This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Reality Transurfing Steps I-V" by Vadim Zeland. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you feel like you have no control over what happens in your life? Does it seem like life just happens to you?
According to best-selling author Vadim Zeland, you feel like this because you’re not conscious of how your thoughts and emotions create your reality. Consciously choosing the way you think and feel allows you to control which version of reality you live in.
Keep reading for Zeland’s two-step advice on how to create your own reality.
How to Create Your Own Reality
You’re continually transmitting emotional energy at a frequency that sustains your version of reality. Zeland’s advice on how to create your own reality involves two steps:
- Step #1: Reclaim your emotional energy.
- Step #2: Redirect your emotional energy.
Step #1: Reclaim Your Emotional Energy
The first step toward changing your version of reality is to reclaim your emotional energy. This involves withdrawing your attention from unwanted aspects of your current reality so that you have more energy to direct toward your ideal version of reality.
According to Zeland, the only reason you might want to change your version of reality is that you’re facing circumstances that you don’t want to experience. You believe that a different version of reality won’t include these unwanted things. However, he explains, all unwanted circumstances result from a reality’s attempts to siphon your emotional energy—by creating problems and concerns that justify strong emotional reactions to them. Each time you direct your attention to such circumstances, you waste your emotional energy sustaining these unwanted parts of reality.
For example, you don’t want to feel frustrated with your children. However, your version of reality keeps creating unwanted circumstances that justify your perpetual frustration with them (for instance, your children repeatedly lie to you or don’t do their homework) so that it can siphon your emotional energy and remain in physical form.
On the other hand, when you intentionally ignore unwanted circumstances, you starve them of sustenance, weaken their influence over you, and reclaim the emotional energy that they’ve been siphoning from you.
- For example, each time your children don’t do their homework, you choose not to give in to frustration. This starves these unwanted circumstances of the emotional energy they need to manifest in your reality.
(Shortform note: Many self-help practitioners mirror Zeland’s claim that ignoring unwanted circumstances helps you reclaim and redirect energy toward creating what you want—for example, Rhonda Byrne (The Secret), Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success), and Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking). Like Zeland, all of these authors imply that unwanted circumstances don’t benefit you. However, some psychologists suggest that unwanted experiences can actually help you approach life more positively. This is because, without engaging in what you don’t want, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish among your experiences, recognize what satisfies you, and consciously move toward what you do want.)
How can you intentionally ignore unwanted circumstances? Zeland claims that observing your thoughts and emotions helps you weaken unwanted circumstances and reclaim your emotional energy in two ways. First, it helps you understand why you’re experiencing your version of reality instead of the version of reality that you want. Second, it breaks the feedback loop that perpetuates your current version of reality.
Step #2: Redirect Your Emotional Energy
Once you’ve practiced reclaiming your emotional energy from unwanted circumstances, practice the second step toward changing your version of reality: Redirect your emotional energy to feed your ideal version of reality.
Zeland argues that, since your version of reality simply reflects your emotional energy, you can control which version of reality gets reflected back to you by matching your emotional energy with that reality. He suggests three methods for redirecting your emotional energy to achieve this.
First, identify what you want. This will help you create a clear vision of your ideal version of reality. Zeland offers advice for identifying what you want to experience: Focus only on what brings you joy or inspires you. Don’t allow other people’s opinions to influence you or make you worry about how plausible your desires are.
Zeland explains that, when you focus only on experiences that bring you joy, you transmit a purely joyful frequency, untainted by negative emotions. On the other hand, when you allow other people to influence you or worry about how you’ll achieve what you want, you pollute your frequency with contradictory emotions. These feed the very circumstances that you don’t want.
Second, practice living in your ideal version of reality. The only way to experience the version of reality that you want is to consistently transmit a frequency that matches what you want. Zeland explains that the most effective way to attune your frequency to what you want is to imagine how you would think, feel, and behave if you were already living in your ideal version of reality.
Consider the type of person you’d have to become and how your lifestyle would need to change to fit in with this ideal version of reality. Then practice thinking, feeling, and behaving like this vision of yourself now.
Third, transmit only positive emotional energy. Zeland claims that this will accelerate this materialization process and help smooth your transition into your ideal version of reality. Zeland explains that you’re always choosing how you interpret all of your experiences. When you choose to interpret something as positive, you transmit positive emotional energy that feeds a positive version of reality.
He suggests that you can train yourself to continually transmit positive emotional energy by focusing only on what you want to experience and appreciating all of the good things in your life.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Reality Transurfing Steps I-V summary:
- How you can control which version of reality you live in
- Why some realities materialize while others lie dormant
- The three methods for redirecting your emotional energy
