Visioning is about seeing the world you wish to create in the future, and being the hero who creates that world now - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly - and always with tons of support and community.
Your vision has its own life-force, and wants regular contact, love, protection, and patience to move forward. It comes into being when you give it space to be, honor its dynamism, grow it in community, and choose aligned actions that bring it to life on this earth. That’s a more poetic way of saying that repetition of positivity will help you create new neuropathways for your brains to say yes to your vision.
The visioning process that I teach is about exploration, experimentation, and infusion – and spaciousness envelops the whole process. In my community, you have space to explore, to try on a vision as if you are playing dress-up, to discover other people and muses who turn you on, to allow your body to communicate your fascination, to go deep and envision a life and life’s work that is soaked in you and what you love, magnificent on your terms.
That also means celebrating the magnificence of others and their vision (as long as they are actually being magnificent, and are not promoting hate).
Butterflies on Concrete
On my way to pick up lunch on Wall Street last week, I saw three women crouched low on the sidewalk. I joined them. What were we looking at? It was a little butterfly standing on the concrete sidewalk in the finance capital of the world.
Four women, all strangers, united in a mission to admire and protect the butterfly. It started with one women who was awake enough to notice this tiny creature amidst the towering buildings and tailored suit crowd. It took some coaxing for him to fly away into the trees, but he did.
Beauty and connection is everywhere if you look for it. When I slow down, I can more easily notice and connect to the gold that is already inside and around me. There are so many riches within and around.
Your Butterfly on Concrete Contemplation
What is beautiful and miraculous about your life today?
What are your riches?
Many Different Paths to the Butterfly
Just as there are many different paths to your vision - your big dreams, desires, and what you have to express in the world - there are many different ways to be a butterfly.
Canadian artist and photographer Raku Inoue creates insects (including this butterfly below) with flowers, stems, leaves, and twigs.
Gorgeous.
It’s a butterfly unlike any other. It came into being unlike previous ways of butterfly creation.
You are a creator, an artist, a designer. If butterflies can be made out of flowers then the particular vision can be made out of anything you desire.
Anything.
You can make your dreams out of marigolds, leather, love, clouds, hairspray, continents, snake plants, the flute, the Aegean Sea. You can craft your vision from that gold that is already inside you and around you.
Borderless, Boundless, Movement
We are living on a miracle planet filled with colorful life and suspended in darkness. We are borderless from space.
Your vision is a gift, natural and abundant like water deep in the ocean, like blood that flows effortlessly through your veins, the earth spinning without having to think it into spinning.
The miracle of fire, light, color.
Your vision explores and survives like the monarch butterflies migrating from the Midwest to Mexico.
We go where it’s warm, where there is food. We move to survive. I am writing this from Brooklyn, but I was not born in Brooklyn or this building (I was born in Queens). My parents weren’t born here, nor their parents. All of my ancestors have moved to find home, to find warmth, to find love.
Butterflies. Humpback whales. Birds. Salmon. Wildebeests. Humans.
Both survival and vision need transience, fresh ideas, fresh water, discoveries, weaving in new experiences. If we stay still, we get stagnant – our bodies, our ideas, our possibilities. Vision means not always standing still, and that means a lot of different things to different people. What does it mean for you?
I’ve been a regular participant of Cacao Ceremonies the past few months. I’m going tonight! It’s all about heart opening. I love it. Last week, an elder who spoke Spanish came and shared blessings for quite a while, and in Spanish (which I don’t understand). I got it, though. I felt it. I felt his intention.
I also felt sad at the thought of not feeling this. My vision of the world is one where we are strengthened and enriched by difference. I also know it’s other people’s vision to gravitate towards sameness, to cage the butterflies, to push strangers away. I don’t want to be in that world, and if you’re part of my community, I think that neither do you.
So let your vision roar. Not everyone will understand it, but those who need it will feel it.
Daily Contemplation
What is my vision, expansive, saturated in me, full of the feelings, sensations, experiences that I desire to have and share?
What world am I creating with my vision?
Who am I asking myself to me in this vision?
How is my vision borderless, boundless, open to discovery, and freeing?
What is one question, decision, action, conversation, experience, experiment or beyond that I can choose today to align to my vision.