How I found my dream, my purpose.

. Follow your heart, create your dreams, go for it, you can do it! Such a great message, such a wonderful promise. These messages should get me excited, shouldn’t they? They should have me racing off into the direction of my dreams, shouldn’t they?

Making a heart on Bethells beach while my heart sings.

Did they and was I on my way?

No, I did NOT race off and no, I was NOT excited! 
Even when I got as far as the start line, I had no idea what direction to race off into.

I hate to admit it, but for most of my life I couldn’t find my dream, my purpose in life and I could NOT race off powerfully mowing down every obstacle on the way.  

I was in good company; most people around me also struggled with creating a dream and a purpose. It showed in our complaints about overwhelm, procrastination, ineffectiveness, confusion and not being able to stick to whatever we started. 

I knew it well, that drifting into feelings of inadequacy and confusion; of ’is this all there is’ and feeling that the brilliant ‘ME’ was securely locked away.
I knew it well that frantic panic to have a dream and feeling so stupid that I couldn’t find mine. 

Lucky for me though; that is all in the past.
I can find my dreams and thanks to my 10,000 hours of questioning I have a useful explanation as to why I couldn’t locate them at first and why I can now! 
I have to thank many a book I’ve read over the years for this ‘enlightenment’ but I particularly want to thank the book ‘Love Without End’ by Glenda Green.

Here’s what I found in this book . . .
It will be of no surprise to you that dreams are all about the heart and this book says it no differently but I paid close attention when it continued to talk about the mind.
The book spells out that the mind is at its best when it is guided by the heart and when it is treated as the servant of the heart.
It is the heart who is the intelligent one and it is the heart that can make the best decisions; NOT the mind.
That was a big eye opener for me at the time, because I was told that my heart was the dreamer that would get me into trouble and the mind was the trustworthy one.

And then there was a sentence in the book that really threw me.
It made it very clear that from the moment our heart is in no longer in a state to guide the mind, it has lost its edge, as it has lost its strength.

So my interpretation of what the book says is that. . .

My heart couldn’t access my dreams because it was numbed by loneliness and overwhelmingly sad stories. So it became messed up and distressed by these feelings just as my mind did!
I have never thought of my heart as being capable of being weakened.
But it apparently is. Brow beaten and injured by the misdeeds and accidents of life, it lost its power and with it I lost my indigenous power and ability to find my dreams.

I never knew that my heart was injured; it certainly didn’t feel that way to me.
Of course my feelings were hurt lots of time, but I never connected that with a loss of personal power and weakening of my heart. 

And as the heart lost its ability to hold its ground, I lost my indigenous power to discern.
I became open to an infiltration of ideas, opinions and judgments that mostly didn’t serve my unique being and talents.
As the heart; my ultimate guide in life became vulnerable and confused, so did my mind when it lost its intelligent guide. That confusion in turn showed up very prominently in my vulnerable and confused behavior and my ineffective quest for my dreams.  

Poor heart, life experience did it in.
Poor me for losing my indigenous power. 
Poor mind for being left without a captain.

Looking at it this way, it is no surprise that the heart is wounded by life. 
As the heart is compassionate; a loving heart cannot help but have its strings pulled.
The loving heart, committed to unity, can loose its ability to distinguish between the experiences of self and others.
Through its exercise of compassion, the heart often accepts and confuses the pain and distress of others as its own and takes it on board adding it to whatever is already happening in its own life.
So that’s a double whammy of misery and hurt, its own and that of the rest of the world.
It feels all the pain and it doesn’t know what to do with it.
From that place it can develop remorse, guilt and fear which overshadows the heart’s positive feelings of true bliss and pure love, leaving the heart negatively geared in the feeling arena so to speak.

By feeling negative the heart is no longer able to connect with the pure foundations of love, well being and trust that dreams are built on.
To create powerful dreams one must have love, trust that all is well AND have a very strong heart.  
When the heart is confused and in pain it no longer has the ability to firmly guide the mind.
The mind then behaves like a loose canon going off on a wild goose chase, looking for dreams in all the wrong places that are way outside of ourselves.
It will never come up with great sustainable results because the mind will fall for every well advertised dream on the planet without seeing the false promises.
All you end up with is struggling with actions that have unclear motivations and are highly dysfunctional. 

So, how does this relate to me and my dreams?
My heart of course was injured like any other.
However lucky for me I unconsciously gave my heart a break from the abuse of the world and it recovered. 
I left environments that were not good for it and took it into environments where it could heal.

I quit a relationship that was not doing it any good, I quit the corporate hierarchy and a job that didn’t do my heart any good either. 
I quit belief systems that held it ransom, I quit listening to the news, I already wasn’t watching any television and I quit people who were dragging me down. 
My heart recovered in a new relationship that nurtured it, during long holidays in nature that made it sing, reading books that resonated, having buddies that pulled my heart strings in the right direction, and by working hard on building new and nurturing belief systems surrounded by loving people who supported my heart.

I have to stress that I could not have done this on my own, I certainly needed other people to build my heart’s self esteem and to override my mind. 

I became open to learning.
I stopped fighting new explanations even though they were totally opposite to ones I had grown up with and believed in for such a long time.
I slowly embraced the new ones I found so different but far more useful.
Great teachers supported me to recognize what to take on board and to rid my heart of the negative feelings.

It was like renovating a house; it took a lot of doing.
Cleansing and rebuilding my heart certainly didn’t happen overnight.
In fact this whole blog is describing that process.
As you can see IT did happen though; I got my dreams. 

Follow your heart, create your dreams, go for it, you can do it!
Such a great message, such promise; it does get me excited.
So am I racing off into the direction of my dreams?

YES!
Finally, I AM excited and indeed racing.
I AM, now accessing all of me, my heart self with Women Like Me and you, the readers of this blog.

So you can imagine how I aprreciate you, all of my buddies, my friends who have allowed me to heal my heart.
Now let me do the same for you!