Sunday, February 27, 2011

Vision and Action

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without a vision is a nightmare.”

This anonymous “tweet” packs more wisdom about how to create your life than I learned in my first 30 years. For most of them I bounced off the walls of disaster. I reacted and recoiled. The only purposeful moves I made were toward isolated, specific goals I created in an unconscious prison of limiting beliefs. Beliefs about what I could have. Who I could be. How I must feel.

Beyond stories of saints and madmen, I had no idea what a vision was. It never occurred to me to consider what kind of life I wanted to create much less a game plan with action.

My daydreams played out fleeting moments, mostly half conscious fantasies that came to me unbidden.

Since I began to work with them so long, long ago I have learned a lot about how to break out from limiting beliefs that block happiness and keep people stuck in anger, fear, resentment, guilt and other painful emotions. It has been thrilling to witness courageous seekers strip away beliefs that block success, to see them flourish and thrive.

When you see for yourself, with certainty, that something you have believed for a long time is simply not true you move through confusion into a more open field. It’s the one the Persian poet, Rumi, talks about when he says, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

It is a wonderful open space filled with possibilities for your creativity to mold into unique form and experience. Few people go there after childhood. We cling instead to illusions of certainty like our ideas of right doing, believing that (even false) certainty provides security.

I know a lot about how to get to that open field. I’m just beginning to learn how to combine vision and action to harness the vast power of conscious creation available there.

I can almost feel the boundaries between me and infinite possibilities. Though I perceive only a tiny glimpse of what is possible for one human to create in real life on planet earth it is more than I ever imagined for much of my life.

The time we spend together in that field of possibilities reminds me of the less known lines of the Rumi poem:

“When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase, each other
Doesn’t make any sense.”

Cheering us on to great visions and inspired action!
With love,
Mandy