Vision the Holiday

This the perfect time to create a vision board. Regardless of past holidays, family wants, Hallmark images and advertisements for the latest gadget, how we feel about the holidays is our choice.There are countless ways to celebrate, the important thing is that you feel like you are celebrating, not obligating.



 It is not necessary to make a large scale collage. A small 8 1/2 by 11 collage will suffice.  Here are a quick review of the steps.

1. Make a wish.
2. Search for images and words.
3. Focus on the vision.
4. Compose the design.
5. Explore and find order in creative chaos.
6. Create the collage.
7. Articulate the vision.
8. Reinforce the dream.
9. Embrace the reality.
10. Celebrate the dream come true.

So what feeling do you want to create this holiday? Lots of activity with family and friends is one way. Spending some time alone to reflect or taking an evening walk to see the lights is another. Eggnog by the fire listening to music is yet a different choice. By taking time to collage with your Creative Self, you are sure to cut through the plethora of decisions if you let your heart guide you.

Finally, the Mayo clinic has great tips for beating the stress. Not surprisingly, acknowledging your feelings is at the top.


Celebrate, appreciate and create.

Dorothy Segovia is a certified Visioning(R) Coach and author of My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Obstacles. Read more of her writing at www.writeinside.com.

Visioning® and Appreciation

While celebrating a dream or major step along the way is important, creating appreciation lists on a regular basis is key to a bliss-filled life. Whenever I get into a funk, jotting down my blessings can shake me into a better state of mind. At the very least, it halts a negative cycle. The reason is that I am focusing on what I have instead of what I do not have. In addition, the simple action of pen to paper brings body and mind together in the present moment.

In addition, we can also show appreciation for our creative self.

“Acknowledging all the support you received throughout the Visioning® process begins with thanking your creative self. As the source of your creativity and the sustaining force that helped you reach for your dream, your creative self deserves your gratitude and appreciation. This is an opportunity to express thankfulness from the bottom of your heart and to do it in as creative a way as possible. Starting with a thank-you letter, you can go on to conceive a unique and very personal ritual of gratitude to your creative self.” page 165, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

From goalviz.com. The benefits of a Gratitude Journal and How to Use One.

Lucia goes on further to suggest that we write a thank-you letter to your creative self. What has it given you? What has it taught you?

Next, she has suggestions for designing and carrying out a gratitude ritual, also thanking our creative self. Some ideas include: creating and displaying a prayer or card, dedicating a special corner in our home to our creative self, and creating a ceremony of thanks.

“With your nondominant hand, allow your creative self to write a message to you. If you have questions, write them with your dominant hand and allow the creative self to respond with your non-dominant hand.” page 166, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Appreciation is an inside job: a simple, yet boundless gift that you give to your self.

Dorothy Segovia is a certified Visioning® coach and author of My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents, a how-to book with music CD. Visit her at www.writeinside.com

Visioning Step 10: Celebrate the Dream Come True

"There's no way to know when it's the right time to do this step. You'll have to decide. It depends upon how your dream unfolds and at what point you feel the need to start celebrating. It may take a few weeks, months or more, depending upon the complexity of your heart's desire. The creative self has its own internal rhythm that gives us what we need when the time is right. Dream your dreams, do your work, but have patience and faith as well. Turn the results over to your creative self and trust the process. And remember that it is a process; there's no end point. Celebration occurs when you feel like acknowledging yourself, your creative self, and others who have helped you in your journey." -- page 161, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

These are the concepts in the above paragraph that catch my attention: "feel the need to start celebrating," and "celebration occurs when you feel like acknowledging yourself."

Photo from ladieslotto.com

I generally thought of celebrating as "the cookies are done, now we can enjoy." But throughout the Visioning(R) process, I have found all sorts of reasons to celebrate. 

1. I dared to name what I want in my life.
2. I committed my dream to collage.
3. Following the journal steps in each chapter gave me the feeling that I am moving towards my dream. 
4. Turning my dream over to my creative self allows me to reach my dream in ways I never imagined.

Finally, when a dream manifests I know I'm going to collage another. And another after that.
Yes, achieving a goal is fantastic, but celebrating the steps make the journey even sweeter.

Dorothy Segovia is a certified Visioning(R) Coach who dreams big. She is the author of My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents book with music CD. She can be reached at www.writeinside.com.

Visioning Step 9: Embrace the Reality

Embracing your dream means accepting all the challenges that come with it. Expecting it to be handed to you without some inner work in unrealistic. Committing to your dream is like becoming a parent; you're in it for the long haul, “for better or for worse.” page 151, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

My for worse came when I couldn't buy a vowel to actually move to Ventura, in spite of working a collage with all of the steps and methods for over a year.

Oddly enough, here's where a miracle stepped in. Last April, on the day I was packing to move to a 5-week pet-sit in Morro Bay, I received a call from an employment agency to interview for full-time work close to Ventura. Miraculously, because I had a feeling this was going to happen, the day before, I had phoned a colleague about whether to accept an “interview in the bush within commuting distance from Ventura” rather than the “paying-pet-sit-in-the-hand in San Luis Obispo county”

He told me that all I could do was make my best choice, honor my commitments and surrender the outcome.

I decided that honoring my commitment for a paid, 5-week gig was more solid than an interview with an agency which would result in an interview for a temporary to staff job. On my Ventura collage, the lower right corner has 4 girls' feet resting on a table. When I walked into the Morro Bay pet-sit, the painting on the wall depicted 4 womens' feet resting on beach-towels. In both images the feet had brightly painted toenails.

I knew that I had made the right decision.

To fully accept that your dream will come true, you have to see yourself playing the role in your new visual scenario. What part of you wants to emerge? The artist, the homebody, the business entrepreneur? Of course, the role is not who you are, it's a way of experiencing. The role allows you to stretch and grow and become a fuller human being. Page 149, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Before the Visioning® method, I was afraid to ask for what I wanted. But now, I have not only learned how to ask, but I have also let go of the outcome. Surrendering my dream and giving up are two different things.

I surrendered when I realized that I was trying to force Ventura into place.

I surrendered to the fact that I actually had no idea how to be a successful business-person. I needed to continue asking for help: from a support group, a 12-step sponsor and private sessions with Lucia to release stuck energy.

Allowing your Vision collage to bear fruit requires that you embrace both your dream and your present life with awareness. Page 147, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

I just left a 2-day pet-sit at the home in Morro Bay with the painting of the 4 womens' feet. It's time to create a new collage that focuses on a stable environment where I support myself and my creative projects. Will it be in Ventura? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe...

Dorothy Segovia is a certified Visioning® coach and author of My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents, a how-to book with music CD. Visit her at www.writeinside.com

Visioning Step 8: Reinforcing the Dream

This phase of Visioning invites you to simply contemplate your collage. You do this by looking at it as well as picturing it in your mind's eye. This is how you reprogram your mind to believe in the reality of what you truly want. You are undoing the programming we've all received that says: believe only in what you see, feel, hear, taste, and touch in the present moment or what you experienced in the past. page 138, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams

The key idea in Step 8 is the great undoing. That is, you are taking a stand for your heart's desire that flies in the face of outdated beliefs of where you think you should be in your life. The undoing is releasing self-judgment, outer criticism or comparing yourself to anyone. Colorado life coach Tama Kieves has this to say about the importance of undoing in her July Mojo message newsletter. ..A life of vision means you are following what you cannot see– but know. Following your heart is radical. It’s the commitment to follow a juice not of this world. Your life may look like less than you imagined, but do not be deceived. You do not yet know how to imagine. If you want to live a singular life, you cannot compare yourself to other. I suggest you take back your freedom. Take back your focus. Take back where you place your attention...

Reinforcing the dream by spending time with the completed collage seems deceptively easy. Yet, this is where many dreams fall by the wayside. Because the work phase of actually creating the collage is done, it is easy to look at the collage for a few days, then jump over to the next collage.

But contemplating and burning your dream's images is an act of creation. Activating the feeling of living your dream is serious play. Allowing yourself to become immersed in the collage images sets the stage for the images to come true. By spending time with your dream a minimum of 3x a day, you are telling the powers that be: yes, I'm ready for my dream to become reality.

Dorothy Segovia is a long-time dreamer, and author of My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents. www.writeinside.com.

Visioning Step 7: Articulate the Vision

“Interpreting the meaning in your collage through journal-writing is a significant part of 

Visioning®. Translating pictures into words bridges intuitive and rational thought non-verbal and verbal ways of knowing, right and left sides of the brain, and yields invaluable insight into the creative unconscious. It's a lot like interpreting dreams. Anyone who's ever deciphered the seemingly strange juxtapositions of images and scenarios that visit us in the sleep state knows the power of this non-rational world. So packed full, in fact, that it often requires some practice, skill, and time to “get the message.”

 – page 130, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Congratulations! You have completed your collage. You are now ready to discover the meaning in the collage words and images. Image writing, Writing by Heart, and Telling My Story journal exercises from Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams are vital keys to unlocking the messages. However, Visioning® can also be used to interpret dreams, as well as process emotional energy This months blog is a a Q & A from CJEA practitioner and author, Claire Perkins, who used Visioning® to articulate her grief after her son Cameron died.  

How did the collage process itself help you to articulate your grief after the loss of your son?

Grief, for me, was infinitely larger and more complex than just deep sadness. It was a roller coaster of every emotion on the spectrum: anger, guilt, sadness, rage, depression, fear, love, gratitude, deep peace, laughter, joy, relief. Often it was a combination of many feelings – even conflicting feelings – all at once.

While I’ve always journaled, during the journey of grief it was sometimes difficult to find the words to express what I was feeling. I think that’s because emotions live in the right brain and language lives in the left brain, so there can be a disconnect in trying to translate feelings directly into words. But imagery and emotion are right brain neighbors; they are more similar in expression. And images tell a story, and story connects back to language. The images become a bridge from feelings to words.

With collage, I could thumb through magazines and find all kinds of imagery that resonated with whatever I was feeling. Creating a collage of my darkest feelings was a cathartic process. It gave me a way to express and move the emotions through and out of my body and energy system. Through collage, my feelings became something tangible that I could then observe more objectively. Collage allowed me to step out of the feelings, if only for a moment, and hold them at arm’s length. From that arms-length visual perspective, journaling became easier and the results were incredibly powerful and transformative.

How did collaging your dreams facilitate your healing?




The Big Wave, collage by Claire Perkins

About a week before my son died, I had a very powerful dream about a huge wave washing up the streets of a city, terrifying a little boy. The dream really stuck with me and I decided to create a collage of it. The collage contained all kinds of water images, images of children, a surfer, and two different women – one with eyes open and one with eyes closed.

After my son died, I dialogued with every image in the collage and received profoundly healing messages from each one. The answers that came were definitely from a higher realm than my waking consciousness. One of the images even spoke as my son, and I knew it was him speaking to me, telling me that he was fine, that he loved me and that I should continue to live my life to the fullest.

An in depth description of this process as well as a transcript of the thirteen dialogues that emerged can be found in my book, The Deep Water Leaf Society, Harnessing the Transformative Power of Grief, available at DeepWaterLeafSociety.com, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

The Big Wave collage, and the messages I received from its images, continued to speak to me for a very long time and contributed greatly to my healing process.

Claire Perkins is an Author, Artist and Evolutionary. She has been a certified CJEA practitioner since 2004. Visit her website, ClairePerkins.com or connect with her at Facebook.com/ClairePerkinsSpiritualEvolution.

Visioning Step 6: Create the Collage

When we reach this step of the collage process, we have learned how to listen to our heart's message, clipped images, sorted them, composed our design and wrestled with the doubting Critic. However, just because we are out of the woods and actually gluing images and words onto our heart-sized paper, we are not necessarily immune to the fear-based rational mind.

In spite of having created many collages, I never fail to be delighted and surprised at my completed Vision board. The initial composition, images and words set on the page before step 5, the step where I dialogue with the Critic and stand up for my dream, always shifts in this stage—IF I ALLOW IT TO TRANSFORM.


Photo from www.inhabitat.com


Here's what one of Lucia's workshop participants experienced:

“For example Clare was completing a Vision collage and noticed a big empty space under a photo of a bespectacled photographer looking out from behind the lens of his camera. Clare had interpreted the photo as symbolizing her need to focus on her dream. Suddenly her eye glanced over to a discarded ad in her reject word pile. A caption and paragraph jumped out at her and spoke to a far deeper meaning in the picture. It read:

Visionary
Our eyes are capable of seeing many things in life;
what is common and familiar, or what is rare and extraordinary.

Clare took this to mean that she needed to look at everything in life with new awareness and attentiveness. A camera lens is a mundane and quite literal illustration for the idea of focus. On the other hand, the word “visionary” and its accompanying text allude to another, deeper level of perception.” page 117, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

By allowing Clare to stay in her heart space rather than head space, she was able to notice and retrieve her word caption from the discard pile.

As Lucia states in her book, Visioning is a form of active meditation. That is, both practices seek greater connection to our Creative Self. This Visioning principle applies to our daily life as well. Of course we all wake up with a plan of what we need to accomplish, but allowing our heart to gently guide us through our to-do list makes an ordinary day, extraordinary.

Dorothy Segovia is an author, songwriter and certified Visioning coach practicing in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. She can be reached via her website at www.writeinside.com.

Visioning Step 5: Explore and Find Order in Chaos

The hardest part about this step is the word explore. The reason is that if I am in chaos, I want out. Now. Even if I claim I'm willing for the chaos to shift into order, I still want it to happen yesterday.

Here's what Lucia has to say about this vital step in the creative process.

“In Visioning we are reshaping the images in our heads to catch up with the vision in our hearts. The heart leads, or more accurately, it allows...it wants us to experience the creative self: its ecstatic highs, unfathomable depths, and everything in between.” Visioning Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams. page 104.

Traveling with Pomegranates co-author Sue Monk Kidd describes her journey with chaos while collaging the outline for her fiction work, The Secret Life of Bee's.

“...It was pretty much an unconscious process. I told myself I was being creative, turning my play instinct loose to roam around and find what fascinated it. Inside, I was thinking: This is nuts.

I ended up culling the pictures to twenty images and randomly gluing them together. Among them: ...A whirling cloud of bees. A black Madonna wrapped in chains... A banner that reads Walls For Wailing."

Kidd goes on to describe her doubt over her idea to write a fiction book. Up until this point, she had only published non-fiction. Kidd also reflects on sharing the collage with her daughter and co-author, Ann Kidd Taylor.

“...When the idea came, it felt inspired, but knowing how capable I was of doubt and how cold my feet would get, I wrote a note to myself: 'Sue, this is a really good idea. Before you dismiss it, remember how you felt when it came to you.'

If it hadn't been for that note, the idea never would have survived. I still wasn't sure whether it was perfectly ridiculous or ridiculously perfect.

Ann does not laugh or roll her eyes. 'So where do they go?' (Ann is referencing the plot scenario that Kidd explained while sharing the collage outline.)

This is the part that makes me nervous, the part over which the novel has stalled.

'I have no idea,' I say.”

Hum. If exploration through collage was Sue Monk Kidd's process for ordering chaos into The Secret Life of Bee's, then by all means—let the chaos begin.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SUE MONK KIDD BOOK AND WHY?

PLEASE POST YOUR ANSWER COMMENTS! 

Guest blogger Dorothy Segovia is an author, songwriter and certified Visioning coach living in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. She can be reached via her website at www.writeinside.com.

Visioning Step 4: Composing the Design

When I am facilitating a Visioning (R) workshop, this is the step where I end up taking someone's glue away.

After all the photos are collected, after the words are in place, now it's time to place the images together on the page. This is designing the composition—and because we are the designers, there is no wrong answer!!! But designing and gluing are two different steps. Here's what Lucia has to say,

In putting your Vision collage together, you'll let your creative conscience lead the way. You'll mix and match individual elements, fitting pictures with words to find meaning. Like Alice in Wonderland, things will mean what you want them to mean. The significance you assign to the pictures will be personal and specific to your heart's desire. When you have the right match, your heart will say, yes. When the pieces of your dream find each other, you will feel it in your body. - page 91, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Ann Beazer explained it like this in the following excerpt from her letter to Lucia.
(Minor editing for continuity.)

“In the visioning session you led in June 2001 when I first met you-- I recall being so thrilled with my collage - something I had never done before - because it was a pleasure to look at.  That was a break through beyond my inhibitions of drawing or painting.   I realize that I still feel the same today having made dozens and dozens of collages since. Since the invitation to attend that event was from someone who leads a nutritional organization for women I had assumed our June 2001 evening would be about health; not so for me.   The focus phrase of my vision board was My New Future. That evening I immediately decided that I wanted to learn with you - so I took details of your CJEA accreditation and was with you in Cambria in March 2002.  The rest is history as they say!  I have never looked back. I love teaching Creative Journaling and liberating people from all the rules and releasing them from the boredom of writing all the time.”

The wonderful thing about this letter was that Ann actually put Lucia's logo in her collage (image at the top left) before she knew what the Creative Journal logo was.



Ann Beazer's collage: My New Future.


Click here to see Lucia's logo at the top right.

Step Four is about allowing your heart's desire lead the way to the design of your life.

Ann Beazer is a Certified Creative Journal facilitator and Visioning (R) coach.in the United Kingdom.Her core workshops are Creative Journal, Work with Passion, Visioning and Living Well. Each workshop is supported with complete sets of materials to use during the workshop and afterwards. Contact her at ann.beazer@me.com

Dorothy Segovia is the Visioning Coach blog manager and certified  Creative Journal facilitator and Visioning(R) Coach. She specializes in collaging your way through obstacles. Her how-to book with music CD, My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents, is available at www.writeinside.com.

Visioning Step 3: Focus on the Vision

So. You're sitting amidst piles of images and words. You've gathered them because your heart has sent you on a quest. You have made a wish, you have a focus phrase, now it's time to focus on the vision.

"It is said that Michelangelo described sculpting as 'getting rid of everything that wasn't the sculpture.' That's what you are about to do. Step 3 emphasizes the next phase in the creative process: discrimination, elimination, editing, refinement, exclusion." -- page 84, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Now it's time to sift and sort. This step is often overwhelming because I want to take everything with me. So I break down the process further with three piles:  Yes. No. Maybe.

I need to do this because three other words are blocking the way to my collage creation:
Discrimination. Elimination. Exclusion.

These are harsh words. I believe that more of anything is better, especially creative ideas.

This third way of  "yes, no, maybe" creates breath and space. It makes way for fun so I can enjoy the  process. After all, Visioning(R) is fun!!!! Remember???

Gratefully Step 3 applies to the collage after it is created as well:

 

I live in a safe and sacred home in Ventura.

I can apply the discrimination. elimination. exclusion word revelations to my current vision of moving to Ventura. While my collage has manifested in amazing ways, I'm still....not....quite.....there: renting a room and working.
PHOOEY!!!!

But phooey creates the opening for the Saboteur to step in and give up on the journey when I may have only 500 yards to drive.

Looking at my collage, I focus on the phrase "Today is the day I write my own story." Yes. No. Maybe.

Yes, I still want to move to Ventura.
No, I'm not willing to give up on my dream.
Maybe if I send out an email to everyone asking specifically for what I want--my own room in Ventura, even temporarily--so I can practice living my Ventura life.

Bingo! I am happy to report I am staying for several days in a fabulous guest room in Ventura on a beautiful sunny ranch with two dogs, three cats and four amazing new friends.

"Your heart may show you things your minds is not ready to grasp. Keep your eyes open for new possibilities. If you knew everything there is to know about yourself, you wouldn't be weaving a new dream or following your heart's desire. Your creative self is leading you into new territory. Will you travel there?" --page 85, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Visioning(R) works.

What will you do today to focus on your dream????

Write your answers in the Comments section!!!

Guest blogger Dorothy Segovia is a certified Vision Coach who knows how to  focus on a dream. She is the author of My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents, a book about using Creative Journaling and original songs to move through obstacles. www.writeinside.com.

Visioning Step 2: Visioning Euphoria

Visioning® Euphoria by guest blogger Kate Dana

With Lucia Capacchione, PhD, in San Luis Obispo CA, October 2012.

I have this collage with me today.

In October 2012 I attended a one-day workshop with Lucia Capacchione, PhD, best-selling author of 18 books, including VISIONING®: Designing the Life of Your Dreams. Under Lucia’s guidance, several attendees and I followed the 10 steps of Visioning® and ended the day with huge posters of our heart’s desire (“dream goals”). Mine was based on creative work, travel and living in a Spanish-speaking country, all of which I am doing now. Visioning® works. I was convinced when I read Lucia’s book, but meeting her and practicing the method together confirmed me as a believer. If you have a chance to attend one of Lucia’s workshops, I strongly recommend it.

Starting the 10 Steps to Visioning® on a sunny Saturday in México

Occasionally, life goals need adjusting. While I still have my original Vision board with me, when I find parts of it feel “stuck,” I create a smaller board to focus in on what needs a boost. Additionally, I have learned if you are not specific enough with your Visioning®, you will get what you ask for, like ordering mayonesa for your elote, when you really wanted crema. It still tastes good, but it’s not exactly what you want. Realizing this, I spent a sunny Saturday afternoon working Lucia’s magic. Just starting the process of Visioning® made me happy: when we stir energy around us – our lives, our desires, etc., – the kinetic energy is almost like a natural euphoria.

Midway through Visioning® – creative energy feels great

I have the 10 steps for Visioning® from Lucia’s workshop here with me in México. I follow them one by one, from brainstorming to finding images and text to assembling everything into a collage. One of my favorite of the 10 Steps for Visioning is Step 2: Searching for Images and Words, or the designers research phase, which comes as no surprise since I have graphic design experience. Step 2 begins by gathering pictures, captions, and phrases from magazines, a personal collection of photos or other visual sources. The emphasis is on what experience you wants to create in life rather than just images of things to be acquired. The mantra is: Grab what grabs you. Lucia urges creators to keep an open mind while gathering as many relevant images and words as needed. If other great but unrelated pictures surface, set them aside to be used in other collages. As mentioned in Step 3: Focus on the Vision, some people gather too many images, creating a giant pile that feels overwhelming to sort through. The best solution for this is to ask specifically, “Does this express my innermost wishes, my fondest dreams?” If it doesn’t, there may still be a reason it “grabbed” you; find a large envelope and stash these images or words for a future collage, where they may be relevant.

Collage detail: “Grabbing what grabs me”

When gathering words and images, I sometimes feel persuaded to collect positive phrases or motivational quotes, partly because I am fighting off what Lucia calls the “Inner Critic” voice, the doubts we occasionally hear in the back of our minds as we pursue anything. Mentioned in Step 5: Explore and Find Order in Creative Chaos (from the 10 Steps to Visioning®), these doubts can come from ourselves or others around us. I find it most important when this happens to stop and write a “Q and A conversation,” asking myself what I want and why, responding honestly and free of fears. As with most situations in life, if you doubt them, you rob them of opportunity. If you believe, they have a much stronger foundation to stand on, with your focus and faith as support.

Visioning® to Go, in a vibrant “Méxican pink” envelope

While Lucia recommends a giant poster, I don’t have the space, so I create a smaller piece that folds in half or thirds, like a card or brochure. I find having my Visioning® collage with me is like carrying a mantra or prayer. This small item keeps me in check. I refer to it when I wake up, throughout the day, and before I go to sleep so the vision is fresh in my mind. Eventually, the desired outcome begins to happen. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly; signs and events reveal that the Visioning® is working: it is real. We all have the power to direct our own life, we just need to say how or what we want, and be specific.

Visioning® collage: Inspiration. It’s all around us.

My Visioning® collage turned out great: colorful, organized, and specific to what I am focusing on: all very much to my liking. I can already feel the changes I want happening. Gracias Lucia por tu Visioning® y por su información. Todos somos de gran alcance en su interior.

Guest blogger Kate Dana is a mixed-media artist and travel writer studying Spanish and teaching English in Jalisco, México. Since 2009 Kate has been studying Spanish, creating art and traveling. She is inspired by the music, food and history of Spanish-speaking countries and has enjoyed visits to Spain, the Dominican Republic and México. Visit www.katedana.com to read about Kate's travel adventures.

Kate is also a 2012 graduate of International Teacher Training Organization in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, where she earned a Certification in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. For more information visit www.katedanateaches.com

Visioning Step 1: Setting Your Intention

It is the 3rd week of January. Many of us are living with the resolutions that we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year. If they are working for you—congrats! You're headed in the right direction. However, if you are struggling, maybe it is time to turn that resolution into an intention.


Step 1- Making a wish or setting the intention.

There is a big difference between resolution and intention. Resolutions often come from our head—what we should be doing: lose weight, finish that project, start exercising. These are all worthy goals, but joy comes from flowing with the heart's intention. Suze Orman once said that she used to exercise regularly because she enjoyed it. But as soon as she made a New Year's resolution about exercising, she stopped. Esther Hicks, author of the Abraham law of attraction books, states that rather than setting a goal— which only locks in the feeling of lack—focusing on what we want and the feeling of having it, allows the dream to manifest. Discovering and allowing our dream is Visioning®

“...once you have heard your creative conscience, you must take action. How wonderful! And how terrifying. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'Be careful what you set your heart on, for it will surely be yours.' Having your dreams come true brings a new kind of freedom and fulfillment. It also brings new responsibilities. There will be surprises when you realize your true desires. From each risk you take, you become stronger and learn more about yourself. From every encounter with your creative conscience, you learn more abut who you could be. If you dare to dream and act on your dreams, you have everything to gain: your true creative self.”
--pages 59-61, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

Now that you know the difference between resolutions and intentions, ask yourself these questions from the pages referenced above:

1.Am I ready to look into my heart?

2.Am I ready to partner with my creative self?

3.Am I ready to listen to my creative conscience?

4.Am I ready to have my deepest dreams come true?

***

Your COMMENTS matter... please tell us about what part of your day you most enjoy and why.

Lucia's Art Studio: Her dream come true.

Guest blogger Dorothy Segovia is a certified Visioning coach. Her latest book “My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents,” is a blend of memoir, self-help and original music. Learn more by visiting www.writeinside.com.