’ll also learn why manifestation isn’t about controlling outcomes but expanding your capacity to safely receive what you truly desire.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing all the “right” manifestation practices without seeing results, this episode offers a grounded, body-first perspective that may completely change the way you approach creating the life you want.
“Manifesting is not about changing what you think. It’s about changing how you feel.” – Kate Northrup
Listen on…
🎤 Let’s Dive into the Good Stuff on Plenty 🎤
00:00 Why Affirmations Don’t Work
01:38 Kate’s First Manifestation Lesson
04:15 The Problem with Positive Thinking
06:01 What Manifestation Really Is
08:45 Why the Body Comes First
11:55 Your Nervous System Sets the Limit
15:02 Feeling Safe to Receive
17:37 Stress, Capacity & Manifestation
20:19 Practice the Feeling First
21:13 Body First, Bank Account Second
Episode Transcript
Read the Full Transcript
Kate Northrup: Manifestation is taught by most people as a mind first or a brain only activity.
But that’s actually creating a false disconnection, and this is why your affirmations aren’t
working. Welcome to Plenty, a weekly recalibration of power, money, and safety for high capacity
humans. I’m Kate Northrup, best selling author and creator of Relaxed Money, and this is where
neuroscience meets ancient wisdom meets real wealth strategy. This is the sacred conversation
at the intersection of money, the body, and the life you’re truly here to live.
If you’re ready to reimagine what’s possible for yourself and for the world, you’re in the right
place. Let’s go. Almost everything you’ve been taught about manifestation was based on doing it
from the wrong organ. I learned it when I was probably 11 years old in the back of my mom’s
minivan, and I’m gonna let you in on the secret to neuroscience based manifesting that is
missing basically everywhere that I read, listen, or watch. Anywhere that is talking about
manifesting is largely missing this one piece, and this is why your affirmations aren’t working.
This is why you’re not getting what you want on your vision board, and I’m gonna walk you
through it today. But first, I have a story. So when I was probably 11 years old, my granny, Edna
Northrup, discovered a tape series, like a membership, the subscription, and it was audio
cassette tapes that were a woman named Esther Hicks channeling a nonhuman entity named
Abraham. Now you may be familiar with Abraham Hicks. They gained tremendous popularity,
but at that time, it was the early nineties.
My granny was a real trailblazer, and she started sending these cassette tapes to my mother
who’s always been into the spiritual and the mystical. And my mom started playing them in the
cassette player tape deck of her teal green Mazda minivan. And I remember so clearly, my mom
would pick me up at friends’ houses or at school, and I would you know, I would slide open the
door of that Mazda minivan, and I’d hear that voice of Esther Hicks, and I’d be like, mom, not
again with the manifesting dates. However, my mom taught me what she was learning, and I’m
so grateful she did because it stuck. And then in my mid thirties, I realized there was an added
layer that the instructions I’d received were missing.
So what I was taught is that if you can hold pure positive intent for fourteen seconds, you will
activate the universe, and you will begin to manifest your desire. Now at the age of 14, I used it
to focus on this boy in my class that I had a crush on. I believe there’s a reason that that
manifestation didn’t work. Number one, I was meant to, end up with my husband, Mike. But
number two, there was a missing element, and no one had taught it to my mom because so far
in the, you know, hundreds of hours that I’ve listened to from Abraham, by the way, bowing at
Esther Hicks’ feet.
I am this is no shade to Abraham Hicks. I love their work. However, when they talk about being
in resistance and when they talk about, you know, going downstream. When they talk about all
these things and when I hear other manifestation teachers or other authors teaching about
manifesting, they talk about needing to change your vibration or change your frequency, which I
love. I agree.
However, they talk about it as though it’s a switch that you can flip, where I can just feel cranky
or depressed or anxious or annoyed with the world, or I can be feeling sorry for myself or self
conscious, all these things. And the instruction is just change your vibration. Just change your
frequency as though I could just flip a switch. If it were that easy, we would all be feeling
amazing all the time, and we would all be manifesting everything we desire all the time. You
would say, I’m a millionaire.
I am a money magnet. Whatever affirmation, and you would you would attract what it is that you
want. And yet millions and millions of people, probably billions of people, I don’t know how many
people are out here practicing manifesting, are doing those things. They’re trying to change their
vibration. They’re doing affirmations.
They’re trying to change their thinking, and they’re coming up short. Right? They get passed
over for the jobs. They don’t get the book deal. They don’t get the audition, whatever it is.
So what is this missing piece? Well, first of all, I wanna tell you something important. Manifesting
is something you are doing all the time. All manifesting is is turning the invisible into something
visible. Every time you make a stir fry, right, you take all the ingredients, there is no stir fry.
You chop them up. You cook them. You put seasonings. Now there’s a stir fry. A stir fry is a
manifestation.
Every entrepreneur who’s out here having an idea and figuring out how to make it, figuring it out
how to get it to customers, how to deliver it, how to market, all of those things, that is
manifesting. So manifesting is not magic. It’s actually atomic. Let me explain. Your heart’s
electromagnetic field is over 5,000 times greater and stronger than the electromagnetic field of
your brain.
Isn’t that fascinating? And yet manifestation is taught by most people as a mind first or as a
head only or a brain only activity, but that’s actually creating a false disconnection between our
entire operating system and the incredible technology that’s available to us. So it’s taught really
as a head trip. Visualize what you want. Think about what you want.
Focus on what you want. All of those things, all of those activities are in the mind. And while I do
believe that you can use your mind in incredibly powerful ways, when we include our bodies, we
actually are, like, dumping fertilizer on all of our manifesting because our frequency, which can
be measured in our electromagnetic field, is actually so much stronger when it comes from the
heart. So not just what we’re thinking, but far more importantly, how we’re feeling. And I wanna
land this for you that how you feel is what you are going to manifest, not primarily what you
think.
So as an example, let’s say you’re a business owner and you imagine getting this really high
paying client or really high paying gig more than anything you’ve ever received in your life, and
you’re all lit up about it and you’re imagining it and you’re thinking about it and you’re saying, you
know, maybe it’s a $25,000 speaking gig. You know? And you’re saying, I am a paid speaker
making $25,000 a year. What happens in our nervous system when we are imagining or thinking
about a scenario that we’ve not experienced before is that if we’re not actively metabolizing our
stress and threat that builds up in our nervous system, we are going to receive the visualization
or the imagining or the thinking about a new scenario, even if it’s a dream new scenario, like
getting paid $25,000 for a speaking gig, our body, our brain and body, our survival wiring is
actually gonna receive the idea of that new circumstance as a threat, and everything in you will
actually clamp up. So instead of it increasing your vibration and raising your frequency, you will
go into anxiety and fear and constriction, which lowers your frequency, which reduces your
vibration.
We’ve been taught in order to manifest, we need to think positive thoughts, and we need to feel
good all the time. But the problem is that’s turned us into little thought polices and emotion
polices. And then when we’re having a normal completely healthy emotion such as fear or anger
or sadness, we then get scared. And, like, I’m gonna attract something bad. I’m gonna attract
something wrong because now I’m low vibe.
You know those, T shirts and bumper stickers that say high vibes only? I that drives me crazy.
Right? That drives me crazy because, actually, in order to manifest, we need to be experiencing
the full spectrum of being human, which means experiencing and allowing the full spectrum of
emotion to run through our bodies. Emotion simply means energy in motion.
There really is no such thing as a negative or a positive emotion, but what we there is such thing
as is emotional suppression or emotional repression. When we suppress or repress our
emotions, when we do anything to try to not feel what we’re feeling, it actually lowers and
weakens the electromagnetic field of our heart, which is the very thing that’s going out in the
world communicating who we are to other people, which is a huge percentage of how we
manifest things. What we actually wanna go for is coherency. Now coherency is when our inner
experience is a match for our outer experience, and our thoughts, feelings, and actions all line
up. One of the most powerful frequencies is authenticity.
Authenticity does not mean slapping on a fake smile and pretending everything is great.
Authenticity means telling the truth with our mouths and our emotions and our behaviors. And
when we can get everything lining up, we actually become stronger in our frequency, stronger in
our vibration. You know those people who make you feel safe because they tell the truth? The
truth may not always be, I’m so happy and excited.
Maybe sometimes the truth is, you know what? I’m really sad today. I just found out that my dog
is sick. But there’s a settling that happens in the field when you are telling the truth and when
you’re around someone else who’s telling the truth. The more we suppress and repress emotion,
the less truthful our frequency is, meaning the less coherent it is, meaning the signal gets
scrambled.
So we might say, oh, I want to be a paid speaker making $25,000 per gig. But when we bring
that into our consciousness, if everything in our system locks down and then we don’t
metabolize past stresses, you know, maybe there was an experience in sixth grade where we
you got up in front of the classroom and you gave a talk to your class and you were made fun of
or you were laughed at or you stuttered your words. And that fear may still be living in your body.
But there are ways to metabolize those past stresses to clear the channel so that your signal is
no longer scrambled, so that there’s no longer static on the line for you around this manifestation
that you desire. So what clogs up the system is not our hard feelings.
It’s not feeling. You know when there’s, like, a thunderstorm in the summertime and the air is all
thick and soupy and hot and all the humidity, and it’s heavy. And then there’s this big
thunderstorm, and afterwards, it smells incredible, and the air feels light, and usually the
temperature has dropped a few degrees. That is that feeling of fresh possibility that’s the very
same thing when you allow yourself to feel your feelings all the way through. It actually reduces
stress dramatically.
So the game is not to feel good all the time. The game is to feel what you’re feeling and go all
the way in and all the way through so that it can clear and so that you unclog the pipes of
manifestation. Our nervous systems, especially when they’re overloaded with stress and threat
and we’re not actively metabolizing the stress and threat, our nervous systems recognize
anything new as a threat. That could be an affirmation. That could be a visualization.
That could be anything you’re thinking about that you wanna manifest that’s something that
you’ve not experienced before. Our body actually will retreat into what it recognizes. And so
even if you say you want something and you believe you want something cognitively, if you’ve
not methodically updated your nervous system that that new thing you want is safe, you will not
be able to have the capacity to recognize it, receive it, or keep it, or enjoy it. Now that applies to
money, and that applies to every other kind of manifestation we might want. So we need to be in
the practice of signaling safety to our bodies and metabolizing stress.
I was out in the backyard of a previous home of ours at 05:30 in the morning. I’d woken up really
early, it was the summertime, and I was watching the sunrise. And out of the corner of my eye, I
saw two deer. And they were just happily munching the grass, and they didn’t notice me. And
then I breathed, and all of a sudden, their bodies were on high alert.
They could feel that there was someone there. There was something there, and I might be a
predator. And I felt so bad, but, you know, they were having this quiet moment, but I had to
breathe so I breathe. And then they ran off into into the bushes and into the trees. And what I
know because of my years and years and years of study of the human body and of the way that
our bodies are animals and the way animals’ bodies works is that they went in and they
metabolized the stress.
You know, for some animals, it’s full body shaking. There’s different you know, they might be co
regulating. They’re going retreating into safety and releasing and metabolizing the stress, and
surely those deer went about the rest of their day, and they were fine. They didn’t need to bring it
up with their therapist. They didn’t need to journal about it.
They didn’t need to, you know, be, like, remembering that ten years later. As humans, though,
we don’t have active practices to dump our stress and threat bucket. In fact, we just stay in front
of our computers, and we stay in front of our screens, and we lock up, and we know instead of
feeling. And so one of the most important things we can do for our manifestation is to be in
constant practice of metabolizing our stress so that we’re opening up the channels. And one of
the best ways to metabolize your stress is to feel your feelings.
Emotion. Energy in motion. Last week, I did a wonderful episode with my dear friend, Emily
Fletcher, who is the founder of Ziva, and she has taught over 60,000 high performers how to
meditate in a way that actually helps you to metabolize stress. Her methodology is one of the
best ways that I know to metabolize stress across any area of your life. And then within Relaxed
Money, we have an eight step process that’s body based for using these manifestation
techniques in your financial life specifically.
Now Emily has a free event going on called magic maker, and it actually closes out tomorrow,
the day after this episode drops. But you can go to katenorthrup.com/magic to get a taste of how
to metabolize your stress with these revolutionary techniques. And if you’re in Relaxed Money,
you already know that we practice this in money date five and across all of our money dates.
Nothing you will ever manifest in your life, nothing that happens outside of you will ever give you
access to feeling any kind of way that you don’t have access to feeling right now. So the move is
actually to practice clearing the stress from your body, feeling your emotions all the way through,
and then feeling the way you think whatever you manifest is going to help you to feel right now.
So if you want to become work optional, the feeling under that might be freedom and
spaciousness. So go get your hit of freedom and spaciousness today, right now without anything
in your life needing to change so that you will begin to expand your capacity to receive the very
thing that you desire, which is the freedom and the spaciousness that being work optional would
provide. But I promise you, having worked with thousands of people, I know this to be true. If
you cannot feel the way you want to feel now, when your external circumstances change, you
will not be able to access that feeling, and the manifestation will fall flat. So practice feeling that
way now.
And, of course, that is exactly what we do inside relaxed money. That’s built in to our
frameworks and protocols with specific applied neurology tools to rewire your nervous system
and make you feel like it is safe to have what you want and to train your body and your brain to
know it is safe to have what you want, which then, of course, makes it available to you. I have
been studying manifesting since back in the day in the back of my mother’s minivan with her
cassette tapes, and it’s still not mainstream that you need your body on board in order for the
manifesting to work because manifesting does not come from what you think about. Manifesting
comes from how you feel, and you cannot think your way into feeling a different way. You can
only feel your way into feeling the way you want to feel.
While manifesting certainly has gone mainstream since the early nineties, which I’m happy to
see, the missing piece of the body has not. But you have heard it here. So you can check out
Emily’s free magic maker event, and you can dive deeper into all of these practices in my world
as it applies to your financial life. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, body first, bank
account second.
See you next time. You’re already manifesting all the time. The question is from where? Most
people, when they’re not getting what they want in their external reality, they think harder, work
more hours, try harder, and it’s very frustrating. But, actually, all of our manifestations, everything
in the seen world, in the visible, first begins in the unseen, in the invisible.
And when you learn how to tap into the invisible, otherwise known as the field, you can get
everything you want. And not only everything that you want, but everything that is good for the
planet. You can learn how during a mind blowing three day free workshop coming up that my
friend, Emily Fletcher, is leading. Emily has spent over eighteen years at the intersection of
ancient spirituality and modern neuroscience. And this event, magic maker, is going to unlock
the intersection between the unseen and the seen, and you will learn manifestation techniques
that will blow you open in terms of what is possible for you and for everyone you touch.
Head over to katenorthrup.com/magic to reserve your free spot. The link is also in the show
notes. Katenorthrup.com/magic.
Links and Resources:
Kate’s InstagramZiva Magic Maker
✨ What If Manifesting Wasn’t About Trying Harder?
Most people think manifestation is about positive thinking or visualizing what they want.
But you can’t manifest from a stressed nervous system. When your body is in survival mode, it scans for what might go wrong, not for opportunity. No amount of vision boarding changes that.
That’s exactly what Magic Maker is designed to shift.
In this free 3-part live experience, Emily Fletcher, founder of Ziva, combines ancient meditation practices with modern neuroscience to teach you how manifestation actually works, starting with your nervous system.
Inside Magic Maker, you’ll learn:
🔹 The science behind why stress has been quietly blocking your manifestations
🔹 How to access the quantum field, a verifiable fourth state of consciousness beyond waking, sleeping, and dreaming
🔹 How to dissolve the limiting beliefs keeping you from what you want, at the root
🔹 How to get your head, heart, and whole body into coherence with your desires
Manifestation isn’t about forcing life to go your way. It’s about becoming an energetic match for the experiences, opportunities, and relationships you’re asking for.
Magic Maker happens live on Thursday, July 16, Tuesday, July 21, and Thursday, July 23. Kate will be there, and replays are available if you can’t make a session live.
👉 Save your free spot for Magic Maker at katenorthrup.com/magic. ✨


