I have a dear friend in Texas whose family is Mexican, Catholic, numerous, and very close. She grew up in Texas, went to school there, and has lived there all her life. She is married to a Jewish man from California, whose family is small and estranged. How could these two people possibly have met?
One day, several years into his career life, the man had a thought about moving to Texas. He’d never been or lived there, but he had a feeling that there might be a girl in Texas who could love a man like him from California—this is how he says it. And so he moved there. The job he took was at the same company where my friend works. It was a match. This is an example of calling an experience to us, at the same time we are called to it. It is, to me, an example of the miraculous in life and exemplifies living in the vertical.
I see the Oprah experience as one part of my spiritual journey. It was an expression of the dialogue between me and my dreaming, or spiritual, Self. I listened carefully to all it had to teach me, and I responded to how it unfolded for me by my listening. When opportunities to manifest it arose—such as John reading my letter and calling me—I was present to it and I responded to it immediately. The experience was me actively participating in the relationship between my conscious and my dreaming.
This is one reason why I see business and creativity as spiritual paths. Both require imagining and manifesting, and becoming facile with the left-right steps forward of these two movements. Imagining is listening to the dreaming voice and being able to receive what it has to bring us; manifesting is responding to it. We have to pull back and then burst forth, just as the creation story where God pulls His Light back in order for creation to spring forth. If we move through these two steps consciously, we can engage with a deeper spiritual aspect of living.
In the process of obtaining the interview for the Oprah show position and then choosing to say no to it, I also realized that by seeing myself in the entertainment business I didn’t need to work for Oprah. Instead, I remembered I was driven to seek the qualities that initially interested me which I saw embodied in Oprah.
While “Oprah” included entertainment at large, making movies, and helping people, I specifically saw in her the qualities my father pointed out when he first suggested she become a model for me: someone who had found a creative way to help people to find their own inner, unique light and freedom. Because manifesting the job offer verified my beliefs about dreaming and manifestation, this freed me to look to my greater goals. Rather than hitching my wagon to Oprah, who had found her own Selfhood, my job was to carve my own, unique path toward a creative way of helping people.
As I was growing up, my father made it a habit to post sticky notes on my bathroom mirror so that I would wake up to a daily thought. These came from books he had read, or conversations he heard, or just thoughts he would have. Later, when I went to college, he would mail the sticky notes to me. Two of my father’s sticky notes stand out here:
Ideals are like stars. We won’t succeed in touching them with our hands, but, like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, we will follow them, and succeed in reaching our destiny.
God needs you to make things happen. Like a rock in physics, when it is in motion it is easy to direct and move, to roll along a new course with the slightest touch; when it is stationary it is nearly impossible. God can’t work with a couch potato. Don’t just sit around and ask God for things. If you want a prayer answered, go out and start doing something—God will show up once you make the first move.
My father’s life in action, and what he passed to me, is to live our passions. These are our ideals. Living our passions, however, means setting a course and then being fluid in the details of how they take form. This feels like a paradox, but in fact it is not. It is about essence, not concreteness. It is akin to letting a baby bird sit in our hands and delighting in watching it move in all its aliveness without clenching our fist around it. If we clench, we kill it.
My father’s life in action also showed me that manifesting requires effort and action, in addition to imagination. God prefers a relationship to a request box.
Dreaming is an impulse, a movement, an idea, a glimpse into the deepest recognition of our Inner and a look into the future. If we do not bring our dreams down and out into the physical, waking reality, then we’ve only done half the work. We’ve squandered the gift of the dream. However, if we respond to our dreams, suddenly life springs open with possibilities.
Lesson Four:
Dreams by themselves are only one part—it is like one person dancing. Dreams require us to pull them into a grounded, manifest, and physical reality through our conscious attention and effort. Dreams and consciousness are two partners in a complete dance.
The work of manifestation may be to engage in the dream, such as making the commitment to paint each day if our inner is leading us to paint, or to write letters as I did to ask for a lead to an interview. The work of manifestation is also the work of developing the inner to remove the blocks that impede our progress.
I have worked with people who have seen their dreams clearly, and even taken a step or more to manifest them. But, they came to me because of a pattern of shutting down just as the manifesting of the response began to unfold. For example, a call would come from a letter sent to a place of possible employment, or an invitation to speak at an event would arrive in the email, but these responses went unanswered for days or even weeks. My clients had hit a block. Eventually many of these offers expired altogether—jobs were filled by other applicants, other speakers were chosen, and so forth—and the opportunities to manifest were lost because of an inability in that moment to actively respond to what their dreaming had put into motion.
Whatever blocks or issues you have in your business and creativity are exactly the same issues you have in all aspects of your life. This is another reason why exploring blocks around our business and creative lives is a path of inner development.
The blocks that impede our progress take many forms; for example, fear, insecurity, feelings of being undeserving, what you perceive to be your mother’s belief that you can’t make money as an artist, your father’s belief that you’ll never be good enough at anything, or the belief that it is your sibling who is the creative one. You might carry a belief system that says only your father can be the star, or that you don’t deserve happiness, and so forth.
We have to do the work to clear ourselves of our blocks in order to bring dreams and manifestations into being. This is another way that manifestation, or miracles, are things we co-create. Co-creation means doing our part to clear the path to be able to both respond and receive. We have to clear ourselves of the belief systems of others we have chosen to pick up, or the tangled associations we have fashioned when faced with life’s challenges, in order to become who we truly are.
Manifesting our deepest passions requires developing our inner being. We have to clear and sweep ourselves of emotions, residues and the beliefs of others much like the Aboriginal women had us clear the space for the sacred ceremony. To do this means recognizing clearly who we are—the outer garments in which we may have cloaked ourselves, in addition to our deepest, truest Selves. In order to sweep out that which does not serve us, or is not part of our true selves, we have to see it. The process of developing one’s inner Self involves a brave and honest look at all the patterns that we have drawn in our life. This can be done through working with images and dreaming.
Once we have cleared the space of inner blocks, stagnant emotions, and old belief systems, the True Self can powerfully step forward. This is called Selfhood and it is being a fully realized person. That’s maybe the biggest reason why I believe that choosing to find and follow our deepest passions is a path toward personal and spiritual development.We each have a unique place and contribution