Feeling Into Your Future

ON VISION BOARDS, FUTURE SELVES & HOW TO WANT MORE WITHOUT FORGETTING YOU ARE ALREADY WHOLE.

March 2025 | (7min read)

I’ll be honest and say if not for Pinterest, I probably wouldn’t have the same reverence for this practice. It has a way of bringing that mood-board-as-magic feeling to life when I let myself live in my curations. In my earlier days it was more aesthetic scrolling and sorting—pinning poetry, beautiful destinations, textiles, outfits... But over time I realized these weren’t just things I liked. They were moods I was longing to inhabit. Each image was a micro-transmission of a life imagined, pulling out a feeling in me that I wanted to experience. I stopped asking things like, “What do I like about this?”  or “What do I want?” And started asking, “What would it feel like to live in this image?” “What mood do I want to wake up inside of?”

I started getting specific. The food I’d make, and the way it would look on the plate. The light that would pour into my space. The habits I would have on a slow morning. The texture of my clothes and the ideal ratio of time spent in service and in freedom from it. I was conjuring a feeling, evolving my fantasy into frequency-building. And once you can feel the mood of the life you’re calling in, you can begin to live inside its edges even before it’s fully there.

Eventually, I turned the images into words. I journaled out a life in my imagined mood-scape and, because I’ve trained my strangely soulful little digital sidekick well, I asked ChatGPT to reflect it back to me in detail. What would a day look like in this life from start to finish? The words painted a version of me I’d already started to feel myself being pulled toward. Reading it oddly made me see how true it felt, like I could already sense it was mine to actualize. That’s the thing about envisioning—through imagery, journaling, or even speaking out loud— the clearer the vision becomes, the more your nervous system starts to organize itself around it. Once something is no longer foreign or abstract, your body doesn’t resist it as much and your habits and your thoughts become attuned to its frequency.

You know when you think of something important and tell yourself you'll remember it later, only to never think of it again? That’s kind of what happens to our desired futures in the noise of modern life. They don’t disappear, but they drift. When we don’t name them or make them visible, they fade into the background. If a dreamcatcher is meant to catch the bad dreams, then a vision board is its opposite. It’s a net for the good ones, made of the threads of your desires. A map of colorful, textured feeling that tunes your inner compass toward the next right step. Think of it as a tool of energetic orientation.

Most people misunderstand manifestation as a kind of pretending, as if we’re meant to trick the universe into giving us what we want. It’s actually about partnering with a timeline that already exists. You're forming a relationship with a potentiality. And relationships, like all things, take tending. You have to return to the vision (not to wish harder) but to attune more clearly. This allows the feeling of your desired state saturate your choices, which then then waters the field for aligned action to grow from. Every version of yourself that lives in your imagination is a potential future. And every day through your attention, your actions, and your energy, you are casting your vote for the version you’ll eventually meet.

I’d be remiss not to name that there are two states at play in this work: being and becoming. In our present state of being, it is key to ground ourselves in the knowing that we are already whole. You do not need a vision board or a more curated version of yourself to be okay. Even the things you think you desire are often not about the thing itself, but about the feeling you imagine it will give you. Maybe that’s peace, spaciousness, clarity… or maybe relief from uncertainty. That feeling is already available to you right now, and returning to that inner knowing is your spiritual home base.

And… being at peace with the present doesn’t negate the natural pull of your evolution. It certainly doesn’t mean you stop dreaming or shaping your life through intentionality. We are always becoming. When we visualize what we hope to manifest into physical reality—a version of ourselves, a creative project, an environment—we’re tuning. We are aligning our internal state with a potential reality that already exists within the quantum field. It’s a future that’s not outside of us, but vibrating just beyond the current level of coherence. And when that tuning comes from your inherent wholeness and not your lack, the vision becomes embodied. In other words, our attunement becomes attainment when we start to believe our visions are not fantasy, but the future becoming form.

From my future self to yours.

xx Alyssa