This interview was originally published in January 2023
“From the ages of 23 to 27, I couldn’t tell you what I did, other than take drugs and party.” Author and development coach Roxie Nafousi is reflecting on how her life has transformed in just a few years. “I hit my lowest point at about 28. I’d just completed a month-long yoga teacher training in Thailand, thinking that it would be the thing to save me.” Within 24 hours of being back in London, though, the one-time girlfriend of Damien Hirst was taking cocaine again. “I went on a two day bender — and when I woke up from that, I just thought ‘oh god, I’m never going to change. There’s no hope for me.’”
It was a friend who recommended that she listen to a podcast about manifestation — and it felt like a lightbulb moment. “It just really resonated,” she tells me with a small shrug. “And the rest is kind of history.” We are sitting in Riding House Cafe one blustery December lunchtime. In person Nafousi, now 32, couldn’t be further from the desperate and drug-addled party girl she’s describing — she has a warm, calming demeanour, and is immaculately turned out — fresh-faced and elegantly dressed in muted tones. Her 27-year-old self would scarcely believe it.
She is compassionate to herself about that period, she says: “I struggled for years with self-doubt, self-loathing and I used alcohol and drugs to numb out those feelings.” She was living in a flat in South Kensington that her father — a wealthy businessman — owned. She didn’t have a job. “I just had no purpose. I became addicted to cocaine really quickly. It’s really very hard to stop in a city like London because there’s always someone worse than you — and there were a lot of people telling me I wasn’t an addict, like ‘oh, you’re fine!’ But people don’t want to admit you’ve got a problem, because then they might have to admit they’ve got one. Manifesting saved me,” she says.
Manifesting — i.e. the practice of turning your thoughts and dreams into reality via visualisation, affirmation and action — became a buzzword in self-help circles back in 2020, and has remained high on the Gen Z spiritual agenda ever since — with Nafousi as their guru of choice. Her debut book — Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life — came out in January 2022 and quickly became an international bestseller (Bella Hadid is a fan — she was pictured clutching the distinctive orange tome a few weeks after its release). Her follow-up — Manifest: Dive Deeper — published earlier this month to much fanfare, and she’s currently gearing up to host Manifest: Live at the Alexandra Palace Theatre, where she’ll be teaching over 1,000 people the secrets to how she manifested her dream life.
It doesn’t take an anthropological mastermind to work out why today’s teens and twentysomethings might feel drawn to a practice which promises them that the power to create their dream lives is well within their grasp. Young people have been handed a raw deal — and manifesting, with its quasi-magical tone (one of Nafousi’s ‘7 steps’, for instance, is ‘trust in the universe’) is an antidote to the depressing reality of a world in crisis. It’s self-help for the Harry Potter generation — and with supporters like Ariana Grande and Oprah Winfrey, it’s big business.
Naysayers scoff but much of the advice Nafousi offers-up wouldn’t feel out of place in a manual written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Everything from how to clearly define your goals to tricks and techniques which will help you overcome fear and self-doubt. One myth that Nafousi is keen to bust is that manifesting is just about visualising your dream future and then waiting for it to happen. “You cannot think your way to change,” she tells me. “Visualising, and having a positive mindset aren’t enough — it’s about doing the work both on yourself and on the project.”
Her second book is more introspective than her first, focusing on confronting and overcoming the thoughts and behaviours which might hold a person in pursuit of their dream life back. “I talk a lot about triggers and wounds in this book… about trying to understand like, ‘why am I always doing certain things? Or why is my response always to get defensive in certain situations?” Nafousi is still on her self-discovery journey, she tells me, still working out those triggers — "but the party days are definitely behind me. I’ve seen enough sunrises, and had enough hangovers, to last me a lifetime.”
Born in Saudi Arabia, the youngest of four siblings, Nafousi’s Iraqi parents moved the family to the UK when she was a year old. She didn’t always have the easiest relationship with her family — her father in particular. At one point she tells me that when she went to interview for her first job out of university, her father and brother scoffed — “they were like, ‘you’re never going to get it’... they like to be realistic.” It seems a little mean spirited, I venture. She’s reflective: “Yeah, people think that realism and tough love are helpful strategies. But I think why not expect the best possible outcome? My dad’s from a different generation, though. He’s an Iraqi immigrant, with a very different mindset - I don’t think they meant it in a mean way, they were just trying to manage my expectations.”
It’s perhaps telling that when she discovered manifestation, the first thing she tried to manifest was unconditional love. A week later, she met an actor called Wade on a dating app and three months after that she found out that she was pregnant. It was a wild ride, she says, but the day that her son was born she felt that unconditional love she’d asked the universe for. “It’s very strange to see young children grow up,” she says. “Because you think, ‘Wow, I can’t believe what was happening to me at that age.’ Children are so innocent, we have such a responsibility to protect them and give them unconditional love. And I think many of us didn’t receive that safe space and validation.”
Manifestation, she says, has helped her inside and out. She’s also on good terms with her father now. “He’s so proud of me — and our relationship has totally changed. We are so close now. He tells me when he’s been manifesting things, which is really cute.”
Of course, Nafousi uses her own ‘journey’ as proof of the power of manifestation — it’s a common tactic among self-help ‘gurus’, because in the absence of any data or scientific proof, they have to offer themselves up as an example that what they’re selling actually works. I can’t help but bristle slightly. The elephant in the room is the fact that, with or without manifestation, the world tends to make way for people like Nafousi: moneyed, privately educated, well-connected, young, beautiful and able-bodied. Given those advantages, success requires only the barest amount of effort. That’s not to say that Nafousi hasn’t worked hard or experienced her fair share of bad times — and as the famous Zadie Smith quote goes: “Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual — it cannot be easily mediated by a third term such as ‘privilege’.” Still, a big part of manifestation is the theory that “we attract the energy we put out” — so if we wallow in “low vibrational frequency” emotions like fear, anxiety, anger, envy etc we’ll attract low vibe outcomes. Nafousi advises her readers to switch to a more “high vibe” mindset by practising gratitude and focusing on the joyful aspects of their everyday lives. All of which, I would bet, is infinitely easier if you’re everyday life is easy to start with.
I put it to her that manifestation is just privilege masquerading as a spiritual practice. “No that’s not true,” she says. “I know I’m privileged for many reasons. But that doesn’t mean that manifesting is just privilege. I’m just one person — there are so many examples of people in very different circumstances to me who’ve benefited from the practice.” Manifesting, she points out, is more about “understanding your limiting beliefs and your insecurities, being proactive, taking risks - which are things everyone can do, and I really want people to know that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what age you are, what gender you are, this is a practice for everybody.” But actually, risk taking isn’t something everyone can do (especially given the uncertain times we’re living through) — in fact, most people wouldn’t take a risk unless they felt they had some kind of safety net.
“Yes, there is so much uncertainty in the world right now,” Nafousi agrees. “There is so much that we can’t control — but of the things that we can [control], we should. Of course [manifesting] is going to have its limits for everyone — but this isn’t about thinking your way to success or to change, it’s also about doing the work. Not necessarily working harder at your job — but working on yourself, your mindset. It’s about the way that you show up, and the specific things that you do.” It’s also about ‘trusting in the universe’ though, and the universe just isn’t as giving to poor people.
Nafousi is eminently likeable, smart and earnest and her advice isn’t bad, per se. But I simply can’t shake the sense that, no matter how hard she tries to sell it as one, hers just isn’t that much of a journey. Her first book starts on the morning that she ‘hit rock bottom’ — that afternoon, she went for a manicure.
She started out privileged, spent almost ten years not working and attending lavish parties, then got her shit together — now she lives a less chaotic version of the same privileged life she lived before. This doesn’t feel like a journey to me, it just feels like she got a job. Did she manifest that job? If she did, it was probably a whole lot easier for her than it would have been for your average Jane Bloggs. Still, as she says, she doesn’t own manifesting, she didn’t invent it, she’s just one person who found the practice helpful and who wants to share it with others. For a price.
