Episode 270: The Truth About Learning to Manifest with Alea Lovely

By Sarah Walton | March 4, 2025

Click here to watch the video version of this podcast episode

Have you ever watched the movie The Secret? It shares this idea that you can manifest whatever you want you desire. One of the misconceptions is that if you really want something, you should just meditate or hope, and it will just fall on your head.

Today, we’ll demystify what manifestation actually is, with Alea Lovely, who is a spiritual advisor and philosopher who's been an intuitive and energy coach for over seven years. She's the creator and host of the podcast, Spiritual Shit, which is a No. 1 podcast on iTunes.

I really hope you hear the humanity in Alea's story and how she talks about her journey in childhood. She shares about learning to listen to herself over the rest of the world and what that takes from each one of us to find the courage, the strength, and the honesty to do that with integrity.

Learning to manifest

Alea says mediumship and life coaching are very mission driven.

“I get really excited about the idea of empowering people and giving them access to that little light bulb that needs to turn on within themselves to help them understand what their gifts are in the world and help them kind of qualify themselves,” says Alea.

Alea had a religious upbringing. She was used to asking others – the priest, the pastor, the college professor – what her experiences meant rather than finding those answers within herself. She went through the process of learning her intuition, how her trauma informs her decisions and anxiety, and then trying to find her inner voice and questioned how it spoke to her.

“It's really important for me in the work that I do that I not only help guide others to, you know, the answers that they're looking for, but also give them the tools and the depth of understanding how to do that themselves,” says Alea. “So that way they're never reliant or never dependent on someone else again.”

This involves having the self-awareness to recognize when you are wrong or acknowledge that you might not be headed in the right direction. The process isn’t time-driven; it comes from doing deep work – and the digging can be hard because sometimes we’re not being honest with ourselves.

Manifestation a gateway to spirituality

Alea says manifestation was her gateway into spirituality. At 25, she became an atheist and was in a dark place where she felt she had no guidance and no one to turn to. She was scrolling on her phone and “The Secret” came across her feed.

She dove headfirst into the idea of manifestation, positive thinking and affirmations. But she found missing elements to The Secret’s formula, because they were calling it a law, but it doesn’t work the same for everyone every time.

“I can think positive all day long, but I'm still a Black woman of size in this world,” says Alea. “There are certain things that are of it feel available to me and that are not in my socioeconomic status."

She says positive thinking is important because if you’re in a negative mindset, it’s going to be more difficult to see those opportunities.

Finding "Happiness" (What the Heck Does That Even Mean?)

Imagine Method

The Imagine Method came from Alea asking, what does it mean to live a good life? Alea says it's important for us to come into contact with why we want what we want. Why is it important that we have these particular things? Are these going to make our life better? Or are they going to cause us to have dynamic incompatibilities with our lifestyle?

For example, if you want a $60,000 car, are you comfortable working the hours that are going to take you away from your family or another priority in your life?

“I start people off before you even get into the method of listing off your five maxims,” says Alea. “Your five maxims are like the top five things that you need to have in order to have a good life. So to give an example, financial security, romantic love, time spent with family, health and wellness.”

Then rate your list. If time with your family is number one, and financial security is number 3, trying to manifest more money by bringing on more clients might be a misalignment of your energies.

What follows after ranking your maxims is the Imagine Method framework:

Inception – what are you starting from and what is your current reality?

Manifestation – the acknowledgment of what you want and asking why you want it. Are you being influenced? Or is that an authentic need that's per your maxims?

Anti-Belief – What is the belief challenging what you want?

Growth – What change needs to happen to get what you want?

Integration – How do you apply that change to your life?

Notice – Observing the signs and synchronicities to help you expand

Expansion – What do you do once you’ve manifested?

There are the narrative aspects that say, “I can't have this because.” Why are you telling yourself that? In what way is it serving you? These little lies that we tell ourselves, they definitely serve us.

“They serve our safety. They serve our vulnerability,” says Alea. Are you keeping this belief because you’re afraid of not getting it or being disappointed? Sometimes, it feels like it's better for to face the devil you know versus the devil you don't.

When you start noticing the changes in your life, you open yourself up and energy starts to shift.

Alea says the last step, expansion, is one rarely talked about. What do you do once you’ve realized that manifestation? And what happens if you worked really hard and realized this isn’t what you wanted?

“All my problems weren't solved because I got that manifestation. I think that that's so important for people to realize that happiness is an inside job,” says Alea. “I really believe that manifestation is only here to help us learn about ourselves, who we are, what we want, our identity, those kinds of things. And then the process starts all over again.”