Reclaiming the Imagination: The Practice of Paying Attention

We are living in an unprecedented economy of attention.

From the moment we wake up, messages compete for our awareness: notifications, headlines, advertisements, opinions, images, warnings, and invitations to buy something, become something, or fear something. Our attention has become extraordinarily valuable, and entire industries have been built around learning how to capture and direct it.

As a hypnotist, I find this fascinating.

Hypnosis is often misunderstood as a state in which we lose control. But in my experience, the opposite can be true. Hypnosis can help us become more aware of where our attention is going, what suggestions we are absorbing, and how our imagination is shaping our experience.

We all move through natural forms of trance every day. We become absorbed in a movie, lose ourselves in music, stare out a window and daydream, or scroll through our phones and suddenly discover twenty minutes have disappeared.

Trance itself is not the problem.

The question is: Who or what is directing our attention, and why?

Attention Is a Creative Resource

One of the most important things I have learned in nearly fifteen years of practicing hypnosis is that attention is trainable.

What we repeatedly notice becomes easier to notice.

Researchers at Queen’s University have estimated that we experience roughly 6,000 identifiable thought transitions each day. That is a lot of mental activity. But having a thought does not necessarily make it important, meaningful, or true.

Thoughts arise throughout the day. What matters is which ones we continually return to, elaborate upon, rehearse, and give meaning to. Attention is one of the ways we participate in that process.

If we continually direct our attention toward danger, comparison, inadequacy, and urgency, our minds can become increasingly skilled at noticing those things. But we can also practice noticing beauty, possibility, connection, pleasure, creativity, and care.

This does not mean ignoring suffering or pretending everything is wonderful. Reclaiming our attention can help us become more capable of responding to the world as it actually is.

Attention influences what we perceive. Imagination helps us consider what might be possible beyond what already exists.

Before something can be created, whether it is a relationship, a piece of art, a garden, a community project, or a different way of living, someone has to imagine it.

Imagination is not simply an escape from reality. It is one of the ways we participate in creating it.

On Campus

The Wishing Well

A WishCraft and manifestation retreat

December 4–6, 2026

Wishing Is a Practice of Imagination

This is what interests me about wishing and manifestation.

A wish gives shape to desire. It asks us to imagine a future that does not exist yet and consider how we might participate in bringing some part of it into being.

We see a practical version of this in sports psychology. Athletes use mental imagery alongside physical training, mentally rehearsing a movement, performance, or response to a challenging moment before encountering it in real life.

They are not imagining instead of practicing. Imagining is part of the practice.

I believe wishing can work in a similar way.

When we vividly imagine something we want to experience, we begin rehearsing our relationship to that possibility. We can notice what it feels like, what beliefs arise around it, and what actions might move us toward it.

Manifestation, to me, is not about controlling the universe with our thoughts. It is about bringing imagination, attention, belief, and action into greater relationship with one another.

A wish gives us somewhere to begin.

The Subconscious Mind as a Wishing Well

In my book Wishcraft: A Guide to Manifesting a Positive Future, I compare the subconscious mind in hypnosis to a wishing well.

In hypnosis, we can become more receptive to images, impressions, and suggestions. It can be an opportunity to offer ourselves something nourishing on a deeper level: a new possibility, a kinder belief, or a wish we are ready to take seriously.

The metaphor was inspired by traditions of sacred wells, particularly in Celtic cultures where water was associated with healing and the sacred. People visited wells to make offerings, prayers, and wishes. There is something beautiful about placing a hope into the water and surrendering the need to know exactly how it will be answered.

Throughout our lives, other things are placed into our own inner wells: family stories, cultural expectations, advertising, relationships, and ideas about what is possible for us.

Practices like hypnosis, meditation, journaling, ritual, and conscious imagination give us a chance to pause and ask:

What is actually mine? What have I inherited? What am I ready to return? And what would I like to place there now?

Try This at Home: A Daily Wishing Well

For one week, take a few minutes each day away from your phone and practice deliberately directing your attention.

Morning Wishing Well Moment: Notice something beautiful. Let yourself really see, hear, taste, smell, or feel it. Say aloud or to yourself, that’s beautiful, breath it in.
Afternoon Wishing Well Moment: Notice something you appreciate. Pay attention to where you feel appreciation in your body. Make it personal and thank yourself for something you did, say you name to yourself as you do, breath it in.
Daily Wishing Well: Make a wish. Choose something you would genuinely like to experience, create, change, or help make possible. Imagine it. Give yourself a moment to picture the wish as if you were rehearsing a possibility. Breath it in and feel where you feel it strongest in your body. What do you see? How does it feel? What becomes possible?
Take one small action. Ask yourself: What is one thing I can do today in the direction of this wish?

The purpose is not to force yourself to “think positively.” It is to practice choosing where you place your attention and strengthening your capacity to imagine possibility.

This is where wishing becomes practice. By doing these practices of attention in an embodied way using your imagination to strengthen the association, registers to the brain that this is important and it will more likely remember and reinforce it.

Imagining Together

We often think about manifestation individually: the job, the relationship, the house, the opportunity. But I am increasingly interested in what happens when we widen the frame.

What if we practiced wishing for one another?

What if our imaginations were also places where we practiced envisioning collective care, thriving creative communities, healthier ecosystems, greater belonging, more beauty, and more rest?

Sometimes another person can hold hope for us when our own imagination has become exhausted. Hope can be collaborative. Imagination can be collaborative.

This December at The Wishing Well: A Wishcraft and Manifestation Retreat, we will explore this together through self hypnosis, conscious imagination, sound, reflection, and the Community Wishing Well. We will make space for our individual wishes while also practicing the art of collective imagining.

We can witness one another’s wishes. We can lend one another our attention. And we can practice imagining possibilities not only for ourselves, but for one another and the communities we are part of.

A wish may begin inside one person’s imagination.

But some of our most meaningful wishes may be the ones we learn to imagine together. One of my favorite incantations is “Just as I wish well for myself, may your wishes come true.”