For a while, I was very good at manifestation. Or at least, I was very good at doing all the things manifestation asks you to do.
I made the vision boards. I pictured what I wanted in intricate detail. I tried to feel it before it had happened, and I said things in the present tense because apparently the universe prefers confident grammar.
Sometimes, things happened. But sometimes they didn’t.
And when they didn't, it got complicated, because when something I really wanted didn’t happen, I rarely thought, "Well, life is unpredictable", or "there are other people involved", or "timing matters", or "circumstances change", or "I was never in control of all of this anyway".
Instead, I went looking for the flaw in me. Maybe I had doubted it, maybe I had wanted it too much, or not enough, maybe I was secretly afraid of success, maybe I had some limiting belief I didn't unpack yet, or maybe, somewhere deep down, I didn’t believe I deserved it.
There was always another layer to excavate, and somehow, no matter where I started, I ended up in the same place: if the thing hadn’t happened, I must have done something wrong.
The practice that was supposed to make me feel powerful, became exhausting, and was actually making me feel responsible for things I could NEVER fully control.
I still believe that what we pay attention to matters, and that what we expect can shape what we notice. I still believe intention changes how we move through the world, and I absolutely believe that if you want a different life, at some point you have to participate in creating it.
What I no longer believe is that every outcome is a reflection of how aligned, worthy or energetically sorted I am.
Sometimes you can want something deeply, work for it, believe in it and still not get it. That is not a spiritual failure, that's life. And oddly enough, the idea that helped me make peace with this wasn’t new at all. It was Niya.
Niya نية is usually translated from Arabic as intention, but the English word feels a little thin. It is not about declaring what you want the universe to give you. Instead, it asks something much deeper:
What am I setting out to do? and most importantly, what is driving me to do it?
And that distinction is everything, because niya belongs to me.
I can choose the intention I bring into a conversation. I can choose why I am starting a business, making a decision, apologizing, leaving, staying, trying again or putting my work into the world.
What I cannot choose is exactly what happens next, and those two things are not the same.
That sounds obvious written down, but I realized I had spent years mixing them together. I would act, and then judge the quality of the action by the result. If it worked, wonderful! I had trusted myself. If it failed, suddenly the whole thing was suspect: my decision, my instinct, my timing, and sometimes even my worth.
Niya gives me another place to stand. It lets me ask: Was my intention sincere? Did I act in line with what mattered to me? Did I bring what I could bring? If the answer is yes, the outcome does not cancel that out.
Of course, niya is not a free pass. Good intentions can still lead to terrible decisions, and we still have to pay attention to impact, learn, repair and change course. But there is a big difference between taking responsibility for our choices and making ourselves responsible for everything that happens because of them. I had been doing far too much of the second.
There is another idea from the same cultural vocabulary that has also helped me here: baraka.
I used to think about abundance mostly in terms of expansion. More opportunities, more money, more success, more of whatever I had decided would make life better. Yet, the concept of baraka asked me to look at abundance differently. In North Africa, it is not simply about accumulation, but about blessing. It is something that can exist in what is already here, something that moves, multiplies, surprises and sometimes arrives in a form I would never have thought to put on a vision board.
You see, that requires a different kind of trust. That's less: I know exactly what should happen, or I trust that I can make it happen, and more: I know how I want to meet what happens.
And that, for me, is where niya and baraka meet.
I set my intention → I act → I pay attention → I adjust... and then I get out of the way and let life have her say.
There is something incredibly freeing about that, because I can pursue something wholeheartedly without turning it into a referendum on whether I am worthy or not.
I learnt how to be disappointed without immediately searching for the belief that supposedly caused the disappointment. I learnt how to fail and still respect the person who tried. I learnt how to change direction without deciding I must have been “out of alignment” before.
Most importantly, I learnt to stop treating life like a vending machine where the correct internal state is supposed to produce the requested result.
Along the way, I haven’t stopped wanting things, and I haven’t stopped imagining possibilities either. I still have plans and big ones, at that. The difference is that I am trying to hold them with a little less control. So these days, before anything that's important to (whatever that is: a conversation, a business idea, even starting a creative exploration...), I am more interested in asking questions on things I control, like:
Why do I want this?
What do I want to bring to it?
Why does it matter to me?
Who do I want to be while I am doing it?
Then I do what I can with that. But I stopped asking myself, How do I guarantee the outcome?
And perhaps that was the part I needed to understand all along.
So the thing that manifestation gurus got wrong, is turning intention into a tool for getting what we want, when its real power is in helping us decide how we want to meet life, whether it gives us what we asked for or not.
Heartfully,
Ratiba
