(Hey, that rhymes – we’re off to a good start!)

Here you are – beautiful, wild, passionate, intelligent, a throbbing mass of sensations barely able to contain how much vitality, desire, love, and inspiration is coursing through your being. You’re talented beyond words, with gifts you’ve been mastering for lifetimes. You are simultaneously so completely connected to the collective that within you is the entire universe, and so utterly unique that you are an irreplaceable instrument the greater intelligence is creating through with a purpose nobody but you can do. You are made of stardust, your voice is the voice of The Creator, you are love manifest.

Seeing you like this, I am in awe of the grandeur of life. Aren’t you!? I mean, take a moment to breath IN how completely mind glowingly cosmically exquisite this being human is, this being you is. It’s wild! Profound! The stuff dreams are made of! Only it’s real, everyday, and it’s called life and you get to live it. Right now. In this moment. Here it is – woo-hoo!!!!

So when I see you (or me) hunching your shoulders, looking critically at yourself in the mirror, holding onto a relationship with someone who treats you badly, telling yourself you can’t do it, looking away when you see someone hot instead of looking at them with your winning smile, and the other 10-bazillion actions that express the low self-worth we’ve each been conditioned to identify with, I want to run up to you and tear the victim mummy wrappings of conditioning OFF of you so you can start seeing who you really are – a divine expression of light in form.

The other day this was my status update on Facebook which got just about as many “likes” as anything I’ve ever posted, which is a LOT!

One of the biggest things I’m re-creating in myself is that it’s OK to take up the space I do, in all the ways that is, and to stop apologizing for being me… or my desires, feelings, dreams, and expression. We’re all dynamic, amazing, and unique – and that takes up some space, which, to me, is a GOOD thing.

One of my friends who is beautifully WAY over 6’0″ responded, “great freaking truths of goodness expressed here…here I am large of body and breath and sound and feeling and life, and there is this tension in me for taking up space…make it go away please!”

I think we all feel that. We want the tension of holding ourselves in and back to end, to GO AWAY. We want to feel free, to shine, to express the fullness of the love we are, and live fulfilling, connected lives of purpose.

But it’s not going to happen with us constantly criticizing ourselves into being small, and whipping ourselves into submission when we color outside the (painfully small) lines our egos tell us to stay within.

It’s going to happen when we say ENOUGH to the inner critic, tune into our respective muses for inspiration and guidance, honor our feelings and desires for expression, take what’s given to us and GO WITH IT!

I’ve been experimenting with this for awhile, and while it’s a forever becoming unfolding, I’m finding that as I keep peeling the layers of domesticated human off of me, the introvert I once thought I was is more and more a thing of the past, which is so fantastically freeing, not to mention FUN!

So let’s begin. Wild and free, baby – that’s where we’re going. You in!?

It’s an easy enough thing to have happen.

You want to live passionately and you start to pursue a dream. In fact, maybe you’ve already started and are in the throws of nursing a sweet gem of fulfillment to life. I hope so.

Regardless – you start chugging along with your dream and there are all these things to do, create, experiment with, buy, learn, and follow up on and suddenly you’re busy with the work of your pursuit. Damn, there’s kind of a lot of it.

So much, actually, that soon enough you start feeling like maybe this isn’t so much fun. Why’s there so much work to do? I thought passion was supposed to be fun and all this work stuff isn’t fun. One, two, three more glances at your to-do list and you cross the line into the overwhelm red-zone and soon your many vices take on a new glimmering appeal. Lost in the haze of whatever it is you do to distract yourself, you can’t remember why you’re doing all of this anyhow and ego puts the finishing touches by smearing some self-defeating and/or confusion-inducing questions into your mind and you’re officially lost with Vaseline on your lenses.

Nice!

Not that I know anything about this.

Yeah… right.

So it’s easy to speak from ample experience when I say that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to passion-dream-manifestation is clarifying what success looks like to you and what being a successful ____ (fill in the blank with whatever your passionate dream is) looks like 3, 5, and 10 years from now.

I mean, that’s the whole point, right? You want to experience fulfillment. So clarifying what this is for you is your North Point – a shining star guiding your way through the maze of choices and slashing through the gazillion distractions we face each day.

So here’s the simplest thing you could do to help yourself.

Write out in detail what being a fully successful ___ (your dream) would look like for you. And then write out what you’d like this to look like 3, 5, and 10 years from now.

From here, take the 3 year version and back it up. What steps do you need to take to get from where you are now to there? Be really incremental with it. If developing a body of work or learning a new skill is part of that, then you know what you’re doing for the next 6 months. But what then? Break it down.

Then put what you wrote someplace you can see it.  Perhaps on the wall above your desk or on your fridge.  And, if you’re more of a symbolic sort of person, take what you wrote and make a collage or image that says it all and put that up, along with what you wrote.

The beauty is that when you have this, then you know what you need to be doing right now. It’s clear. And when you’re faced with choices between x, y, and z, you can look to the 3-year North Point and decide if x brings you closer to that or puts it off.  Being busy for the sake of being busy does NOT mean you’re being productive for your dream. But being busy with a clear focus and purpose DOES.

So on that note, I’ll say one other thing. A lot of things that look like they’re taking you towards your dream aren’t. I call it faux-productivity. For example, If you want to be a musician, you need to practice. Period. You just do. There’s no two shakes about it. So a faux-important thing you may be seduced into doing before you can get started is cleaning your room, well how about the whole house, and getting the perfect cup of tea, and oh it would be good to get outside for a minute, Nature’s always inspiring, and so on. Sometimes you may need to do these things, but most of the time you don’t.  You just need to pick up your instrument and play. You can get to the rest of that if it’s really so important later.

Isn’t life great? You just got a free coaching session! What abundance. Now get to it!

Lately everyone I speak to is talking about changes.  And not little shifts but MAJOR changes.  Changes like quitting an old job without knowing what’s next, surprisingly being offered a new job with unexpected complexities and needing to decide what to do, moving to a new house in a new neighborhood or city, breakups, divorce, health symptoms prompting new healthy habits that feel annoyingly unfamiliar, deep, undeniable feelings of stagnation igniting a desire to seriously mix it up and branch out.

And woven into all of these conversations I keep hearing the sometimes vague, sometimes direct implication that we should know how to navigate these changes.  Really?  Why?  I don’t remember right now happening before.  Do you?

Personally, I don’t know how to navigate all the changes happening in my life, and it’s actually sort of freeing.  Things are falling away I had hoped would stay.  Other things are transitioning and I don’t know what will come of it.  Opportunities are coming in I don’t yet know what to do with so, as gracefully as I can, I’m letting them simmer.  Situations I was sure would go one way turn out quite another and I just have to go with it.  For instance, last month – and this is one of many such moments I’ve had in the past month alone – I went to a hot spring to relax for a few days and one evening got lost for a couple hours in the woods when I had only intended to go out for a stroll and ended up having to hitchhike 9 miles back to the hot spring.  Crazy, right?  But, that’s life. Full of unexpected surprises and faith-inspiring adventures.  And it’s happening to and through all of us all the time, no matter how much we try to safety-proof ourselves from it.

Had all the changes and uncertainties happening now taken place in another moment at another time I may’ve been having a meltdown right about now.  In fact, I can clearly remember quite a few moments when my tension about not knowing combined with my fear of being unsupported caused me to SNAP!  And, who knows – maybe tomorrow I’ll hit a bump in the road and my check engine light will come on.

But right now my attitude is that the level of change that’s happening is so extraordinarily huge, it’s moved into the realm of comedy.  It’s practically knee-slappingly hysterical how unrelenting life is with crowbarring each of us out of our holding patterns, especially of taking ourselves so seriously, and shepherding us to loosen up and go with the flow.  So given that this tide is way bigger than anything any of us could even try to control – why not enjoy it?

Personally, I’m all for deciding that this is the best moment of our lives so far.  And considering that it IS happening, why not relish it and embrace it like the lover we’ve been waiting our whole lives to find?  This may sound overly-romantic to the pragmatist in you, but truly, the palpable, fertile potential hanging in the atmosphere right now could ignite the most exciting stretch of new growth we’ve each ever had and, to me, that’s wildly exciting!

So wouldn’t it be lovely to look back on now and see it as one of the most thrilling and empowering moments of opportunity you had up to this moment?  That’s the feel I’m going for.  Perhaps you’d like to too?

If you’re a yes to that, then let’s ride this wave of change and not knowing, complete with its electric sparks of anxiety and life altering possibilities, with delight and laughter and see it all as good news.  Let’s take ourselves off the hook of pretending that we should know how to do this better than we do and assume a stance of playful grace as things continue to bump along in the night and we’re called to expand far beyond our current comfort zones.

I mean, what more can we do than chart what’s before us the best we know how, ask for help when we need it, and surrender the rest to life, who’s thoroughly taking care of us all the time?

To me, that’s wisdom.