This is the mantra I got in this week’s Dream Book journaling + alchemy kit: I am ready for bigger things.

First: Holy crap I am at WEEK TWENTY?! It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for 20 weeks. I love it.

I still feel like I “just started” re-doing all of these.

I AM READY FOR BIGGER THINGS.

It keeps amazing me how the right mantra finds me at the right time.

I am breathing this one in and it fills my body like helium… I feel light.

Like I can float up into bigger things, and not “work my ass off to get there” which is the vibe I can tend towards, if I am not intentional about HOW I am holding my intentions.

How does it feel to you?

This one can easily feel uncomfortable, and sitting with that discomfort can show you things that your dream wants you to know.

When it comes to “dreaming bigger” and “thinking bigger” our toxic culture impacts us in what the ways we define what is BIGGER and MORE VALUABLE.

Our creative dreams always want to bring us back to what is true for us.

So listen to YOU. Listen to YOUR dreams. No one else has to understand what “bigger things” is for you.

Leaving a high paying job and fancy life to life a more creative and fulfilling life can be “bigger”, you know?

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(I wrote this post a few weeks ago)

Seven years ago today, I got married. Today, I am not speaking to my husband. We are separated and plan to divorce, at the stage where getting the paperwork figured out feels like too much so just leaving it for now.

I honestly thought I was getting married for life, but here we are.

Things often don’t go as planned. I feel like we can’t say enough: it doesn’t matter what happens in your life YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE.

There is so much in our culture about this. So much judgement and shame and this unconscious push to try to make our lives look as perfect as possible. This is traumatizing.

Life is a mystery. The world is a mess. We’re all doing our best.

I’m finding such surprising gifts in the divorce process. My life is opening up in new ways. I’m turning 50 next week and feel so optimistic about this new chapter in my life.

AND it’s not what I’d planned or aimed for but… what if it’s better?

Re-reading this a week later:

That “It’s not what I’d planned or aimed for but… what if it’s better?” feels like SUCH A FUCKING CLICHE.

Like a pollyanna take on the pain of how disappointing it is sometimes, to go after a dream wholeheartedly and not have it work out.

Re-reading this a few days after that last update:

Last weekend I shared my birthday cake.

I am IN LOVE with how it turned out...

But it wasn’t what I had planned, lol!

My sister baked it - 5 layers of chocolate lavender cake and FIVE (!) batches of icing, so I’d have plenty to play with. She helped me dye the icing 6 different colours.

I piped different shapes all over the cake, in every colour of the rainbow except purple. I saved purple for last.

The purple was in a larger bag with a larger tip, and I piped this thick purple ribbon over the thick, multi-textured piped rainbow of icing…. and then this purple ribbon was too heavy, and pulled the rainbows of icing off the cake as it slide down the sides.

Yikes!

I had a flash inspiration of a “rainbow galaxy” smear of all of this thick icing. It felt like when I am doing intuitive painting and I tend to smear colours together a lot, like I am letting them play with each other.

So I grabbed a knife and did it.

There were big hunks of icing falling down which I piled on top of the cake as I spread out the sides to create this rainbow gradient kind of thing.

Then I had quite a bit of yellow in a bag with a nice thin piping tip so I added the yellow lines and….

It FELT like I wanted this cake to feel.

The original piped shapes, which were sooooo cuuuuuute, didn’t quite have the ZING of it feeling the way I wanted it to feel.

So, my cake was a disaster for a second there and then it did end up turning out better than I’d hoped.

My sister said: “It’s like your life! It fell apart but with the magic of creativity you turned it into something better!”

And now I am remembering that this is actually NOT Pollyanna at all.

This means FACING and BEING WITH the disappointment. Working with it and growing through it, to find your next step.

Accepting that disappointment is a companion on the path, and learning how to find the lessons and opportunities in it.

(Creative Dream Incubator members: there is an alchemy process for working with disappointment, right here. It's three videos with two different journaling sheets, for different ways of working with disappointment)

Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:

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Some of the steps towards a dream are boring and some are scary. Sometimes you need to be your BRAVEST and MOST ALIGNED SELF to take a step, and sometimes, that step comes along on a way when you are not that version of you. Not even close. That’s where I am today.

So. What am I going to do?

I feel upset that I can’t do the thing I want to do but when I look at it, my head hurts. I am so far away from the version of me who can do it.

Can I accept that I feel upset about not being able to do it AND accept that I feel really really off today? Like the opposite of brave and aligned?

Those two feelings are conflicting a bit. The uncomfortable feeling and then the resistance to the uncomfortable feeling.

In this moment, all I know is that pushing myself is not the answer.

If I can’t seem to access any other answers, can I try to access another question?

It comes to mind immediately: What do I need?

I wrote this a few weeks ago.

Coming back to it today I am thinking of how the step that’s in front of us is not always the step we want to take.

I had an Outer Work step I had WANTED to take on that day, but the actual step that was in front of me to take was Inner Work.

My taking THAT step, and doing the Inner Work that was in front of me to do, I brought myself closer to being able to take the Outer Work step that I wanted to take.

We do tend to want to focus on certain steps, and totally ignore/avoid others but the path only works if we take ALL the steps.

Dream Book members:

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Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.

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On our Marketing as a Creative + Spiritual practice call last week, we talked about how awkward and embarrassing this work can be.

A few times over the years I have talked about feeling cringy about promoting myself and would get messages back from people telling me not to feel that way.

I know they all meant well, but that is just not helpful.

We feel how we feel! Pretending we don’t is a waste of energy.

Plus avoiding your feelings gives them a lot of power over you. Feeling your feelings, and processing your feelings GIVES YOU CLUES about how to get what you want.

So, we made space to feel awkward and embarrassed and found ways through it.

Then, last week, I got this idea to do a promotion for my 50th birthday.

Because this feels like a Big Deal kind of birthday, I wanted to ask for what I wanted: help spreading the word about the Creative Dream Incubator.

Which felt SO awkward and embarrassing.

So this is how I handled it: I gave myself loads of time to feel how I felt AND take little steps.

On Tuesday morning, I went out for coffee with the goal of writing a rough copy of what I wanted to say. And brainstorm ideas for an image to share with it.

I do not usually spend this much time on a single post/email. Because I felt embarrassed, I gave myself more time to work through the feelings and in so doing - I also gave myself more time to write the best post possible. It was a win/win.

So Tuesday morning after a few VERY AWKWARD writings, I ended up with good rough draft! And I got the idea to take a photo of myself in front of the flower garlands I was making to decorate for my birthday party, which felt exactly like what I was going for - celebratory.

Then I sat with it, and came back on Wednesday to update it, and read through it and notice how it landed in my body.

Did I feel ready to ask for help in such a public way? What would help me feel ready?

I was already feeling so much more ready to do it... and I still have three more days to get ready, emotionally, to post this thing.

This is how we do things we don’t feel ready for. We break it down into teeny steps and then PRACTICE THEM.

Dream Book members:

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This is the mantra I got in this week’s Dream Book journaling + alchemy kit: I trust my power.

I breathe deep and just sit with it. It's like, the deeper I go inside me, the more I can find my power.

When I feel connected to it - yes I trust my power.

But am I "feeling powerful" and "trusting my power" as my usual state of being?

No, I don't think so.

That's interesting to notice.

I do feel competent, but POWERFUL has a different quality and then TRUSTING MY POWER has another different quality still.

Trusting my power feels like: I am not rushing or pushing or forcing. I am not betraying my values. I know I can do this MY way in MY time. I won't deplete myself in the process...

It puts a new spin in how much I have slowed down in the last few years.

Partially the overwhelm of the pandemic and partially peri-menopause. And I was doing a lot of exploration around how much capitalism determined how fast I moved, and how much "this is genuinely and sustainably how much I can work" determined how fast I moved.

But, when I sit with this... I trust my power... I don't feel any need to move faster.

Dream Book members:

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I joined a CRAFTIVISM group, which I was SO excited about while also feeling not sure how, exactly, I could contribute.

And you know - it can be uncomfortable to join a thing NOT KNOWING how you could contribute or participate. But the organizers were so warm and welcoming and had an attitude of “We’ll listen to everyone’s ideas and figure this out”. They were open to hearing ideas and growing the group together.

So, I went, and worked on an embroidery of a Palestinian flag. The group wanted to collect handmade items to raffle off to raise funds for relief efforts in Gaza.

The flag was beautiful but I was feeling kind of like - why bother? It’s so small in the face of the intensity of the bombs falling. And also feeling like - well it feels good to gather with people and do SOMETHING. And I had gone to some of the rallies, but sitting together and crafting is really more my speed.

But still, I had this sense that embroidering a flag, with really fine threads because that’s how I embroider, so it takes a loooooong time, is not quite how I want to do my craftivism. Like hours and hours of work for... how much money could this possibly raise? That there must be something more impactful I could do.

I say that to highlight - we often feel this way about wanting to do a thing.

We can see a way we could do it, (I embroider A LOT so I had all the stuff on hand to make this flag) but that’s not necessarily the BEST way we could do it.

It’s uncomfortable to take the POSSIBLE step instead of waiting for the opportunity to take our BEST step, but it’s in taking the possible step that we actually get to a place where a better step becomes possible.

Because now I am starting to see new ways of engaging with crafting as a form of activism - ways I could not have seen if I hadn’t starting by just doing a thing that felt possible.

BECAUSE I joined in and start doing stuff, I saw other stuff I could do!

And then when the Craftivist group decided to do a CRAFT BOMBING in one of my favourite parks downtown, I knew exactly what to do.

I got a bunch of cheap broadcloth and sewed these big flags...

I made two flags, which took way less time than the one (small!) embroidered flag I had started with.

This is VERY messy - I cut and pasted the fabrics (with a glue stick) like collage. Then did a quick zig zag to sew them down, this is not actual quilting, which would also take a loooong time to do.

So this takes less time and is more impactful.

BUT I don't know that I would have done this, if I hadn't started with that small possible step, you know?

I think using our creative gifts to support our values and support the work of creating the world we want to live in is some of the most powerful work we can do. It was so great to see everyone's creations as we put them up all over the park and I can't wait to see what we do next.

Dream Book members:

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Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.

Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.

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I was hoping the hardest part of my divorce would be right right when he left, and then it would get easier in time. Of course life doesn’t work that way, there are ups and downs. Nothing is linear!

And a part of me is like - this isn’t about your creative dreams! Don’t write about it here! OMG don't be so embarrassing!

But the work of showing up for your creative dream practice DOES include how you navigate life’s challenges.

There is this tug-of-war between your current life and your dreams.

And sometimes current life takes over. Sometimes this is for really good reasons and sometimes this is for incredibly shitty reasons.

And the work is to keep figuring out - how do I practice my creative dreams, even here?

And remembering that creative dreaming as a practice includes so many things.. healing, creativity, courage, growth.

Lately I’ve had a TON of resistance to the conflicting feelings I have about my ex and our situation. The conflicts are just too big for me to carry - I don’t mean conflicts with him, I mean conflicts within me about my different feelings.

We did a call on Working With Conflicting Feelings because this isn’t unusual when it comes to dreams...

But I don’t want to do that.

I want for my conflicting feelings to just disappear on their own without me having to sit with them or work through anything....

Luckily, after sitting with this for a few minutes with my journal open, my desire to work THROUGH things outweighed this resistance to NOT work through anything.

I drew a little diagram of me and wrote all of my feelings where they are in my body. This helped me get a new perspective and find a little acceptance.

Then I laid down and breathed for a while. Which gave even more perspective and acceptance.

We don't have to SOLVE things, just making a little space to BE WITH them can help them dissipate enough that our creative dreams can win that tug-of-war.

Dream Book members:

Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.

Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.

Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.

Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.