Mar

Your Ultimate Dream

Article by Tabitha | Filed Under Freedom, awareness

Here are some interesting questions that were posed : “What is your ultimate dream and how can you know that it is your ultimate dream? Can you measure a given dream against your ultimate dream?”

Your ultimate dream lies dormant within you. It came with you when you came to earth, planted deep in your consciousness by God/ Source/The Creator. It is directly linked to your Life Purpose and your mission on earth. As you tap into this Ultimate dream, you simultaneously tap into your Life Purpose and mission and vice versa.

There are many different ways to tap into your Ultimate Dream. In the book “The Dream Giver”, the hero learns that in pursuing his Big Dream he will encounter Dream Givers and Dream Stealers.

Dream Givers are those who champion what you do, support and encourage you, assist you, teach you, coach and mentor you and inspire you to be the very best you can be. Dream Givers beleive in the innate Goodness of the universe. They see abundance and possibility, they look for opportunity and give generously whenever they can. They are humble and gracious, knowing that everything comes from Gods/ Source and that we are all part of one human family and are all longing to find our way home.

Dream Stealers are those who criticize what you do, judge you, mock you and put you down. They always look for faults in others because they are so insecure they cannot bear to think of anyone else excelling and outshining them. They are control freaks, enslaved to the beleifs that safety, security and comfort are the chief requirements in life. They cannot stand to see anyone succeed and attain any kind of freedom because success and freedom expose The Big Lie that says we live in a universe of scaricty, lack and limitation. Dream Stealers will always be the first to point out why something can’t work, won’t work, hasn’t worked in the past and doesn’t work for them. They ignore and discredit any evidence to the contrary.

Finding your Life Purpose begins with learning to gravitate more towards Dream Givers and cutting ties with Dream Stealers. Very often, Dream Stealers are people who were once close to us” parents. siblings, family, friends and peers. One of the most difficult lessons in life is letting go of relationships that no longer serve us and hold us back from our destiny. Dream Givers are always very “different” from us: they come from different religious, cultural, educational, professional and class backgrounds and therefore force us to leave our confort zones as we establsih a relationship with them. When we are open to learning from them and growing through the relationship, we become much richer people because we imbibe some of their good qualities and are able to share some of ours with them. This gives us clues about what our Big Dream could be.

To tap into your Big Dream, you have to be aware of your talents and abilities, spiritual gifts, skills and aptitude, temperament and capacity for giving. There are many processes you can use to discover these things and begin putting the pieces of the puzzle together. In my coaching practice, I give clients a template called “The 5 Major Pieces of the Life Puzzle”. On a piece of paper, draw two lines (horizontally and vertically) to divide the page into 4 blocks. In the middle of the page, where the two lines cross, draw a large circle. At the top of each block, write the following titles : Values, Top 10 Goals, Roles and Responsibilties, Leadership qualities. Over the next couple of weeks, begin making lists in each block. What are the core values you subscribe to and uphold? Why? What are your Top 10 Goals, 10 things you want to achieve during your lifetime? Why? what roles and responsibilties do you currently have? What “hats” do these enable you to wear? A hat is a skills set that enables you to become competent in a particular role. I generally give clients 9 Key Hats we all wear at one time or another: Managing, Selling, Counseling, Nurturing, Healing, Teaching, Organising, Fixing, Supporting.

Leadership qualities are things you learned through all the jobs you have had. even as a child baby-sitting your siblings or mowing the lawn, you learned certain things about what makes a good leader. If you can’t think of specific leadership qualities you have acquired in each job you have held, list the leadership qualities you admire in others and would like to acquire. You do not have to be in a leadership position to display leadership qualities. The best leaders in the world are Servant-Leaders, those who live to serve others and a cause that is bigger than all the followers. They attain leadership positions because of the personal qualities they model for others.

In the centre of your template, you will gradually begin filling in what you want to radiate outwards from your core/ essence. If you are not attuned with your essence, what makes you unique, think about what is at the centre of your life: is it God or Making Money, Relationships or Getting Ahead, Serving others or Surviving from day to day?

This is a time when a great shift is taking place in human consciousness. More and more people are waking up to the fact that their dreams died and their vision became foggy because they were living from a centre of Fear and Lack. At the core of their existence lay the belief that making money, getting ahead and surviving from day to day was what life is all about. As a result, their values were incoherent and in conflict with their essential nature. Their goals were purely materialistic and had nothing to do with their Life Purpose and mission on earth. Their roles and responsibilities defined them, so they were constantly “wearing all the hats” and refusing to delegate responsibility to those who wear certain hats better than them. They beleived Leadership was all about Planning and Control and sought positions and power to exercise their leadership ability rather than being used by The Universe as leaders in their family, their community , their schoold or their church/ religious organisation.

This is a life-long process, so you cannot really measure the progress you are making towards making your Big Dream a reality. You can measure other goals and dreams against it though and this usually tells you when you are on track and “flowing” with the energy of the universe and when you are stuck and blocking the energy of the universe. The universe assits you in moving towards your Big Dream when you remain open and attuned to what it is bringing into your life. Every person, every experience, every test and trial is designed to help you understand more of your Big Dream.

I wrote a course a few years ago entitled “A dream is a goal taken seriously”. Even though this makes for a very long post, I would like to share the essence of what that course teaches and invite you to do your own mini-course at home.

The course revolves around the story of a young woman named Mara. (Incidentally, Mara is Hebrew for ‘bitter’). Mara is in love with a young man named Jacob who wants to marry her. Jacob has asked Mara’s father for her hand in marriage and Mara’s father has refused becaused Jacob is a starving artist. Although Mara’s family is of moderate means, her father has worked very hard all his life to give his children a good education and pbringing and he wants the best for his eldest daughter. He is negotiating with the parents of a wealthy businessman named Murak to give Mara as a bride to him. Jacob and MAra both live in samll towns separated by a large river. Further downstream is the large bustling city where Murak lives and where Mara and her father go every Saturday to sell clay pots at the marketplace. One Saturday, Mara sees Jacob at the marketplace and he says : “Let us elope and run away together to the capital. My brother has just set up a furniture shop there and wants me to go and help him run it. We can live with him until we have saved up enough for our own place and in the capital, no one will know where to find us. Let us leave this life of poverty and traditional customes and restrictions placed on us by a generation that is out of touch with modernity. Once the furniture shop is profitable, I will be able to sell my paintings and I am sure people in the capital are more sophisticated and appreciate good art. You will have a good life there and be able to do whatever you want.”

Mara was not raised to think lowly of her elders and traditional customs but she loves Jacob so much and dreads the thought of being married to Murak, so she agrees. But her father is close by; she will not be able to escape that day. She asks Jacob if they can meet that night, after everyone has gone to bed, and begin their journey to the capital at dawn. Jacob does not want to meet in the city at night; it will raise suspicion amongst the policemen who patrol the streets to remove beggars and street children and it is not safe for MAra to make her way alone at night to the city. She will have to find a way to cross the river and meet him outside his village.

Mara contemplates all the ways to cross the river. She could swim across, but there are crocodiles that pose a serious danger and she would not be able to carry many belongings with her this way. There is a ferry that takes people up and down the river, run by an old amn named Jonathan who knows Mara’s family very well. On the way home from the marketplace, MAra asks her father if she can go and deliver a message to Jonathan from someone who needs to be ferried privately. There is nothing unusual in this request and Mara’s father does not suspect anything. Mara tries to negotiate with Jonathan to ferry her across the river that night but his price is much too high and Mara can not possibly come up with the kidn of koney he expects to do this favour. Dejected, she is about to walk away and give up on her dream of running away with Jacob, when Jonathan proposes an alternative: if she can convince her father to give him Lulu, her sister, as a bride, he will take her across the river as soon as the negotiations are completed. Mara thinks quickly on her feet.

“Alright, if my father agrees, we have a deal. But I cannot wait until the negotiations ar eover because I will be expected to serve all your relatives who come to the house and be part of the wedding preparations. We only have a deal if you take me across the night after I give you my father’s answer”.

Jonathan is so excited by the prospect of getting a young, beautiful woman as his bride that he agrees. Mara’s plan is to now to trick him, by telling him her father has agreed to the marriage proposal and then ducking as soon as she is across the river. But Jonathan is not completely fooled. He goes and tells Jacob of the deal and warns him : If MAra tricks me and I do not get Lulu as a bride, I will tell her father where you have gone and he will hunt you down and kill you. Jacob is so afriad that on the night Mara crosses the river with Jonathan, he leaves the village and camps in the hills so that she won’t find him. There he wrestles with the burning question in his soul: should he throw caution to the wind, follow Love and run away with Mara anyway? Should he desert her and abandon his dream of love as he goes to the capital to pursue the bigger dream of becoming a famous, successful painter? Should he reason with MAra and convince her that if they do the right thing, pray and wait then God will look favourable upon them and make a way for them to be married properly?

The ending of the story is up to you. As you give it the ending you want, you will learn something about your Core Values, how you view Roles and Responsibilities and how you would prioritise goals and dreams in a situation like this. The final question is : Who is the best leader in this story, the true hero/ heroine? This is a subjective question and tells you something about what you consider true leadership and heroism. Allow all these questions and the answers you come up with to inform your “5Major Pieces of the Life Puzzle” and you will definitely begin to glimpse your Big Dream.

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