It’s not easy to maintain hope in our current climate.

Yet shifting from the road of despair to the path of vision works. When you put aside anxiety and focus on the world you want to live in, your heart opens.

When you vision the world we are dreaming for our descendants, you calm down.

When you drum or rattle every morning for the earth and clear waters, you connect with the whole.

It is up to us—whether we be lightworkers, visionaries, dreamers, idealists, or simply determined humans—to create the world we want to live in.

That doesn’t mean ignoring the shadow side. Yet if we do not have clear dreams—in our lives, our businesses, or countries—we flail.

We are the creators, weaving a piece of the whole web. We are, as we hear so often, the ones we are waiting for. So let’s step up to the plate!

“Our beliefs have the power to change the flow of events in the universe—literally to interrupt and redirect time, matter, and space, and the events that occur within them“ as Gregg Braden says.

Visioning from Your Essence

My imagination was seriously suppressed when I was a child. It became inaccessible to me as I grew up. So it was a challenge to learn to vision and dream.

When I learned to integrate the focus I’d learned in meditation, my nature connections, and shamanic worldview into visioning, doors opened.

I want to share this visioning practice with you. The spirit world and the ancestors are really calling to us to help shift the trajectories on the earth—to redirect events and feed the shifts of consciousness that are occurring.

Visioning from your essence is simple and profound. I’ve used it daily for many years. I’ve done it alone and in groups, large and small:

1. Begin by finding some images for your essence. You might experience it as a tiny light at the center of your heart, a great glowing ball of light, or something else entirely.

By feeling your essence with all your senses, and getting friendly with how it looks, feels, sounds and smells, you ground your vision with images you can return to over and over.

Rattling while you do this, or listening to some repetitive percussion, helps you stay focused and concentrated.

2. See your essence get bigger, so it fills your whole body and shines out from you. You can think of this as a way to experience your sacred power.

3. When you’ve got a strong, consistent sense of your essence, the third step is to visualize the world you want to create (keep rattling) from your essence.

For example, to vision a world with clean clear water, you let your essence show you what that looks and feels like. It’s a whole body sensation.

You stay with it. When your mind wanders or says “not possible,” you come back into your essence to revision and experience the clean, clear water. You see yourself taking it in, feeling it in your body.

The more you let your experience be somatic, the stronger it becomes.

You are creating new neural pathways.

You are retraining your doubting mind.

You are shifting your perception—from despair to divine perfection,

You are creating a vision of substance to sustain you when times are challenging.

If you’d like to try this with voice guidance, listen. About halfway through this interview with Future Primitive, I lead a visioning-from-essence journey to the Ogallala Aquifer under Standing Rock, and then up to the gathering of Water Protectors.

Visioning as a Path for Change-Making

I grew up in a progressive household and had my eyes opened by major political change movements. Went to many protests. Got discouraged. Trained in nonviolent protest. Explored Despair and Empowerment with Joanna Macy. Dropped out, returned, dropped out—my “glass half empty” perception focused me on what didn’t change, rather than what did.

Being an empath, it wasn’t easy to be in big angry crowds. I noticed that most “protestors”—people who care enough to stand up for what they believe—fueled themselves with rage and frustration. That’s true on both sides of the divide, as we see around the world daily.

I didn’t want to fuel my work with anger. I care passionately, but I’m non-violent. I kept looking for alternatives.

The meditation pillow approach was personally calming but too far removed from activism for me. As I learned more about how our perception creates our “reality”—from indigenous wisdom keepers, lightworkers, spirit helpers, and quantum physicists— visioning became part of my shamanic and spiritual practice. It became central to my toolkit for change making because it helps me see, know, and create images of substance to sustain my passion and my activism.

It’s a lot more powerful to learn the various aspects of visioning in groups: the energy fields we create together augment and expand our individual visions. We do this together through ceremony, circles, and online.

When I founded Earth Caretakers 25 years ago, it was to encourage and build ways for us to dream a new dream. We’re still at it. I’m always available to talk with you about your own visioning process and help you sort out the next steps on your path.