How to Manifest a Tall, Handsome Boyfriend for $30 a Month

A few months back, one of my friends seemed good — like, really good. This was one of my most Daria-like friends, and she sat in my living room, barely touching the Fuji Ice vape that she stores in my apartment. When I offered her a second glass of wine, she refused it. She’d been drinking less, she said. She was feeling like she “didn’t really need alcohol.” I examined her expression; the muscles of her face were relaxed, her gaze was steady. She looked younger, softer, more agreeable. She told me she was simply at peace. I demanded an explanation.

So she gave me the sales pitch: There was an app, she explained, that her acupuncturist had recommended. It was called To Be Magnetic, and yes, it sounded a little woo, she cautioned — but I would just have to trust her. It was created by this woman named Lacy Phillips who had set out to be an actress in Hollywood but who had instead come to be a manifestation evangelist. This woman’s specific program involved listening to recordings to help you unblock your childhood traumas so you could become a magnet for the things you wanted, which the cosmos would readily provide. The recordings were meant to hypnotize you, sort of, and they were called Deep Imaginings™, or “DIs,” in the heavily trademarked parlance of the app — and if you did enough of them, my friend said, you could rewire your subconscious to increase your sense of self-worth and thereby attract anything from a specific pair of Levi’s 505s to a lover.

The only catch? It was $30 a month, and I had to pay for a full year up front. But it was totally worth it, she swore.

I had heard of manifestation: It was the stuff of inspirational Instagram posts, the vague idea that through the repetition of positive incantations and the constant re-sticking of cheerful notes onto a vanity mirror, one might be able to garner confidence, a promotion, a smaller waist size. Basically a get-rich-quick scheme for the emotionally shattered internet era. It was yet another symptom of the modern industrial-wellness complex, magic and mysticism and the “Law of Attraction” and The Secret all chewed up and spit out by TikTokkers. Meanwhile, the algorithms had primed us to glom onto synchronicities as though they were fated. Manifestation is hundreds of years old, dating back to New Thought — an American religious movement that grew out of the “mind over matter” teachings of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who claimed that symptoms of his consumption were alleviated by exciting activities like galloping on a horse.

But a quick scroll through the app made it clear that I had not heard of manifestation like this. The To Be Magnetic protocol — termed “The Pathway” — began with a series of videos, each featuring Lacy Phillips in a DÔEN-looking top, calm, seated, explaining what I would be doing. The idea was that, once upon a time, I was a soul brought to Earth with an authentic code. Then the world around me eroded away aspects of my self-worth and identity. To manifest the things I wanted, whether material or ephemeral, I would first have to identify my authentic qualities and make a list of what I wished to “call in.” Then I would engage in a litany of practices. I’d follow journal prompts. I would listen to her DIs, crafted to reprogram my thinking through neural-rewiring processes of the subconscious. (Each recorded DI would be different, but the majority would generally encourage me to regulate my nervous system through deep breathing and body scans, then prompt me to recall a recent or childhood event that gnawed away at some essential personal quality and guide me through how to reprogram that event to restore my sense of self-worth.) And outside of the DIs, I’d take “aligned actions” like listening to intuition “pings” and setting boundaries that supported my list of manifestation goals. I’d pass “tests” that came my way — essentially a lack of positive outcomes or else challenges crafted by the universe to delude me into thinking my manifestations weren’t coming through, but by continuing to believe that they soon would, I would strengthen my “trust muscle.” And I’d identify what Phillips called “Expanders™,” an umbrella term with many subcategories that boiled down to people who had some or all of what I wanted.

The deeper I got, the more To Be Magnetic presented a sort of 2020s word salad of somatic therapy, neuroplasticity, EMDR, theta waves, Jungian shadow work, and — here this might have been my second glass of wine and puff of my friend’s Fuji Ice talking — elements of early Buddhism, even Stoicism. It was all wrapped in beautiful branding, evoking a box of Sakara Life sesame-citrus glow salads perspiring in front of my neighbor’s door, a clean-fonted cousin to the Moon Juices and Goops and CAP Beauties of the world. On one hand, it was intoxicating: Who among us would not want to “Live the life you deserve for less than a dollar a day™”? On the other, Phillips often said “summize” when I thought she meant “summarize.” The community around the whole thing — more than 25,000 users, according to the site — was rabidly supportive, hosting meet-ups and walks and communicating throughout the day on a dedicated message board. All around the city — the world — women in AirPods on walks were saying “vroooo” as they exhaled, if you just stopped to listen. I had stopped. I was listening. I was saying “vroooo,” too.

And at the center of it all was Phillips. Phillips with a rectangular jaw, and tight, high cheeks, and wavy brown hair. Phillips in an expensive-looking hat. After an upbringing that she’s described as tumultuous, she had tried acting. When her career didn’t take off, she found herself gravitating toward the mystical as she worked unrelated jobs. Sometime in the early 2010s, she began to blog under the moniker Free and Native and to offer one-on-one manifestation coaching — which, over the next few years, became more programmatic and eventually available to the masses in a monthly subscription as The Pathway, now offered through the To Be Magnetic app. (She also launched Expanded, a popular podcast co-hosted by TBM’s chief content officer Jessica Gill with topics like “How to Manifest With the Energetics of Summer” and “How to Make High Self-Worth Decisions.”)

Only some of that is relevant to her appeal. More relevant, perhaps, is that in a film adaptation, Olivia Wilde would play her. An uncharitable person might have said that Phillips looked smug; I thought she looked happy. Whatever kind of person you were, you couldn’t miss the hard sells. They were all there, in plain sight, on her Instagram feed, or splashed across the pages of Domino. One recent hard sell: Back when she lived in Echo Park, Phillips wanted a new house. Ideally it would have hardwood floors and high ceilings, and it would be in Topanga Canyon. So five years later, Phillips literally manifested it after seeing only two options. Within 35 days of finding a 1930s hunting cabin on an acre of land, she closed on the home.

Everyone I reached out to in the TBM community had these success stories. Their hauls were impressive. A free Ninja Blender. An air filter. A Roomba, dropped off by a friend who no longer wanted it. Cures to physical ailments. One manifested an intelligent, funny, foreign boyfriend with most every quality she had recorded on a list.

Norva Bennett, my friend’s acupuncturist who runs Shen Shu Acupuncture and a business called Zen Bride, got out of debt. For Destini Cruz, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mother and writer in New Jersey, the most significant results were emotional: She manifested the ability to find beauty in the everyday and to make time for self-care.

Karen Maloney, 38, found TBM in 2018 when she was at a low point, struggling with symptoms from Lyme Disease and down from not one but two rejected application for a U.K. visa. Her husband had already moved overseas on his own visa, but Maloney was holed up in a sibling’s apartment, biding her time and trying to feel better. Then one day deep into her TBM journey, she was on a roof and she saw a butterfly. Maloney opened her laptop, and after months of failed attempts to reverse her fate, she received an email: the decision had been overturned. She was getting the visa after all.

“It doesn’t actually matter to me what someone says, how manifestation is just a buzzword on TikTok now,” said Maloney. “The real meaning is so transformative I think it’s made the biggest impact on my life, and my life mission, than anything else.”

Not everyone’s an acolyte, though, especially online. TBM gained a fervent following in a crowded field by dangling Phillips — with her perfect skin and Malibu farmers’-market energy — in front of users like a promise. But by allowing herself to become synonymous with the app, Phillips made it easier to criticize its teachings on the basis of her lifestyle. Phillips was “out of touch,” overly materialistic, unethical because she was shilling personal growth so she could rake in cold, hard cash, some said.

Some raised issues with actual TBM practices and teachings: A few people were horrified that the program would encourage users to mine traumatic memories without a professional present. Others thought that Phillips had ignored the idea of privilege being integral to one’s circumstances, that there were some things that couldn’t be overcome with the right mind-set alone. (Neither Phillips nor Gill responded to interview requests.)

What reeled in Jenny Canonico, a 38-year-old event producer in Los Angeles, was the emphasis on science. To Be Magnetic, which brought on an in-house neuroscientist, Dr. Tara Swart, claims that its methods work by taking advantage of neuroplasticity, which more or less refers to our brains’ abilities to change structurally and functionally throughout our life. To Be Magnetic advertises the possibility of convincing our subconscious of new beliefs of worthiness by processing those beliefs while in a hypnotic state, which can then create new neural pathways to overtake the old ones.

There are modern neuroscientists who back manifestation. Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, a recent book by Dr. James Doty, a neurosurgeon and the founding director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, outlines several tenets. When a person calms down, the shift from the sympathetic nervous system (flight, flight, freeze) to the parasympathetic nervous system can facilitate clearer thinking, he writes. And the brain can form new networks of communication within itself, molded around intention.

Dr. Sabina Brennan, who wrote The Neuroscience of Manifesting: The Magical Science of Getting the Life You Want, likened it to habit formation. Essentially, she told me, if we take the time to give ourselves clarity on what we actually want, and we repeatedly try to dispel limiting beliefs that we might have programmed at some point in our lives and which are no longer useful or necessarily true, we can change the way we think and thus the way we behave.

“Manifesting is associated with the magical and mystical, but I’d argue that science is just magic explained,” she said. “Lots of things in the past appeared magical to us: thunderstorms, eclipses, certain diseases — and then science comes along and explains it, and it goes from the realm of magic into science.”

As for me, I cried a dozen times on my office couch. After an Inner Child–themed DI, I ran into three family friends on a single walk, though I can’t say any of us necessarily wanted that. I tried to manifest an email from my agent that said she had not only read but actually loved the latest manuscript of my novel, and while I did hear from her, it was only in response to a pocket dial. “I didn’t even get a missed call,” she wrote.

My friend, the Daria one, said she is manifesting a boyfriend but has not yet found one. “I do feel like the DIs have helped regulate my stress levels, like a lot,” she said. “I think, for me, that’s my biggest takeaway.”

“One lady got a Ninja blender,” I told her, but by then she wasn’t listening; she was reaching for a new vape, Miami Mint flavor. She had not manifested it; she had searched her soul about what would make her happy, and so she had gone to the vape store and bought it with intention and foresight and money she had earned. Maybe, I realized then, that was enough. The exact same thing.