Do I close myself off from receiving when I am overwhelmed in an effort to keep myself safe?
And does this actually do anything to create more safety?
When did I learn to equate lack of change with safety?
What if staying open to change is the most dynamic, creative, safe and pleasurable way to live my life?
These questions came out of my meditation with the soul of my dream, using the Dream Lab practice which helps you explore the soul of your dream and understand all that it has to offer you.
This get really trippy sometimes!
Today my dream wanted me to see all of these layers of … stuff… that I put between me and it. And how they’re not serving any REAL purpose. They don’t even protect me from the things I would like to be protected from, they just make it harder for me to have what I want.
As a creative - I feel pretty alone in this.
I look around at how other creatives share their work and I don’t see anyone else struggling with it the way I do.
I am comparing their outsides to my insides.
As a coach - I know it’s pretty much universal.
It’s such a gift to me, to be able to see so deeply into other people’s process and after doing this for so many years, I see all the ways that we are the same.
The ways we betray ourselves to feel safe are cultural.
They are learned, they are not an inherent part of being alive.
We can unlearn them.
This is why we PRACTICE.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
Every Monday in 2025 there will be a new journal prompt in the Year of Hope classroom in the Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership.
Get this week's journal prompt here.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! Leave them in the comments at the bottom of that page so we can discuss this as a group. Practicing hope in community is MAGIC.
I am still doing my Year of Hope project. But I am behind.
I have this HUGE (9x11”) planner with a page a day plus an extra page each week and this project was to fill it over the course of the year. I didn't say I would ALWAYS fill a page every day. I knew I would get behind sometimes, and then catch up... but I have been consistently behind for a while and only getting further behind.
It would be easy to say to myself “It’s fine! You SAID you wouldn’t necessarily do this every day, but by the end of the year you would fill this! You could always end the year with a huge journaling binge at the end of December! It would be fun!”
It would be easy to just… tell myself not to feel this way.
Especially since, on the spectrum between hopefulness and hopelessness, I am living solidly on the side of hopefulness.
I feel all the things I had hoped the Year of Hope would bring me this year.
But there is no magic in avoiding our feelings, or telling ourselves to feel differently than we feel.
So what is this inner knowing telling me?
Taking my feeling that I am a failure into the Un-Sticking Station…
My feeling that I am a failure is 5 years old. Dressing up as Holly Hobby. I give her a hug and I can feel the anxiety radiating from her.
OMG! I was sitting with this… and then I suddenly noticed that I was on Facebook! So funny how resistance takes over and I don't even notice I've let the process to go scroll.
Coming back to it. There are so many layers here around perfectionism and worthiness.
It’s soooo heavy.
And my five year old self is trapped in it. It’s like iron was melted and poured down her, though it wasn’t hot and didn’t hurt, but then it solidified at her feet and now she’s completely stuck.
(In this mediation, I am imagining that iron is the most heavy material in the universe, doesn’t matter if that’s true, that’s what is happening here)
There are so many layers here around perfectionism and worthiness. Like the more I look, the more layers there are.
And no matter how much work I do on this, there are still so many layers.
This time when I step away from the meditation I do it more deliberately.
I go make breakfast (I had frozen blueberries sitting in a bowl to thaw, so I just add yogurt and granola) and then eat my breakfast thinking about this.
This is cultural and personal and I think about all the ways I have internalized perfectionism. And I have freed myself from it in so many ways, and yet there is more work to be done.
This is where I notice that I’ve been defining “working through this feeling of failure” as “getting back on track with this journal”.
Which is actually just LETTING MY FEELINGS CONTROL ME.
The feeling that I am a failure for not keeping up is saying that I AM A FAILURE... UNTIL I catch up... and so THE ONLY SOLUTION is to catch up.
But when I was contemplating how old and layered this perfectionism is and the places where I have freed myself of it and the ways I would like to be more free… there was space there to not feel like a failure AND not catch up with the journal.
But yes I think I did go into this meditation, unintentionally, with the goal that it would “get me back on track” with the journal.
Healing would ask me to explore what it would mean to be ok with NOT getting back on track.
Then something shifts in me.
There is a lightness in my chest, kind of a radiating energy.
When I look at my 5 year old self, she is wearing iron shoes but she can lift her feet. She is not stuck in iron now.
When I went to offer love to the inner 5 year old, I just ended up with all these different thoughts and ideas and I followed that instead of finishing the meditation.
It’s always better to be with your experience than necessarily work through the guided meditation.
And we can always come back to it.
Like, this deep and layered perfectionism is not healed in one 15 minute meditation.
But I received a new insight around it, and I shifted something, and I am going to hold this idea… that letting go of perfectionism and NOT catching up with the Year of Hope journal IS HEALING, whereas making myself “get on track” so that I don’t have to feel that feeling of failure - is letting my fear of uncomfortable feelings control me.
And underneath that is a real desire to be spending more time with the journal.
I feel like I am holding hope in a new way in my life, but I also want the journal time, you know?
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
On Fridays I do these "Dream Status Report" prompts to help me have more clarity, momentum and groundedness on my path.
There are journaling sheets for doing this! these are available for everyone, not just membership members. Download them here.
This is another week of"Creative Dreaming in a dystopia"
I DID THE FREAKING THING!!!
And I did it while new wildfires started in my province, these ones further north where there aren't a lot of roads - and some of the roads were on fire so people were unable to evacuate on their own. I was checking the news a lot to see what was happening as the military was flying people out as fast as possible.
Not that the fires are near me or threatening me, I'm not experiencing it but I am crying a lot of tears over it.
I also finished the Journaling Kit for Existential Dread - I will have sent it out before this post goes out!
It's hard to have the words to talk about this week. I finally did this thing I'd been thinking of for years, it felt B I G but also I suddenly felt ready.
AND
It took A LOT of energy just to acclimate to "being the person who is doing the thing" after being the person who was dreaming of the thing for years. There were A LOT of feelings to move through in all of that.
And I am so proud of myself for giving myself space to do that. To BE WITH all the conflicting feelings, including an awful lot of frustration with myself for not having done it sooner.
AND I didn't actually do THE WHOLE THING. There is a whole other chunk of it to do, and I am probably not going to do that next week either. It felt really good to break it down into a few steps, and I really want to give myself space between the steps.
And that's what I need now - SPACE to acclimate to where I am.
And my dream is like... Oh yes. Because it is excited about the next steps, but if I take them without acclimating to this one first, I am likely to fall down and roll way back.
Co-Dreaming/Co-Working call is today!
We'll start with a short meditation for connecting with the soul of your dream (like the Dream Lab) and then have time for whatever you want to do - planning next week, working on your projects, sharing your updates, talking about something that is stuck with your dreams or just hanging out in the magic of the group.
Call details are here. Replay will be there a few hours after we're done today.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your Dream Status Report or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
If you're not a member - find out more + join us here!
You may have noticed I’ve been sharing photos of myself holding my Year of Hope journal, to share different pages.
I really love this.
I love sharing it here on the blog, and I love having these photos to share on social media, to put my work out there.
I did a lot of experiments, and lot of them felt really uncomfortable and didn't look the way I had hoped.
Then it turned out I really loved taking these photos beside the window in my bedroom, where there is that black part of my wall mural, and it’s right beside the window.
But then I re-arranged a few things and there is a plant in there way there which I have to move over each time I want to sit there to do a photo.
And now that summer weather is here, my portable AC is there too.
It’s just a lot to move around.
And I really want to have as FEW obstacles as possible to continuing to do this as a practice.
So I started taking the photos downstairs beside the window in my workspace.
Which is ok - but I am missing the BLACK in the background and how that feels. And the window is making weird shadows.
So today I just… moved a lamp over there to counteract the window and now - no shadows!
And I just realized - I can paint this wall black, too. There is a colourful mural there which fades out into white… it can just as easily fade out into black and give me that dramatic background I want.
One step at a time.
I wouldn’t have thought of all of this at once.
I figured out how I want to do it... because I started doing it.
I looked around to find a way to try it, and trying it showed me more about what I need - in terms of lighting, background, and space to put my tripod to do the photos. And each thing I adjusted made it a little easier until now when it feels like it’s all coming together.
This is how most things come together!
Not as a “oh I got this perfectly the first time” but more as “I showed up imperfectly, I tried out my ideas, I reflected on how that went and what I wish was different, I made adjustments, I kept showing up, I made more adjustments, now it feels pretty good to keep going knowing I will likely keep making adjustments and it can all get better and easier over time”.
Where are you waiting to be ready to take a perfect step and where can you take some imperfect steps?
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
The “good vibes only” “just think positive” “fake it till you make it” approach is NOT going to help you deal with this inevitable disappointment.
It actually sets you up to feel WORSE about the inevitable disappointments. Because it piles on a steaming layer of shame, telling you that you shouldn't feel how you feel!
What you need are tools, support and a mindset that accept disappointment as a part of the process and help you work through it.
In the Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership you get 3 videos for disappointment:
- One about normalizing disappointment as a part of the process.
- One alchemy meditation for nourishing yourself and relaxing your uncomfortable feelings of disappointment
- One alchemy meditation for receiving the holy gifts of disappointment. Because yes, there is always a GIFT in the disappointment.
Your disappointment is a not a personal failing!!!
It's just a part of the process.
If you can make a dream come true without feeling any disappointment along the way - you are not stretching yourself at all. You are not growing as a person. You are either thinking WAY too small, are prioritizing safety/certainty over authenticity, or you have a lot of money and are just buying your dreams, you're not engaging in a growth/healing/creative process with them.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
I just wanted to share that I WOKE UP HAPPY THIS MORNING.
And I have been waking up feeling happy every morning for a while now.
This feels surreal, given that I felt I was drowning in self doubt earlier this year when I set out to find out who I am as an artist in my 50s.
And I remembered something one of my teachers used to say:
Your clothes don’t look that dirty, but it’s time for a wash.
You put them in the washing machine…
And if you open it up halfway through - it’s disgusting. All the sweat and dirt and whatever that was in the filers has been released into the water it’s a big dirty mess.
But if you just let it go through the whole cycle - everything comes out clean.
He would say this at the start of his healing retreats to say - things are going to get worse before they get better, don’t let that make you give up halfway through the process.
It’s like that with our dreams.
Some steps we take can dig up deep rooted stuff, stuff we didn’t know what there, and working through it all can feel impossible.
But it’s not.
This is just what the process is like.
Let yourself stay in it until the end.
This is why I always say that the INNER WORK is a valid + needed part of the process, every bit as much as Dream Work and Outer Work. (Those are links to the libraries of practices + tools for each of the "works")
Inner Work is where we generate miracles, healing, and the shifts that make the outer work possible.
So, even if you feel like you're really stuck deep in there - please keep showing up. You'll work through it in time.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
Every Monday in 2025 there will be a new journal prompt in the Year of Hope classroom in the Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership.
Get this week's journal prompt here.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! Leave them in the comments at the bottom of that page so we can discuss this as a group. Practicing hope in community is MAGIC.
I'm not doing the Hope Alchemy Meditation as consistently as I was in January.
(There is also the hopelessness meditation)
But I am still doing it once in a while. I really love this sensation of looking, in my body, for hope.
It comes from the assumption that hope is in there somewhere.
Where is hope glowing in my body?
Some days that light is SO tiny. Not a judgement! Just a noticing.
There is something so special about just sitting with that tiny light.
Nothing is happening, but it feels like an important practice.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
On Fridays I do these "Dream Status Report" prompts to help me have more clarity, momentum and groundedness on my path.
There are journaling sheets for doing this! these are available for everyone, not just membership members. Download them here.
In a quickly changing world, steady practices are... steadying.
Feeling grateful for the steadiness of this practice this week.
Checking in with my "big dream" and my current new moon intention immediately gave me this sense of direction. Like I have been wandering in the cosmic jungle and then was suddenly given a compass that shows - oh look, I have been going in the right direction.
Since January I've been in this process of "BEING the artist I know I AM" which has a lot of layers of uncovering and discovering.
The last new moon call (since I write these in advance I am writing this on the day of the May new moon call, so looking back to April) was intense for me! Messages came through hot and heavy - I came out of that call with a totally different intention than I had intended on.
And it's just now that I see things kind of coming together, or kind of starting to "make sense".
It's SO GOOD when the messages we receive in creative dream meditations don't make sense. This means we're tapping into "next level stuff". It's not supposed to make sense from our current state of being because it's guiding us into a new one.
I am moving into a new state of being and everything is... new.
I feel like I am, just now at age 51 after prioritizing this for most of my life, finding out who I really am as an artist.
This is an intense feeling! In light of this - it makes sense that this wasn't a hugely productive week. I felt like I made progress on everything that I wanted to make progress on but I mostly... vibed with my dreams.
What I am learning... and this is blowing me away... is that BEING the artist I AM has nothing to do with anything I make.
I think I did know that, when I started following this thread I was really clear that it wasn't about what art I made, it was an internal shift I was looking for... but I think I also thought that once I had that shift, some actual tangible "new way of doing art" would emerge.
Now, I don't know. I think I am learning that BEING the artist I AM is really much more about how I am in the world and how I see the world and how I express that through my life. I care less and less about "producing" and more and more about FEELING fully expressed.
At the same time, an idea about how to put myself out there in my business, which I have been circling for years, is starting to come into focus.
So - this feels like it was such a rich and fruitful week, though what I mostly have to show for it is a shift in how I feel about everything and a several-years-old idea that feels new and ready for implementing.
When I ask my dream what it thinks, it's kind of exploding with joy about where I am with all of this. It LOOOOOVES this "new" idea I have.
In light of all of this: next week I want to focus on implementing the new idea. Or, preparing to implement.
Co-Dreaming/Co-Working call is today!
We'll start with a short meditation for connecting with the soul of your dream (like the Dream Lab) and then have time for whatever you want to do - planning next week, working on your projects, sharing your updates, talking about something that is stuck with your dreams or just hanging out in the magic of the group.
Call details are here. Replay will be there a few hours after we're done today.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your Dream Status Report or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
If you're not a member - find out more + join us here!
My Year of Hope journal collided with my Dream Book journal for this one.
In my Dream Lab and Dream Self and Project Miracle meditations - I feel so much power, clarity and sense of sureness. That's what these meditations are designed to do!
Outside of the meditations - I can't always feel it.
This is the work. WE PRACTICE.
We can practice being powerful and we build it up over time and start to FEEL, ACT and BECOME more powerful in our lives.
And I don't mean developing the ability to overpower other people, I mean developing the ability to fully and meaningfully act on our convictions, inspirations and dreams.
We ARE powerful and we don't always FEEL IT.
And I am just sitting in that space of noticing the difference between how it feels in these meditations and how it feels in my daily life.
Noticing those differences is good.
Sitting with how it feels to notice those differences is good.
It's easy to freak out and judge yourself for not being able to hold that more powerful/confident/creative energy all the time.
But I want to encourage you to be proud of yourself for being able to access it in the meditations.
This is a big step.
You're feeling into your potential.
This is an invitation and a glimpse into what is possible for you if you keep showing up and working on it - it's not a judgement about how far you are from it today.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.
I had a busy week last week and was feeling quite overwhelmed. One of the ways this manifested is that I felt emotionally clogged up... I knew I had a lot of feelings but I was mostly just numb to them.
Then last night I woke up in the middle of the night and started crying. I can’t even say what I was crying about, just… everything. And it was real crying - snot flying, loud sobbing, etc. Like a dam breaking.
Then I guess I fell back asleep, because the next thing I know my cat is on me, tapping my face with his paw to let me know it’s 30 minutes until breakfast.
Today I feel emotionally hungover. My eyes are puffy and all of my muscles are achy and I am tired and in a haze.
I’m sharing all of this because I want to help normalize that these are trying times we are living through and there isn’t a right or wrong way to process it all.
But the way dominant culture is encouraging (demanding?) that we just carry on like everything is normal is not serving most of us. I think it helps to acknowledge how we are feeling and what the impacts are.
As artists, healers, visionaries and activists - we can’t really afford to be clogged up. Feeling our feelings is a part of the work, if we want to be good at our work.
I mean we can’t help but get clogged up sometimes, we're likely going to get lost in conspiracy theories and distraction - but it’s a part of our work to process and work through our feelings and try to stay present with that is actually happening.
And I was doing plenty of doomscrolling and noticing that I wasn’t even really processing what I was watching in reel after reel, I was just 100% trying to distract myself from the world.
And each time I noticed that, I reminded myself that I feel better when I stay present.
Even though today I feel like.. this is crappy and hard and none of us asked for this, when we do the work to stay present, we can access our creativity, our power and our inner knowing. And with all of that - we can find our way through.
So what to do on days like this? How do I want to show up?
I don’t know.
I do know I’ve already had too much coffee, but I’d like to make a note to self for the future: matcha would have been a better choice for how it impacts my mind, compared to coffee. And I do have a tin of matcha! So next time I could do that.
(sitting quietly with the question: how do I want to show up today?)
I think I just want to focus on art today.
I had a list of admin things to do, but it would be ok to do them tomorrow instead.
And if do those tasks - that means pushing my vulnerable emotional hangover feelings aside to get focused and that doesn’t feel right.
If I do art - something new could emerge out of these feelings. Or I just give myself the space to really be with this and let it move through me.
Either way - this is what feels right today, so this is what I’ll do. Some days are just a jumbled mess.
Creative Dream Incubator Coaching Membership members:
Come to the forum to share your thoughts or start a conversation about whatever you're working with.
Get your next Dream Book lesson or get a weekly journaling + alchemy kit.
Go the Library of Creative Dream Alchemy to find a practice that fits for where you are or use the Dream Lab if you're not sure where to start.
Check out the calendar of upcoming calls. Make a plan to join us live or catch a replay.