The Alchemy of Creation: Decolonizing Manifestation

Every few years, a new wave of manifestation teachings circles through our collective imagination.

They arrive wrapped in the same promise: if you think the right thoughts, speak the right affirmations, hold the right vibration, life will deliver what you desire. It sounds simple, and it touches a deep human hunger to feel that we have some say in what happens to us.

Many of us have followed that call. We have sat under moonlight, written lists of intentions, clipped images from magazines, and waited for the magic to unfold. For a while it can feel thrilling, even empowering. Yet somewhere along the way the practice starts to ache. The lists grow longer, the goals more precise, and the nervous system more strained.

We begin to notice that the same language promising freedom can tighten around us like a net.

That tension does not mean we failed. It reveals the limits of a story built on control. Manifestation, as it is often taught, turns creation into a personal project, something we do to life rather than with it. The body knows this imbalance. It tenses against the pressure to perform and achieve even in the realm of the sacred.

When I listen to people who feel disillusioned by manifestation culture, I hear something tender underneath their frustration. They are not shallow or naive. They are weary of trying to command what can only be courted. They want to remember the deeper rhythm that every creature already knows, the way flowers turn toward light without needing to visualize it first.

Perhaps what we call manifestation was never meant to be a method. Perhaps it is the natural movement of creation when we are in relationship with the world around us.

The Cosmic Ordering Service

My first encounter with manifestation culture came in the late nineties. I was living in Germany then, still healing from the accident that changed everything, when a friend handed me a book called Bestellen beim Universum—The Cosmic Ordering Service. Its premise was simple: you could place an order with the Universe, like a celestial catalogue, and what you asked for would appear if you believed hard enough.

I remember feeling both amused and uneasy. I could sense why it appealed to people—the promise of agency, of hope in uncertain times. Yet even then, something in me knew that life did not work that way. I had already brushed the edge of death and experienced miraculous healings, already learned to listen to the world that breathes beneath words.

Creation had shown itself to me as conversation, not transaction.

Years later, when I found myself married into a family that ran a large retreat center in the German countryside, I met thousands of seekers who carried the same hope I had seen in that book. They wanted relief from struggle, a sign that the Universe was paying attention. Many of them had tried to manifest their way out of illness, scarcity, and heartbreak. I began to see the tender wound beneath those efforts. It wasn’t greed or ego that drove them. It was loneliness. It was a longing to feel that life was on their side. That longing is holy.

But when this sacred longing is met by teachings that frame creation as command, something sacred is lost.

Manifestation culture turned desire into a form of consumption. It began to sound like the same story that shaped our economies and our histories—the colonial story that says, if you want it, claim it; if you dream it, it’s yours.

Standing at the edge of the Land where that retreat center sat, I could feel another truth pulsing underfoot. The trees were not trying to manifest more sunlight. The river was not visualizing its next turn. Everything moved in rhythm with everything else. Life was already creating through relationship.

How colonized manifestation teachings mirror empire

Manifestation culture did not arise in a vacuum. It grew from the same soil that shaped our economies, our religions, and our education systems. It carries the residue of colonial thinking, the belief that we can and must control what is living. The idea that if we work hard enough or believe purely enough, life will yield to our will, is the same illusion that drove empires to conquer Land and people. It is the myth of control dressed in spiritual language.

This way of thinking shows up in the nervous system as tension, in the culture as extraction, and in the planet as exhaustion.

We have been trained to take instead of relate. The body of the world now reflects that training through its fevered storms and collapsing rhythms. The world is mirroring our own disconnection.

There are teachers who help us remember another way. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the grammar of animacy, the language that honors the living intelligence of trees, waters, and winds. She reminds us that everything is alive and speaking, that creation is a conversation we enter with humility.

Dr. Rosales Meza teaches that decolonization is not an abstract idea but a lived return to right relationship.

She says, “Decolonization is the process of remembering our wholeness, of reclaiming our original relationship with the Land and with Spirit.” Her words point to what our bodies already know. Healing begins when we slow down enough to feel the world breathing with us again.

Indigenous cosmologies across the Earth hold the same remembrance. The Dreaming, Sila, the animacy of all things — each speaks of a universe made of relationship, not hierarchy. Creation was never a ladder to climb. It is a web of reciprocity, always moving, always alive.

The same spell that tells us we can manifest anything we want is the one that taught empires they could own the Earth. When we recognize this, something softens. We begin to feel how much we have been carrying, how much effort it takes to hold a worldview built on domination. From that recognition, a new rhythm can begin. Creation waits for us there, steady and patient, ready to move again through relationship.

Remembering the alchemy of creation

When we begin to see how deeply the myth of control has shaped us, something in the body starts to release. The shoulders drop. The breath deepens. There is a sense of relief in remembering that we are part of a larger intelligence that never stopped creating.

Creation is a movement that arises when opposites meet.

Fire touches water, longing meets limit, and spirit enters matter. In that meeting, something new is born. This is the alchemy of creation. It happens through relationship, never through command.

The old stories of alchemy spoke of transforming base metals into gold. But what they were really describing was consciousness—how the heat of awareness and the weight of the body can mix until they produce something luminous. The process is both ordinary and holy. It asks for participation, not control.

I often picture the World Tree when I speak of this. Its roots reach deep into the dark soil of the Earth, its branches stretch toward the open sky, and the human heart stands between them.

The tree does not choose which direction to grow—it simply follows what life asks of it.

This is how creation moves when we allow ourselves to belong to it.

In the body, this feels like a quiet pulse under the sternum, a steadiness that holds both desire and doubt.

Creation does not ask us to erase either one. It asks us to stay present until the friction between them softens into movement. That is when a new form begins to take shape, often small at first, like a sprout breaking through frost.

True manifestation is not a performance of power. It is the felt experience of the world becoming through us. When we listen instead of command, the rhythm returns. Life begins to show us what it has been dreaming all along.

Learning to participate in creation instead of trying to control it

There is a moment, once the old story loosens its grip, when we begin to wonder what takes its place. If manifestation as control has carried us this far, what does creation look like when it becomes relational again?

The first shift is subtle. It happens in our body before it happens in thought.

Our breath deepens, hands unclench, and our attention widens to include what is here, not only what is desired. We begin to listen to the conditions of creation instead of trying to force an outcome.

Dr. Rosales Meza describes this as tending the colonial wound with love and ancestral remembrance. When we tend it, creation begins to breathe again. Her words remind us that every act of control is also an act of separation. Healing comes when we return to the rhythm of reciprocity, when we remember that our choices ripple through the web of life.

To participate in creation is to recognize that the world is already alive and responsive.

We are not summoning energy from somewhere else. We are entering a conversation that never stopped speaking. This kind of participation is quiet but powerful. It does not ask us to erase desire. It teaches us to feel it as part of the larger field, to let it find its natural place among all other living desires.

When I walk outside and feel the pulse of the Land beneath my feet, I can sense this field moving. The wind shifts, the birds call, and my body listens. It is a rhythm older than language and it asks only for attention.

We do not manifest our destiny. We participate in the world’s becoming. Each breath, each act of care, each word spoken with awareness becomes part of creation’s unfolding. When we live this way, the nervous system settles. The heart steadies. The mind becomes less interested in control and more attuned to coherence.

This is where the work of creation begins to feel like belonging.

Imbolc and the quiet fire beneath the snow

In the old European calendar, the season we are in now is called Imbolc. It is the breath between winter and spring, a time when life begins to stir beneath the surface of frozen ground. The Earth dreams in her sleep. The first spark gathers under the snow.

This is the season of the hearth flame, tended by Brigid in the northern Celtic lands and by Holle in the Alpen. These are the keepers of warmth when the world still sleeps. They remind us that creation begins with devotion, with the steady tending of what is not yet visible, not action.

Imbolc teaches that desire is not separate from rest.

The pulse of the new year forms inside stillness. What wants to be born through us needs the same patience the soil gives to seed. Creation at this threshold is quiet, cellular, intimate. It is the warmth that lets dreaming continue until the time is right to move.

When I listen to the rhythm of this season, I feel how it mirrors the alchemy of creation itself. There is heat under cold, movement within stillness, longing that ripens without rushing. The body recognizes this wisdom even when the mind forgets.

If you are longing to listen for your Heart’s Desire, this is the doorway. On January 30th, we will gather for Imbolc: Remembering the Heart’s Desire, a free ninety-minute class and ritual. Together we will enter the dreaming time, learn from Brigid and Holle, and let the first spark of the new cycle find its place in the body.

This gathering is a remembering of how creation really begins — in warmth, in rest, in the rhythm of the Earth that never stopped holding us.

Living as creator is remembering you belong to life

There comes a point when listening ripens into movement. The seed that has been dreaming beneath the snow begins to lean toward light. In that movement, we are invited to live as Creator.

Living as Creator is not a title or a task. It is a way of walking in rhythm with life. It begins when we allow the same intelligence that shapes tides and seasons to move through the body of our own becoming. This is creation as relationship, a living conversation between what is visible and what is still forming.

When we live this way, healing and creating are no longer separate. Each choice becomes an act of alignment. Each breath becomes a renewal of belonging. We remember that life does not need our control. It needs our participation.

The work I teach is an immersion in this practice. It draws from the lineages that shaped me: Taoist inner alchemy, Earth-based cosmologies, and somatic psychology. What matters most is how these traditions meet inside you. Living as Creator is the place where ancient wisdom and lived experience meet, where longing becomes movement, where the invisible begins to take form.

This path teaches the mechanics of true creation. You learn to recognize the structures of identity that have shaped your perception and to feel how emotional tension can be transmuted into creative tension. What once felt like resistance becomes the raw material of transformation. Creation then becomes an act of coherence, where the energy once bound in struggle begins to serve life again.

If you feel the quiet recognition of this rhythm, Living as Creator: The Alchemy of Remembering and Becoming is where we practice it together. It is a living field, a curriculum in creation as devotion.

When you are ready to stop fixing and start creating, Living as Creator will meet you there.

Creation keeps speaking when we learn how to listen

Creation is not something we arrive at. It is something we return to. The pulse that moves the tides and turns the seasons is the same pulse that moves through us. When we stop trying to shape it, it begins to shape us.

The colonized manifestation teachings of our time have trained us to reach outward, to grasp for proof that life is responding. They carry the same spell as empire, convincing us that power means control. But creation was never waiting for our command. It has always been speaking, in the soil, in the breath, in the quiet warmth that rises when we remember we belong to the living world.

In this remembering, desire becomes devotion. The nervous system settles. What once felt like striving softens into rhythm. The mind listens, and the body becomes an altar.

The flame that moves through this work is not the fire of willpower. It is the steady warmth of presence, the hearth fire that keeps life alive through winter’s long night.

If you are ready to begin here, with breath, with warmth, with the ground beneath you, I invite you to Come Home to Your Body.

It is a simple ritual of belonging, a way to meet the quiet intelligence of creation moving through you now.

🕯️ Come Home to Your Body — A Ritual of Warmth and Belonging

Ro Marlen
is a teacher, healer, and guide whose work honors the sacred ecology between body, Land, and lineage. Through her courses and private mentoring, she companions spiritually sensitive Thresholders, those navigating spiritual fatigue, chronic illness, and relational wounding, back into right relationship with their natural rhythm.

Her writing is an invitation to slow down, listen through the body, and remember that every season of change carries its own medicine. Ro’s work lives where wildness and tenderness meet, in the space where the soul begins to breathe again.