Nurturing Your Dreams

This mini-series coaching is about breathing new life into your old dreams, visioning the possibilities and reaching deep for the resources you need to move forward to live a life of joy and passion.

Nurturing Your Dreams is about

• Acknowledging your current skills and accomplishments (think celebration!)
• Re-igniting the fire and passion to move forward in the direction of your desires
• Committing to new action steps to begin living your dream now.

Do you KNOW what you want? Or has it all become quite hazy and elusive…or even frustrating and confusing? Are there true dreams you want to accomplish but…apparently, your own self-sabotage keeps them from manifesting? Are you just staying ‘busy’ to avoid looking at your ’successes’ and ‘failures’?

If you do know (even vaguely) what your heart’s desire is - that something that has been calling to you for some time now – to paint again, to finish that book, reconnect with family, learn a foreign language, open your own business – this package of four very focused weekly coaching sessions will empower you to begin living now what you have only imagined as possible.

In our phone coaching sessions, with complete confidentiality, we will explore paradigms and limiting beliefs around manifesting your desires and dreams; create a touchstone for your vision, and immediately get your into action - to make things happen! You will be able to set clear intentions, identify and eliminate apparent roadblocks, discover resources, tools, and support - and begin to celebrate progress in the direction of living the life you desire!

Cynthia taught me how to put the ‘gremlins’ of doubt and fear to sleep – we  sent them off on a vacation – and I got busy with exploring my creative self.  Little baby steps at first and pretty soon I was so into this new way of being I was getting up an hour earlier every day and heading into my studio, excited to see what would unfold.

Here is how this special coaching package works:

Once a week phone sessions plus email updates and support over a 4 week period - $225

(first session is up to 60 minutes, remaining 3 sessions are 30 minutes – includes ‘homework’ every week and accountability by email weekly)

Special offer good for 4 consecutive weekly scheduled sessions initiated before September 30, 2008

Money Back Guarantee - if you are not fired up after the first session, Cynthia will refund your full payment.

Use the form below to send Cynthia an email to request scheduling your ‘Nurturing Your Dreams’ sessions- you will be directed to a new page with payment options for online or mailing a check.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Join this new ongoing class and begin to experience your life as poetry!

Living the Poetry of Life is not exactly a meditation class…nor is it a typical how-to class where you might be inclined to take notes. Instead, the sessions are an experience of a sacred path of Beingness.

Led by Cynthia you will participate at a level you desire - self-guided and self-paced. You will be inspired by one-hour weekly sessions in a small group, sacred setting designed to aid your discovery of meaning and joy of being; the beauty and sacredness of life within and around you.

Some things you may experience:

• Dropping your ’story’ of success/failure
• Noticing the power of your spoken words
• Explore what ‘is’ without an ‘I’
• Using metaphor to develop deeper understanding
• Finding the sacred in this Now moment
• Dropping pretensions and facades to make room for authenticity
• Tapping into intuition and inner guidance easily

This class will meet weekly at 7:00 PM starting in August (day of the week to be decided). $15 per session or $50 per month (4 sessions). Email or call me if you are interested and I will let you know about the date and other details.

How good are you at asking for what you want in life? Hmm, this is probably not a skill you have really assessed yourself on, as on a scale of 1-10.

Before you can ASK for what you want, you will need to know what IT IS you really want! Do you know? Can we get real for a moment? On a scale of 1-10 how well do you know who you are, where you’re going and what you need to get there?

It is said that if we don’t know where we are going, it is because we don’t know where we are now. So it is not surprising that discovering what you want begins with looking at what you don’t want. Most of us find the first step easy—make a list of Don’t Wants.

Next you take each Don’t Want and translate it into real desire. So you don’t want to be in debt— let’s get past the focus on ‘debt’ and translate that into a positive want. If debt were not looming over you, what would come next? Perhaps a sigh of relief, a sense of freedom from struggle—but what possibility has the new space opened up?

Believe me, you will fill that space—either with new debt or what? People don’t want to get out of debt really, they want to arrive at a place of power to freely express their real desires. So let’s cut to the chase—what is it your heart most wants?

What would an authentic life look like for you? Are you wanting to travel? Go back to school? Start your own business or begin a new art project? OK, that’s a step in the right direction. But what is the inner essence, the passion behind these ‘wants’? What does traveling mean to you? A sense of freedom, adventure, connecting with other cultures? What is the reason, the ‘why’ of your desire? Why go back to school? Why start your own business? Why build a 12 foot sculpture?

The answers to these questions are the real “wants” in your life right now – and quess what! You can begin right now to have exactly what you want! Next step…fulfillment versus happiness—the journey not the destination.

What is living with passion? Interesting, isn’t it, how life’s really big questions always lead to more questions? What is living anyway? What is passion? Forget dictionary meanings, what does it mean to you personally?

For me, passion is a deep inner-driven expression that makes me feel alive. The expression is important because unexpressed, the passion becomes stifled and so submerged that it becomes more a pain, a throbbing without release. Resulting in a withering into a depressed type of nostalgia – a remembrance of more passionate times rather than an expression of the passion of the moment.

So how to get in touch with the passion of life and express it through one’s personal and unique qualities? Again, you need to go deeper into the meaning and find the essence of passion. One way is through metaphors. My favorite is the four elements – fire, air, water and earth.

The fire element naturally has a sense of passion for most people. What lights your fire? What makes you glow like the brilliant sun? How do you fan the subtle embers of your inner self to awaken that flame of passion? Where in your life are you denying or avoiding the fire of passion for fear of being scorched?

The other elements also hold a potential for this power and energy we describe as passion. You may be an ‘air’ person. So think of the power of the winds in the trees, subtly softening and moving everything it touches, or the power of tornados and hurricane winds sweeping away all before it. A ‘water’ person can image the powerful waves of the ocean or the invigorating drenching from a sudden downpour of rain and the surge of swollen streams. How is this like the passion within? An earth-based person can perhaps connect with exploding volcanic eruptions and the flow of lava – now there’s an image of passion! – or more subtly, the erupting growth from a bulbs first emergence from the ground in spring.

Living with passion begins with being awakened to the miracles around you and within you — and continues as you learn to translate your passion into the real world of work, family and mundane daily activities.

As the clouds above me cast shadows on the desert floor,
I know that I have often lost my way,
And when the shadow aspects of myself diminish my life,
I become afraid.

Oh, Great Mother, Take my hand,
Help me to see the trail So that I may find my way home.

I am often tired these days, I think sometimes that I will be bereft of
Balance forever,
That there is no one to help me.

But as I look at the great mountains in the distance,
As their silhouette is etched against the sky With such clarity,
I know that somewhere in my heart I have known such clarity before, And that you are there for me.
It is only me that sometimes refuses to see you.

And I will open my eyes now, And I will see your face,
Just as the sunlight bursting through the clouds
Illuminates the flowers all around me.
I will begin to shine as they do.

I am flowering for you, Great Mother,
I am lending my beauty to the universe for a short time.
And I realize that this life is a process
Of seed and stalk and growth and flowering,
And then death.

But death is only a rebirth back into spirit, a rebirth back into life. And you may call me anytime, Great Spirit,
Back into your arms. So I am here for you, Great Mother,
I am here for you, Great Spirit, I am like a hollow log
With your love and your energy flowing through me Forever.

Help me to walk in beauty and power
All the days of my life.
Ho.

© Lynn V. Andrews, Woman at the Edge of Two Worlds
Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

Initially, the old mule was hysterical! But as the farmer and his neighbors continued shoveling and the dirt hit his back, a thought struck him. It suddenly dawned on him that every time a shovel load of dirt landed on his back: he should shake it off and step up! This he did, blow after blow.

“Shake it off and step up… shake it off and step up… shake it off and step up!” he repeated to encourage himself. No matter how painful the blows, or distressing the situation seemed the old mule fought “panic” and just kept right on shaking it off and stepping up!

You’re right! It wasn’t long before the old mule, battered and exhausted, stepped triumphantly over the wall of that well! What seemed like it would bury him, actually blessed him. All because of the manner in which he handled his adversity.

Is your life fulfilling? Fulfillment is about each day, each moment being full – full of possibilities, adventures, new learnings, and connections. Where happiness tends to be a state we describe as ‘doing’ or ‘having’, fulfillment is a state of ‘being’ – being with one’s self, one’s authentic self.

Can you imagine being 89 years old and on your death bed and having NO REGRETS? Looking back without regret is a great joy but it is not a destination. One doesn’t arrive at fulfillment somewhere out in the future but rather it is a process; you are experiencing lesser or greater amounts of it right now. This very day holds the possibility of fullness, joy and fulfillment.

Many are aware that we each create our future by our own decisions and choices made today. Knowing this is one thing, holding yourself accountable and responsible, is another thing entirely. The makings of fulfillment are not about addressing the past mistakes but rather about making new choices today to create the life you want for tomorrow.

Oh, by the way, ‘feeling good’ is not a criteria of fulfillment – fulfillment can be felt even when life is difficult or challenging…when you are doing what you want and feeling committed and passionate about your life.

If your life has become a boring treadmill of old patterns, today could be the day to step off and explore new possibilities. To take an honest assessment of where you are. If perhaps your life seems more like an escalator heading up but you, in your impatience, are taking it two steps at a time, maybe it is time to be still and take a look around -and within- for a glimpse of your old dreams. And reevaluate your beliefs - Has struggle chosen you or did you choose struggle?

Your Authentic Self - what it is and how do you reconnects with it?

The Authentic Self is the core of my practice as a personal life coach and of course my own spiritual practice….to live with passion and follow my bliss, listening to and expressing as best I can that Authentic Self. The Rumi quotes below represent the closest thing I have found to explain this mystic aspect of life.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. ” ~ Rumi

“Let the beauty you seek be what you do.” ~ Rumi

Finding your Authentic Self is more than discovering your life purpose or passion or forgotten dreams. But that could be a good start.

Sarah Ban Breathnach (author of Simple Abundance) has written a very good book called Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self in which she explores the process of digging into the soul for that elusive ’something else’. That sense that something is missing, that surely there is more to life, is an early clue that the Authentic Self wants to come out and play. During this process of exploration and ‘excavation’, one won’t necessarily change jobs or careers or spouses or homes, though any or all of those are possible.

What seems more important than finding a new job, new spouse or new house, is to learn to discover and uncover in small ways every day what being genuinely ‘you’ would be like. And then to begin to ‘be’ just that. To get on with your desired life rather than become resigned to something elusive out there in some distant future.

Every one of us has had that thought as some point…well, when the kids are grown or when I finally lose this weight or once I pay off these debts…and on it goes. For those that have experienced coaching you know that uncovering the authentic self is a ‘process’ and requires getting into action. You will want to try some new things and also allow your memories to bring up some forgotten joys to explore. And baby steps are ok, it IS a journey in the desired direction.

I’ll offer some suggestions to get you started, some questions for you - you can write a list or journal your answers.

I have found that there are two approaches to getting unstuck and as an individual you may resonate with one more than the other…

Suggestions - pick one or two below that seem pretty easy and then another 1 or 2 that bring up some resistance to work on!

Group 1: Moving away from being ’stuck’ or feeling you’ve lost something (authenticity)

1. What do I resent? What do I regret?

2. What have I been unwilling to change?

3. Where am I in denial? What have I been overlooking?

4. Where am I too comfortable?

5. Where have I denied myself?

6. Where do I stop short? Where am I holding back?

7. What decision have I been avoiding?

8. Where am I taking my foot off the gas?

9. What am I stepping over?

10.What am I settling for? What am I unwilling to risk?

Group 2: Moving toward authenticity, plotting a course of action

1. What am I most grateful for?

2. What makes me laugh? makes me smile?

3. What thrills me? What is fun?

4. How am I generous with myself?

5. What is fulfilling, what feels good?

6. How could I go softly into life? How can I have this be easy?

7. What can I give myself permission to do today?

8. How can I double my vitality? recharge my batteries?

9. What acknowledgment can I give myself today?

10 What awes me?