Editor's Note - Make sure to listen to Sandra Anne Taylor's talk today at the Hay House World Summit, where she shares how to break the chains of limitation that are holding you back from achieving what you want.

It’s far too simplistic to whittle down the multifaceted principles of destiny creation to just one formula. Yet countless people sum up their approach to attraction in just three words: ask, believe, receive. While this is very good at its core, in many cases it only goes so far, revealing yet another half-truth that can actually lead to more frustration.

I’m not saying that this bare-bones approach doesn’t work—I’ve used it successfully many times. Sometimes a thing that you want is so deeply ingrained in your destiny and in your consciousness that these three simple steps are all it takes to do the trick. Yet there are other times when your path of personal evolution is so complex that it takes a far greater depth of awareness and a much more layered approach just to move in the direction you desire.

When I met my husband, we decided to try to have children right away, but we were immediately and continually disappointed. I’d been teaching the principles of attraction and manifestation for many years by that time, so I pulled out all the stops. I did meditations, visualizations, and affirmations; and my husband and I prayed together each night. We both took herbs and followed nutritional and lifestyle advice that was designed to increase fertility. Short of in vitro fertilization, we did just about everything we could in order to get pregnant.

Yet that result was not to be a part of our destiny. The grief and sense of loss seemed to increase every month, and I had the same old reaction: What am I doing (or thinking) wrong that means I can’t make this happen? Each month, I visualized myself excitedly telling my family and friends that I was pregnant; and each month the sorrow struck anew. It felt like some big cosmic joke with the Universe saying, You teach this stuff—if you really believed it, you should be able to make this happen.

After enduring nearly two years of striving and self-torment, I finally gave up on that goal. In fact, it was the constant exertion that caused me to give up—not because it was so much effort, but because it just didn’t seem natural anymore. It didn’t resonate! For that reason, I felt it was time to move on. As much as it grieved me to do so, I started working on letting go of my dream to have children.

Not long after that, I met an attorney who dealt with foreign adoptions. I’d looked into adoption earlier, but I was told that I was too old to receive a child from domestic agencies. The same wasn’t true in the world of foreign adoptions, however, so I started the long, arduous process of identifying and bringing home a child.

Believe it or not, this took eight years. Since my husband and I wanted to adopt children who were hard to place, we decided to look at the older kids that so few people ever consider. Because of the psychological and historical issues, it was a very important decision. To get the right match, we had to be especially particular about the agency. It took quite a while to find one that was willing to give us all the information we required, but it was worth the wait. We ended up bringing home two wonderful children: an 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. It’s been more than ten years, and we know we were destined to be together. We all feel so blessed to have each other!

I now know why I wasn’t granted my wish to get pregnant—and I also know why the striving had taken me so much out of balance with my own resonance. I was fighting my destiny—and the destiny of my adopted son and daughter! But even if that destiny had meant that I had no children at all, I needed to become willing to move in that direction and open up to other options that resonated with my heart and soul.

These experiences, along with many others, have taught me so much about the wonderful process that we call life—the being and becoming, the achieving and letting go. Through the ebb and flow, the happiness and hardships, I have to say that I’ve been blessed by it all. One of the biggest gifts has been learning to live in paradox—and be comfortable with uncertainty. It’s an approach that brings such equanimity and peace. Energy is predictable, yet it can be very random. There are patterns in the chaos, and our real power lies not in forcing outcomes, but in understanding.