xo,
Sunni
As you begin to follow your dreams in life, from the tiniest little dreams to the big ones, you will soon become very familiar with a narrative in the head that sounds something like this:
what the hell are you doing?
are you out of your mind with this?
that is ridiculous.
so unrealistic!
that is never going to happen.
how could this possibly happen?
it’s impossible and/or way too hard.
you are wasting your life/time with this!
you’re going to hurt yourself and people you love with this!
who do you think you are?
what kind of person are you becoming?!
stop being a stupid child.
wake up and grow up!
don’t be stupid.
let this dream die before you ruin everything.
be practical. be realistic!
this is not how the world works.
get your head out of the clouds and get cracking’.
stop living in a fantasy land.
come back to reality and just do things the way they’re done
don’t be an idiot.
why can’t you just follow the proven track?
you are embarrassing yourself with your naive views and ideas.
if you were smart or this was real, you’d already be killin’ it.
just stop. give it up. let it go.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re pursuing a big goal, changing directions, upgrading something or just updating your freaking prices, this same narrative will come up.
Because this narrative’s ONLY mission is to keep you out of change and in the “known”. Attempting to do ANYTHING new or different from the known will bring it up, guns blazing. You can expect it. It doesn’t want to try something new, it wants to stay safe. That is its primary directive.
At this point you have a choice: listen to the voice and back away from what’s calling you, pack it in, and give it up, downgrade the thing you wanted to upgrade, go back to the known and proven way, and put away yourself and your dream — OR — question the validity and motive of that voice and carry on.
What you’re really doing here is learning a vital lesson that will serve you all the days of your life, and that is whether to choose, listen to and nurture the power of love, or fear.
It is really that simple. If you nurture love, you may discover the immense intelligence and creative power of love in your life. If you nurture fear, you may stay safe, but also: in fear.
There’s no wrong choice, it’s totally fine either way, and either way you are going to be continually needing to feed and upkeep your choice, fear requires more fear and guarding to keep you safe at all times, and love requires more love and trust to allow you to grow in the direction you are choosing.
So the question is, what do you want to feed? In which do you choose to live?
When you choose to live from love that does not mean fear stops. In fact it will grow much stronger before it gets quieter, because it’s a pattern you’ve been unconsciously operating in all of your life, and it’s going to louder when you see it for what it is. It’s going to cry and scream and bolt all the doors.
But what happens is: your choice becomes simple.
From moment to moment and situation to situation you choose to feed fear or feed love. They are both present and available to you always, and you just become more and more AWARE and AWAKE to that choice so you can choose with intention. Because you know that what you feed is what grows.
This will feel like the fight of your life at times, because fear will give you every reason under the sun to stay in its grip. And love will rest quietly at ease in the background, waiting for you to come home.
You may even feel like you’re going crazy for awhile. For it most certainly does feel like insanity at first to try to choose in the opposite direction of the fear that our entire world and society has deemed “normal”, “right”, and “good”.
This is why most people don’t choose ease, because they simply do not believe it’s a choice available to them. The worrying and scrambling has been running so loud and so long it seems like it’s all there is. But it’s not. It’s just where all your energy’s been wrapped up until now, and now you can wrap it into something else.
And that of course is a practice. You’ve been practicing fear all your life, and now you’re simply going to practice love. Unconditional love for you and your dreams. That love will look like greater awareness, patience, hope, faith, trust, and opening your heart to yourself and life.
So what’s in a dream is the chance to learn to love—bigger and more wide open than you ever did before. Bigger than you were taught you were allowed to. Bigger than you ever thought you could.
That is what is hidden in every dream… more of the infinite beauty we’re all born of and return to.
So question the narrative, and love your dream, no matter how big or how small, and you’ll carve a new path for the rest of us to follow—one where living in love is the norm.
