Are You Hiding From Your Dreams?





Living Dreams

I love imagination, passion, and possibility.

Weave them together with a sprinkling of hope.

Dreams of a bright future will fill your heart and mind.

And dreams are the fuel that drives personal growth.

Do you think that you’re too old to dream?

Many people assume that only the young can dream.

Everyone has moments when they are filled with passionate dreams of the future.

For some of us those dreams flash and disappear, and are gone.

For others, the dreams are like the moon.

The dreams grow stronger, weaken, and then return.

Sometimes those dreams are sharp and alive.

They seem to surround us, and call to us.

At other times, those dreams are lost, buried, forgotten, or hidden.



Safety and Adventure

We have contradictory elements within us.

One side of us looks for the familiar.

It looks for familiar patterns among the world that greets our senses.

We want to connect today’s world to yesterday’s world.

We want to predict and control what happens to us.

This side of us makes us feel safe.

Another side of us swims in a sea of possibility.

We hunt for new patterns to taste, and explore.

We want to expand our world, and make it larger and larger.

This is the heart of all desire for freedom.

This side of us loves adventure.

It loves dreams, and lives on dreams.

This side of us makes us feel alive.

Perhaps the years you’ve lived have weighed you down, and clouded your dreams.

But are your dreams really gone?

No.

You can’t live without dreams, any more than you can live without air.

And, if you’re only safe, you can never be free.



Getting Stuck

When our pain and fears and habits stand in the way of our dreams, we get stuck.

Most of us are stuck in one or many areas of our lives.

We have goals or dreams, but we can’t seem to make any progress toward them.

When we can’t connect with those dreams, they become another reminder that we’re trapped, and the dreams lose their magic.

There are many ways to describe the feeling of being stuck:

resistance

trapped

enslaved

running in circles

life on hold

powerless

lifeless

small

old

It’s easy, and natural to think of yourself and your life as something small.

Focus on the physical world that surrounds you.

You’ll see a world of objects.

Objects fill a small place in space, and have a limited, predictable use.

It’s easy to look at your body as just another object.

And you assume that your mind and heart and future must be similarly bound and limited.

This way of viewing the world comes from that part of us that wants the world to be small and predictable and safe.

But there’s a price to be paid, when the drive for safety buries the dreams of the explorer.

The life drains away from the familiar, until it seems old and small and empty of life.

One of the reasons why we get caught up in looking for only safety is that we come to feel overwhelmed by change.

It’s frightening when everything seems new.

You’re overwhelmed by the endless possibility and you don’t know what to do with it all.

You shut down, and look for a safe, familiar little corner to hide out in.



Safe Abundance

For most of us, our drive for safety has suppressed the drive for possibility.

We need to strike a balance between safety and possibility.

Let’s try to reconnect with the explorer who is hunting for possibility.

There’s another word that carries us to the world of possibility.

This word is popular in traditional religious works, as well as spiritual and new age works: abundance.

When we think of abundance, we think of rich possibility, but a possibility that is friendly and nurturing – a world of possibility that supports us fully in familiar ways, as well as offering pathways to new worlds.

Let’s look into abundance a little deeper.

Look at how the idea of abundance enriches specific areas of our lives.

These pathways and directions add some structure to the possibility, and make it much less overwhelming.

Let’s open ourselves to abundance in the following areas of our lives:

abundant vision of self

abundant learning, knowledge, and skills

abundant attitudes

abundant choices

abundant action

abundant relationships

abundant tools, objects, and space

abundant time, with abundant opportunity for growth & change

In later posts, we’ll explore each of these in detail.