Just Show UP: Manifesting a New Dream!

Your past can have you deadlocked in an old way of thinking and being. Just because that’s how you’ve always done it. Let’s be honest with ourselves, there is this sick, twisted comfort in our mediocrity. The hiding behind stories that have been told to us about us… so we begin to rehearse it to ourselves over and over again. Until it sounds like truth. Until it puts to sleep any whispers of our greatness. Until the loudest critic in our lives is the voice in our heads that says how dare you? How dare you believe that you can start that business? How dare you believe that you can write that book? How dare you believe that you can speak? How dare you believe ______ (insert word to fill in your blank)

When HOW DARE YOUs get the best of you!

I mean none of this was new to me. I knew what it was like to go full out with a dream. To conceive it… carry it in my womb… birth it and nurse it… watch it take steps and grow beyond what I could’ve imagined. Bring sweet tears of joy to my eyes because it chose me as much as I chose it. Like a proud momma I showed it off and raised it and I swear I didn’t see it coming. The sweet joy turned bittersweet… to disappointments and heartaches… that once brought me so much joy I could no longer stand to look at it! Until one day I dropped it off on someone else’s doorstep and never looked back. Until one day it became a distant memory that I remembered had happened to someone else.

A decade had gone by since I last felt this passionate about something! Something homegrown. Something that had been deposited in my womb for me to take full term. I was real squeamish on the inside. A whole lot of knee knocking, teeth chattering and heart palpitations. A whole lot of HOW DARE YOUs now coupled with What IFs! A few years ago some time in July, I found myself scrolling through FB when an invitation to a summer program on manifestation popped up on my feed. I spoke to the holistic coach hosting it during a “virtual” teatime where she read me appropriately, calling out my long time fling with mediocrity that had disguised itself in so many things, especially the story about me, told to me by everyone else. It was time to flip the script. Get to the blank page and dare to write the story myself… unapologetically and authentically the juicy tale of self!

Where would I begin and what would it look like? I was challenged to focus my energies on the experience that I desired to have rather than being able to rattle off everything I no longer wanted. It was about being crystal clear in my dictation to the universe.

“Girl, just manifest it!”

Truth is I always have been manifesting except it was all the things that I didn’t want.

“And while you’re at it… stop spending so much time in the mirror primping and propping… just SHOW UP!”

And so I did!

Everyday I show up as a result of the extraordinary decisions I make to turn an ordinary life of what almost ended like… “She existed” to “She SHOWED UP!” She showed Up to tell the story not about how she succeeded but how in the face of defeat she found the courage to dream again, to live again, to love again, to sing again. How she got split open by pain to the white meat and still managed to find the purpose through blinded tears. How on some days she still hears that taunting voice which she turns into her battle cry to… KEEP GOING!

I encourage you to take a look at the page that you’re on. Do you recognize the voice of the storyteller? Is it your momma’s voice? Your father’s voice? You’re ex-boss or lover? Are you hiding behind the cloak of mediocrity and a pained past you can’t seem to let loose? Is it an illness or a failed attempt at a dream that has you looking away in the opposite direction?What gets to happen if you finally decide to turn the page and just start with one line… What would you like to experience today? Would you dare start with that one line and Just SHOW UP?

It all begins with, Once Upon a Choice!