Visioning® Allowing Room for Chaos

Let's say you've just moved into a big new house. It's twice the size of the space you are living. There are boxes all over. Some are neatly labeled, but no matter how carefully you packed, there are a few surprises when you unpack: the measuring cups are in with the laundry detergent, your library novel got tucked into the toiletry box. Depending on your daily responsibility's, it can take a while to get things put into their proper place. It takes time to get the feel of where the pictures should hang.

In the same way we need time to recreate ourselves when we move, we need to allow the same re-creation time when we are playing with our completed vision boards. Let's face it, when we first enter our new digs, chaos happens. When it comes to manifesting our desires we are literally moving our stuck energy out of our bodies and expanding into something new. While the process is definitely exciting, stretching our psychic limbs may not always feel so good. But remember, we got a taste of the chaotic energy in Visioning® Step 5 when we learned to make order out of our messy, juicy vision.

"When we encounter chaos in the creative process, everything feels topsy-turvy. We're the Hanged man card in the tarot deck, suspended by our feet. Our linear left brains are helpless when we face the mystery of creative chaos head-on. Of course artists understand this subterranean world where new life takes shape. So do pregnant women, gardeners, shamans, and all those who have dared to participate in birthing something new. Innovators and explorers who venture off the straight and narrow path, who shun the predictable, the acceptable, and the approved live in this zone. Creative chaos is it's name and change is its game.

The challenge is that change is difficult. It's so much easier to retreat into the safety of the known and the familiar. What may be the most difficult is learning to live with the possibilities that change presents. When we change we redefine ourselves." page 104, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams.

The Dreamer: Panel 3 of 5 part series

When I created my latest collage series, I didn't have any agenda other than to follow my heart and stand for my truth out in the world. Generally when I think of this type of creating, I think of high energy, go-go-going. It was enlightening for me to journal with The Dreamer, who felt "peacefully expansive" because "she can see ahead to where I'm going." The writing was filled with the acceptance that I am already living my dream. That's it, no forcing involved. This is good news, because lately due to my super busy schedule (I was secretly hoping The Dreamer was actually The Napper) the phrase on panel 4 feels intimidating.

Panel 4 of 5 part series

"Contributors: It's time to build the next great empire. May the gods be with you."

When I read the above phrase, my mind whirled. "The next great empire, why isn't going for another round of rewrites on my musical enough? Empire? I just want to memorize the song I wrote last September, in my room at the ranch...alone."

Giving myself time to be with The Dreamer gives me time to relax into my vision, which includes the imagery on panel 4, but I'm not there yet. It gives me time to let my truth take shape, since speaking my truth through writing IS my dream. Time gives me the freedom to sort through my old furniture and take a load of unnecessary approval-seeking and inner criticism to the garbage.

To practice the art of moving through your own obstacles to your success, visit Lucia's site: www.visioningcoach.org. Here you can purchase her book, find out about certified coaches in your area and read about Lucia's story.

Dorothy Segovia is a certified Visioning Coach® and author. Visit her at www.writeinside.com.

Trying Not to Try: The Heart of Visioning®

In an effort to make their collages images come true, many novices try too hard to bring about their vision. They notice a woman on the collage is wearing a bright yellow blouse, so they overspend on the wrong color shirt that's just a little too tight. An impulse buy: all for the anxiety of forcing their vision, rather than allowing their vision.

I'm not discounting that your fairy godmother could walk up to you with prepaid tickets to Bali for two and happens to be wearing a bright yellow blouse, but the Art of Visioning® states:

"We can rearrange the outer world forever, but if we haven't rearranged the furniture in our hearts and minds the experience of fulfillment will elude us. As we replace outworn beliefs and limiting perceptions with new pictures and a new scenario, we literally recreate ourselves." Lucia Capacchione, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams, page 253.

In the same way I practice writing, we must also practice Visioning®. Embodying our collage images through journal writing, movement and contemplation brings our vision deep into our heart memory. As we feel our way to our vision, we make adjustments to release the inner critic's voice. We release self-sabotaging thoughts and habits.

This point is brought home in a recent article about Edward Slingerland's book, Trying Not to Try: Cultivating the Art and Science of Spontaneity.

"Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive."

"Starting Over" Collage 1 from my 5-panel series: "I Know What I Said."

After playing with my latest vision board  "Starting Over," I got an intuitive body hit to explore moving to Europe. Elated one day, panicked two days (I had just got settled), by day four I was making a plan to scram next year, and finally, I started over at peace.

Now I'm planning to take a vacation to explore several cities where I can see myself living. I bought a travel guide, borrowed language CDs from the library and filled out my passport application. In August, I'll check in with my friend who lives overseas to see what her plans are. Beyond that, I'm enjoying where I live and work now, and following my Visioning® heart.

Dorothy Segovia is a certified Vision coach and author who explores creative journaling and music in My Body, My Car: How to Coach Yourself Through Life's little Accidents. Learn more about her at www.writeinside.com.

Discover the heart of your creativity by becoming a Creative Journal Expressive Arts facilitator. Learn how to teach and coach others in a beautiful, retreat setting. Teachers, health practioners and other professionals can incorporate the Creative Journal and Visioning® methods into their own teaching. Visit Lucia's web site for details.

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® Coaching: Support for Dreams Coming True

One-on-One: The Visioning® Coach Process

Rooted in my 30 plus years of work with private clients as well corporate and job outplacement consulting, I've developed a method of one-on-one coaching based on my book, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams. Few things are more exciting than being mid-wife to other people's dreams coming true. Some clients work with me in person. They get to see the fruits of my own personal Visioning®: the very environment I live and work in. Clients who work with me on the phone, use my book which includes the illustrated story of how I Visioned my home and studio and the nearby coastline (see previous blogs). I also have a consortium of Certified Visioning® Coaches I have trained (listed on VisioningCoach.org)

One-on-one Visioning® Coaching always starts with the client making a collage, either at home or in the first double (2 hour) session. Again, coaching is done in person or by phone. Afterward, the client is guided through a simple interview during each session and given assignments to be done during the week between. Sessions are usually a half hour in length in a 13 week series. In these sessions, a certified Visioning® Coach also leads the client through journaling activities, Voice Dialogue, Embodiment exercises, and much more. There is "homework", such as journaling and regular viewing of the collage-as-visual-affirmation for keeping the momentum going. Clients move through the 10 steps described in the book with support and a sense of accountability to themselves.

Tobey Crockett, an artist living in the Cambria area, worked privately with me a couple of years back. As is so common with one-on-one clients, she discovered wonderful surprises and new talents as she engaged in the Visioning® coaching process. Starting with collage-making on her own, she did movement and Voice Dialogue in sessions with me based on images in the collages. This helps to make the dream more physical and open up personality traits and aspects longing to come out in relation to the dream.

At home Tobey did art and writing in her journal with the content of her collages, which led to a delightful series of paintings of her Inner Brat. She has gone on to create 3-D versions of this character as well. The energy and immense outpouring of Tobey's innate creativity was really something to behold. Once she got started, there was no holding her back. This was a whole new direction for Tobey as she discovered her Inner Brat, an aspect of our personalities which we all have but which we often squelch in the name of propriety and convention.

Tobey's celebration of her Inner Brat grew out of my Inner Child Work, which is part of the Visioning® process. The Inner Child work was presented in my bestseller, Recovery of Your Inner Child and brings a playful and creative dimension to Visioning®. And that is the richness and uniqueness of this process: it incorporates so many expressive arts techniques, like the Creative Journal, Voice Dialogue with art, embodiment through role-laying and more. See LuciaC.com for more on the full array of methods. These methods all blend together naturally in the Visioning® coach process. That's why certified Visioning® Coaches are first trained in my Creative Journal Expressive Arts program. In order to help client's find hidden talents and new ideas and directions from the deepest well of creativity and innovation, the coach uses many expressive arts techniques. And this works for everyone. Not just artists and so-called creative people. We are all creative. We just need to tap into what is already there.

When Tobey (in gray in the photo here) joined me in sharing one of her fabulous Brat paintings at a Visioning® Coach Training Intensive, the group was so inspired by her story of discovery and deeper creative expression. For more about Tobey and her work, go to www.tobeycrockett.com.

There is an enthusiasm in the air when people tell about how their fondest dreams came true. You can experience this for yourself. Why not give it a try? You have nothing to lose but the blues. Get more inspiration from the dozens of career change, job and business stories in my book Visioning. (LuciaC.com)