On New Year’s Day my family, friends and I create Vision Boards for the upcoming year. This ritual of creating images and words of our ideals for the year sets a particular inspirational tone for the day and year. I take up the entire afternoon making mine. Even as the others retire to a movie or return home, I remain arranging and pasting my ambitions to a board. 

When I showed mine to my daughter this year she said, “Looks like your others.”

I have made manifestation boards for over twenty-five years and she’s right. There are themes that repeat through out my life, both on my wish lists, and with what I actually come to create and manifest. These themes as it turns out are the threads that sew together the tapestry of my life.

We don’t have to feel in anyway inadequate or detoured when we find ourselves coming back to some prior dream or commitment (again and again). As a transpersonal counselor people return to me embarrassed with a “reoccurring issue.” I remind them that this reoccurring stuff helps make up the rich soil of our life – that there is something meaningful and even purposeful there to work with as well as to cultivate.

Something wants our attention and energy or it wouldn’t keep coming up. 

Another way to frame this is – you can’t escape your own life. You may drown your dreams and ambitions in addictions or other distractions, or put your creative life on hold while doing for others, but on those sober moments when the light of what you really want comes shining through, you must face both the demons and deities of your dreams. There is little comfort in postponing the creative life; the life that has been calling to you and that keeps showing up. Physical limitations, other’s perceptions, limited finances, difficult relationships or even death won’t stop these dreams. You are the only means for this particular ideal to become manifest. Would you give up on you?

Who really knows how old, or how many lives this particular dream has been haunting you.

What makes up our real possibility for satisfaction over time is to keep showing up for all that repeats and then following through on all that we said yes to, recommitting ourselves over and over again.

Like those night dreams that repeat, our repeating visions also hold meaning for us. It is up to us to listen for that which keeps rising up in our dreams and ideals and to follow their tracks to our inheritance of treasures. Instead of getting discouraged, further sidetracked or worse, lazy, be willing to start up where you last left off. Sometimes we have left ourselves a trail of crumbs or broken branches leading back to our dreams; other times we have to make a new path to an old ideal.

The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
Across the doors where the two worlds meet.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.  –Rumi

 

Creative Prompts

• Make your own visioning board. (The images with this newsletter are of my 2012 vision board.)

• Listen and notice what has been calling to you over the years or lifetimes. Is it some place to travel to, or a vocation that calls to you? Where do you need to begin again and give it fresh energy? What’s a repeating theme in your life, in your dreams, or in your musings?

• Write about receiving your true inheritance using the following words: mystery, reluctant, surface, scattered, hemlocks, battered, song.

• Write about your other life.

There is room for two more in my 2012 Writing Consultation Circle that begins in April. Let me help you fulfill your writer’s dream.  Julie@julietallardjohnson.com