Last year a friend shared that a feng shui specialist gave her a lesson on the meaning of the amount of wicks on candles. Essentially, my single friend was encouraged to buy candles with two wicks because it suggested a coupling. One wick reinforced being solo and three wicks, well, that might bring a baby into the picture.

Since then, I’ve never looked at candles the same way. Last weekend I was shopping in a home store with two other friends and we talked about this as we looked at candles. When the married friend saw a candle that would look great with our single friend’s décor, she convinced her to buy it.

“You’re not superstitious?” she asked.

“No.”

“Thank God.”

Something about this exchange nagged at me. Not the part where my single friend bought a beautifully fragrant one-wick candle. That was a no-brainer. Nor was it about my other friend’s intent because it was pure. It was more about the use of the word “superstitious” because it is usually defined with modifiers like “ominous” or “ignorant” or “irrational.”

Now sometimes, of course, buying a candle is just about buying a candle. It smells great. It brings a shelf to life. Pure joy.

Here is why, though, a simple act like this can be more than just what it appears on the surface. Buying a one-wick candle doesn’t mean you’re sentencing yourself to a life of lonely despair. Buying a two-wick candle doesn’t mean the next hottie to walk by is going to ask you out and you’ll wind up living happily ever after. Believing either of those individual actions will change your life is indeed superstitious.

But in tandem with other behaviors, more insidious ones, these more surface-seeming actions could mean you’re moving in a more specific direction than you realize. When I explain this to my life coaching clients, the question becomes, is it a desirable direction or not? What if each action is looked at as part of a whole?

For example, let’s say you have a personality or belief system wherein you’re shutting people out and doing subtle things that generally put potential dates off. Suddenly you recognize it and want to make a conscious shift. Perhaps buying a two-wick candle is a step towards more awareness.

And maybe that leads to the realization that you’ve been listening to an awful lot of angry music and you decide to change it up. And then one day you forget to bring a magazine on the subway and someone strikes up a conversation because you actually seem available and approachable instead of closed in your world and it opens your eyes even more. And on it goes, rippling, and soon people who have known you for a while start making comments about how much more open you seem. And strangers seem to be paying more attention when you walk down the street.

This becomes a way of being. Is it technically because you bought a two-wick candle? Of course not. But is it energetically because you bought a two-wick candle? Darned straight it is.

This isn’t about stashing a rabbit’s foot in your purse and then sitting on your butt hoping your life will change. It’s about moving towards a goal and taking action that lines up with that desired outcome. It’s about acting “as if” the outcome is going to happen. It’s a show of faith, a shift in attitude, recognizing that some seemingly innocuous things are part of a continuum.

In his new book Manifesting Change, It Couldn’t Be Easier, author Mike Dooley effectively uses the metaphor of MapQuest.com to illustrate the power of being clear about the goal and not so much what he calls the “hows.” You input your starting point and – he stresses this -- then you type in your end point. Knowing the latter is key for MapQuest to do its thing, right?

“And in the instant you give it your end result; it calculates every possible road you could travel on,” Dooley writes. “It takes into account yields, merging lanes, speed limits, stoplights, everything, and in a heartbeat returns to you the shortest, quickest, most harmonious way for you to get there. In other words, it calculates the hows for you in a split second.”

In his view, this is just like what the Universe does when you give it a new end result.

“It instantly knows the entire sequence of events necessary to get you from where you are today to the manifestation of this end result,” he writes. “And this sequence will begin to play itself out once your start moving.”

Bingo. Make a move. Shake things up. Buy a two-wick candle. Or, if you’re a baseball player, start wearing women’s underwear on game days. Remember Bull Durham? Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner, has a talk with Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon.

“I told him that a player on a streak has to respect the streak,” Davis says. “If you believe you’re playing well because … you wear women’s underwear, then you ARE! And you should know that!”

Have some fun with it, but know that there’s power in it, too.

In Sunday’s New York Times, there was a story about what has come to be known as the “Oprah effect” and who will be her last anointed star as she winds down her final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show. But the piece also talked about those who didn’t turn their Oprah appearance into gold. Winfrey seems to really connect with those aligned with her positive, spiritual outlook and who seek to be a part of what she’s built as opposed to those primarily looking for pure marketing and self-promotion on her show. Surely this is manifestation at work, connected to the continuum and how one moves in the world.

Dooley, known for his Web site TUT.com and the daily email “Notes from the Universe” he sends out, sums it up nicely in this note cited in his book:

“It’s not possible. For better or worse, you cannot significantly change your life by manipulating the material world – not by working harder, not by studying longer, not by schmoozing, not by sweating, not by fasting, not by the hair of your chinny chin chin! But change, great change, is inescapable … when you first begin manipulating the world of your thoughts. It is that simple.”

I’m sure there are plenty of couples out there who own one-wick candles and it’s not because they’re expressing a wish for divorce. But if that’s the goal, it might not be a bad place to start.

Nothing superstitious about it.

Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.