or the first two years of this practice, I used the word karma the way most people do. Loosely. Casually. The way you say it when something bad happens to someone who had it coming, or when you drop your phone in a parking lot and think, well, I know what I did.
That version of karma is basically a vending machine with a moral chip. You put in an action, you get out a consequence. Good behavior deposits, bad behavior withdraws. The universe keeps the ledger.
I carried that understanding into my manifestation work and didn't notice how much it was quietly undermining everything.
The ledger I didn't know I was keeping
If you're looking for structured support alongside this kind of practice, the store has a small catalog worth looking at.
Here is what the vending machine model does to you when you're also trying to manifest.
You want something. You do the practice. You do the SATS, you shift your self-concept, you try to feel the end. And underneath it all, there's a voice that says: but do I deserve this? Not in the way where you intellectually question whether you've done enough inner work. In the way where you really wonder whether the universe has your file and your file doesn't look great.
I grew up Catholic. My grandmother's rosary was never far from her hands when she was worried, and worry, for that family, was a spiritual act. You were supposed to worry about whether you'd been good enough. That's what made you good. The anxiety was the point.
When I found Neville Goddard's The Power of Awareness in March 2022, I was thirty years old and on my kitchen floor at eleven at night on a Tuesday. Priya had sent me the audiobook at three in the morning a few weeks earlier during a stretch of insomnia, and I had been listening in the dark. Something cracked open. I understood that my imagination was causative, that the state I occupied was what reproduced in my life, that consciousness was the ground of everything.
But I had not yet understood karma. So karma stayed in the background, this ambient sense that whatever I manifested would have to pass through some kind of approval process. Some moral checksum. Did I earn this? Have I paid enough? Is the ledger balanced?
It was Catholic guilt wearing a Sanskrit name.
What karma actually means (and why it matters for the practice)
The word karma comes from the Sanskrit karman, meaning action or deed. In early Vedic use it referred to ritual action, the performance of rites that maintained cosmic and social order. By the time you get to the Upanishads and early Buddhist texts, karma had expanded into something more psychologically sophisticated: a principle of causality connecting intention, action, and result across time.
The critical word there is intention.
The earliest Buddhist formulations of karma, particularly in the Pali Canon, located karma specifically in cetana, which means volition or intention. The Buddha was recorded as saying, in translation: "It is intention that I call karma. Having intended, one performs actions through body, speech, and mind." The action is downstream of the intention. The seed is in the will.
This is where the vending machine model breaks down entirely, and where something much more interesting begins.
If karma is primarily about intention, not about the action's surface form, then the question shifts. The question becomes: what is the quality of consciousness behind what I'm doing? What is the state I'm operating from? What is the intention I'm planting?
Sit with that for a second.
Because Neville Goddard, writing in mid-twentieth century New York, drawing from mystical Christianity and William Blake and Scripture, arrived at almost exactly the same place. He said the state you occupy is what you plant. Your assumption is the seed. Your imaginal act is the intention. The feeling you sustain is the creative act.
They're not describing the same metaphysics. Neville is not a Buddhist and Buddhism is not Neville. But they're both pointing at something the vending machine misses entirely: it's not what you do. It's what you are, in consciousness, in the sustained attention of your being.
The concept I hadn't encountered: vasanas
This is where I want to go slowly, because this is the part that actually changed how I practice.
In the Yogic and Vedantic traditions, there's a concept called vasanas. The word is sometimes translated as "latent impressions," sometimes as "residual tendencies," sometimes as "habitual patterns of the subtle body." The idea is that every experience you have, and every intention you hold, leaves an impression in consciousness. Like a groove cut into a record. Over time, those grooves become the default path. The needle falls into them automatically.
Vasanas are why you can say all the right words in a scripting session and feel nothing. The grooves run elsewhere. Your verbal intention is new, but your habitual consciousness is old, and the habitual one is louder because it has been playing longer.
Here's the connection to manifestation that I had to figure out the slow way:
Your current results are not punishment. They are pattern. They are the accumulated grooves of your sustained consciousness over time, playing out into physical form. The debt I was carrying when I lost my job in 2022 (about $40,000 at the time, just to give you the number) didn't appear in my life because I had done bad things and the universe was billing me. It appeared because I had operated for eight years from a consciousness of scarcity and grinding, of never-enough and must-produce-more, and that consciousness had been deepening its groove with every 70-hour week.
This reframing sounds simple. It isn't, emotionally. There is a kind of freedom in the vending machine model, because at least in that model your situation can be blamed on your past actions and the ledger can theoretically balance. In the vasana model, your situation is a mirror of your current habitual consciousness, which means the responsibility is more present-tense and more intimate. You can't blame actions from years ago. You have to look at what you are sustaining right now, in the quiet of your mind, in the quality of attention you bring to your own life.
The part where I actually had to do the work
What changed for me between March 2022 and the middle of 2023 was not a single technique. It was a gradual revision of what I was sustaining.
I had a lot of help I'd found on my own, slowly, with a lot of false starts. Books, mostly. Some somatic work I found through my friend Beatriz, who had been doing this kind of practice longer than I had and who kept sending me voice notes about polyvagal theory and embodiment and why thinking your way into a new state is only part of the equation.
But the karmic reframe was what made the practice stick.
Because before I understood it, I was doing manifestation work as if I were making deposits into a cosmic bank. Scripting, visualization, affirmations, and then waiting for the balance to tip. And the problem was that the cosmic bank model still assumed a ledger. It still assumed a transactional universe. Which meant the anxiety of the ledger remained, just relocated. Instead of have I been good enough to deserve this, the question became have I done enough sessions to deserve this, and that is the same question with different words.
The vasana model asked something else: what is the quality of consciousness I am actually living in? What are the grooves I am deepening with my daily attention?
And when I was honest about that, in 2022 and into 2023, the answer was: fear. Specifically, a fear that was very, very practiced. Eight years of 70-hour weeks had carved it deep. I knew how to operate from fear so fluently that it felt like competence. It felt like productivity. It felt like the way responsible adults behaved in a difficult world.
Unlearning that was not a scripting session. It was a slow renovation of what I was willing to feel, regularly, without crisis pushing me.
What does that look like in practice? For me, it meant building an actual morning that wasn't primarily defensive. Not checking my phone before coffee. Not running threat assessments before nine a.m. It meant sitting with the sensation of things being okay, not as a pollyanna affirmation but as a deliberate choice to give more time to that groove than to the fear groove.
It sounds mundane. The work often is.
Fourteen months after the layoff, I had cleared the $40,000. That wasn't a vending machine result. That was a pattern gradually becoming a different pattern.
Where Buddhism gets specific about desire
There's a question I've been waiting to address, because it's the one that comes up every time I write about Eastern philosophy and manifestation in the same article.
Does Buddhism say you shouldn't want things? And if so, how do you square that with a practice that is entirely about wanting things and bringing them into being?
The short answer is that Buddhism doesn't say desire is bad. It says tanha, a specific kind of craving characterized by clinging and aversion, is the source of suffering. The distinction is subtle and important and I've written about it elsewhere. (If you want the full version, What Buddha Taught About Desire and Why It Matters for Manifestation goes into it at length.)
For our purposes here: the problem in Buddhist psychology isn't wanting. The problem is the quality of wanting. Specifically, wanting that comes from a premise of deficiency. Craving that says: I am not okay until I have this. That kind of wanting amplifies the groove of not-enough. It deepens the vasana of lack. And so even if you get the thing, the groove remains, and the craving attaches to the next thing, and the suffering continues.
What this actually maps to in manifestation practice is something Neville was very clear about: the state you manifest from determines the quality of what arrives, and more importantly, whether it arrives at all. Manifesting from desperation is seeding desperation. Manifesting from genuine fullness, from a felt sense of having even before the evidence appears, is seeding a different reality.
The Buddhist framing and the Neville framing converge on the same practical point: the consciousness you sustain while wanting something is more determinative than the wanting itself.
This is not an excuse to pretend you don't want things. It's an invitation to examine the texture of the wanting.
Karma as a creative principle, not a moral ledger
So here is where I've landed, after four years of practice.
Karma, understood through the lens of intention and consciousness rather than the ledger-and-punishment model, is actually a description of the same law that Neville was working with. Consciousness is causative. Intention is creative. The grooves you deepen are the world you produce.
This is not the karma of "she had it coming." This is the karma of you are always already planting something, whether you're conscious of it or not, and what you plant is less about the surface form of your actions than about the quality of being you are operating from.
Which means karma is not in conflict with manifestation. Karma, properly understood, is a manifestation principle.
The vending machine version, the version that's really just Catholic guilt or Evangelical prosperity gospel wearing a different hat, has a ledger and a judge and a balance that has to clear before the good stuff can arrive. That version creates anxiety, which deepens the groove of lack, which produces more of what you were trying to escape. It's self-defeating in the specific way that most spiritual frameworks become self-defeating when they're borrowed without examination.
The consciousness version says: what you sustain in awareness is what reproduces in form. The present-moment quality of your inner life is both the cause and the preview. You are always manifesting. The question is only what.
I find this more demanding, not less. There is no ledger to balance. There is only the ongoing quality of what I am being, right now, and the grooves I am choosing to deepen. That's a practice with no finish line.
But it's also, really, a practice that works. And the reason it works is that it stops locating the creative power somewhere outside you, in a universe with a clipboard, and places it exactly where it has always been: in your sustained attention.
The thread that connects everything
I want to give you something practical before we end, because I have been in abstract territory for most of this and that is not where the practice lives.
Do you want to know the question I return to now instead of have I done enough sessions or have I been good enough to deserve this?
The question is: what am I practicing right now?
Not in my scripting journal. In my actual, ambient, daily consciousness. When I'm making coffee at seven in the morning and I haven't made any decisions yet, what is the groove I fall into? When I'm reading something that reminds me of a financial fear, what do I do in the next thirty seconds? When I'm waiting for something to manifest and it hasn't yet, what state do I sustain in that gap?
Those moments, the small unconscious ones, are where karma actually lives. They are where the planting happens. The scripting session is an hour. The ambient consciousness is sixteen hours a day. The vasana that gets reinforced more is not the one you addressed intentionally in the morning. It's the one that ran on background process all afternoon.
This doesn't mean the formal practice is useless. It means the formal practice is trying to shift the background process, and you should know that's what you're aiming at.
For me, the shift happened gradually. Beatriz sent me a voice note once about a body-based practice she'd been doing, something simple, just checking in with the physical sensation of safety several times a day. Not a meditation session. Just a pause, a breath, a noticing of whether the body was braced or open. She'd been doing it for months and had started to notice the background process changing.
I started doing something similar. Not because I expected it to manifest anything in particular. Because I was tired of the fear groove being the loudest one in the room.
The results were not cinematic. The debt cleared over fourteen months, which felt slow while it was happening. The freelance contract appeared six days after the layoff, which felt miraculous, but now I understand it as a groove that had been there for a while, an orientation toward possibility I had started cultivating before I had the framework to name what I was doing.
If you're interested in how non-attachment fits into all of this, because it does and it's complicated, Non-Attachment and Manifestation: How Both Can Coexist is worth reading alongside this. The two concepts are adjacent in a way that changes how you approach the gap between intention and result.
The short version: you are always planting something. Karma is just the name the tradition put on the relationship between what you plant and what grows. Manifestation is the name we put on the conscious cultivation of that same relationship.
They're the same garden. You've been in it your whole life.
The store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, if you want tools alongside the reading.
The practice, at the level of the ordinary Tuesday
Here is where I want to resist the urge because summaries are clean and the practice isn't.
What I have found, and what I'd offer to anyone who's been doing this work for a while and still feels like there's a ledger somewhere: the work is not about balancing the ledger. There is no ledger. The work is about the quality of ordinary Tuesdays.
Not the mornings when you're motivated and your scripting feels electric and you can see the version of you who already has it, crystal clear. Those days are easy.
The Tuesdays when nothing is happening and you're tired and the gap feels wide and the fear groove is the loudest sound in the room, those are where the actual karmic planting occurs. Those are the moments that determine the pattern. Because those are the moments when you either reinforce the groove you've been trying to leave, or you do something small and deliberate to deepen a different one.
I am not always good at this. I have ordinary Tuesdays where the fear groove wins and I spend three hours anxious about something that hasn't happened yet. This is real. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But I have also, over four years, watched the background process change. Watched the default groove shift from scarcity to something quieter and more spacious. And I know that this shift did not happen because I balanced a moral ledger or because I did enough sessions or because the universe decided I had suffered adequately.
It happened because I kept planting a different thing, imperfectly, inconsistently, with occasional stretches of several weeks where I forgot entirely, until the new groove was simply deeper than the old one.
That's karma. That's manifestation. And in my experience, they have always been the same practice.
The store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, if you're looking for structured support alongside the practice. No aggressive upsells. Just things I'd point a friend toward.
