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!

The Art of Better Rendering: Mining YOUR Story

Humans are inherently Storytellers. We conceptualize  and tell others about significant events and time frames of our lives as narratives. Stories have beginnings, middles and ends; stories have challenges the protagonists face. Stories are comic (with positive resolutions or ‘happy endings’), or they may be tragic or as yet unresolved.

Recognizing our human capacity to spin a good tale, especially about significant or critical events in our lives, carries tremendous potential from the perspective of this blog’s focus on Better Endings. Let’s talk about “better-endering” or perhaps better even, “better rendering!” We can apply the PRINCIPLE of Better Ending envisioning to events from our own life, either in the Past, Present or Future, by SEEING and then TELLING these potentials, weaving them into the story we would tell about our experiences.

For the Past, for example, we can revisit our significant events with an eye to seeing the LESSON we have learned from that experience. Some say that the more we can MAKE SENSE of our past events, the more likely we are to face similar challenges more successfully in the future. Live and Grow becomes a story in itself. I invite you to print this post and  write the Lesson or Strengths you have gained from some past event in the space provided below:

For the Present, we are the central protagonist, on par with mythical heroes or Everypersons in literature. What can YOU DO to bring about a Better Ending to some thread of the Story you are currently living? What are the inherent potentials of the Moment you are presently constructing—whether positive or not? WRITE/ TELL the most positive outcomes of the life you are living NOW. This is important. I encourage you to journal, talk with a loved one, or artistically visualize and represent the positive potentials of your CURRENT Life Chapter. Here is some space to jot some ideas about this story:

For the Future, well, here the ground is So-o-o-o RIPE for you to envision Better Endings. The Future, I believe, is NOT fixed in stone. We can consider the future as a relatively open, endless set of possibilities. Now then, which potential becomes a STATE in some future Present is ultimately up to YOU. Current or lifelong patterns and habits of thought, motivation, and action certainly orient us along a pathway from Present to Future that sometimes SEEMS relatively fixed and immutable.  That is where MINDFULNESS, however YOU can practice this, comes in. One technique I offer in Your Life Path is to envision several “Alternate Future Lifescapes.” Envision a desirable Future Scenario. Write it out or practice active contemplation about it. Then, either on the same day or later, creatively envision an Alternate future scape; several even. What does this desirable imaginative future CARRY that reveals your deepest values, goals and motivations? What CORE VALUES does your desired Future embody? Here is some space to jot some ideas, but I invite you to write this out elsewhere as a descriptive STORY of the life you can be living as you REALIZE this desired future set of conditions and lifestyle:

Now then, PICTURE your Life Story as a WHOLE. What is the MESSAGE of Your Story; your Legacy that you would like to leave?

And finally, how? What are some things or ONE THING you can be doing Now or in the near, realistic, practical future that can help to bring about your most desirable future conditions, your own Better Ending?

Better Rendering means to re-tell your Story focusing on the lessons, messages, and strengths you have gained that you can APPLY to your Present in order to manifest the life of your dreams.

images are from pixabay.com

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

 

 

 

 

What Does Your Mystic Predict?

Although by general rule I don’t seek out fortune tellers—preferring to draw upon my own inner Mystic Ally, as I invite you also to consult—I do know quite unequivocally that seership or fortune telling can be quite accurate and valid. I know this from my own prophetic dreams but also because of an event that occurred 22 years ago.

In 1993 I completed my PhD at Arizona State University. That February or so, two job announcements came to my attention that appeared relevant to my preparation, one in Colorado Springs, Colorado and the other at the University of Texas at Austin.  I applied to both and I was put on short lists for them both. The first to invite me to interview was in Colorado. I interviewed over a three day period, from a Tuesday through a Thursday, enjoying the interview process and feeling quite good about the potential fit with my background and teaching experience.

That very Saturday, for the first time ever, I went with a friend for a lark to a Renaissance Festival in Phoenix, Arizona.  Not far into the theme park I saw a booth for a Palm Reader named Madame Carolyn. Because my Great-Great Aunt Bessie, whom I had cherished growing up, had read palms and was somewhat of a gypsy, I figured this would be fun. Neither myself nor the friend I was with, please remember, had ever even met this woman before this moment.

The very first words out of Mme. Carolyn’s mouth to me were:

“You’re going to get the job.”

Well, that surely caught my attention after I had just been interviewing that last week. Her next words were even more ‘telling’:

“And you’re going to work in one of the other two places where I do Renaissance Fairs: either Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Austin, Texas.”

Zowie! The next week I received the job offer in Colorado Springs and I began teaching that August and have been there ever since. Every summer too, of course, I continue to visit Mme. Carolyn at the Colorado Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado (about 20 minutes from my home). Over the years she has foretold equally astounding potentials. I have learned that what she is able to do with me is to see positive potentials. Then it is up to me whether or not to act on those potentials and bring them about.

Forecasting and engaging in your own creative future envisioning can be a very helpful tool. In the Life Mapping Process which I share with people and will provide in my upcoming book, Your Life Path, I provide several “Future Casting” techniques to help you to envision, plan for, and manifest your Life Dream. The motto of this approach to Life Mapping is:

Live Your Dream, Now!

But first you need to tune into what your current Life Dream IS. It may morph and transform as you work with this Dream image, but wherever you are at Now is an excellent point at which to sit at the ‘dock of the bay’, as it were, and cast your line or net into the waters.

images from pixabay.com

Close your eyes and call upon your own Mystic Archetype Ally.  Ask him/her to foretell for you  where you will  be/ what you will be doing five years from now (or more or less depending upon what it is you are hoping to fulfill in this time frame), with your most positive Life Dream potentials achieved.

You can engage with your Inner Mystic in active imagination (contemplation) or by writing a back-and-forth dialogue with your Mystic. You could use an artistic approach to sketch or draw an image of your Life Dream fulfilled. Or you could make a collage of magazine pictures or computer images to represent your Dream.

I invite you to share with us all here your insights and results!

What Is Your One Thing?

Here’s a thought: ALLOW the Future to affect your Present NOW. Contemplate a desirable future event, deeply. Then imagine backwards to where you are presently. What might you be doing now or in the foreseeable near future that can carry you, even PROPEL you forward to the realization of that desired effect or set of conditions?

We do this in reverse order unthinkingly, much of the ‘time.’ That is, we are generally dimly aware of how our present thoughts or actions might influence future developments or “consequences.” But reasoning or imagining backwards instead FROM a desired future can help us be more mindful of our thoughts and actions as constituting a process by which future and present are naturally interconnected or ‘entangled’.

Adapting the PRESENT in view of a desired future can LAUNCH and PROPEL you directly to that desirable set of outcomes, like a “truly aimed”  arrow from a taut bow.  I offer this concept of discerning the “One Thing” to life mapping clients who are aiming to manifest life goals. To be effective, the One Thing needs to be something very definite and will generally incorporate ‘out of the box’ thinking.

Here is a personal example: While engaged in an archetypal psychotherapy process several years ago, I was developing the Life Maps Process by conducting a series of interview studies and writing articles about the results. When I began to understand that the interview subjects were benefitting from the very process of engaging in life review and reflection, I wanted to take this beyond the “study” phase to write and publish a personal development book and handbook by which people could do this on their own. My therapist helped me to recognize One Thing I could do to create the time and mental space I would need to make this shift of focus and produce the book: a full month writing retreat! Although I had very little savings, she asked me to consider taking a one month retreat, and the more I thought about that prospect, the better it sounded.

I found a way to hire a pet sitter and I rented a chalet in Steamboat Springs, Colorado for a full month that next summer. I brought my elder cat companion Ariel with me. Every day for 10 to 14 hours almost every day, I wrote a proposal, several preliminary chapters and the opening chapter pages for a full book. Since then, I have never stopped my forward motion toward manifesting this dream.  I have now acquired an agent and have a well developed, full book manuscript and proposal. Hopefully in a few months we will begin to circulate the proposal. With true fulfillment, I will at length be able to announce to you here when LIFE PATHS: Life Mapping to Live Your Dream, Now! will be released.

The point is that the writing retreat was precisely the One Thing that would launch and propel me in the true direction of realizing my future goal. It took planning. It took a leap of faith to find the means to accomplish the agenda. It took finding the right place, the right chalet. But when it all came together, it was like magic and every day was filled with wonder and delight. I was manifesting in the present every day that month material that would only fully coalesce in the future of my envisioning. Most of the material that I organized and wrote is still embedded in the current manuscript, though much additional material has developed since what I could only begin to conceive of then. The retreat SET IN MOTION for me a process that has only accelerated ever since.

So, WHAT IS YOUR ONE THING?  What future Life Dream would you love to be able to manifest, IF ONLY?  If only WHAT? You had the time, the money, the opportunity of one sort or another? Then consider: how can you OPEN THE PORTAL of that specific OPPORTUNITY?

I invite youto take some time to work this ONE THING out. Don’t just commit to a new habit or activity in order to move toward your envisioned future. It’s not (usually) just about exercising more or journaling more or reading more; although, in principle any of those COULD be your One Thing, if it can truly FUEL your specific trajectory forward to realize your goal. But is there something more, something different, something DISTINCT that you CAN DO that will aim you irrevocably in the direction of fulfilling the very future that is reaching back to you RIGHT NOW and calling you forth?

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Thin Boundaries for Better Endings

“You’ve been given the ability to build a magical tunnel that will quickly and secretly connect your home with the location of your choice — anywhere on Earth. Where’s the other end of your tunnel?” (reblogged from The Mobius Strip blog by dreamwalkeramrita)

 Consider the idea that some people have “thinner boundaries” than others.  Drs. Michael Jawers and Marc Micozzi have written about this in a study of sensitivity factors in humans. In The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion  these authors describe boundary issues as follows:

The personality construct of Boundaries was developed by Ernest Hartmann (http://www.tufts.edu/~ehartm01/) , a psychiatrist and sleep disorder researcher. He asserts that each person can be characterized on a spectrum of boundaries from thick to thin. Thick boundary people “strike[s] us as very solid and well organized; they keep everything in its place. They are well defended. They seem rigid, even armored; we sometimes speak of them as thick-skinned.” At the other end of the spectrum, thin boundary individuals are “especially sensitive, open, or vulnerable. In their minds, things are relatively fluid.”

Other characteristics of the thin boundary personality type are:

• A less solid or definite sense of one’s own skin as a body boundary
• An enlarged sense of merging with another person when kissing or making love
• A penchant for immersing oneself in something – whether a personal relationship, a memory or a daydream
• Sensitivity to physical and emotional pain, in oneself as well as in others
• An enhanced ability to recall dreams but also a tendency to experience nightmares

It seems to me that thin boundaries relate to what we have been discussing this month in relation to the life metaphor “Life is but a Dream”.  Let me start the final week of this month’s topic then by considering how enlisting your Teacher archetype to help you “mine” the positive metaphor Life is but a Dream can lead to your own Better Endings.

Life as a Dream opens unlimited potentials because by their nature dreams allow creative flexibility.

 

I invite you to ask your inner Teacher to help you envision a “better ending scenario” for some situation you have been feeling ‘stuck’ in or hampered by. If you could transform this current situation-scenario by imagining a ‘better ending’, what would that other ending be, from the standpoint of your Inner Teacher? Let me role model briefly with a Teacher and Self dialogue:

S: What CAN I do to move forward with my book project? Nothing is happening; it feels stuck without communication from others.

T: Step back so you can look at the whole picture. Aim to gain a greater vision of what you are trying to express and share.

S: Should I edit then? Revision the whole approach?

T: One small step at a time, dear. Envision how you might reformat according to your highest Vision.

Do you see how direct and easy Archetype Dialogue can be? It allows you to immediately tap into your own multiplicity, to query and then to listen to your own interior, alternate perspectives. This can help you to resolve inner conflicts and to move forward after “checking in”.

The common notion of following your “inner counsel” is enhanced by envisioning your Inner Council of archetype Allies who are your intrinsic, ‘personal unconscious’ ensemble cast of mythic characters. Get to know your inner ALLIES, because that is what they aim to be, working together toward your own highest Good!

I welcome YOUR comments and stories.

Change Your Dream, Change Your Life

So, what is your current dream-life about? What story does it tell? Who are you in your current story? Who are others? What messages does your dream express? If you were to interpret this dream, what might you learn?

One consideration based on the metaphor Life is a Dream is to ask, Where is this dream leading to; how might this dream story end?

A common dream technique (mentioned in The Art of Spiritual Dreaming, by Harold Klemp) is to wake up from a dream and if you don’t like where it was going or how it ended, go back to sleep to finish it better, or simply use your imagination or journaling to alter the ending of your dream more to your satisfaction. This may help you to feel better throughout your day rather than carrying around tense feelings from your dream.

But think about this: if you can change how a nightly dream develops or ends, you can do this with your waking dream, too!  Simply reflect on a situation in your day to day life that is not going as you would like and apply your imagination to creatively envision how you could handle the situation differently and better.  You can also use internal dialogue with someone you are having an issue with, changing how you might normally interact with or speak to that person.

If you can DREAM or envision a more positive outcome, you can act consciously to bring that about, or at very least you can learn to respond better to how the situation needs to be. It is important that you are empowered with this approach; you can take the responsibility to alter your own attitude or behavior in a manner that allows the outer situation to change. For remember, you are the Dreamer!

Have you had an experience in your life where you have been able to change the outcome of a ‘stuck’ or a habitual situation? Standing back from your life-dream to reflect upon what is happening, as if “life is but a dream” you can interpret, can offer you the distance to apply a more mindful solution; your “recurring dream” can thus be resolved!

Recognizing that your waking consciousness is only qualitatively different from your dreamstate helps to strengthen the link between your conscious and sub-conscious awareness, so you can become more receptive and accepting of important messages coming to you from within. 

I invite your comments and stories!

WHAT IS YOUR NEXT STEP?

Action, like a sacrament,
is the visible form
of an invisible spirit,
an outward manifestation
of an inner power.

~ Parker Palmer ~

(The picture and quote above are from Theresa of Soul Gatherings [click to link].)

This week I have been focusing on tools to help you manifest your Life Dream. First you can envision your Future Goal deeply (see Sunday’s post). Then you can contemplate a pathway that leads from where you are Now to the gradual realization of your Goal achieved (see Tuesday’s post). Today I invite you to focus on discovering your NEXT STEP in the direction of manifesting your Goal. The difference between “magical thinking” and effective implementation of the law of Manifestation can be summed up in the concepts of VISION plus ACTION. Clearly envisioning your goal allows you to create a Plan of Action that will deliver you TO your goal, step by step. The ‘trick’ is to establish a practical yet at the same time a creative and idealistic or value based Process.

I invite you to review the Yellow Brick Road life path image from Tuesday’s post (reprinted here above). Here you were invited to fill in the winding path to a meaningful life goal by envisioning stages or phases you can anticipate experiencing en route to realizing your goal, or your Bliss. If you completed that game board design, you can review it now again. If not, I invite you to create one. Choose a Goal that you truly hope to manifest on your own road to fulfillment of your life Purpose or Mission.

Now then, zoom in on what you have included or described on this game board “life path” as your very next phase or stage of the Life Path journey you have envisioned toward your Goal. Focus only on that next phase itself to explore and expose more deeply. Now then, what ACTION STEPS can you take NOW in your life or in the foreseeable/ plannable future in order to accomplish this one next phase of your journey en route to your more distant, Bliss related Goal? Focussing in what you can do NOW helps you to establish MOVEMENT in the direction of your Goal, to overcome any inertia based on how far away your goal might seem.

Explore and more fully develop this one next phase, only. Create a Plan of Action that will manifest this next step. When you focus on “one step at a time,” before you know it you will be well on the Road to YOUR GOAL!

I invite and welcome all of your Comments and Stories!

HOLD FAST TO YOUR DREAM

These next four weeks will complete the present six month cycle here at Better Endings for Life Paths, after which we will embark on a whole new, exciting yearly cycle.  As a culmination of the process represented by the sequence of topics we have been exploring, we will finish the next four weeks with a flourish to help you contemplate a major Goal: Your Life Dream, Your Plan of Action, Your Dream Totem, and Live Your Dream, Now!  

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die,

Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

– Langston Hughes

For this week, I want to help you to deeply ‘excavate’ or to (re-) claim a Life Dream.  What is your understanding of your Purpose for being in this life? What is your unique personal Mission and how might that you realize that as your Life Dream?  Earlier I asked you to consider: “What do I want to be when I Grow Up?” Envisioning your answer to this is a way of picturing your Life Dream. How did you answer that question when you were a child?  What was essential about what you wanted to ‘grow up to be’ then that still applies to where you’d like to be in, say, five years from now or when you have fully manifested your Dream?

Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams go,

Life is a barren field, frozen with snow.

— by Langston Hughes

This week I invite you to ‘excavate’ your dream from childhood and then to elaborate on where It stands for you Now.

When I was in high school for awhile I wanted to become a physical education teacher, because I became fascinated with gymnastics through an obstacle course program in high school, around 9^th grade. I couldn’t get enough of that obstacle course; it was challenging and exciting to every fiber of my being. I wanted to achieve a level of perfection at every task, from parallel and uneven bars to the pommel horse. That particular dream developed later into my activity in college as a member of an intercollegiate fencing team.

Even younger, I wanted to be a musician (a violinist) or, a little later and ever since then, a writer. I wrote a novella when I was 12 which I called The Fate of Kuwait. It had some oddly prophetic parallels to events of the first Gulf War. Then when I was 18, my best friend Barbara and I snuck out to ‘run away’ to New York City, for her to be an artist and for myself to become a poet and a fiction author. It was time, we both felt, to leave our childhoods and to begin our awaiting artistic careers. We had met some young men from New Jersey in Niagara Falls earlier that day who said they would drive us to The City. My dream was of writing creative works in smoky coffee houses in NYC; a bohemian artist’s way of life.

Barb and I snuck out from her house and actually we could have made it to Niagara Falls, but at 6AM after Barb and I had successfully scaled an escarpment cliff en route to our bohemian futures, I realized my Grandmother was visiting; she would be so upset if I ran away while she was there! We slid back down the escarpment on our seats (it was February near Buffalo, NY) and made it back to Barb’s by 6:45; 30 minutes before her mother called us to breakfast. Oddly enough, two summers later while I was ushering at a performing arts center in Lewiston, NY, a famous symphony conductor and his wife invited me to come be a nanny for their children in New York City; I would just have to quit college and leave the next day! I let that dream go by, but I have nurtured the deeper dream by gradually developing my writing; publishing continues as my life’s Dream which I have already had some success with and am yet en route to fulfilling.

So, what did you dream of becoming or of growing up to Do or to Be in your childhood? How does that relate to your current Life Dream? What are you doing now or what can you begin to do that will allow yourself to arrive at this destination of your Heart and Soul?

Nurture your Dream this week. Write about it, dream about it, talk about it inwardly and outwardly. Draw it; imagine your DREAM coming forth into fruition.

I invite your insights and stories!