We are doing the 30 day journaling + meditation invitation for the month of August. An explanation of this project is here. For this challenge, I some mugs, notebooks, magnets and stickers with the "Slow the fuck down. BE as creative, powerful and magnetic as you ARE" written on them - they are here.
I have written and re-written this post so many times I have lost count.
Each post was a actually really good.
AND felt inadequate to express what I actually want to do with this project and I how I feel as I begin.
I don't remember being this challenged by a project in a very long time.
And so I am going to take the projects' advice: SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.
Don't try to share everything today.
Just share A thing.
A thing that's happening: I am feeling A LOT of resistance to doing this.
Sometimes resistance can hide in reasonable-sounding reasons why "this just isn't the right time".
And sometimes it shows up as inner critic self doubt attacks. Or just - getting so stressed and crabby that you throw the whole thing away.
This resistance is a natural part of all dreams, all creative pursuits, and all healing processes.
Right now, the resistance is manifesting as EXTREMELY stiff shoulders (my therapist once told me that is often a sign of struggling with oppressive systems that are pushing us down. And yes that's how it feels, I am pushing up against a lot of very powerful invisible things here) and an EXTREMELY crabby mind.
Trying to calm my mind enough to write clearly is very effort-FULL which is really the opposite of the whole vibe I am going for here.
A lot of feelings are going to come up in this process.
Dream Book members - remember our principles!!! If you feel stuck or like you're doing this wrong, re-read them.
Accepting that your process IS unfolding in the right way for you while honouring all of the feelings that come up are important parts of this work.
Without them, you just skate around your blind spots.
So - today I am honouring my feeling about not wanting to do this.
AND honouring my feelings about how I WANTED to start this, and my feelings about how that just isn't happening.
And, deeper down inside, listening to that part of me that knows this is exactly the perfect way to start.
As we go through these 30 days, I will be sharing my own journaling and process.
But today we're starting by figuring out how YOU are going to do this.
What's actually doable for you?
What makes this feel like an INVITATION and not a CHALLENGE?
How do you WANT to do this?
Step 1: pick your practice
This is a "30 day journaling + meditation invitation" and so I recommend you do BOTH journaling and meditation for this.
There is a reason why I always use them together.
But this is your thing, so do it your way.
Step 2: define your minimum practice.
Some days you may want to do more, but all you are committing to are these minimum practices.
For example, for meditation you could pick:
- Sit down, close your eyes, and breathe for 30 seconds (change this to however long feels right for you).
- Sit stare at the wall or out a window for 30 seconds (change this to however long feels right for you).
- Go for a meditative walk for 5 minutes (change this to however long feels right for you).
Either way, your meditation time is spent contemplating the theme:
Slow the fuck down!
BE as creative, powerful and magnetic as you ARE.
And just follow your thoughts wherever they go. Follow all of the rabbit holes.
No, this is not traditional meditation where you empty your mind. This is a meditation as a tool for making space to explore.
Right after the meditation, you journal.
This way you can take notes about what you learned in your meditation, to not lose the threads.
Here is your minimum practice for journaling:
Open your journal, having a pen handy, and sit there with it for 2 minutes (change this to however long feels right for you) (no you don't have to actually write).
The assignment for today: set your intentions
Write out how you're going to do this:
- What you hope to receive from this practice by the end of the month
- What time of day will you do this
- How long will you meditate for
- How long will you sit with your journal for
Write these all out in your journal, don't just do this in your head.
Dream Book members - if you want a private space to share your comments as you do this with me - use the daily mastermind posts.
See you back here tomorrow.
PS: I made mugs, notebooks + stickers for this challenge. Check them out here!
I'm also working on a whole line of Creative Dream Incubator mugs, notebooks, zipper pouches + stickers.
Two messages that my dream has sent me lately:
Slow the fuck down!
BE as creative, powerful and magnetic as you ARE
Meditation and journaling make it easy to receive messages, flashes of insight and new perspectives that can change everything.
What's less easy is knowing what to DO with those messages. How to work with them so they actually CAN change everything.
The secret is: daily practice.
Your daily practice is a container for your process of receiving information from your inner knowing and figuring out how to act on that information.
Without a consistent practice of healing and growth how do you expect to heal and grow?
You know how good it feels to do yoga, but you don't expect to stay feeling calm and stretched out if you only do it once a month, right?
The secret to daily practice is: make it small enough that it fits in your daily life AND enjoyable enough that you actually want to do it.
When I say daily I mean that's the goal. OF COURSE you will miss some days, that's fine.
But what if you had a thing you did each day that you enjoyed doing, that FELT GOOD TO DO and then also helped move your life towards where you want it to be?
This is the magic of having a daily practice with your dreams.
This is what I teach in-depth in Dream Book.
But for August I want to share a really simple daily practice out here, (on my blog and social media) and invite you to join me.
Find out what kind of magic is possible for you right now.
We start on Monday, August 1.
You don't have to have any ideas at all about HOW to do this - that first post I share on Monday will be about setting up your practice to be DO-ABLE and enjoyable for you.
I'll give you a simple practice to start with and you can make whatever changes you like to make it suit you.
And then throughout the month we'll find out what kind of magic is possible, when you show up for it every day.
I had this transformation all planned out.
A summer of slowing down. Burnout recovery. Creating a whole new relationship with my creativity and productivity. Naps, journaling, making art, eating amazing salads while also moving my workspace upstairs and creating space for my new E X P A N D E D art and writing practice.
Nothing is going according to plan. Except naps and salad, I have that part down.
I mean I have taught this long enough to know - if your "transformation" is going according to plan, you are not actually transforming anything.
So I am taking that as a good sign.
There's a lot I want to say.
I think there's a lot we all really should be talking about, in terms of sharing how this time is impacting us, the ways we choose to respond to that, and the healing that we are each being called to do.
But I don't have the capacity for any of that right now.
So I'll say: I am making some amazing summer salads. I am feeling SO nourished.
During the winter I was freezing lemons - I would put 1/2 or 1/3 of a lemon into a smoothie and then freeze the rest. Now I am using those frozen lemons and homemade lavender syrup to make lemonade in the blender and OMG.
I've moved 75% of my work stuff upstairs. I gave away my old bed frame and made arrangements for the mattress to be picked up this week.
I moved into the new bed downstairs. I have slept upstairs in the loft for the last 11 years. The longest I've been in any bedroom. This is a HUGE transition for me. The first morning I woke up and actually wanted to cry I missed my upstairs bed so much.
I know I still want to move ahead with this re-configuring of the space.
AND it's a little like being ripped out a beloved space.
It even feels like not having a home, even though I am still very much in my home.
This is what it's like, being in the goo of transformation.
I'm going with it. Staying nourished and doing what I can each day which is so much less than I wish it was. Following my intuition about what to do next which feels grounded and clear but also disorienting and new.
I am thinking about how a seed changes states to become a plant. How sudden and wild it is.
I am feeling that but in super slow motion.
I trust what I am growing into.
Even though it all looks like a mess right now.
I wrote this last week, but then I was so much "in the mess of being in the process" that I forgot to post it. This week I am in a completely different place - for one, I LOVE my new bed downstairs and have put a whole jungle of plants around it and I don't miss sleeping upstairs at all now and I wake up feeling so grateful for my home, again. When you're in the process of change it's good to remember that things will continue to change.
Every month in the Year of Dreams 2022 planner there’s a reminder to check in with your vision for your year, and space to journal about how that felt and what adjustments you might want to make.
I didn’t want to do that this month. I mean most months I don’t want to but this month it REALLY felt uncomfortable.
But here I am doing that. And sharing my experience as a way of offering a light on your path, in case it's uncomfortable for you too, right now.
As I sit down to answer these questions and I feel like a total failure.
This feels so heavy I want to just stop, and make up a story for why it just makes sense that I not do this reflection work this month.
And I say “Andrea, you don’t HAVE TO do this, but… this is your job. And YOU are the one who gave yourself this job, you worked hard for it, and now you don’t want to do it? What’s up with that?”
Oh. I do want to do it. I know that this is important. I know all of the things I teach are true and that being in the process is messy and that nothing is wrong, I just need to be brave enough to keep showing up. Can I just complain and throw a bit of a tantrum first?
“Sure sweetie you do that”
Permission to tantrum led me to just sit down and flip through my Year of Dreams journal.
I remember how excited I was back then but I realize…
Actually it was a desperate kind of positivity. Like “holy fuck this year has got to be better” vibes.
What I feel now are “Holy wow I am really getting into my own flow. Feeling myself. Feeling my future. I may be moving slow as fuck but this is deep and rich.”
It turns out I love where I am.
It’s just when I am judging myself based on goals I’d set six months ago that I feel shitty.
But I am not six-months-ago me anymore. Me-from-today is totally different. I mean, I have bangs now. I have these new outfits I made myself that FEEL LIKE my future self. I have totally different plans now.
I actually *KNOW MORE* about what it will take to achieve some of those bigger goals, from the last 6 months of experimenting with them.
And that’s why I know that some of them are just not going to happen this year.
And that’s why it feels so right to be focused on different things because these things feel needed right now.
I am re-arranging the Dream Loft, tearing down the workspace my husband had built me when we got married, and using that wood to build something new.
I am creating a new art + writing + creative exploration space in the upstairs loft.
I am E X P A N D I N G my art and writing practice in all ways. New bigger space. More time + attention. New projects + directions.
I am really expanding into my future self in all of these important ways.
Just not in the ways I thought I would, when I made those plans in January.
BUT
That doesn’t mean I was wrong.
You should literally NEVER sit down, make a plan to get your dream, and then follow that plan exactly. That is a recipe for disaster because…
BEING ON THE PATH HEALS AND GROWS YOU.
And as you heal and grow your perspective shifts so you see completely different options.
If you follow that plan that you-before-you-healed-and-grew made - you are actually stagnating.
To grow means to change.
Again, the Year of Dreams 2022 is a tool to help you stay in this process. Which means the goal is NOT to follow exactly what you said you’d do in January. The goal is to stay in the process which means HEALING AND GROWING which means surprising new things emerge.
This is how you tap into your magic to make your dreams real.
So.
Having moved through that initial “why bother doing this I am a complete failure” I now feel really proud of how I am showing up for myself and my dreams.
AND I feel excited it’s about what’s next, which was NOT on the initial Visioning 2022 section, so I am adding it now.
(You can still get the Year of Dreams 2022 and play along for the rest of the year. Six months of HEALING and GROWING into your dream! The Year of Dreams 2023 is going to be quite different - details to come soon-ish)
We had a group coaching call in Dream Book where one person attending (a very accomplished creative entrepreneur actually) said “I mean, what am I even doing?” and I laughed because I saw myself in it.
“What am I even doing?” came up again and again later on in the call as more people shared their stories.
It’s actually REALLY EASY to feel “what am I even doing?” when you are doing your own thing.
It’s natural to feel lost.
It’s natural to think you’re stuck when you’re really just incubating, or resting, or preparing for the next thing in ways your conscious self doesn’t know about yet.
With our dreams, the tangible parts are only about 1/3 of what is actually happening. So if you’re only using tangible, measurable things to measure progress, you are missing most of the picture.
And yet, this is what we do. Myself included!
The week before last I was in that “what am I even doing?” place. At the beginning of the week I was being GRACIOUS with myself and my process. I was MAKING SPACE for how I was actually feeling. I was honouring my energy.
But a few days in I’m all “OK process, wrap it up. I need to be doing something productive here”
But my process did not wrap it up.
In fact, on Friday, the day I did the Holding Space For What’s Next To Emerge class, I had my list of things to catch up on and instead I took 2 naps.
I felt great DURING the class because I always feel great when I connect with people in that way.
But the rest of the day I was still… meh.
And then Saturday I woke up feeling clear-headed and inspired. I rode my bike downtown, got my favourite doughnut for breakfast, and went to my favourite park (which has a TON of seating overlooking the river - it’s actually a bar at night but gorgeous and quiet in the mornings).
I wrote and wrote and wrote. Blog posts, emails, ideas for new projects.
It’s like all week I WAS incubating.
And then when it was time, it was a time. And everything just poured out.
This kind of trusting our creative flow is one of the things we need, if we want to create a new world.
The way our world is run on the Monday-Friday calendar and being productive on a schedule is counter to our actual human nature.
Also, we only have weekends because enough unions fought for them that they became the cultural norm. We can create new cultural norms. This is literally what humans have always done.
Humans created the huge corporations that have become corrupt and are now holding our economic and political systems hostage. They are even holding our entire future hostage by refusing to address climate change in any meaningful way.
We can destroy this and create something new.
We do it all the time.
This fall, my husband and I are going to tear apart the workspace he built for me when we got married. You know the cute one in the background of my videos? It will be GONE.
We’re going to use that wood to build a wall to create a new bedroom in the loft, in the space where my workspace was.
There’s more to this story, which I will share in time.
I just wanted to share - we can tear apart the things we built for A LOT of different reasons. Maybe because they didn’t turn out like we’d hoped. Maybe because time marches on and we change and want something different. Maybe because they turn corrupt and threaten to destroy the world.
We are the creators. We are the ones with the power.
But we need to give ourselves the thing we need in order to access that power:
- Feel your feelings.
- Give yourself space to process your thoughts and ideas.
- Take your dreams seriously and pursue them.
- Be open to the GROWTH and HEALING that your dreams are pushing you towards.
I’m doing all of this every day in Dream Book You are always welcome to join me there.
It’s time.
(I went to visit my favourite peony patch yesterday, and was so inspired by how it FEELS to be surrounded by peonies I made a peony mediation for blooming + radiance - you can get it on Instagram)
What do we do with this?
Whatever you are feeling is 100% valid.
I’m Canadian, I’m not in the US, but still - I feel it. It was a big step on the march towards authoritarianism that is happening everywhere.
So many people have mentioned to me lately that they’ve been reading up about different forms of collapse and what’s happening in the society - what’s happening to the people - during the collapse.
For the most part - life goes on. It gets more stressful, there are more and more disruptions, but we carry on with everything we can carry on with.
There is no sudden move from one way of living into the next, there is this messy transition where you’re not even sure, for sure, that you are in a transition.
And on top of this - all of the normal life stuff.
And on top of that - all of the creative dreamer stuff. You still have stuff you want to create and do!!
It’s a lot. And so: Whatever you are feeling, however you are coping, is 100% valid.
I still believe that giving yourself space to have your feelings, including your feelings about what you wish was happening AKA your dreams, is key to navigating this time.
Deeply processing your feelings always brings you to new possibilities for how to respond.
I think this will save us.
It’s not the ONLY thing that will save us. But it’s one of the things, and it’s the thing I am equipped to support you in doing, so I am going to keep doing that.
The replay from the Holding Space For What’s Next To Emerge class is available here.
Grab your journal and give yourself an hour to explore.
This replay will be available here until July 1. After July 2 it will only be available inside Dream Book.
What you need:
- One hour of time (or just do the first 30 minutes if you're really short on time)
- Your journal
What you'll get:
- Energy clearing meditation to give you some space away from stress, overwhelm and whatever else you are carrying, to give you space to really BE with yourself.
- Space to process some of your thoughts and feelings about everything that is happening in an atmosphers of "everything you are thinking and feeling is valid, you are not wrong for feeling how you feel AND you don't have to like how you're feeling"
- A new perspective on what you can do next to support yourself
[replay no longer available here - Dream Book members can access it here]
Join me in Dream Book to keep exploring!
Your Dream Book membership gives you access to ALL of my classes, plus live calls every month and the Dream Book journaling system, which helps you navigate the inner and outer work of following your dream - step by step.
I put on a favourite summer dress and went out to do some favourite summer things this morning and... nothing worked as planned.
Other cyclists on the path were so obnoxious!
I forgot my noise canceling headphones and nearly lost my mind in the din of 20 people all talking over each other on the coffee shop patio.
I did get to my favourite peony patch in the park, but it was so full of mosquitos I couldn't stay.
I am thinking about how complicated it is to hold a vision for your future while navigating reality.
Like I wrote yesterday - I feel like my soul is calling me towards a brighter future than the rest of me can see. How do I move towards a thing I cannot see? Especially when every step that I CAN see on this path feels impossible?
This is what creative dreaming has always been.
AND
It's all more complicated right now because you don't dream in a vacuum, you dream in the world.
Exploring "what's next" is actually a jumble of intersecting layers.
As the world changes - how are you feeling called to change with it?
How have you been forced to change and how are you coping with this?
What's been stirred up in you that needs tending to?
What new dreams are being born, and how can you give them some space (even if pursuing them feels impossible right now)?
It's a lot.
AND
NOT exploring any of this only keeps us stuck in it.
Holding Space For What's Next To Emerge is a 1 hour meditation + journaling class (and it's free!)
Meditation to make some space for your thoughts and feelings about all of this.
Journaling to help get it out of your head and onto the page where it's easier to sort it out.
Conversation about what comes up to feel less alone in it all.
The call details go out to everyone on my email list. Sign up here. (If you're already signed up, the call details are in your inbox now.)
The replay will be available for anyone on my blog for 1 week. After that, it will only be available to Dream Book members.
Join me and Heidi Straube (@innerpathphoto) on Monday to talk about following your creative dreams and living a nomadic life!
Heidi is the expert on this and I can’t wait to spend this time digging into her stories.
We'll be going live at 12 pm noon, Monday June 20 on my Instagram account.
Go to this post (from your smart phone) to set a notification for when we go live.