Shauna Cummins - WishCraft: A Guide to Manifesting a Positive Future

Hello, dear wishes.

Yes, thats right wishes.

In the beginning, we were all wishes. When you think about it, its quite literally true: we are the result of an act of desire. The word desire comes from de sidere in Latin, meaning from the stars. Humans have been wishing on stars, wells, wishbones, candles, eyelashes, flower petals and fireflies (among many other things) since the beginning of time. Across all religions and spiritual schools of thought, there is an active practice of petitioning the divine through prayer, meditation, trance, prostration, song and dance. Wishing has been an integral part of my spiritual practice since childhood, yielding many unlikely successes and glorious adventures, but it wasnt until I began the study and practice of self-hypnosis that I really began to master the art and enjoy the benefits of well-wishing (positive ritualistic wishing) and WishCraft.

In WishCraft, I will share the story of how I came to this practice. I will show you the ways in which I have learned to work with wishes and sometimes against the odds even make them come true.

By understanding self-hypnosis, both as a natural ability and a tool, we can learn to empower our wishes with intention. The energy of wishing is both primal and divine, and we can work with wishes as if they are a blessing, affirmation, meditation and prayer all rolled into one. By doing this, we can retrain the mind to focus, find and receive what its looking for. Not only does this enable us to better believe in our ability to change or manifest but, most importantly, it can expand our awareness to notice and possibly attract positive experiences and opportunities that move us in the direction of our dreams. In other words, it can increase our ability to (as I like to say) surrender to the supportive forces within us and around us. It also helps us, very practically, to make our wishes come true! This is WishCraft: the art of integrating self-hypnosis into the mystical world of manifestation, in order to organise our desires or wishes into action.

In my work as a hypnotist, I have shared this method with thousands of clients, witnessing them successfully train themselves to take control of their subconscious minds and make their wishes become a reality.

Throughout the book, I will include instructions and explanations on how to use wishing as a total mind, body and spirit energetic upgrade, by way of self-hypnosis. When we learn the art of well-wishing and the benefits of the , our subconscious mind becomes a proverbial wishing well: an ideal place to plant our wishes and watch them grow. A wish can act as a focusing lens for our desire, a portal for divine intervention and an energetic arrow to move us into action. The motto I want you to adopt as we dive in together is ...

Im so excited to share with you my musings on the divine energy of wishing; the history, mythologies and explanations that have inspired me, and what the very human phenomena of wishing a wish actually is; and how I have used WishCraft illustriously in my own life to weave wonders and transform self-depreciation into self-collaboration and a compassionate mindscape. I will also teach you how to make your mind a wishing mind. This process involves letting go of who you think you are and accepting that your capacity for change is greater than the conscious mind can realise. There will be detailed instructions for calming the mind in order to allow your wishes to influence you on a deeper level, as well as information on how to create an ideal environment for wishing, and how to adopt daily practices that will help your wishes come true.

My wish for you is that you get better and better at wishing well for yourself and the world, as you learn more about how your mind works and how to make it work for you.

Repeat after me three times:

Just as I wish well

for myself, may your

wishes come true.

Just as I wish well

for myself, may your

wishes come true.

Just as I wish well

for myself, may your

wishes come true.

Before I go into the history and art of wishing, I would like to share the story of I how I came to understand the idea of WishCraft. I hope hearing about my own journey to WishCraft will help you as you start out on yours.

It happened suddenly. I woke up in the middle of the night, after tossing and turning, my heart throbbing, anxiety pumping through my veins. As I lay there, adjusting to the darkness of my room, I thought: WishCraft. Thats what I had been dreaming about: thats what my mind (and body) had been trying to tell me. The idea of WishCraft was born out of a sort of dream: a trance-like, insomnia-induced haze.

At the time, I was recovering from a particularly destructive relationship. It had left my nervous system completely shot and my head in a shambles, so much so that the trauma had caused sudden hair loss or alopecia, resulting in a complete bald spot on the top of my otherwise very thick head of hair. But that night, despite the unanticipated bald spot, was different. The thought of WishCraft woke me up like a long-lost, burning flame of desirous life-force energy: a last-ditch effort from my psyche. It told me it was time to do more than make lemonade out of lemons. It was time to make my dreams come true, once and for all.

What my dreams had revealed to me that night was profound, but in many ways, it was also obvious. WishCraft. Of course. Thats what it was, that was what Id been doing: what had helped me ever since I was a kid; what I did now, professionally, as an adult. But now I had a name for it.

WishCraft.

Its what I did when I was sick as a child in my hospital bed, as I lay healing in an incubated tent, breathing through strange and debilitating inflammatory reactions as my skin flared up in wild rashes and my lungs contracted from pneumonia. I wished. I wished myself, my lungs and my body well. I wished it obsessively, as sick kids often do. I managed to channel my OCD in a positive direction of sorts, focussing my efforts on wishing. This calmed me, even as my body was on fire, fighting all sorts of things that the doctors didnt quite understand.

My brother had come to visit. In my memory it is like a movie from the 1980s. I think he arrived at night, after taking the bus up from college. I was the youngest of five kids, and he was the second oldest. When he was thirteen and I was still tiny, he had been tasked with sharing a bedroom with me, finding himself taking care of a crying baby. Like me, he had suffered through a lot of illness and many long hospital stays during his own childhood.

Now, stepping off the bus from college to visit his sickly seven-year-old sister, he brought me a plant. I believe it was some kind of clover-like plant, one that opened in the day and closed at night. Our parents are from Ireland, and we had a family habit of incorporating Irish mythology and culture into almost everything we did: blessings and rosaries decorated the house, copper-plated leprechaun statues sitting on pots of gold were tucked in hidden corners and beneath stairwells. Prayers and blessings and the idea of luck were always close to the heart and home, and so my brother let me believe that it was a lucky plant, a sort of wishing plant: that I could make wishes on it and that they would come true. And I did. I wished on it. I wished for my lungs, I wished for my heart, I wished for the other kids at the hospital to be well, I wished that one day I would grow up and be free, travelling to far-away places, writing in cafes along riverbanks, dancing into the night, finding whatever I was looking for.