Obviously, there's no mysterious, magic power in the box, it's just a box. But the idea of it is to help you release your request and thereby release your resistance to your request which will then put you in a state where your request will automatically manifest because it has already been created in the moment you wanted it.

What you seem to be saying here is can you release the request and not release the request at the same time? :)

In return, I would suggest you honestly examine your motives for not wanting to "let go" of the request. If you were already completely aligned with it, it would already have manifested in your physical experience - the "buffer of time" that people talk about is really a "buffer of resistance".

So if you are continuing to think about your request after releasing it, is it because....

• You don't really trust the method and would like help it along with a "backup" method instead?
• You desperately want the thing you are after?
• You are trying to force the thing you are after to come more quickly to you?
• You keep noticing that what you want isn't there yet so you feel like you need to do something to make it come?
• You need it to come a particular deadline and you are feeling increasingly worried that it isn't coming?

If any of those (or similar) reasons resonate with you then you are standing in your own way by highlighting the absence of the thing you want and you may need to reconsider whether the Box experiment is really appropriate for your situation or whether you should try a different Manifesting Experiment.

Now it could be that none of those reasons are valid for you and you are genuinely resistance-free when you think about your request. In that case, yes, you can help your request along through appreciation of it (or anything else, actually) because appreciation is an indication of fast, free-flowing energy directed towards your manifestation.

But in doing that, there's now a slippery slope leading to a trap whereby your focus on what you don't have yet may stand in the way of the manifestation (i.e. manifesting the absence of it, as mentioned above). This is what I call a manifestation-killer. For a more subtle example of this look at the difference here of a millionaire versus a non-millionaire: Focus on what we want or ask for it and forget about it?

You get around that by enjoying using the manifesting process for the pleasure of the process alone, and not for the purposes of actually seeing a physical manifestation. Another way of looking at this is to treat the good-feeling emotion you get from using the process as the manifestation instead i.e. the emotional joy is the REAL manifestation

If you are definitely insistent on using appreciation in addition to the Box experiment for getting what you want then you need to be very clear within yourself on the difference between appreciating and yearning. For more information, see Is the feeling of expectation sufficient for the manifestation to occur?