Create a Totem of Your Goal Achieved

An elixir is a potion or aid you receive from achieving some degree of fulfillment along the path to attain your highest goal.  The elixir is like an alchemical agent in that it raises your energy levels, your awareness, to a higher plane that you have attained with your accomplishment. So you come away from the ordeal you have successfully met with a greater power of insight or a force of greater love that you can carry forward with you on the next leg of your Journey.

A Totem is an image or object you can literally plant in your ‘growing space’ or carry with you as a reminder of the qualities you have gained and of your higher Goal.  It could be something as simple as a talisman, like a necklace amulet, pin, or charm bracelet representing the qualities or goal you wish to focus upon.  It could also be a collage of images you compose and place in a highly visible personal space to serve as a Vision board. (I do these often and pin them on my office bulletin board).

Totems are anchors that “ground” your vision and amplify your intentions like a magnifying glass that concentrates the rays of the Sun.

To create a personal Totem of your goal or aspiration, whether that be a concrete objective or a value you wish to strengthen day to day, find or create an object, or create a collage of images that will remind you to center your attention on your ideal.

With online imagery such as at pixabay.com or with clipart, it is easy to find images to represent your goal or the values you aim to strengthen.  I recommend placing an image or photograph of the goal or value itself, or of yourself having achieved this goal, in the center of the page to form a mandala composition.  You can surround that central image with additional images that represent how you are to attain this level of fulfillment and what will be the outcomes when you do!

Place your collage or object somewhere that you will see it often. It could be at your office or in your bedroom or kitchen, somewhere you spend a lot of time thinking about your goal and actively pursuing that.  Or you could wear your totem talisman close to your heart or on your person. It could be private, like a special stone that you carry in your pocket, or even a personal mantra or prayer or poem that you repeat inwardly as you move through the day or before sleeping at night.

Your totem can be any means of focusing your intentions deeply. This plants your intention in the loam of your everyday life, infusing your activities with a greater sense of mission, of value and purpose, and of unconditional love.  For no one but you can fulfill your deepest Soul objectives, which enhance not only your own capacity to live but your determination to serve Life Itself.

images are from pixabay.com

I value your Comments and stories!

Create Your GRAIL Collage

images are from pixabay.com

What is your Sacred Calling, your Holy GRAIL for this life? Create a collage representing your Life Dream as an Elixir such as the Grail at the center of a mandala sort of composition.  Represent on your pictorial collage as well: How you will achieve your Grail, and what will result from your reaching this level of personal fulfillment.

You can simply find images online (I recommend pixabay.com for free, common domain images, or clip art), or paste in your own photos or scanned magazine clippings to represent your ideas. Here is my Grail Collage from this week, below.

I welcome YOUR pictures or story!

Marry Your Future, with a Vision Board!

Maybe this is a bit of a stretch for our topic this month of The Sacred Marriage, but I find myself sitting at my office desk and looking at my bulletin board that I realize I have turned into a Vision Board.  I have embarked upon my final year of teaching before publishing my book, Your Life Path, and then retiring and relocating to focus full-time on writing and life mapping services.

I pilot every life mapping tool that I will be introducing with this book, and the art of “future casting” is a big part of this approach.  Any form of creative envisioning of what I like to call your future Lifescapes can be helpful to you in manifesting the life conditions you desire to express.

On my Vision Board bulletin board I have the poem Ithaca by Cavafy (You can click on the Youtube video embedded below, narrated by Sean Connery!):

I also have a collage of images that represent my journey ahead to realize my Life Dream.  It shows my future ambitions and goals:

To create your own Vision Board, simply imagine!  What CORE VALUES do you intend (not simply wish for or hope to do, but INTEND) to establish in your future Dream Come True?  Even if your most desirable future is the life you are living Now, what core values are you manifesting that you intend to extend and embellish further on the road ahead?

Goal setting is not about–or need not involve, anyway–LINEAR THINKING.  By focussing on VALUES rather than specific, material objectives, you remain open and flexible to however the Universe or Spirit fills your mold.

You can write your future values or conditions you intend to live into onto a poster board or in Publisher on a blank page on your computer. Then find (or draw or paint in) pictures online or in magazines that represent these values and conditions, and place them on your Vision Board in a manner that feels right to you. You can also cut out or cut and paste words and phrases onto your collage.

I like to create my Future Casting Collages (BTW, do several! The future is not cast in stone!) to represent my pathway from where I am Now to the future Now I aim to create around me.

images (other than my own) are from pixabay.com

I invite and welcome your Comments and Stories!

I would invite your collages to share, but actually I recommend you hold these close and share them mainly with your loved ones. Your VISION is your own; nurture it well and it will be!

Create A Golden Child Vision Board

Now that August is waning it is a good time to harness the Leonine energies of your Golden Child part of Self. I invite you to create a Vision Board of your future aspirations from the perspective of your Golden Child viewpoint.

An easy way to compose a Vision Board with your computer is simply by going to a graphics site you like (I recommend pixabay.com, as all its images are free to use online; or you could use clip art or simply Google Images).  Create a blank Word or Publisher page, set up in landscape mode.  Next, Imagine! Assume the perspective of your Golden Child persona, that part of You that is bold and adventuresome and often even gregarious. What does THIS You wish to project into your future with regard to any situation or with regard to your Life Dream as a whole?

Your Vision Board will be an image collage representing various aspects of your future (or, situational) Vision. All you need to do is to copy and paste from images you find online onto your ‘blank page’.  For example, if you see your future self living in Hawaii, find an image that evokes Hawaii for you and copy and paste it onto your page. Assemble your Vision Board collage by simply adjusting the size and shapes of the images you gather and arranging them in a meaningful way on your collage Board.

I always pilot every self-help Tool I develop first for myself before inviting others to utilize that Tool. So below is the Vision Board collage I created a few days ago to channel, as it were, my Golden Child vision for the future of our imaginings. Needless to say I won’t explain my images here; your vision is private. You can share it with others but be careful not to dilute its energetic force for you by explaining it overmuch to others. I can share that without even intending it as such, the little writer-girl image I placed on the bottom right of my collage does portray my Golden Child persona very directly.

I invite you now to create and compose your own Golden Child Vision Board. Be sure to use images of what CAN BE and include images that portray your means of manifesting your Dream!

all images used above are from pixabay.com

After you complete your Vision Board, I encourage you to save it on your computer Desktop but also to print it out in color and place it somewhere important to you where you can see it often. Let your Golden Child Vision Board remind you of your Dream, of your Vision and of your CAN-DO attitude.

I welcome your Comments, Insights, and Stories!

Picture Perfect!

As a third method for creating a symbolic, representative TOTEM of your Life Dream Achieved this week, I invite you to, first, contemplate your Life Dream goal once again.  Envision yourself living your dream in deep detail. Where might you be living? What sorts of relationships will be central in your life? What will you be doing to contribute to the world you are inhabiting in this future landscape of your dream fulfilled?

Second, find (or, create) a picture or design a collage of images that clearly represents something central or core to you about your treasured Life Dream. You might find your picture(s) by an online search of images associated with your goal, or search through magazines or through your own photo collection. You could instead draw a blueprint of your dream home or landscape (I did that this morning and it was amazing); or, use your completed Alternate Future Life Path image from last week’s posts (below).

Now then, I invite you to paste your selected LIFE DREAM PICTURE or envisioned plan of action or collage at the top of an at least twice larger page, such as on a poster board. Then on a separate sheet of paper that you will later paste below that picture (or, you can write directly onto the poster board if you prefer), imagine and write a FIRST PERSON, PRESENT TENSE description of YOU, living fully the Life of Your Dreams!

Your First person, present tense account of you, Living Your Dream, could be in the form of a letter to yourself FROM the future of your dream fulfilled. Or, it might read like a postcard story:  (For my  own starting example:) “Here I am, finally living in Bemus Point, just ten minutes from the Chautauqua Institute and 40 minutes from my dear sister, Cheryl! It is April. I have moved into my sweet new little house by the lake with Sophie, Loki and Emily. There is land for workshop retreats; I will build a lodge and place a labyrinth there…”

Got the picture? Well okay then, find one or a set of YOUR Future-Life Dream-Fulfilled images that resonates deeply with you as Soul! Place your “perfect picture” somewhere prominent where you will see it often to remind you of your Life Dream that you are bringing into Being through living the values you relate to your Dream.

I welcome all of your stories or pictures!

Thanks to WordPress and to every  reader and fellow blogger.Yesterday was the one year Anniversary for Better Endings! This next week I will present the final Life Paths for Better Endings topic of Live Your Dream, Now! Then we will embark upon a whole new annual round, with monthly Better Endings Life Metaphors, monthly Archetype Ally profiles, and many more Life Mapping tools!

Your Quest Totem

This week I have invited you to reflect on your Life Quest, celebrating yourself as the adventurous protagonist of your own Life Story.  I hope you have reflected on a challenging goal which you aim to fulfill in your life; if not, I encourage you to do so now.

Now I’d like to introduce a powerful technique and principle to help you to “ground” your intention for realizing your vital quest. It is called TOTEMIC REPRESENTATION. Totems can be anything that represent something you wish to remember or to center your focus upon.  Totems can be as simple as keeping a “talisman” for good luck, like a rabbit’s foot, which helps you to remember your ambition to succeed. If you have a particular idea you wish to center your attention upon, you might create a SYMBOL of that idea that you carry with you or place in a personally meaningful location that you see often. A shrine in your contemplation space or a rosary, for example, might be symbolic of your spiritual beliefs and may help you to practice your faith on a daily basis.

Totems are very good for representing your goals or Quest, to help you focus on that which you wish to remember or to be reminded about in the process of achieving this purposeful goal.  A simple totemic device for helping you to focus on your Quest is a pictorial Collage or “Vision board.” I invite you to create a collage that represents aspects of your Quest that you recognize as important.

Here below is an image collage I’ve just created to represent my Quest for the next several years. To create this online collage all I had to do was to open a Publisher page and then to INSERT some personal photos and some online royalty free clip-art images from my laptop. You could also use magazine images on a poster board, or create your own artistic collage of images and words. I recommend you place the most central aspects of your Quest centrally in the collage design. I have placed processual steps I feel I need to realize plus results from achieving my quest, accentuating the Positive!

Once you have created your collage or some other Totemic form that represents your Quest, I encourage you to place this somewhere you see often, such as your bedroom wall or mirror or your office bulletin board, or on your refrigerator door. When you contemplate the images in your collage, notice how synchronous they are with your Quest intention, even more than you realized while placing them on your Vision board.

What action steps does your arrangement of images suggest? Can you read this like a map to the realization of your Quest? What steps can you take in your life now in the direction of fulfilling your Quest?

I welcome YOUR insights, pictures, and stories!