| I remember having this unstoppable confidence as a little girl. I would climb up trees and dangle swinging from climbing frames and dive-bomb into the ocean to the echoes of my mother’s ‘BE CAREFUL!’ scattered to the winds. “I CAN DO IT!” I would shout back completely certain in my bones that I could. Frustrated that anyone could doubt me. Amused that anyone thought their concern would stop me from doing anything I wanted. Risk was an acceptable price to pay for the joy that I got out of life. I had to climb the tree to get the view and best of all the freedom from my parents’ orders. I had to face the icy cold see to float in the waves and see the fish and become a mermaid. But when I got sick at the tender age of ten, my confidence was shattered. Suddenly I barely had the energy to get out of bed. Never mind to conquer the world. Suddenly things I took in my stride before were ‘just too much for me.’ That unstoppable part of me was forgotten. You have million-dollar dreams inside you. but you need the confidence to believe that they are worth pursuing. That your dreams are important and that they will make a great impact in the world if you dare to create from that space. Sometimes through an illness or through a trauma we loose a part of our soul. The shamans call it ‘sushtu’ or the ‘fright.’ But we leave our bodies and seem to float outside of our lives and potential instead of embodying it. We can become so disconnected from ourselves that we don’t know what we want. We stop caring about ourselves and we focus on helping others hoping that this will be enough. But the bottom line is that you can’t give what you don’t have, and the hard thing is that when we don’t believe our dreams have financial as well as emotional value, we often don’t really deep down that other peoples do either. We find ourselves telling ourselves to be realistic, to grow up, and then we say the same things to our children to get them to give up on their dreams. But the truth is, your dreams are realistic. To me believing in dreams and miracles is one of the most realistic things I do. But to believe is to do more than pay lip service to an idea. It’s to follow it on the call to adventure. And on a call to creation. It’s believing that you will figure it out along the way. It’s trusting that things will get hard but when they do, you will become the hero of your own life. And knowing in your soul, that there is no greater threat to the darkness in this world than those of us who are able to fall and to are brave enough to rise. |
