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Creating inspiration
Seeking inspiration
How do you begin if you have written down some good ideas but are still lacking real inspiration about what to ask for?
There are times in life when you get a feeling inside yourself that you want something different to happen. It is like a distant radio signal that you can’t quite tune into. But it gets stronger and stronger until the day comes when you feel an irresistible urge to do something about it. Yet how can you act if you still don’t know what to do, or what you want, but you just know that it is something that you don’t yet have in your life?
Inspiration is a communication from the universe, it can’t be forced into existence logically. It is from the Latin word inspirare, literally meaning to ‘breathe into’, or indicating that God has breathed upon the one inspired, so you are taking in ‘spirit’. This is why inspiration can feel as if it’s just dropped into your mind from nowhere. Because your brain loves pictures and images much more than words, you can inspire ideas by feeding your mind with pictures.
The following exercises will create pictures in your mind and stimulate your unconscious so that inspiration just pops into your head when you are least expecting it.
Your dream picture
If you only have a few ideas about what you may want in your life, a dream picture is a highly effective way of beginning to stimulate your imagination.
1 Collect a pile of magazines, as many as you can find. Give yourself some space. Sit down with a pair of scissors and start cutting out any pictures of objects, people, situations and places that inspire you. You will find that you become surprisingly discriminating as you do this, rejecting some outright.
2 Next, either take a piece of flip-chart paper and glue the pictures on in a collage, or pin them onto a kitchen-style notice board. The important things are that you are entirely intuitive about where you place each picture and that you can put your finished collage somewhere in your home where you can look at it regularly.
3 The best place to position your dream picture is somewhere you pass by several times a day, so that you catch sight of your inspirational pictures regularly. This way, they will feed your imagination with positive images of your future. If you are using a notice board, you can add other items as well as magazine pictures—maybe photographs of you in happy situations, postcards, or objects that remind you of things you want in your life.
Your box of dreams
An alternative to a dream picture is to have a box specifically in which to keep bits and pieces that capture your imagination in some way. If this works well for you, use this method. I prefer the dream picture, because you are likely to see it frequently in passing, whereas you may not open your box as often. The more you see pictures or items that feed your imagination, the more your imagination will be fired up.
Remember: What is important to you?
People who do what they want are doing so for no other reason than because it matters to them. This applies whether they are in business, a writer, an artist or a refuse collector.
Suppose you get to a certain point in your life, yet you still aren’t happy. Perhaps you have millions in the bank. Maybe you have a great family, a big house, all the trappings. If all this still leaves you feeling empty, then it’s because you don’t have a life that really matters to you.
What is important to you in all the different contexts of your life is unique to you. Only you have the ability, the gift (and the responsibility) to decide what should be important to you.
However, one advantage of using a box is that you can put actual objects into it, and the sensory experience of taking the objects out and physically touching them can be a very positive way of stimulating your imagination.
Where have you got to in your thinking about what you want?
At this stage of your thinking, you may have some very specific ideas about what you want to create in your life. If you don’t yet, that’s fine, you can think in broad terms at the moment. For example, if you know that you want a new career but don’t know what career that might be, picture yourself in a place of work that is happy and harmonious, where you feel fulfilled and are learning and progressing.
Or, suppose you would like to be in a relationship, then imagine being with someone who you are happy with, who you have fun with and love, and who loves you.
Perhaps you would like more money. Visualise a table in front of you piled high with banknotes and gold and precious gems. Imagine that you can spend as much as you want and yet the table will never be empty of cash.
Creating broad images will get your imagination kickstarted and you will automatically find that you start to see more images of what you want in your life. Moreover, as soon as you start the process, the universe will throw events and people into your path to show you what it is possible for you to have within the vision you have outlined.
Make sure that you complete this exercise before continuing to the next step.
Now, use all the exercises you have completed so far and bake your ideas into a dream pie.
Look back at everything you have written down so far about your dreams.
Look back at What is my life like now on page 31 to remind yourself of the areas of your life in which you are least satisfied.
Remember to make the distinction between what really matters to you and the things dictated by your current circumstances.
Once you’ve identified something as being of value to you, imagine living life both with it and without it. If managing without it is not such a big deal then maybe it’s not something that’s of prime importance to you.
Write down under the title of each life area what you would have to do to go from 10 per cent to 100 per cent satisfaction in your life.
If you would prefer different titles for your life areas, write them in the extra boxes.
Tip The importance of balance
When you think about what you want, it is important to think about all the different areas of your life. If you simply place orders in one part of your life, the rest of your life may become out of balance. This can happen unintentionally. How many people can you think of who spend so much time thinking about their careers that they get exactly the success they crave, only to sacrifice a marriage or their health in the process? Or they swing the other way entirely, spending a lot of time building a good social and family life, but lose out on financial stability.
Area of life Dreams
Social
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