It’s clear to me that what we each inherited regarding how relationships are and how we and others should be within them is stiflingly outdated.  Just one moment in those old roles and rules and we mostly find ourselves running away screaming!  The good news is that every one of us is hacking away at the traditions and structures that no longer fit and are carving our own paths towards what’s fulfilling for us now.  Yipee!

There are a million different ways this deconstruction/recreation is happening — gender roles, communication, sexual orientation, monogamy/open relationships, making clear agreements –  but the one I’m most fascinated with these days is expectations.   And my interest in this is largely fueled by an experiment I’ve been running this last year where the more I let go of the expectations and conditions I place on any given moment or person and accept, appreciate, and engage with what is, the more fulfillment I experience in my relationships!  (And I’m guessing those in relationship with me feel the same way.)

To me, expectations are the sneaky killer angel of experiencing joy in relationships.  They stealthfully creep in, like a wild anti-passion vine, and replace the flow of joy and positive exchange with heavy, sticky push-pull and disappointment.

You know the feeling I speak of.  You’ve felt it often enough in yourself when one of your (probably unconscious) expectations isn’t being met by someone in your life and you start having that all too familiar sinking and/or tightening up feeling that, if you feed into it, leads you to pull back, push, defend, blame, manipulate, or possibly go into an emotional spin-cycle.  And you’ve seen others play the same thing out with you and the other people in their lives.

It’s a trip, really, because we each have many relationships and, at the core of them, we have them to experience joy, mutual upliftment, and love. Right?

So in my desire to experience, live, and share more love, I’ve been playing around lately with the idea that just like problem and solution can’t co-exist, fulfillment and expectation may be mutually exclusive as well.  This isn’t the same as making requests. That’s a natural part of communicating and expressing self-worth. But to expect anyone (including ourselves) to be other than they are or to want what we want is a guaranteed recipe for disappointment because we’re immediately putting ourselves in a situation of struggling against and resisting what is. No matter how much we (or, probably more accurately, our ego) wants it to be different, the bottom line is that people are how they are and they want what they want.  That’s what is.  And what is, IS.  Period.  And, like Byron Katie often says – when you resist what is, you’re the one that will always lose because what is, is.

It’s a wild thing to really try this on because the second you put on your radical-love-and-acceptance goggles and say “I’m going to accept everyone as they are, myself included”, you’re immediately confronted with how much your ego tries to convince you that your lack of fulfillment in any given moment is because of how someone else is or isn’t being.  This, of course, is a BIG FAT LIE designed to keep you under the spell of identifying as a victim, but it’s so ingrained into each of us that it takes some perseverance and practice to wake up to this and break through.

So let us, for a moment, step into a wild world of imagination and possibility (à la The Reading Rainbow, if you were a child of the 80s) where you drop all the overt and subtle expectations you have of the people in your life.  You step into the knowing that everyone gets to have their own experience and that the fundamental joy, aliveness, love you seek already IS because it’s who you are.  As you really submerge yourself in this, imagine letting everyone OFF the hook. Imagine no longer looking to anyone to be anything in particular for you and instead enjoying everyone you know exactly how they are right now.  Imagine filling in the perceived gaps other people leave in your life with your own joy, love, and creativity.  Imagine not even expecting those who expect a lot of you to be different than that and not taking it personally because you see it for what it is – their pain and drama.  Imagine not expecting yourself to be different than you are.  Imagine releasing the conditions and expectations you place on your life in order to be happy and instead just being happy now.  Imagine!!!  Can’t you feel pounds of weight dropping off your shoulders as you imagine this? I do!!

The skeptic in you may say this is a utopian fantasy world, but I think this is possible with some practice because it’s acceptance and love in action.  And inherently, love is at the center of who we are.  The rub is that many of us grew up in households where there were a lot of things masquerading as love that were not love, and to varying extents, we’re all still caught up in these patterns and mis-perceptions of love.  Manipulation and expectation are part of that.  But there’s nothing loving about trying to blame, guilt-trip, or nag someone into being how we want them to be so that we can have more of what we think we want in relationship… and then punishing them when they don’t – or better said can’t – meet our expectations.  That’s a form of control that comes from insecurity and fear, not love.

A huge part of our opportunity right now is that we GET to be the harbingers who create a new, fulfilling pathway of relationship.  We GET to wake up to the way old, fearful mechanisms have been at work and carve a new path through being love and extending this to ourselves and others through radical acceptance.

So let’s begin as best we can, right from wherever we each are.  Let’s drop any lingering perfectionism that’s conjuring up grand gestures and move ourselves forward through the daily, moment-to-moment opportunities we have to be loving in our thoughts, words, and actions … and see where it takes us, how it empowers us, and how it heals and inspires us.

I’m ready. Are you?

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.

I found this video so inspiring I watched all of Oprah’s Master Class videos, each filled with gems.

In this one she talks about how life gave her a second chance at age 14 and the grace and opportunity that came to her, carrying her to where she is today.

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” -Thoreau

“Decide who you’re going to be and do it on purpose.” -Dolly Parton

You are the creator causing what you want to have happen in your life.  This begins with you consciously deciding what you want to have happen.  And because what you decide comes from seeds that are percolating in your imagination right NOW, there’s hardly anything more important you could to than to take time OUT to vision.  Yes, VISION… so you can hear what you really want and act from that place.  Not what your old self wants, or what you’ve been sold to want by society/family/lover, or what your ego tells you you should want – but what you in your heart r-e-a-l-l-y want.

Our culture is sooo stimulating and left-brained.  Does anyone regularly go 24 hours without staring at a screen for at least 30 minutes (and that’s a really conservative estimate)!?  I rarely do.  And it only seems to be getting worse.  But how many of all of our dreams pass us by as we’re busy getting lost in the sea of distractions we entertain in our lives?

Having a clear vision can slice through the swirl because then you have a direction.  It will call you to action, inspire you to make new choices, reach out to new people, let go of old habits through creating new ones that better match the direction you want to go, and open to wider rings of life and support.

Though I haven’t always been conscious of it, I’ve spent a lot of my life morphing from one version of me who’s all about one thing to another.  As a kid, it was brought on with my moving every couple of years.  Nothing like moving from a loving neighborhood filled with sweet friends to one filled with violent bullies, or a wild California public high school to a conservative Southern Episciopalian private girls school to let you try on new realities and create new selves.  But even after I left my parents, I kept moving and changing – going after one dream and then another, morphing into many different version of myself over the years, some hardly recognizable to the me I am now.  And even that’s under heavy construction at the moment.

Ken Wilbur says that within this process, it’s not that we toss out the old version, it’s that we transcend and include them into the new version we create.  I love this idea because it reinforces that we can include all of our old experiences and selves into who we are now.  There is no part of us we have to turn away from, we just don’t have to let it drive our car anymore.  Metaphorically speaking, this conjures up the image of Russian Dolls for me as we create a new outer doll while the old ones are lovingly held inside us.

What I most like about this process of self and life creation is that it affirms our power to create not only things in our lives, but who we are.  This may be our greatest creative achievement – to create new, inspired versions of ourselves that can carry us further than the person we’ve been up until now.

So how do we go from vision to reality?  I don’t have a 1-2-3 step-by-step formula, but I will share with you some of the things I’ve been practicing with lately that’ve been helpful… and are yielding fruitful results.  Not that it’s always easy – it ISN’T.  But, it is empowering.  And that’s the point, right?

• I see my future that I want to happen as so. Because, in some parallel reality, it already exists.  I flesh it out without being overly obsessive about the details and transpose it onto my life now, as if it’s what’s so (because it is), and show up as if this is what’s happening.

• With this vision in mind, I re-choose and re-commit every day, every moment to let my vision/dream guide and inform me. For instance, sometimes I get out of bed and start responding to the day in my usual old way.  Because I’m sooo painfully yet hypnotically used to it, I may not notice at first.  But the minute I get present to the fact that I’m experiencing my familiar, limiting emotions and stories, I know I’ve got an old version of me behind my steering wheel and I need to PAUSE, reconnect with my vision, choose who I want to show up as, and clarify what I want to cause through my actions.  And I do this, oh, about 200 times a day because the default setting to go back to the miserable-familiar is so strong.  And, because I’m prone to impatience, sometimes this seems rather tedious and annoying but I ask myself – How can I move forward into the new if I’ve got an old me up and running?  I can’t.  At least not gracefully or pleasurably.  So I do what I need to do, as best I can.

• I can’t change everything at once so I prioritize what’s most important. What’s my dream as I know it now?  What are the most important aspects of that dream?  Lately my answer to that has been art and physical health so I’ve been putting these things at a higher priority and have been experimenting with re-structuring my day to give them more time, especially at the beginning of the day.  But, each of these categories breaks into several smaller categories like learning a painting technique that will help me create what I want to express and organizing my art area to flow well and be an inspiring place to create. Or, taking herbs, regulating my sleep schedule, and getting a variety of exercise regularly.  So, it’s a bit of a nuanced balancing act but I keep getting closer and that feels good.

• Possibly the hardest one I’m currently working on is choosing to focus on and savor my accomplishments and what’s going well with me and my life…. instead of feeding into the habitual pattern of focusing on what’s wrong or the next challenging hurdle I have to “deal” with.  So much that’s wonderful is happening all the time and it seems we’ve all been brainwashed to disregard these moments, especially when they are our own, and focus on the negative.  I don’t know about you, but that’s not the direction I want to be moving in!

If this rings a bell for you, here’s something you can experiment with.  In a class I taught for several years, I gave the participants an assignment to not complain for a week.  This included no verbal complaining or self-criticism, and no participating in anyone else’s complaining through agreeing or feeding their fire.  Everyone came back the following week with their eyes wide opened to how much EVERYONE complains ALL the time… and how much presence it takes to step out of that way of relating both within ourselves and with others.  But it’s doable, it just takes presence and practice.

So dreamers of dreams, here are my questions for you:

• What would you like to wake up to tomorrow? A month from now? A year? 5 years?

• Can you see this as so?  What does it look like?  Feel like?

• If you take this and transpose it onto your life today, how does that change how you’re called to show up?

• And how does that change who you want to show up as?

• What areas of your life are most important to focus on?

• And, from there, what are 2-3 simple actions you can begin with?

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth,
so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over
the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
-Henry David Thoreau