Focusing Your Intent: Creating Anew Day by Day
Why Vision and Dream the Future?
Dreaming affects the world in powerful ways.
Reality follows your expectations and your visions. You create what you perceive.
When a vision is magnificent, your heart sings with the universe and everyone who resonates; you are empowered to live more fully.
When a vision is just forming, it can stimulate excitement, confusion, engagement, and purpose.
Even when a vision is terrifying—as are predictions of climate disaster— your actions, dreaming, and releasing of attachment to outcome take you into deeper communion with the original creative energies of the cosmos.
As Marianne Williamson says, “Creating the world you want is a much more subtle and powerful mode of operation than destroying the one you don't want.”
Five Practical Benefits of Seeking Vision!
Dreaming a different world into being, you feel better.
Using your imagination is more fun than complaining! (Think of a happy child and a whining child).
Visioning the world you want to live in helps you find your true path.
Dreaming and visioning a world you want to leave for the future—childrenand planet—helps you clarify your true destiny.
Dreaming and visioning help you walk what the Navajo call “the beauty way.”
Courage to Make Change
To make change, you need courage. You need to believe it is possible to shift your energy, open your heart, and nudge the consciousness of a people, a country, a world.
You attract what you think about, focus on, and put energy into. Yet most of us have been taught that we cannot create what we want, that someone else is in charge.
I want to help change this belief; that’s why I wrote Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life. Stimulating our dreaming and deepening connection to everything alive is essential to our survival in these troubled times.
Facing Our Challenges: Seeking Guidance
Humans have always faced practical and spiritual challenges. Often those challenges were similar to ours: the Anasazi faced tremendous drought between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains,” and had to abandon their life ways and great civilization to survive. Receding glaciers 10,000 years ago changed climate and led to mass migration across the earth.
In response to such challenges and changes, indigenous people did two things we in the west have mostly ignored: they went on vision quest to seek guidance, and they looked to the living universe for both guidance and prophesy.
A formal vision quest is quite complex in preparation and practice, often taking several weeks. It’s wonderful to find an experienced leader to guide you. And it’s possible to draw from the process of questing when you seek a vision on you own. Here are the five essential steps I use.
Seeking A Vision: Five Steps
You can incorporate these five steps to seed and guide your own questing:
Set an intention and make space for a vision by leaving the ordinary. The Oglala Sioux fast and pray on a mountaintop. The Q’ero go on pilgrimage to a sacred glacier, Qoyllur Rit'i. Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and nights. You might have a day of ceremony, of meditation, or of hiking alone to create such a space. Or join with others for a weekend “out of time” to feed your dreams.
Let go of what stands in your way. In traditional quests, people fasted (food distracts you); left familiar environs and responsibilities; and went into nature (no cell phones, IPods, or email). You might ask, “What do I need to let go of?” “What blocks me?” “What habits feed my anxiety, fear, and powerlessness?” as you make space to leave the ordinary.
Seek the vision after setting intention and letting go. In a vision quest, people draw on direct revelation: watching for signs and synchronicities to guide them; praying and asking for assistance; opening themselves to the universe with no expectation of outcome. One often has to quest many times before the vision becomes fully clear. You, too, can pay attention to signs and synchronicities; can ask your spirit helpers; can ask to be shown; and can learn to trust the revelations offered to you.
Feed your vision with whatever changes of attitude and action are called for. Understanding and engaging with a vision takes time. You have to believe your vision is possible, no matter how outlandish, unimaginable, or difficult it seems. You have to act as if the vision can and will happen. You have to make whatever changes are required by revelation and spirit. You have to be patient. And you have to do the inner work to maintain both attitude and action in supporting your vision.
Strengthen your own intent with collective resonance. Strengthening your individual intent by entraining with others on the same path is crucial for maintaining your hope and courage. If all this seems like a lot, it is! And know that it’s common to resist, avoid, and try to get out of a calling. And yet…
Are You Called?
If you are one who is called into dreaming for the collective, know that it is a beautiful, interesting, and rewarding path.
You will find purpose and meaning when you step beyond your private life to nurture the collective through vision and dreaming.
You will know you are doing all you can to help us humans forge a resilient, sustainable, conscious destiny. May it be so!
Meg Beeler—Author, Shamanic Guide, and Spiritual Mentor—helps you heal your spirit and find your luminous presence through mentoring, training, healing, and community ceremony. A lifelong explorer of shamanic, animist, and meditative consciousness, Meg is the creator of Energy AlchemyTM, founder of Earth Caretakers, and author of Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy. She works with clients worldwide and lives on Sonoma Mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.megbeeler.com
Need support? We can help. Schedule some time with Meg to explore your vision. Click here to book online.