I’ve been browsing through my old blog posts (I was an avid blogger for a good seven years before turning to podcasts) and I found one that really blew me away.
If you have a big dream that you would love to make come true, but you’re kind of avoiding it and not doing anything about it because a part of you just isn’t sure if it really is possible for you or if you are longing for a loving partnership in your life and wondering if It’s really ever going to happen for you, then read this blog post that I wrote four and a half years ago. Because knowing what we know now about what happened in my life just six months later, it gives a very compelling argument that you really CAN make your dreams come true. Even the big ones that you slightly fear can never happen for you.
At the time of writing the blog post I was single and had been single for a frustrated eight years. It was my life long dream to be in a loving relationship and have a family. But I hadn’t wanted to ever fully admit it. I just didn’t feel that that dream aligned with being a strong independent woman or perhaps deep down I was just very afraid it was never going to happen.
In this blog post I shared how for the first time I was finally owning my dream and the steps I was taking to help bring this dream to life.
Exactly two years later after grabbing hold of my dream and really owning it for the first time I was in the loving partnership I had been dreaming of and we had just found out we were expecting a child.
This is why I love doing what I do. Because it really does work. You can be the person that makes your dreams come true. And here, handily in this blog post. I give you step by step instructions on how to do that!
Read the blog post over on loveprojectlove.com and please drop me an email back and let me know if this post struck a chord. I love hearing from you guys.
x S
Here are the steps I took that I truly believed helped to make that dream come true:
"Do you have a dream that you don’t even dare to admit because you want it so much that it hurts and so you avoid it altogether? One that makes your heart ache when you think about it and so you’ve set your life up to distract you from the fact that you don’t live that dream?
A dream that lives right at the core of you, but that you fear probably isn’t ever going to happen for you and so you keep it buried?
Well up until very recently I have had one of those dreams.
One that lies deep at my core.
It’s a simple one. It’s a classic one. It’s downright unoriginal but here it is: to have a loving relationship and a family.
There are a million reasons why I had started to give up on this dream, but ultimately, like with your deepest longing, it was the longing itself that made it so painful. The not having it hurt too much. Being resigned to it not happening felt safer and less painful than holding out in hope that it might still one day come true.
I just couldn’t bear having this dream that I longed for, that didn’t seem to be in my reach. So I spent my energy on dealing with it not having come true. The result was a quiet sadness underneath all the joy, fun and happiness I was experiencing in my life. Not because I didn’t have a partner and family to wake up to every morning, but because I was denying my dream. I wasn’t giving it the space or the chance to grow.
I thought I’d pretty much managed to erase the dream altogether.
And then I went to a workshop in Esalen, California – all about getting in touch with yourself on a core level. And before I knew it I’d plucked this dream out of the dark and there it was unmistakeably alive and kicking and in my hands. I groaned. Not this one still.
See here is the thing:
Your dreams are alive IN you.
They start out as longings.
Your job is to create the space to bring them to life.
Having thoroughly workshopped my own dream out of an anxiety-inducing ‘let’s not even think about it, it’s just not going to happen’ to a blissfully calm and content ‘of course it’s going to happen, why wouldn’t it?’, I wanted to share with you the key steps that helped me take an old deeply buried dream and bring it back to life in a way that no longer causes me sadness and pain, but that makes me feel fuller, more complete and faithful to myself and my dreams again.
So take out your dream now. It’s time to breathe life and belief back into it:
Instructions for washing the disbelief out of your dreams and scrubbing them in sparkling reality:
1. You long for the thing that you are ready for
I’ve come to the conclusion of late that we’ve got it seriously wrong when it comes to longing. We’ve tangled it up with suffering and painful feelings of not having, not being complete, lacking in life in some big way. I think that we’re missing the whole point of longing and the critical part it plays in the whole ‘dream then make it happen’ cycle.
That feeling of longing is not a sign of something lacking, it’s the sign of a dream being ready to be brought to life. It signals the very start of a dream coming to life. It’s the seed.
2. Your dream fits you like a glove
Ask your friends what they long for, really really long for. I bet their answer will make sense to you. I bet you will be able to picture them at it because it’s just so them. It makes sense.
Well the same goes for you and what you long for. You’re longing for it because it’s an expression of who you are. That dream fits you like a glove.
You are THE person to make that particular dream come to life.
You are having that particular dream, you are longing for that thing in life, because you are meant to one day live it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be dreaming it.
3. The dream is already alive IN you. Start to feel that and your dream will start to come to life.
Now bear with me on this one if at first this all sounds a bit of a stretch. It’s just because we are, most of us, still operating from the DO-HAVE-BE rather than the BE-DO-HAVE principle of how things come about in life. But it really does work. Try this for starters:
Step 1: Imagine what it would feel like if you were living your dream
That is the feeling of the dream already alive in you. It’s like the seed underground of what will one day be a tree in full bloom above ground.
The tree is your dream realized. Your longing is the seed. It’s the start.
Step 2: What is an activity you can do or a place you can go where you can connect with that way of feeling on a regular basis? Is there somewhere in your body where that feeling lives? Connect with it there. Every day.
Because you need to start cultivating that feeling in you. Because as you cultivate that feeling, the dream starts to come alive and starts creating a space for it to emerge into your outside life.
When I went through these stages during the weekend workshop in Esalen I started by not even mentioning the dream that I had come up with. Then at some point, as I listened on and tried on these new ways of looking at my longings, the penny finally dropped. It was as if I finally acknowledged this dream, gave myself permission to have it, gave it the stamp of approval and the go ahead to believe in it.
As I did that I started to allow myself to feel what it would be like to be in a loving relationship and to have a family. I got comfortable in the feeling, got comfortable in the whole idea of it. Plenty of emotion came up in the process, but by the end of it I felt like a different woman. I still am feeling like a different woman. I connected with my dream, brought it to life again and now I am happily honouring it by simply allowing it to be without any fear or even thought of ‘what if it doesn’t happen?!’.
You know what? It feels totally possible and totally delicious.
I now feel confident that it will happen. No rush. But why wouldn’t it? I’m not attached to exactly how it will look, it has space to breathe and grow but I’ve noticed that my actions, my choices, my thoughts, my perspective around this whole area have shifted massively. Where there was pain and sadness, now there is ease and contentment. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s come as a huge shock! haha!
Living our dreams isn’t always the easy route. Far from it. Bringing your deepest desires to life requires being committed without being attached to a certain outcome. It requires you creating the experience you’re seeking through feeling and learning to embody it before it ever exists in the world outside of you. It requires patience, self-discovery, it requires dealing with disappointment and grief.
It sounds hard, and sometimes it is, but it is worth the effort. In bringing your longings to life you grow into your own skin, slip back into your core in a way very few other pursuits will cause you to do.
For now, it’s your go. Take that dream of yours out into the open, clean out the disbelief and breathe life and possibility back into it and let me know how it goes.”
And so there you are. Eighteen months later and I met the man that quickly became my loving partner and two years after writing this blog post we were expecting a baby.
The key for me in making that dream come true, I truly believe, was to own that dream, to take it seriously and to start making space for it and start taking action that would help me to bring that dream to life.
So let this be the encouragement YOU need to believe in your biggest deepest dreams and start doing the things that will help that dream to come true.
x Selina
