▶️Prefer to listen? Click play above. I share a little more in the podcast and it feels a bit more personal, but if you prefer to read, it’s still juicy and you can follow along with the meditation and Futurecasting process. There is also a song! You can access these below as well. In April this year, I broke my own heart. I was in a relationship with someone I really loved, and who really loved me. But there were some serious issues on his side that weren’t going to change, things that were harming me and that I couldn’t fix no matter how much I loved him. So, I made the hard choice and I ended it. I broke my own heart, on purpose, because staying would have cost me more than leaving. And I was heartbroken. More than I imagined I would be. It wasn’t the kind of thing you get over in a week or two. And in the middle of all that, still raw, still nowhere near ready, not looking for anyone, I sat down and I wrote from the future. I imagined it was New Year’s Eve, the very end of 2026, and I wrote in the present tense, as if the whole year had already happened. And in it, I’d met someone. Someone amazing. I described the relationship, how it felt, the ease of it, as though it was already real and already mine. I did it almost as an act of faith, because I know this practice works, even when I’m not feeling hopeful. And I was not feeling hopeful. I’d been on so many first and second dates, and couldn’t face doing online dating again when I was recovered from my broken heart. And then this is what happened... I was scrolling Facebook while away for the weekend with my bestie, and I was in one of those singles groups, the kind that had never once popped up in my feed the whole time I’d been in my previous relationship. And suddenly, there it was. A photo of this really lovely guy, mountains behind him, out at Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, Australia. I zoomed in, and he had the kindest eyes. So, I commented on his post, which is something I would never normally have done. We messaged back and forth a few times, then had a phone call where we chatted easily. Then we went on a first date. There was this really strong connection, straight away. Our date went for a few hours as we sat in a café having multiple cups of tea for me and coffee for him, followed by a walk around the local lake next to the café. It’s early days, we’ve been getting to know each and it’s been nearly three months now. But there he was. Weeks after I wrote him into being, while I was still heartbroken and absolutely not looking. So how does that happen? How do you write something from the future while you’re heartbroken and not even trying, and then watch it show up early? Is it magic? Is it woo? Is it just a nice coincidence I’m reading too much into? What I want to talk about today is that it’s a bit of everything. There is real science underneath this. There’s also, I believe, genuine mystery. And there’s a structure, an actual method, that makes it work far more reliably than crossing your fingers and hoping. It’s part brain chemistry, part paying attention, and part something I can only call alchemy and working from the superconscious. I first explored the word, alchemy, properly, when I read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. It came out in English in 1993, and I read it as a young woman at university. And I loved it. It lit something up in me, this idea that when you truly want something, the whole world conspires to help you get it. Alas, loving this idea didn’t change my life because I had no idea what to actually do with it. I had the inspiration and none of the instructions. I had the wanting, but no structure for the wanting. And so, it just stayed a beautiful book on my shelf for a very long time. It took me until 2020 to find the structure despite watching The Secret and reading lots of books on manifesting. That’s when I started to properly studying alchemy and the creative process, through the work of William Whitecloud and his Natural Success teachings. And that changed everything, because it turned a lovely idea into an actual practice but even then, I needed something even more powerful, which I have termed Futurecasting. I’ve created so much from it, in my work, my creativity, my life. The heartbreak story I just told you is just the most recent one. And one of the things I learned that has stayed with me most is this: success isn’t personal. It’s not about being special, or chosen, or luckier than the next woman. Success follows structure. It follows principles. Which means it’s available to anyone willing to work with those principles. That took so much pressure off me, and it’s the opposite of what a lot of the manifesting world tells you. So, let’s start with the brain, because this is where it stops being woo and starts being fascinating. There’s a growing body of neuroscience showing that your brain cannot fully tell the difference between something vividly imagined and something real. When you picture an experience in enough detail, your brain lights up many of the same pathways it would use if you were actually living it. Imagine biting into a chocolate cake and your mouth waters. Imagine something frightening and your heart rate climbs, your body floods with adrenaline. Your body responds to the image, not just the event. Researchers describe it as a difference of degree, not kind. Your brain runs a kind of reality threshold, and when an imagined signal is vivid enough and emotional enough, it can cross that threshold and get treated as real. And here’s the part that matters most for us, and it’s why I keep talking about pleasure and the body on this podcast. Emotion is the amplifier. A dry, detached visualization does very little. But when you feel it, when you get in your body, put music on, let yourself actually experience the joy of the thing as if it’s happening, that’s when the brain really takes the imprint. Mental rehearsal done with feeling creates real changes. Athletes have used this for decades. So, when I wrote from that future New Year’s Eve, I wasn’t just listing what I wanted. I was feeling it as if it was already true and something I had already experienced. I let myself feel what it would be like to be loved well again. And my brain took that seriously. It was a remembering rather than an imagining. Then there’s the second piece, and this one is beautifully practical. Confirmation bias. We usually hear about confirmation bias as a bad thing, the way we only notice evidence that agrees with what we already believe. But it works powerfully in our favor too. Once you hold a clear, vivid vision of what you want, your brain quietly starts filtering the whole world for anything that matches it. It’s like when you’re thinking about buying a certain car and suddenly see that car everywhere. It was always there. You just weren’t tuned to see it. So, when you hold a vision of love, or a full bookshelf with your name on the spine, or a business that thrives, your attention re-tunes. You start noticing the opportunities, the openings, the people, that were probably there all along but that you were too closed or too busy or too heartbroken to see. Look for the good and you are genuinely more likely to see it. I don’t think the universe delivered a man to my door. I think I became someone who could notice him when he appeared, and open enough to say yes. But here’s where it becomes more than positive thinking, and where the alchemy really lives. Because just imagining nice things is not enough. And this is my problem with a lot of what’s out there right now, the be delusional, lucky girl version of manifesting, where you’re told to just believe hard enough and act as if. That version skips the most important step, and it can be a bit cruel, because when it doesn’t work, you’re left thinking you didn’t believe hard enough. As if it’s your fault. Real alchemy, the old alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold, has three parts, not one. First, yes, you need a strong, vivid vision of the gold, the thing you want – the desired end result. But second, and this is the step everyone skips, you have to look clearly and at your current reality. The lead. Where you actually are right now, no sugar-coating. And third, you build the bridge between the two. You find the path from here to there, and you take real steps along it. Action is required, not just wishful thinking. Vision, current reality, and the bridge between them. That’s the alchemy. And notice that it asks you to hold two things at once, the dream and the real truth of where you are, without collapsing into either one. Which, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, is a thread that runs through everything I talk about. Holding two true things at the same time. Carl Jung took alchemy seriously, by the way, which I love, because it means this isn’t just fluffy. He read the old alchemical texts as a symbolic map of inner transformation. The turning of lead into gold was really about turning the raw, unformed self into a whole, realized one. He called it individuation. So, when I talk about alchemy, I’m not talking about magic tricks. I’m talking about a genuine process of transformation, one that serious minds have studied for a very long time. Now, where do I stand on all of this? I believe in both the science and I believe in the mystery. I don’t think you have to choose. I think there’s real brain chemistry here, real attention, real structure. And I also think there’s something we can’t fully explain, something a bit magic, in how fast that man arrived, in the timing of things, in the way life seems to move when you get clear. Science and mystery, living in the same two hands. And the other thing I want to say, is that I don’t do this from a place of force. I’m not white-knuckling my vision into being through sheer h
