Keeping Our Dreams Alive
It is important to hold onto our dreams and visions. Helping to bring our dreams to reality brings strength, depth and love to ourselves and to our relationships. If we let our dreams die, then a large part of us dies as well.
When Barry and I were twenty-seven years old, we spent an inspiring summer at a meditation retreat in the French Alps. During this time, two very important dreams came into focus. First, we felt inspired to help others in their lives and relationships through classes, writing and counseling. We realized we wanted to work together. That dream took nine years to come to reality. In that period we gave birth to two of our three children and Barry worked as a physician in a medical clinic. Several hours a week, we worked together counseling individuals and couples, and that brought us great fulfillment and helped to keep our dream alive. Nine years after the initial inspiration of our dream, we began working full time, writing, counseling and giving workshops on living from the heart and loving relationships. Our work is now the fulfillment of our dream.
The second dream took twenty years and many frustrations and heartaches before it came to fruition. We dreamed of owning a piece of land where people could come for healing and renewal at one of our retreats. We were so inspired by this dream that, when we left the meditation retreat in France, we drove immediately to the Sierra Mountains in California and found twenty acres of land. We were in escrow when the reality of our financial situation hit us and we had to hold back.
Two years later, Barry had a job at a clinic and we bought thirteen acres of land by a stream in Santa Cruz. In our minds and hearts we could see little camping spots for people and a beautiful spot for meetings by the stream. We had all the permits and the road built, when torrential rains hit Santa Cruz early in the fall. The road was totally washed out. I was five months pregnant as Barry and I held each other and realized our dream would not take place there or at that time. We sold the land. Five years later, Santa Cruz again had heavy rains and flooding. The spot we had chosen to build upon was covered by a mudslide which would have destroyed our home.
We rented an old farm house on a vast piece of land. Again, visions of our dream began to emerge as we pictured little camp spots and the living room as the meeting room. Each year for 15 years, we begged our landlord to let us buy the place as year by year we became more strongly convinced that this was the land to fulfill our dream. Each year, his answer was no. Then the earthquake happened in 1989 and destroyed the house completely.
There were several other pieces of land we tried to buy and each one disappointingly was not right. The dream was so strongly alive within us, yet bringing it to reality was so difficult.
After the earthquake, we experimented with living on our neighbor’s property in a small motor home for one year. We now had three children, two dogs and four cats. It was quite a tight squeeze and far from our dream. While there, the property next to it came up for sale and we bought it right away. We had walked on this land every day for fifteen years.
Twenty years after the inspiration and dream came to us, we moved into our new home. Seven days later, a group of twenty-four people came and camped on our land, and we held our first ten-day workshop, “Living Your Purpose”, in our home. Our dream had become a reality. Every single day, we are grateful that we persisted in the creation of our dream.
The struggle, the heartache, the disappointments, are all part of the creation of the dream. Sometimes the setbacks and seeming failures are because we are not quite on the right track and need to try a new way.
If a dream is worth having, it is worth striving for. It will bring power, joy and fulfillment into your lives and relationships. Take a moment now and reflect on your dreams.