At the beginning of Become Your Dream, Joan McManus offers the main point of her book: “Right now you have the mental skills to learn to synchronize your dominant mindset with the higher frequencies of the ideal person you dream of becoming. By using that gift of choice that is already yours, you will become, by universal law, your dream.
This powerful statement sets the tone for an adventure through the ten essential steps McManus explores that will bring transformation to anyone who follows them. McManus devotes a chapter to each step, including Designing Your Dream; Taste, digest and invest in his dream; Understanding the Power of Your Thoughts and Words; Assume leadership of your mind; and receive your abundance. To achieve his dream, McManus explains that we must familiarize ourselves with the six mental faculties that determine the lives we lead. She refers to these as our Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). They include intuition, will, perception, imagination, reason, and memory. McManus explains how to use these HOTS to their fullest potential to achieve the lives we currently only dream of having.
Throughout Become Your Dream, McManus draws on scientific research and insights from numerous spiritual and leadership experts. For example, in discussing the power of imagination, he quotes Eben Pagan, who tells us, “We were born into a world that seems to want us to believe the first thing we imagine in our minds. It is a reality that is spectacularly friendly to us.” creative design and demonstration”.
Building on this focus on imagination, McManus tells an incredibly powerful story that alone is worth the price of the book. She reveals that as a child she had polio and was in a hospital with other children who had it. Her grandmother continually sent her inspiring postcards and, at the urging of a friend, she spoke openly about her grandmother’s vision for her: “that I was a child of God, made in the image and likeness of my Creator. She said I must’ to see myself walking. I must not accept these circumstances as my reality; that was Error speaking. I did not have to understand how, but I did have to know that I would walk. She said that the image was already formed in her mind. -soon it would begin to form in the material world”.
When McManus shared his grandmother’s vision with his five-year-old friend Kenny, he said five words that would change his life: “I can see you walk.” At this time, McManus also began to see him and, before long, he was recovering and returning to school, able to walk and play like the other children. She discusses here how her other HOTS, such as the role of memory, came into play in her ability to walk. She says it was necessary to “unmemorize” her many attempts when her limbs failed her and “remember” herself as a whole and healthy person. She also needed to question the common reason and replace it with an uncommon reason. “A rare reason was needed here to say that although I couldn’t conceive of how it would happen, I had an inner knowing that it was possible, because I could clearly see my body standing upright and walking in my mind.”
McManus goes on to talk about the power of faith and knowing that the Spirit has your back. Just as she had faith that she could walk again, we can all achieve our dreams if we have the same faith. She agrees with the biblical analogy of needing mustard-seed-sized faith to move mountains, but asserts that “you must, however, have that seed firmly planted in the fertile soil of your mind.”
Many more stories and powerful messages fill the pages of Become Your Dream. McManus discusses how our reptilian brains hold us back and how we can conquer them. She advocates the importance of meditation, during which time we can reconnect with the intelligent field of consciousness that we are all an inextricable part of but forget about it because we are too busy. She agrees with Blaise Pascal here, whom she quotes as saying, “All of mankind’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And she talks about the power of forgiveness, using as an example the genocide in Rwanda and how Paul Kagame, its president, spread a message of forgiveness to help heal the nation from it.
Personally, I found McManus’s discussion of the false rules we have all learned and how to overcome our belief in them especially valuable. These rules are usually based on false beliefs and no longer work; they cover a wide range of areas in our lives, from religion to sex. Ultimately, we have to learn to make rules that work for us.
Becoming Your Dream concludes with a beautiful chapter on receiving abundance, which includes these powerful words: “As you learn to receive your goodness and abundance with grace and gratitude, you will discover that the same divine light within that shines so brightly in those you love. who you love is also present in each of us. You will be joyfully motivated to share your wealth of knowledge, resources, experience, and happiness with the world at large. There is no private good. Your gifts are part of the fabric of humanity “.