There’s more to fall magic than pumpkin spice and HomeGoods decor: This season of change and renewal is also the perfect time to tune into the higher frequencies and synergies of manifestation—especially if you’re in the market for a new home.
From clarifying your housing goals and sharpening your visualization skills to opening up the gateways to creative actualization and harnessing—for lack of a better term—the woo, Woodside Homes has put together this seven-step guide to manifesting the perfect space for you and your family from dream to reality.
So, read on—the cosmic pool is warm and the pumpkin spice is gratis.
In her 2020 ode to woo “Just Like Magic,” pop star Ariana Grande sings, “Manifest it/I finessed it/Take my pen and write some love letters to heaven…I'm attractive/I get everything I want 'cause I attract it.”
When it comes to finding the right home, intention is extraordinarily important: An extensive Kingfisher survey found that “73% of people who are happy with their home are also happy in life. In fact, our homes account for 15% of our total happiness, making them as important as our general health and fitness (14%), and significantly more important than what we earn (6%) or the job we do (3%).”
And by singing it out Grande is making those desires more likely to become real: As the Washington Post notes, “numerous studies have found affirming yourself can produce wide-ranging benefits”—both mental and physical. You can literally talk yourself into a better, healthier, more successful life. But if you think affirmations are simply about love bombing yourself in the mirror, think again. “It’s more about identifying, in really concrete ways, the kinds of things about you that you really value,” Carnegie Mellon psychology professor David Creswell tells the Post.
This clarity combined with self-belief is the essential starting point for manifestation.
If you want to be happy, you need to get clear on what you want from life and in a home. And if you want to get clear on what you need from life and in a home, take a page from Grande’s (song)book and start that conversation with heaven—and then manifest it!
This short Woodside Homes quiz can help you clarify what a dream home means to you.
Even as you celebrate your own power in this pursuit, be sure to create some affirmations that are home-hunting specific. For inspo, the blog Happier Human has compiled seventy-seven on point house hunting affirmations, including:
And if a house goes off the market before you can snatch it up? Take a deep breath, recite two other relevant affirmations from Bernstein (“Rejection is protection”; “Obstacles are detours in the right direction”), and keep going.
The saucy comeback “as if” has a long and storied history that, if you can believe it, stretches back much farther than Clueless—check out this history of the phrase, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal—but we’re here to reclaim it, at least partially, for the woo: Living as if your intention has already come to pass is one of the primary building blocks of manifestation. As the celebrated Barbados-born mystic Neville Goddard, popularizer of the “law of assumption,” put it, “Dare to believe in the reality of your assumption and watch the world play its part relative to its fulfillment.”
So much of manifesting comes down to removing the internal resistance and blocks that prevent us from being flexible and imaginatively expansive enough to become attuned with our true powers of creations and actualization. The details between dream and realization are important, of course, but an obsession with the process is a recipe for fatigue, disempowerment, and compromise.
The key to keeping one’s eye on the prize, then, is belief—belief in the validity of your desires as well as a belief that the prize, in fact, exists.
(Spoiler alert: your desires are valid and the prize does exist.)
The belief we referred to above is a flame that can be kindled and kept alight by immersing yourself in the sights, smells, and—most importantly—feelings of the space you hope to manifest.
This can seem easier said than do—at least until you embrace the synergistic wonders of meditative visualization.
The question isn’t whether you should have a visualization or meditation practice—the benefits of both are widely acknowledged—but, rather, why those active practices have been kept separate for so long.
Meditation allows us to quiet what the Buddhists call “the monkey mind”—i.e., the discursive mind which “serves us well but never gives us a moment’s rest.”
As for visualization…
“If you’re truly present, the brain does not know the difference between what you’re imagining and what you're experiencing in the 3D world,” Becoming Supernatural author Dr. Joe Dispenza says. “So then you begin to install the neurological hardware in your brain to look like the event has already occurred. Now your brain is no longer a record of the past, now it’s a map to the future.”
To get started with meditative visualization, simply login to Headspace or search for meditations on YouTube, Spotify, or the streaming service of your choice. Pick either a well-reviewed guided meditation or binaural soundscape in the 432, 528, or 777 hz frequency.
Settle in, set an intention, and begin to visualize your own oasis…
If, for example, a kitchen is a meaningful household hub to you, go throughout your day picturing what it would feel like to hear smart appliances humming to time-saving life—voice-activated kitchen faucet, anyone?—or to smell ultra clean, life-giving air and water run through state of the art filtration or moving freely through spacious layouts that allow you room to flow and grow.
If it’s self-care, imagine sinking into a freestanding tub, serenely looking out your family preparing dinner in the patio pizza oven through large glass doors, or stepping onto the little bit of heaven that is temperature controlled floors.
The possibilities are literally endless.
Now that you’ve visualized your desires it’s time to turn the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” on its head.
Populate a cork board with pictures from magazines or the internet (our move-in ready collection can help), quotes and affirmations that make you feel powerful, pictures of yourself and your family in places or spaces that are meaningful to you, and favorite affirmations.
If you have a spouse and children, bond over a shared future and gain some insight into their subconscious hopes and dreams as well as your individual and collective priorities. (Don’t worry, your kids can manifest, but as powerful as these techniques are, I promise you that you will not wind up living on a rocketship, tending dinosaurs in the backyard, or be neighbors with a YouTube celebrity influencer…)
“Vision boards—also known as a ‘goal board’ or ‘dream board’—act as a compass to keep you moving in the direction of your dreams, no matter what is happening in the world around you,” motivational speaker and Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield writes.
Ready to join Canfield, Oprah Winfrey, Katy Perry, Steve Harvey, Ellen DeGeneres, and others in vision boarding? Start with a visit to Woodside Homes’ Inspiration Gallery!
As you seek a physical space for yourself and your family, likewise create space for the magic necessary to receive it with a manifestation box. Essentially, this is a box in which you place objects that represent the goal(s) you hope to…manifest.
This can be any size or shape box, but typically they’re modest sized. For our purposes, however, we’re going to suggest you purchase a moving box and begin to fill it, as a family, with items that represent to you forward motion, comfort, security, and home. This might be an uncut key, a map, a treasured family heirloom, the bowl you’re going to mix your first batch of batter for new home muffins in, a toy of a beloved pet. (Yes, your pet no doubt has dreams, too.) If your preferred move would encompass changing climates, buy some new weather appropriate clothes and put those in.
It’s really all up to you. Be playful and casual about it. Don’t overthink it.
Again, this is all about telling your own subconscious and the universe, the manifestation of your home is a formality—and it’s simply time for the “how” to catch up to the eventuality.
6. Script Your Own Heroine’s Journey.
Scripting is another powerful manifestation technique in which you write your future story out as you want it but in present tense.
So, for example, “I am so grateful I found a home in Cambridge Court with plenty of natural light. It’s so close to the stores and my yoga studio, and the kids love the nearby park as much as I hoped they would—in fact, the iPad is getting a well-deserved vacation! The neighbors are nice and have welcomed us into the community. It feels as if we’ve been here for years. Life is really, really good.”
If you want to put a fun spin on it, address the letter to your previous house or apartment—and include some gratitude for the gifts and launchpad that space provided you.
In manifestation circles, daily numbered lists are extremely popular. Chances are if you’ve delved into this world at all, you’ve heard of the popular 3/6/9 method (writing out your distilled desire three times in the morning, six times at midday, and nine times in the evening) or the 55X5 method (writing out your desire fifty-five times each day for five days). But on TikTok—a weirdly active hub of manifesting, considering the context—the 10/10/10 method has emerged as a favorite.
With 10/10/10 you first write a desire or desires ten times each. Then immediately after you write ten things for which you are grateful. Finally, you write ten things that bring you real, unadulterated joy. These lists will slowly refine these lists as you begin to see the way this trinity of what you want, what you have, and what gives you meaning intertwine. From there, you repeat the process and watch the magic unfold.
At first, it may seem a bit rote and simplistic. Yet, as self-development uber-guru Tony Robbins often says, “Where focus goes, energy flows. And where energy goes, whatever you’re focusing on grows.” Again, you think of your life as a garden, you want to be watering and nurturing the plants that will nourish you and add beauty to your life, not the weeds.
Ready to manifest your own chic, safe, and healthy home? At Woodside, we understand homebuying is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. By combining versatile designs and intentional developments with high-quality materials and energy-efficient features, we open up a universe of living opportunities. Begin the journey right here, right now.