Dream on…
Creating a dream life in the modern world. What does that look like and how do we get there?
This week I was asked to give a talk to a group of INCREDIBLE women at a local networking event for Women in Business.
In preparation for this, I asked my online audience “what do you think it takes to create a dream life?”
Here are some of the responses:
Passion and commitment
Not to be scared to follow your dream
Stay true to yourself, embrace your truest self
Ignore influence
Brutal honesty / acceptance
Alignment
Knowing what you want
Loving yourself
Feelings, such as pleasure and joy
Purpose
To date, I’ve been asked to give a few talks to groups of women on a number of topics including Work/Career, Challenges, Bullying in the Workplace and Life/Work Balance. The last talk I gave was in connection with what it took for me to achieve true life/work balance and the gruelling journey this took me on. Unbeknown to me, reducing my audience to tears.
It’s often been said that Ted Talks will be a way for me to deliver the powerful messages in my story. Yet when I turn up to these events with little more than a starting point, maybe an end section, I leave with no real idea of what I’ve just said. I talk and the words flow. From an anxiety/nervousness point of view I much prefer it. It also adds to being in the flow that I find is a huge benefit to my health and wellbeing.
I don’t know if it was due to a little imposter syndrome, but this talk was very different. I wondered if there was a little bit of that “who do you think you are, talking about living a dream life”?! It appears I am very comfortable talking about pain and suffering - I do see myself on stage being asked to give talks on a more regional and national basis, globally even - but this appeared to be a next level-up in my talking career.
The opportunity came with mixed feelings. Nervousness. Excitement. Worry. Fear. It felt like a challenge and one that I was ready for.
It’s the first time I’ve had to sit down and really outline what I wanted to say. I used presentation cards for the first time in my life. I didn’t see it like a backward step. It felt like a useful way to document what I was sharing so that I could turn it into a blog to share with you.
Sharing with the audience how I was feeling and what was coming up for me before the speech felt like a way to show my real self. I didn’t want to give the false impression that my life was perfect and that I had it all figured out. Living a dream life isn’t about that. It’s about staying true to you in a noisy world. Accepting the highs with the lows as part of the human experience. Knowing what you want and having the courage to go after it.
Creating a dream life starts with tapping into your core beliefs. Not the limited kind. Not the ones passed down to us. For me, that started with waking up to chronic illness and disability with the newfound belief that “I matter, my health matters”.
A random search for a migraine meditation the next day changed my relationship with migraine pain and put me on a whole new trajectory of hope and healing. Maybe it will for you too? Maybe not. Only you can know for sure.
This same weekend, nearly 5 years ago, I also had what I can only describe now, as this deep inner knowing. This deep inner knowing that change was what was needed and making changes was what it was going to take if I had any hope in hell’s chance of ever improving, even if only slightly.
What are those deep inner knowings you have? You know, the niggles, the nudges, the insights. What you know to be true. You might have voiced them, only to find others disagree. I’d done this before finding myself in this frightful state, only to feel like I wasn’t being taken seriously, that I wasn’t being heard and that I was somehow wrong.
Know that others may disagree when it comes to you sharing your own. It’s your inner voice, your knowing, not theirs. It only needs to mean something to you, not them.
Speaking of needs. Once I identified what it was that I actually needed, I was better able to understand myself. Recognise what it was that was going on beneath the “should do this and should do that, you can’t do this and you can’t that”. Once I knew that what I desperately needed was a) support and b) to find a way to generate an income so that I could work around illness, I was in a better position to do something about it.
What would you say your greatest need is in life right now?
In the absence of the support I needed - the support I now found myself beyond desperate for - I became my own support, my own best friend and my own cheer leader. Read more about how I learnt to deal with the invisibility of debilitating illness in invisible me.
As deeply uncomfortable as it was, I accepted that the disabled way of being I now found myself in, as not my dream life or how I felt my life was meant to be.
Do you ever feel that there must be more to life than this? That’s an inner knowing. A niggle. What is trying to tell you? What direction is it trying to guide you in?
Brutal honesty and accepting that how life might be in this moment is not in line with a dream life is the near-starting point for creating a dream life.
What is it you want?
When I really sat with this as a question, the answer was “to get well”. Wellness, therefore, became my priority. My goal. My vision. I adopted a mantra “health first – no matter what”. My health came first above everything - work, relationships, financial worries.
It’s only now I look back, I can see how crazy this looked to others around me. My loved ones had not seen this version of me before. All this time I was living as if my life didn’t matter, as if I didn’t matter. I was living someone else’s dream, working towards someone else’s vision. Seeing authority as right and me, wrong. Something had changed. I had changed.
“You’re being selfish” I was told.
“You don’t know what you’re doing”
“You’re too vulnerable to make decisions regarding your own health”
Though it’s taken A LOT to arrive at this new way of seeing, I now see that when others disagree with the direction you are going in, this is a sign you are on the path that is meant for you. The more signs you receive, the more in alignment you know you are.
Once clear on my vision, I set intentions aligned with my vision and (after much resistance then eventually journaling and gleaning them for insights and messages) started to voice my dreams.
THIS. TOOK. TIME.
Particularly with chronic illness, to the point of disability. Though I did not, do not and will not ever believe myself to be incurable, it is true that there is no quick fix. No overnight solution. No magic pill. No one size fits all. And, much to my dismay, no one ever came to my rescue.
To get from the frightful situation of where I was once to where I am now took time.
4 years to be precise.
In 2018, my Dad died and I found myself completely disabled by illness with no mortgage insurance, no sick pay and no immediate family to help.
By 2019, I broke the chronic pain cycle and simultaneously retrained to offer a mobile beauty service.
2020 was the year I turned 40. I broke the chronic fatigue cycle alongside training to be a Yoga Teacher.
At the beginning of that year, I set the following intents to:
- write an international best seller
- live mortgage free and
- come out of lockdown thriving
I also experienced a massive health relapse (it was only after that I came to understand that a health relapse is all part of the journey).
All this, and more, lead to me selling my luxury riverside apartment in Newcastle upon Tyne and following a recurring dream that took me back to Yorkshire. All whilst continuing to maintain my health as my utmost priority.
Come 2021, I made giant leaps forward with menstrual migraine (migraine disease is the number 1 most disabling condition a person can live with in women under 50).
It was around this time I started affirming “I do what I want, I love what I do and I live everyday like I’m on holiday.” Even though we were still in the throws of lockdown, I visualised myself travelling by a patch of clear water any time I went for a walk to the river.
In the summer months, training to offer the healing modality of Bodywork, so that I could help others the way I’d been helped, kick-started a deeper connection with my life’s purpose. Towards the end of the year, uncovering the reason for my existence and what I came here to do.
Add to this year a second relapse (a smaller one this time) and I finished the year with an insight that I was moving. I didn’t know where or when, only that a move was imminent.
2022 got off to a clunky start (you can read about that here), but signs that I was moving in the first month of the year came through thick and fast. I kept telling loved ones “I’m moving soon. I don’t know when or where, but I am moving”.
By February, I got wind of there being holiday homes for sale in a country park 30 minutes from where I was living. Based on signs, synchronicities, dreams, messages, feelings and deep inner knowings, on arrival one Saturday morning I bought a home to live in - 2 weeks later, I moved in.
A move that was in full pursuit of a dream life and not only for the benefit of my health. The park being closed all of January and February gifting me freedom to travel. As scary as that felt, I am pushed to finding somewhere to stay during those months each year. This year, I went to visit Thailand on my own, made some wonderful connections and unforgettable memories.
With being as fully immersed in nature as I am, an extra layer of healing has opened up to me. Within several months of living here, I slept off the pain element of an attack one evening in September and have been able to function through them ever since. One year in to living here and I am celebrating an entire year living free from the severe and agonising pain that I have been accustomed to for 25 years.
Though my life is far from perfect and I experience inevitable challenges just like anybody else - car tyre puncture issues costing my over £600 last year and my pipes freezing for 9 days before Christmas, leaving me without running water being a couple of examples, it is true:
I do what I want
I love what I do
And I live every day like I’m on holiday.
Here’s one incredible woman right here! 👏🏻✨💝