The Open Tabs That Are Draining Your Manifestation Energy

A couple of weeks ago, I put my back out doing Pilates.

Completely my own fault.

I've been on a bit of a Pilates kick recently. Everyone had been talking about it, I'd seen everyone on reformers for a year, and I kept saying I'd try it. Finally, one opened a two-minute walk from my house and I thought: right, this is the moment.

Here's the thing about Pilates. When you watch the instructor do it, you think: that looks easy. I can totally do that. What's all the fuss about?

Then you start doing it and you're like... oh. Oh no. I am burning in muscles I didn't know I had.

The other day my instructor did a backbend. I looked at it and thought: that looks pretty tricky. But instead of following that thought, instead of saying "can you help me make sure I do this safely?", my ego jumped in. Yeah, I can do that. I went over the block, put my back down, and went: f*ck.

Two days later I woke up and could barely move.

Now, I could easily say I'm never doing Pilates again. But that would be letting the lesson go to waste. Because that moment, the moment I saw something, knew in my gut it wasn't right for me, and did it anyway…that is exactly what happens when we try to manifest without a proper process.

The real reason manifesting feels hard

Go on TikTok or Instagram and the message is: just write your desires in a circle. Stick some numbers on a glass jar. Visualise for five minutes and wait for the universe to deliver.

I'll be honest with you. Don't go looking at my TikTok circa 2020. It's not my finest work.

The problem with making it look that easy is that when you try it and it doesn't work, you assume something's wrong with you. When actually, the issue is that real change, deep change, has never been designed to be that simple.

When you're calling in your next level, the universe is going to give you feedback. Sometimes that feedback is a pulled muscle. Sometimes it's something falling apart. Sometimes it's nothing happening and you're sitting there wondering why your visualisation isn't working.

It's not that you're broken. It's that there's a part of the process most people skip entirely.

Identity infrastructure

I want you to imagine you're building your dream house.

You need a blueprint, yes. You need to know what it's going to look like. But before anything goes up, you need to sort the foundations. The steelwork. The infrastructure that holds the whole thing up.

Your subconscious mind is that infrastructure.

Your beliefs, your stories, your identity. They're determining your thoughts. Your thoughts are creating your energy and emotions. And your energy is the language you're communicating with the universe in. So if the infrastructure is shaky, it doesn't matter how beautiful your blueprint is.

Here's what makes it complicated. Most of us, as adults, are operating from an identity that was built before we were even 11 years old. Everything you saw, heard and experienced in those first years became your blueprint for how the world works. Your scripts around money, love, success, worthiness. All of it.

And unless you go and deal with those scripts, they run on autopilot for the rest of your life. Which is why you can be doing all the right things on the surface and still hitting the same ceiling, over and over again.

The open tabs

Here's the part I really want you to understand. And it's the part most people are missing.

Go and look at my computer right now and you'll be slightly horrified. I have about a thousand tabs open. And you know what happens when you have too many tabs open? The whole thing slows down. It uses memory. It drains energy.

Your mind works exactly the same way.

When you go through a negative experience and don't fully process it, your subconscious mind takes a photo of it. A high-res colour photo that it sticks on the back of your mind with a note that says: don't put yourself in a position like this again. And whenever anything in your life even slightly resembles that moment, your mind scans its archive and says: no. We don't want that again.

This is why we self-sabotage. This is why we shrink. This is why the thing you want most is sometimes the thing you keep unconsciously pushing away.

When I was 17, I fell in love. My boyfriend and I went to university together, convinced we were going to be together forever. After year one, it became very clear that wasn't going to happen. He broke my heart. Ended things because he wanted to be single.

A few months later, I walked into a club. We were still totally over but not over. You know exactly what I mean. And as I walked in, I saw him kissing one of my best friends. The friend who had been consoling me. Looking after me. The song Mr. Brightside was playing.

I felt like a dagger had gone through my heart.

What happened in that moment was a microtrauma. Something I never fully processed. So for the next 15 years, every single time I heard that song, I relived that moment. The club. The kissing. The feeling of my heart shattering into a billion pieces.

My subconscious mind didn't know 15 years had passed. It believed it was happening now. So every time I thought about it, it flooded my body with all of those emotions as though it was happening right now.

That's what open tabs do.

You might be holding onto anger about something someone did at school 30 years ago. Heartbreak from a relationship that ended a decade ago. Shame from a moment you've never spoken about. And your mind is spending energy on all of it. Energy that could be going somewhere completely different.

You can keep the tabs open if you want to. But I want more for you than that.

You can't just let go. Here's what actually works.

I want to push back on something. The idea that you can just "let go" of the past.

The subconscious mind works in imagery. When you say "let go," it looks for something physical to release. And when it can't find anything, nothing shifts. You can't just decide to stop being angry. You can't just decide to move on. If you could just let go, you'd have let go already.

What you have to do instead is process it. Teach your subconscious mind that the thing is done, it's passed, and you're ready to release what you were holding at the time.

I had a client, 57 years old, who had been holding onto anger about the way her mother had treated her as a child. That anger had created chronic health problems in her body. Within one session, it was gone. One hour. That is how powerful the subconscious mind is when you work with it properly.

Closing your tabs doesn't have to take decades. But it does require intention.

Your homework

Think about an experience from your past that you know you've never fully processed.

Write it down. Write down everything you're still holding from it.

And then ask yourself: who would you be if that was no longer defining your energy?

Because when you pull your energy back, when you stop spending it on things that happened years ago, your energetic signal becomes so much stronger. The thing you're putting out to the world becomes cleaner, more magnetic, more powerful.

You don't need more vision boards. You need to close your tabs.

Love, Noor x