Growing A Dream, Starting Small, and Sharing My Journey With You Along The Way In Hopes That It Might Help Others Who Want To Realize Their Dreams...

“As surely as the acorn becomes the oak tree, the images in your mind become your reality.”

~ Author Unknown ~



Dear Ones,

It has come to me in the night, and all day long as I have studied the costs of building a building, getting a permit to do so in a residential area, the complexity of becoming non-profit when you are starting so small and more that I need to -- while working in any way that I can to achieve my goals along the way -- write a mission statement and outline concrete plans. The website is underway, and more important than building a building that is a sanctuary, I think we all have to start with building both a sanctuary inside ourselves, and one right where we live. This includes personal healing, guidance, and many of the others healing modalities that I have been trained and certified to do as well as phone counseling, starting to print the small books that I hope will help people along the way, and as much else as I can do to begin to realize my dream so that it can grow and grow like that acorn into a tree. Will you take this journey with me? Will you plant your acorn, water it, and watch your tree grow? It might grow slower than you'd like, but once it has grown it is incredibly strong and bigger than you might have ever imagined. What is my dream? What is yours?

I've written so much about mine here that it would be redundant to go over it all again. Suffice it to say that once you name your dream, instead of it being this ambiguous, amorphous blob of a thing like jello that has only begun to set, you will wade about in that congealed mess of a mass feeling lost and weighed down. I know I have.

After starting countless books that I thought might be right, but knowing that something was off and not getting very far, I realized, suddenly, that my dream, inasmuch as I have written for over 40 years, (It saved my life starting at nine years old...) and considered myself first and foremost a writer, and to that end thought that what I had to give to the world would come in my writing, I realized that that wasn't enough. I studied for months on end this last summer into fall to become certified in healing modalities that stretched my dream a little further, and gathered together skills and talents of a lifetime into a basket along with the others to look and see what I had. I formed a plan, a good plan, one I was happy with, but then came the dark side of the moon.

I am borderline agoraphobic and I became terrified to step out into the world to use the healing gifts I had worked so hard to acquire. I would still write, but I needed to do more. And then the words came to me, The Love In Every Moment Sanctuary. That was it. It was one of those moments when you feel like you've been hit by a lightning bolt, something I hadn't felt before. Oh, being Bi-Polar I've had lots of big ideas, believe you me, and as the pendulum would swing the high highs would catapult me into a new beginning and the low lows would bring whatever the then goal was to a crashing halt. What's different now?

What's different is that I'm different. I have been changing more than anyone around me, who knows me well, has been able to imagine, and the healing work that I've done the last several months, work on myself with several different healers, as well as learning these modalities myself, and able to use them on myself, and spending much more time in meditation and prayer, (...and yes, having a very good doctor and medications that have evened me out over the last several years, and even she has seen enormous changes...) I am changing at the cellular level. I might not be able to venture as far out into the world as I thought I might, yet. (You'll pardon me, I hope, if my writing is a little wobbly for a moment. The new little pug whom I already adore is under my desk chewing my toes!)

So then came the thought of the sanctuary, and when the disappointment began to engulf me for all the reasons I noted at the beginning of this entry, the fear quickly subsided and a new plan began to form, and most important of all I realized that sometimes, in the beginning, we may overshoot the mark with a dream just to finally settle back into the place we were meant to be all along. This reaching forward and sliding back a little over and over still moves us forward, at a pace we can best manage, and this is the way we all grow and change on every level. I love the idea of having a sanctuary, an actual building, where I can have people come here for healing work so the fear of the outside world doesn't keep me from doing it, (I can't do it inside here, can you imagine laying on my table having a gentle healing with beautiful music and essential oils wafting in the air while four pugs raced around barking, parrots screaming in the background? I think not!), so what then?

I rustled around in my basket and looked at the talents and skills I had that I could use. Yes, I could write. Yes, I could teach online (I was a journal writing teacher teaching a very healing, spiritual class for thirty years, the last five online.). With the new healing modalities, healing that can be done as "distance healing," and my work in pastoral counseling, spiritual teaching and support, and more, I could start right from here and build that sanctuary that is fueled by love, not only in every moment but in every facet of everything I will be doing. So the website, the phone, the internet, and anything possible to do from here -- and there's a lot, far more than I at first realized -- will get the ball rolling, and once rolling I know that I'll go farther than I ever dreamed possible. I have gone out to study and to a wonderful healing center where I will continue to go and meet once a month with the group of people who became Master Healers in the Shamballa method. I have been working on people here, people who know me and whom the dogs don't bother because they will settle after awhile, and I know that I will venture out to do healing work on people that I know or who come to me when the time is right through channels that open as I am ready to meet them. I know these things to be true because I am not the same person I was.

I know that I am different as well because I am not tossing a dream away out of fear, I am looking for new ways to see it into reality and I know it is possible. I am not just dreaming, I am doing concrete work. I am taking a business class, I have worked out a structure so that I will write everyday (first here, and then a section on the book) and it is working, and it is good, better than I ever imagined. And I have made friends here and started to build a community and as I venture out into it, even a little at a time, the ability to do my work outside the home will grow too. I am meeting my demons and making friends with them. It is possible after all.

And finally, when you talk about your process, your dreams, your fears, how you move through them, out loud, to other people, to you dear reader, it all becomes less scary and seems more possible. I get tremendous support from both my online community and my growing local community as well. My dreams may shapeshift along the way but this time I am not letting fear stop me. That I could go out to a workshop from nine in the morning until six at night actually shocked people, but I knew I could do it. I had been going out and working with healers for months, and so I will go again. The most important thing that I am told by those who support me and work with me is not to push myself or rush because I'm afraid others will think badly of me. This had been a recurring theme in my life that can only lead one place and that is into a paralyzing downward spiral. One of the most profound things that anyone has ever said to me came from the woman I have loved for a decade. She said, "You are not your diagnoses." She made a point of telling me that I had many talents and gifts and that she believed in me and just because I had certain challenges in this life didn't mean that I couldn't achieve my dreams. To this day it is the most important thing that anyone has ever said to me, and it has kept me going and moving forward when otherwise it would have been very hard. Kind of wobbly like little pugs chewing on your toes as you're trying to get something done.

And so I am doing this. Let me say that again for my own benefit... I am doing this, and though it is changing by the day it keeps floating on the surface and bobbing along and my dreams keep shining through. The pebble has been thrown in the pond and the ripples keep moving outward. It is thrilling to watch them and the very notion that they keep on rippling outward propels me forward. And I have a lot of pebbles. When the ripples stop I'll throw another pebble in the pond. Nothing will stop me now.