Creative Katrina

Not literally with fireworks, wayward candles or unattended fondue pots, but fan it with the flames of your personal missions and desires. Those sparky little fireworks that ignite when you give them space and room to breathe, taking in oxygen and building flames of creative folly.

Instead of spazing over a series of resolutions for 2012 that you will never keep, just create and keep one. Give yourself permission to day dream and think bigger than any self-imposed limitations that have followed you throughout this past year. Don’t dig them up to reprocess them, just acknowledge any limiting thoughts, ideas and actions, thank them for their insight, and set fire to the rest – IN YOUR MIND of course. Or to the paper you write them on if you simply must get them all out in a literal fashion. Just remember, no dwelling, just acknowledging.

Now onto the fun part – getting to the ooey, gooey good stuff.

Ask yourself the biggest and most important question – Am I happy? When the lights are out, the computer is off, the kiddos are sleeping quietly and my mind is open and at rest, do I feel content, in alignment and happy with the direction my life is going? Leave behind what you think your answers SHOULD be. Kick them right back into the abyss.

Then just settle into the quiet, the nothingness, and listen to the clear, quality answers that bubble up when you are willing to open to the complete truth with yourself. 

What better way to embrace a year of new beginnings than wishing the old ones adieu and leaving your heart, soul and mind open to all that you deeply desire? Sounds like the best possible idea – any time of year, actually.

(Source: creativekatrinacom)

Painting by Nadia Minic, Light of a dream or hope for a new love

Dreams are everywhere, in successful and failed companies, in happy marriages or crumbling ones, in thriving careers and celebrity rehab. Once upon a time each dream was fresh, bright and had so much promise; little specks of hope, creativity and great ideas all rolled into one.

Then expectations begin to creep in, those small, seemingly harmless little seeds including  when, who, where, why and how – just like the game of Clue. As they show up you find yourself weighing the expectations against the dream, trying to tie all the details into a neatly formed package ready to ship at Christmas. And sometimes, when all those little seeds start to add up they begin to sabotage your big vision or dream, making you doubt yourself and your plans.

Expectations and the Human Condition

Its only human to have expectations. As a combination of family values, life exploration and community and social obligations, these experiences shape life and what you have come to expect from it. This smörgåsbord of interactions, big and small helped you form powerful ideas about exactly HOW something should be shaping up or working out in your life.

Sometimes, these expectations can begin to kill your dream one seed at a time, as they force you to keep rethinking the details, needing something to happen at a certain time and in a certain way. This riddles your beloved dreams with bullet holes of second guesses and frustrations.

When our desire for a specific outcome is tied to a time, place, person or thing (pieces), life becomes a  bit more tricky and confusing. We might be misled into thinking something is the right path towards our dream because we are so attached to the pieces in front of us, and the expectations we have for those pieces. Its our attachment to those pieces coming with us in a very specific way that may influence us to overlook the fact they don’t fit the true dream at all. In fact are distracting us from it altogether.

We might even miss an opportunity to get closer to our true dream because it doesn’t look, smell or feel similar to the expectations we have so long marinated over in our minds and souls.

Keeping an Open Mind About Dreams Big and Small

Now is the time to review what your dreams mean to you. Do you have new ones? Are there old ones languishing that need tending? Are you regretful about a dream that has died and want to think of a way to resurrect it? Can you identify some expectations that may be keeping you from following a specific, long-held dream? You owe it to yourself as we close out one year and begin the next to give your dreams the love they need and deserve.

Dreams should be left just as they were when they were created, as little pieces of juicy, crazy love and creativity that are hopeful, open-ended, passionate and uplifting. So do yourself a favor and love the dream for what it is, your lovely, perfect creation.