How to Get What You Want from the Universe

By Kay Newton

The midday sun has started to reach through my sun hat, the sweat drips down my neck. My legs have a life of their own, my toes inside my shoes are beginning to complain and the 8 kg backpack begins to mysteriously grow heavier with every step. I am ready to stop for the day, yet I know there are a few more hours left in me if I really listen to my body.

If you read my column last month, you’d know that I am on a pilgrimage in Spain on the Camino Frances, towards Santiago: 534 km completed and another 195 km to go. For the most part, I have let the Camino provide, letting my feet take me as far as I want and then leading me to a place to sleep. I am learning to trust and it is very liberating.

When your life is simple and basic (walk, eat, sleep and repeat for 30 days or more), you tune in to your reality and how you create it. Take for example the day I was walking with Lisa from the US. We bumped into her old friends at a café, and they told us enthusiastically about the place they’d stayed the night before.

Clean cotton sheets and chocolates on the pillow. It sounded like heaven.

As Lisa and I set off again, we talked about our ideal place for that night and what it would look like. A small intimate place, a large pool for our aching legs, real linen sheets, and no Pilgrims menu.

No sooner had we voiced our intentions and rounded the next corner, a billboard appeared with information for what seemed the perfect hostel. Yet it wasn’t right. The pool was there and the sheets on the bed, yet we had failed to include in our intentions the price of the room and the fact that we wanted to walk another two hours.

This wasn’t the first time I had experienced setting an intention and getting an immediate response, yet it was the probably the first time I had witnessed two people collectively creating thoughts and turning them into reality.

The simplicity of the Camino helps you see things that have always been in front of your nose. Things you may have forgotten. I am now more aware how specific I need to be in order to create the reality I wish.

Setting intentions for your own life is very simple:

• Take time out to imagine exactly what you want.
• Have a pen and paper handy; write down your thoughts.
• Add the tiniest of details. Include what you can see, hear, touch and feel.
• Write it as if it has already happened, using the present tense.
• Keep refining until you are sure you covered all the minutiae.
• Adjust as your life changes.

Lesson learned: Set your specific intentions and watch the magic happen.

Follow me on www.Kay-Newton.com.

Photo credit: Myles Tan on Unsplash. First published in the November 2017 issue of eShe magazine. Read it for free here. Or buy the print edition.