“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
We all have dreams. A picture perfect vision of what we want our life to look like. Maybe you envision a beautiful home and you have walked through the rooms a hundred times in your mind, running your hands across the furniture, choosing the colors of the walls, even imagining who is standing around in the kitchen, sharing a delicious meal with you.
Maybe you have a vision of your ideal partner. You know what they look like, smell like, if they speak with an accent. You imagine how their skin feels and how you feel when you are with them.
On one hand, it’s important to engage in these fantasies. They awaken the imagination which sparks an opening in our heart. The danger comes when we start looking for this exact manifestation of what we’ve envisioned and we close our heart to any other option.
Our dreams are there to guide us in the direction of our heart. But as we get closer to manifesting something, our perspective changes, and we must be willing to let that original vision become something else, something that will better serve us, even if it’s not at all what we, in our feeble little minds, have imagined.
If we continue to open to the new vision, we may realize that, even if the house or the person isn’t what we imagined, the heart-felt feelings we have when we remember our original vision ARE still there.
Every time I imagined living at the beach, I connected with how I would feel living there. My body would feel alive, I’d be breathing deeply and fully, walking a lot, and loving being in nature.
When the option of moving into that beach bungalow came to me, I realized that, even though, in the original plan, the house and my life there looked exactly like I had imagined, with a yard and a laundry room and a view of the ocean, it didn’t resonate with those strong heart feelings of freedom and aliveness.
If I hadn’t allowed my vision to shift, I’d be living a very different life right now. I’d probably be feeling the pressure to work a lot to afford the rent. And I’d be so busy working that I wouldn’t have the luxury of my many daily walks at the beach. Or the time every morning to write. Or the space to let go of all that, to begin to dream new dreams.
So what are you dreaming? And how insistent are you that it should manifest exactly how you’ve imagined it?
How can you let go of all of that and allow your heart to lead you to what you really love?
Please share in the comments below!
Don’t miss another blog post. Sign up to receive your own copy of the weekly Heart Sparks by entering your information in the box on the right.
