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.