Live Your Dream, Now!

“Live Your Dream, Now!” is the  credo for the personal development handbook Your Life Path, which I currently am waiting for my agent to begin circulating after she attends to a major “launch” and probably some other projects.  Your Life Path will provide a complete, three stage rites of passage process for which you will be able to use life mapping and other creative self-discovery tools to uncover patterns and archetypal influences in your own Life Story that have been helping or hindering you from actively claiming and fulfilling your Life Mission and, yes, Living Your Dream, Now.

Living your dream NOW means that after you claim or excavate your goals and can identify the Strengths you have developed through overcoming challenges and learning valuable Life Lessons, you can begin Here and Now to conduct your day to day life integrating the values you desire to be expressing with the realization of your highest sense of purpose and adventure.

This month we are exploring the principle Live Your Dream, Now as a positive affirmation and postulate.  Consider first, then, do you presently even ‘have’ a Dream; or, how do you currently conceive of and envision your Life Dream? What would your life look like if you were exactly where you would wish to be living, doing precisely what you would most love to be doing in your IDEAL future scenario?

Or are you already Living Your Dream? Even if the life you are living fulfills you, where is it leading for you? I believe human consciousness or perhaps even all sentient beings strive not just for survival on a daily basis but also for self-transcendence. We want our Tomorrows to be ever more spectacular, even if we are the best we have ever been right Now.

Here is a Future Life Mapping Tool: Create a Game of LIFE game board that includes the sorts of twists and turns you can anticipate passing through along the winding road of your own Life Journey from Now toward some Future life scenario in which you have fulfilled your life goals. You can do this with a friend or family member and talk about each other’s game boards.

I like the Wizard of OZ game of LIFE version because it reminds me very clearly of Life Mapping. Dorothy begins on her Aunt and Uncle’s farm in Kansas, of course, and she and the rest of her archetypal ensemble cast members weave and wend their way through ordeals and tests, making choices along the way and gaining salaries (rewards). Eventually they return HOME, of course, having gained much of value along the Way.

Joseph Campbell, the world famous comparative mythologist who gave us The Hero with 1000 Faces recognized that the Hero’s Adventure that we are naturally all set upon in the journey of a lifetime always leads HOME.

So let’s start there this month. Where truly is your Mythic HOME? Set that as your destination on your game board of LIFE!

I welcome your insights and please share with us your life mapping results!!!

What’s Around the Bend?

What is around the corner in your life that you can envision as you “look forward” to embrace and maximize your future potentials?

Yes, being mindful and accepting of the here and now is important for appreciating life as it is, yet Nowness embraces more than the present in timespace; past-present-future are interconnected or we could say “entangled,” always. On Through the Wormhole this past week  the focus of the episode on state of the art  Physics perspectives was about the question of how the Future affects the Present. The Future exists Now, as a manifold of possibilities. How you envision your own future helps to orient toward and manifest specific potentials of the future conditions you envision.

This past semester I conducted some 65 students through a life mapping process, and they created some really amazing Life Dream Maps for themselves as a means of artistically grounding Future Action Plans they developed. Many of their Life Dream Maps were in the form of board game designs, reflecting versions of the Milton Bradley game of LIFE. These life mappers embellished their game boards beautifully, representing their anticipated goals and Turning Points with personally very meaningful images.

Since this week at Better Endings for Life Paths is about conjoining your ARTIST Archetype Ally with the image of Crossing the Threshold to establish a desirable set of life conditions, I invite you to envision and create your own Life Dream Map.

On a large, blank sheet of paper (maybe 11″x 17″), sketch out a winding pathway or devise your own “pathway” sort of image. Consider the major steps or cornerstone “turning point” spaces on your path to be pivotal actions or events you can anticipate experiencing as you wend your way consciously to manifest your Life Dream. Represent some image of your Life Dream itself as the Goal or destination point on your game board.  In designing your Future Dream Map, be as specific as you can about time frames for arriving at your Turning Point spaces. But you can also include playful transition points that, if you “land” on these steps, might say something like “Pause to Reflect,” “Move Back two steps before moving forward,” or “Leap ahead confidently” to the next Turning Point.

Have fun with this. Play it as an actual game if you like or play with your friends by each of you creating their own game boards! Whether you sketch this out roughly or artistically invest quality time in producing your game board, I encourage you to display it and save it as a time capsule that you can look back at as you proceed along your own path to manifest your Dream!

I welcome your insights and stories!

Your Yellow Brick Road

The more clearly you can envision your Life Dream or a future goal, the more you can collapse the space-time, so to speak, between yourself Here and your goal Now. That is, the better you can visualize and embrace the reality of your worthy end achieved, the more evident will become the path that connects you to the place or set of conditions your goal represents to you.

Last week I invited you to imagine a set of Alternate Future Scapes as a mode of “Future Casting”.  If you established two or more of these Alter-Future visions, choose one now. (If not, go ahead and cast an alternate future scape; nothing is cast in stone so feel free to imagine a desirable set of future conditions that feels good to you Now.)

Have you played the board game LIFE recently? My favorite recent version is the Wizard of OZ rendition. Dorothy and other characters wend their way from Auntie Em’s farm into the Land of the Munchkins, the Land of OZ, the Witch’s castle, and ultimately back Home, to Kansas. The image of a Life Path as a winding spiral, with bridges to cross, rewards to collect and obstacles or setbacks to overcome along the Way–like Dorothy and her Archetype Allies’ adventure along the Yellow Brick Road–is a classic mythical image of an Epic Journey or of a labyrinth pathway of self-discovery.

Below is a rather rough sketch of a Winding Path motif.   I invite you to fill this in (or draw your own and fill that in) with incremental steps or phases that lead to the realization of your Alternate Future!  Use your creativity and your mindful awareness of your Goal to represent time frames or the processual stages you anticipate experiencing along the Yellow Brick Road of your own exciting Adventure to the manifestation of your Life Dream. You can share this with a loved one, friend, or children, too. Then you can each talk about what you have projected about your own Life Path.

Have fun with this. You can create as many of these Life Path pictures as you like, to one or to several alternate futures. But take your time with each one, too. Focus inwardly on recreating–as it were, from the ‘end achieved’–the actual steps you CAN take to bring your Life Dream to fruition.

When I have filled in my own envisioned Pathway to a meaningful Life Dream, I have later been amazed to look back at this mapping some several months or even years later to find that I have been actualizing these stages pretty much in the sequence envisioned.

I invite your Comments and your Stories!

P.S.: Thank you for reading and for your Likes!!! Stay tuned for Friday’s post : Your Next Step