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How to Live the Life of your Dreams: 4 Steps to Freedom, by Karen Mehringer

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Surrounded by royal blue water extending beyond the horizon in all directions, no land in sight, I gaze at the path of diamonds dancing on the ocean's surface. The sun radiating on my skin feels like a warm cashmere sweater. It is August 19, 1998, and I am on my first ocean passage of a life-transforming journey, a journey leading to a more authentic and purposeful life.

My journey to living a more authentic and purposeful life began in Seattle, Washington, where I lived with my husband, John. Unfulfilled with our lifestyle of working full time, coming home tired, and crashing in front of the TV with little energy left to pursue our passions, our souls cried out, There must be more to life!

Craving more adventure and fulfillment, we began taking sailing lessons, an activity we both felt passionate about. Spending time on the ocean enlivened our spirits, causing us to dream and see that there were other possibilities for living. As our interest in sailing grew, we read magazines and books about it. Stories about couples who cruised around the world, slowing down to take time out from their modern lifestyles, inspired us. One book in particular, Maiden Voyage, by Tania Aebi, described her adventures at the age of eighteen as the first American woman and youngest person to circumnavigate the world. Discussions ensued. If these people could do it, why couldn't we?

We began looking into options. One was crewing boats. For a minimal amount of money, we could crew on someone else's boat and gain valuable experience while also traveling. As crew, we would share the responsibilities of navigating, helming the boat on scheduled watches, cleaning, and cooking meals. After applying for a couple of positions, we decided on a forty-six-foot sailboat in the process of circumnavigating the world. We would join it on its second leg, cruising from Fiji to Singapore for a six-month period, visiting the countries of Vanuatu, Australia, and Indonesia along the way.

After renting out our house and taking a one-year leave of absence from our employment, we up-anchored and left Seattle on June 1, 1998. Before meeting the boat, we went on a road trip for three weeks, camping out as we explored several different states. Driving east on I-90 through the Cascade Mountains, the sky was bright blue and sunny, the pine needles on the evergreens glistened, and a feeling of summer was in the air. My heart felt lighter and lighter the farther we traveled from the hustle of civilization and our old life. Gratitude welled within me for our choice to live adventurously and break out of the confines of our own limiting beliefs about how life should be lived. At last, we were free to follow our hearts and begin anew.

Are you following your heart? Are you living the life of your dreams? In order to live the life of our dreams, we need to take time out to reflect on who we are and what makes us feel alive inside.

Within each of us there is a powerful vital life force energy that resides. Like a raging river, this vital energy needs a channel to flow and be fully expressed. When we allow it to move through us, for example with our writing, artwork, or music…by expressing our passions, we allow the river of the divine to flow through us. When in the flow, we are in the present moment. Our spirits come alive; we feel at peace and can experience great joy and bliss. When we resist or block the flow of this creative energy, we experience constriction that causes us to feel anxious, physically ill, and spiritually disconnected from our source of love, joy, and abundance. Like a river being blocked by a dam, the water has no where to go and thus builds up more and more pressure.

At the beginning of the year, I created a New Year's intention for 2009. It is: "To be an open channel for the divine flow of creation and expression." Near my computer, I have a beautiful altar card with a colorful picture of a Dancing Fire Goddess, the Goddess of Expression. The card says:

"O Dancing Fire Goddess! Teach me to set myself free,
To create, to move to dance, to be!"

What is your soul's passion? What is your unique expression? Have you given yourself permission to freely express who you are without limitation? If not, try these exercises to assist you with engaging more fully in your passions:

1. Sit down with your journal or note book and begin the page with, "I feel most alive when…" Write non-stop, without lifting your pen from the paper, for at least five minutes. Then, take the items that have emerged and create a list of your passions.
2. Next, evaluate how often you engage in each passion on your list. Ask yourself, "If I were to make more of a commitment to the expression of my passions, what might that look like?" Journal for clarity. For example, I recently joined a Writer's Success Group to assist me with making my writing more of a priority. I now have weekly and monthly goals and a forum for accountability.
3. Now, meditate for five to ten minutes and visualize yourself engaged in your passions. What do you see? What are you doing? How does it feel to express your self more fully? Allow the feelings that have emerged such as freedom and joy to anchor into every cell of your being. See the energy of these feelings as a color or light to help with the visualization.
4. Pick a symbol or representation of your passions. For example, if the feeling that came up during your meditation is that of freedom, then a picture of an eagle soaring might be a wonderful representation. Since I love dancing, the altar card of a Dancing Fire Goddess is inspiring to me. Find something that resonates deeply with your soul and place it where you will see it frequently. For example, you might place it as the background on your computer desktop or at your altar or both.

By allowing the divine flow of creation to express through us freely and abundantly, we feel more alive inside. Our actions are inspired from the depths of who we are and we are able to live the life of our deepest dreams!

"The more willing you are to surrender to the energy within you, the more power can flow through you."
—Shakti Gawain, author of Creative Visualization

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2009. All rights reserved.

I'm in a relationship that seems to be heaven sent. The circumstances surrounding our meeting and the synchronicities that have occurred have quickly made this union feel right and comfortable on a soul level. However, I'm having trouble sorting out my intuitions from fears based on past experiences. I know that past hurts and disappointments can cause us to tend to look for problems that aren't there, and now I'm not sure what to think when I sense red flags in terms of certain things my lover says or does, or simple shifts in energy that alert me that something hidden is occurring. Any insights you can give me into this tricky matter would be greatly appreciated.

- Contessa

Dreamchaser:

I could ramble on and on about this or that, but the bottom line here is that this boils down to YOU. You are directly responsible for your moods, your thoughts, and your emotions. You choose what you allow to affect your state of being.

You describe a meeting that was very serendipitous to say the least. It sounds like you two are very compatible, yet still you can't relax and trust. I believe you need to ask yourself a few questions.

Is he really the right one, or just the closest you've found so far?
Have you caught him lying to you in any way, or otherwise proving himself untrustworthy?
Do the things he says line up with the things he does?

Does your heart feel this is good but your head says that it's bad?
Does your heart feel this is bad but your head says that it's good?
Does he remind you of someone from the past that you just can't separate from the present?

Are you REALLY ready to open up to true love and deep intimacy?
Are you totally in love with yourself?
Are you looking for love or affirmation from outside of yourself?

Those are just a few of the questions you need to honestly answer for yourself, Contessa. You also need to look at how you are thinking. Are you more focused on what you are afraid will happen than the outcome you desire? You know that where you put your focus will determine your feelings, which will determine what you create. If you are focusing on what you don't want, that's what you'll get.

When you feel a shift in energy in this relationship, when you get one of those twinges in your gut, I recommend you stop, breathe and ask yourself some questions. Why are you feeling this? Where is it coming from? What is causing it?

Whenever you feel a negative emotion about something or someone outside of you, it can be traced back to something inside of you. This is your problem - it's not about him, love, life, or anything else.

To be fully in a relationship, you have to lay yourself wide open. You can't have any walls or blocks. You have to allow the energy to flow freely. This is incredibly difficult for you because of your past.

Do you REALLY believe you can have the love you desire? If you don't believe it, how can you expect anyone else to believe that you are lovable? How can you expect anyone from the outside to give you what you can't even give yourself? We have to be to ourselves what we want others to be to us.

I wish you true and open love for your man and (more importantly) for yourself.

*****

Astrea:

Once upon a time, there was a handsome prince who lived with his parents in a grand castle. When he was old enough to marry, the king called for all eligible young ladies of the realm to come to the castle and audition to be his bride.

The prince devised a sensitivity test for all the young maidens who came to see him. Each girl would spend the night in the castle. Under her mattress, he placed one pea, the idea being that a true princess would be sensitive enough to feel it through the mattress.

Girls came and went night after night, and no one felt the pea under the mattress. Disappointed, the prince was about to give up and stay single when a girl arrived who could feel the pea no matter how many mattresses were placed on top of it. She was the princess he'd been searching for, so he married her.

What I'm saying is that for sensitive souls, true love comes with a lot of lumps! Think of the feelings you have from your past as peas under your mattress - if you FEEL them, they're there.

No matter how many mattresses you pile one on top of the other, until you release those old feelings, they're going to bother you in this relationship. As you go along, if you judge each new little mistake as significant because of your past, you'll add one pea after another to the mix, and will feel like you're trying to sleep on rocks.

We all learn from mistakes and bad choices. Now you've found someone with whom you can really share your life, and must trust that if you open up about your feelings about the past with him, he'll understand. Heck, he probably has some peas of his own rolling around.

Talking to him is the way to work this out. Let him know how frightened you are because of your past experiences. He can dispel all your worries and fears if you let him. Each time you tell him a fear, mentally remove one of those peas from that dirty old mattress you've been lugging around in your head, and ask him to do the same.

Soon you'll be comfortable again. No relationship is perfect, of course, but MANY are happy and fulfilling. Sharing your fears will dispel them. This always works.

People sometimes become addicted to the drama of their poor choices. Don't be one of them! Everyone has some feelings from the past that haunt them in the present. It's natural to compare one relationship to another, but to allow abundant, authentic love to bless your heart and soul, at some point you have to let go of the past.

Every day, new abundance is fighting to come into your life. Leave the drama of the past behind so you can move forward with someone who really loves you from the bottom of his heart!

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.