I’m sitting in a coffee shop full of plants. I’m the only one here.
The coffee shop is off to the side of a bakery - which is full of people baking in a wood fired oven which keeps the whole place SO warm and then with the plants everywhere it’s like being in a conservatory, making this my favourite winter coffee + journaling spot.
In the summer I’m usually outside, but it’s rainy today so here I am. I’m sitting at a bar by the window, watching people on the busy street outside.
I had a disorienting night of weird dreams, waking up and also dreaming of waking up but still sleeping.
I feel disoriented in my life.
I lay in bed asking myself what I wanted and decided to come here and journal. Once I looked at my Year of Dreams I saw that I had a lot to journal about. I’d been filling my pages with questions and ideas about what’s next.
I feel un-moored without my routines. As a highly sensitive person, my routines are one of the things that keep me settled in my body enough to hear my intuition and act on my creativity.
The pandemic destroyed so many of my routines and then this last winter I discovered a new form of magic, having ALL of the space without routine or structure.
Anyway. Now I am here - having let go of so many routines that I don’t feel interested in picking back up AND ALSO remembering the magic of routines and how they fuel creative flow and progress AND ALSO feeling really interested in FINDING OUT what’s next for me vs PLANNING what’s next for me.
I’m 48.
A lot of my dreams this last year have been thinking about who and how I want to be in my 50s which doesn’t need to be different than my 40s of course - unless I want it to be.
Which I do.
I feel ready to stretch and grow but in the past that always meant that I had a clear picture of WHO and WHAT I was growing into.
And right now I feel OPEN about all of that. Which is SO thrilling and terrifying.
There are a lot of metaphors in the life coaching/new age/wellness communities about planting seeds and how a tomato can’t be a rose, what you plant is what you get.
What if I am actually a lot more magical than all of that?
What if my brain and it’s clear intentions were only in my way?
What if I don’t need to plan? What if I need to LISTEN?
Since 2015 when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its findings in Canada, I have been learning about colonization and white supremacy, which are systems I have lived in my whole life without seeing them for what they are.
Which led me to see the entire new age, life coaching and wellness communities in a different light.
Which led me to feel differently about my own work.
Which led me to re-work my work and create a space that can hold the bigger questions and invite in a more soul-truth aligned kind of growth. (Which is Dream Book)
Which is what brought me here, I think.
To a place where holding intentions feels so small. Like a way to try to control the mystery.
To a place where I’ve let it go.
To a place where I feel ready to LISTEN as my primary way of PLANNING.
Which is wild - in my late 20s my best friend nicknamed me “Planny McPlanster”.
I had this idea that the best growth grew you into who you WANTED to be. Brought you the life you WANTED.
And I still believe that we need to be better at trusting our desires for a lot of reasons.
But now I see how SMALL that is.
To only dream about the life I can visualize for myself.
I mean yes I always spoke about how your dream can be much better than what you’re thinking, about how the inner growth will nurture you in ways you can’t see now, about how it WILL be different and better than what you picture.
But now - I guess I see the next level of that.
Our dreams are a light on the path, for sure.
But that path is leading to something much more expansive than what we dream of.
AND ALSO we are right here in the heart of the mystery right now. We are so creative and powerful right now.
What if we are MORE creative and powerful when we're in the mystery of it all, and not trying to manifest, create, or control the outcome?
Which feels like a different way of holding our dreams.
AND ALSO a different relationship to the mystery.
I'm offering a free Zoom class on Holding Space For What's Next To Emerge.
It's happening on June 24th at 1:00 pm, Central (North America).
Details to come. Everyone on my email list will get an invite to the live class. The will be a replay available on my blog - for 1 week only. Then the replay will only be accessible to Dream Book members.
![Where I\'m At now: Holding Space for \](https://www.creativedreamincubator.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/holding-space-for-whats-next.png)