The concept of a “mental diet” is often overshadowed by manifesting techniques like visualization and affirmations. However, according to Neville Goddard, managing your thoughts is just as important for successful manifestation.
What Is a Mental Diet?
A mental diet is like a regular diet. When you want to lose weight, you follow a diet that tells you what you can and can’t eat. Similarly, a mental diet dictates what kinds of thoughts you allow into your mind. As Neville Goddard said:
“We become the embodiment of that which we mentally feed upon.”
Five Lessons, Neville Goddard
Negative or destructive thoughts don’t just make you feel bad; they also manifest externally as real problems in your life. Your external reality is the manifestation of your subconscious mind’s reaction to your thoughts. To manifest better outcomes, you need to take care that you don’t dwell on harmful thoughts.
Your current mental diet is basically a mix of everything you think about: self-talk, judgments, expectations, and so on. Most of this comes from how you’ve been treated in the past. If people have always been mean to you, you might think you’re “not good enough,” affecting both your behavior and external circumstances.
The Role of Mental Diet In Manifestation
A mental diet is important for manifestation because it determines the thoughts you feed to the subconscious, and therefore what you manifest. Consider how internalizing a negative thought like “I’m not good enough” will impact you. Your subconscious influences your actions, maybe making you shy away from opportunities because you don’t feel worthy. This thought of “I’m not good enough” of course also manifests itself in your external world. You’ll find yourself confronted with all sorts of situations that align with this belief, and before you know it, you’re stuck in a cycle of underachievement, all fueled by that initial thought.
The idea of a mental diet is to prevent this from happening. When you practice a disciplined mental diet, you consciously catch yourself when such a negative thought surfaces. Instead of dwelling on it, you replace it with a more empowering belief, like “I am capable and deserving of success.” Over time, this positive statement takes root in your subconscious and realizes itself in manifestation.
A mental diet replaces the “junk food” thoughts with “nutritious” thoughts. It might not make a difference overnight, but if you stick with it, the accumulated impact can be life-changing. To quote Neville again:
“Feast on the idea, become identified with the idea as though you were already that embodied state. Walk in the assumption that you are what you want to be. If you feast on that and remain faithful to that mental diet, you will crystallize it. You will become it in this world.”
Five Lessons, Neville Goddard
Common Mistake: Over-Focusing on Techniques and Neglecting a Mental Diet
A lot of us mess up when trying to manifest something. We get caught up in the methods like visualizing, or using affirmations but forget to watch what’s going on in our heads the rest of the time. If you’ve read some of my other articles, you’ll know that I’m a big advocate of doing the particular visualization technique or whatever it may be, and then just forgetting about it. The issue comes in when you instantly begin dwelling on negative thoughts again, uprooting all the work we did during the visualization session. Neville Goddard puts it well:
“We cannot have a little bit of meditation in the morning, curse at noon, and do something else in the evening. We have to go on a mental diet, for a week we must completely change our mental food”
Five Lessons, Neville Goddard
If you’re constantly thinking, “This won’t work,” or “Good stuff doesn’t happen to me.” Because if these suggestions are accepted by the subconscious, they too will externalize themselves.
Here’s what I do when I want to manifest something: The bulk of the work happens when I enter meditation and carry out my visualization or affirmation session. If I successfully imprint my desire onto my subconscious through these repeated sessions, I know the desire will start to materialize on its own, without my help. But when I’m not doing these sessions, I’m careful not to entertain negative thoughts that contradict my desire. In other words, I maintain a mental diet. I avoid thoughts like “I can’t do this” or “this won’t happen” because it goes against what I want to accomplish. Sure, the occasional doubt does sneak in, but I am careful not to let my mind run with it.
How To Do a Mental Diet
Sticking to a mental diet is essential for successful manifesting. The process can be divided into two key parts.
1. Observing Your Mind
You need to do this as often as possible throughout the day. To know what’s inside your mind, you have to be aware of it. By stepping back and observing what is going on within, your mind starts to feel like it’s a separate entity.
From this viewpoint, you become less attached to your thoughts. This takes power away from them, and it also makes it easier to think constructive and positive thoughts instead. Spot the bad thoughts and see them for what they are, just thoughts. All your thoughts of “I can’t” are all just the offspring of a negative belief in your subconscious. As you stop accepting these thoughts as truths, you begin to uproot the belief.
2. Changing The Thoughts
Let’s say you want more love in your life. If that love is missing, you likely have negative self-talk related to love. You might feel you’re “unworthy” or that you “don’t deserve it.” In this case, create thoughts that say “I do deserve love” and “I am worthy of it.” Counteract the negative belief.
Tell yourself positive things about love. Have belief that the inner world shapes the outer world. Realize there’s no logical reason you shouldn’t “deserve” or “be worthy of” something like love. This mindset is a good addition to your mental diet. Many times, these irrational beliefs fall apart when you simply look at them and see they’re based on emotion, not fact.
A mental diet can be both specific and general, but usually, a good general mental diet is needed for specific goals. For instance, it’s tough to manifest something good if you believe that “good things don’t happen.” Once your mindset changes to “good things always happen to me” it consequently becomes easier to manifest things that are “good.”
Conclusion
By now, you should have a solid understanding of how to stick to a mental diet. It’s pretty simple to understand, but hard to do in real life. Keep an eye on your mind and don’t let yourself fall back into the old state by getting stuck in negative thought-loops. Don’t forcefully push them away, but don’t give them power either. Understand that they’re just thoughts, nothing more.
Don’t overlook the importance of a good mental diet; it keeps you from falling back into your old state of consciousness when you’re trying to manifest your desires.
Further Reading
If you want to learn more about Neville Goddard and he teachings, here are some recommendations for you:
