Catching up with the Dream

The Simple Abundance Companion
by Sarah Ban Breathnach

(Page 3 of 4)

Dreams grow holy, put in action.

ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTOR

A dream is a promise you make to Spirit and yourself. Sometimes it takes literally years to keep that promise, whether it's a home, a family, a career, or a lifestyle. Dreams cost sweat, frustration, tears, courage, choices, money, perseverance, and patience. But birthing a dream requires one more thing: Love as the midwife.

There is a dream that only you can bring into the world. Do you know what it is? Or has it been buried under layers of naïveté, good intentions, relinquishment, bitter failures, detours, disappointments, rejections, wrong choices, bad timing, bungled efforts, stupid mistakes, unforeseen circumstances, whims of fate, and missed opportunities? In other words, the rubble of an unconscious life.

But how can you resurrect that dream, when you weren't able to realize it the first time? The difference is that now you know how to make choices, whereas maybe twenty-five years ago you didn't.

So set yourself a realistic deadline in which to bring your dream into reality. If you give yourself a deadline that is feasible-say, four years from now, not four months-by next year you will have taken the first concrete steps toward realizing it. It might be breaking ground for a new house. It might be renting a storefront. It might be finishing the first draft of a book. I don't know what it is for you but you do. And if you've not discovered it yet, continue doing this process and you should discover it by the end of the year.

Dreams need doing as much as they need being, or they remain wishes. Be quiet and call forth one or two of your fondest wishes when you were a girl. What was it? Were you going to be a physician? Have six children? Be wealthy? Be different from your mother? Win an Oscar?

Is that ember still glowing in your soul? The way you give expression to it today will no doubt be different from what you yearned for years ago, but think about how you might channel that energy now, and turn your wish into a dream. As the writer Cheryl Grossman reminds us, “I dream, therefore I become.”

The Intuitive Sense

Intuition is a spiritual faculty, and does not explain, but simply points the way.

FLORENCE SCOVEL SHINN

If we are to realize our dreams, it is essential that we use every resource available to us-and intuition is one of the most important tools we've got. Intuition is the capacity to know something without rational evidence that proves it to be so. It is known as the “sixth sense” and is often an ability ascribed to women. The English writer D. H. Lawrence believed that the intelligence that “arises out of sex and beauty is intuition,” while anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded that feminine intuition was a result of our “age long training in human relations.”

Do you use your intuition? Have you learned how to fine-tune the inner instinct that is constantly transmitting signals to you? Think of yourself as a radio. Is your dial clearly set on the intuitive station so that you can receive its message when you need it, or are you just picking up static?

Intuition is the subliminal sense that Spirit endowed us with to maneuver safely through the maze that is real life. Wild animals rely on their intuition to stay alive; we should rely on ours to thrive. “It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can lead a rich life and if you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct then your life will be safe, expedient and thin,” Katharine Butler Hathaway wrote in 1946.

Intuition tries to communicate with us in inventive ways. One way is through what my friend the script consultant Dona Cooper calls “the educated gut,” which frequently slaps us to pay attention by triggering a visceral, physical reaction in our bodies. One such intuitive signal is the emotional trembling that accompanies creative discovery or warns us not to take a certain action. Another intuitive message breaks through when we suddenly grasp that to try something new might be delightful; we do so and are surprised by joy. A third intuitive nudge occurs through revelation, the inner knowing that helps us arrive at the right place at the right time so that we can be swept away by the benevolent flow of synchronicity that gets us where we're meant to be as easily as the Universe can arrange it.

“I believe that we are always attracted to what we need most, an instinct leading us towards the persons who are to open new vistas in our life and fill them with new knowledge,” the writer Helen Iswolsky confided in her book Light before Dusk, written in 1942. But we've got to be able to follow our intuitive instinct on faith or the new vistas will become voids of despair.

Copyright © 2000 by Sarah Ban Breathnach

About the Author

SARAH BAN BREATHNACH'S (pronounced “Bon Brannock”) work celebrates quiet joys, simple pleasures and everyday epiphanies. The wisdom, warmth, compassion and disarming candor of her No. 1 New York Times bestsellers, SIMPLE ABUNDANCE: A DAYBOOK OF COMFORT AND JOY and SOMETHING MORE have made her a trusted voice to millions of women.