Early in Becoming Your Dream, Joan McManus offers up her book's primary point: "You have right now the mental skills to learn to synchronize your dominant mental attitude with the higher frequencies of the ideal person you dream of becoming. By using that gift of choice that is already yours, you will, by universal law, become your dream."
This powerful statement sets the tone for an adventure through the ten essential steps McManus explores that will bring about transformation for anyone who follows them. McManus devotes a chapter to each step, including Designing Your Dream; Test, Digesting, and Investing in Your Dream; Understanding the Power of Your Thoughts and Words; Assuming Leadership of Your Mind; and Receiving Your Abundance. To achieve your dream, McManus explains that we must familiarize ourselves with the six mental faculties that determine the life we live. She refers to these as our Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). They include intuition, will, perception, imagination, reason, and memory. McManus walks us through how to use these HOTS to their highest potential to achieve the lives we currently may only dream of having.
Throughout Becoming Your Dream, McManus draws upon scientific research and the insight of numerous spiritual and leadership experts. For example, in discussing the power of imagination, she quotes Eben Pagan, who tells us, "We were born into a world that seems to want us to create what we first imagine in our mind. It is a reality that is spectacularly friendly to creative design and manifestation."
Building upon this focus on imagination, McManus tells an incredibly powerful story that is by itself worth the price of the book. She reveals that as a child she had polio and was in a hospital with other children who suffered from it. Her grandmother would continually send 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 'see' myself walking. I must not accept these circumstances as my reality; that was Error talking. I didn't have to understand how, but I did have to know I would walk. She said that image-already formed in her mind-would soon begin to form in the material world."
When McManus shared her grandmother's vision with her five-year-old friend Kenny, he said five words to her that would change her life: "I can see you walking." At that moment, McManus began to see it too, and before long, she was recovering and back in school, able to walk and play like other children. She discusses here how her other HOTS came into play, such as the role of memory, in her ability to walk. She says it was necessary to "un-memorize" the many attempts when her limbs had failed her-and to "re-member" herself as a whole and healthy person. She also needed to dispute common reason and replace it with uncommon reason. "Uncommon reason was needed here to say that, although I couldn't conceive how it would happen, I had an inner knowing that it was possible, for I could clearly see my upright, walking body in my mind."
McManus goes on to talk about the power of faith and knowing that Spirit has your back. Just as she had faith that she could walk again, we all can achieve our dreams if we have the same faith. She agrees with the scriptural analogy of needing faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains but states, "you must, however, have that seed firmly planted in the fertile soil of your mind."
Many more powerful stories and messages fill the pages of Becoming Your Dream. McManus looks at how our reptilian brains hold us back and how we can conquer them. She advocates for the importance of meditation, during which time we can reconnect to the intelligent field of consciousness of which we are all an inextricable part but forget about because we are too busy. She agrees with Blaise Pascal here, whom she quotes as saying, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." And she discusses 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 his nation.
Personally, I found especially valuable McManus' discussion about false rules we have all learned and how to overcome our belief in them. These rules are generally based on false beliefs and they no longer work; they encompass 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 about receiving abundance, including these powerful words, "As you learn to receive your goodness and your abundance with grace and gratitude, you will find that the same inner divine light that shines so brightly in those 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 as a whole. There is no private good. Your gifts are part of the fabric of humanity."