Karl DireskeIf you are waiting for clarity before you move towards your vision, it is my belief that you will be waiting a long time. It may be hard to know when you are moving towards vision, and unfortunately it can be all too easy to become stagnant or to lose sight of it altogether. It may be easier to gain more clarity when we step away from vision than when we move towards it. The pull or call towards vision is often subtle and hard to feel. It requires our awareness and daily participation. Many of us have become experts at ignoring it.
I hear people say they heard the call but then it disappeared over time, so I must’ve been mistaken or if it was the call then everything would’ve lined up perfectly and it didn’t. These misconceptions become a trap to keep us from creating movement. Following your inner-vision is seldom easy. It requires effort and daily participation. I assure you that your interaction, your communication with Creation is required at every step along the journey. If Creation did not require us to make effort, all this would happen without our participation.
Inner-vision speaks to us through intuition and feelings. We want to feel strongly that our inner-vision messages are clear and clearly understood. However, when following inner-vision you must be prepared to make many mistakes. We learn when things get messy. If you are not willing to make a misstep, or learn what your vision is not, you will never have clarity. Inner-vision is an act of courage, not comfort. It takes courage to not only accept mistakes and missteps, but to look at them face-to-face to learn from them. When faced with failure will you look within? Will you have the courage to ask the questions you don’t want to ask? Will you choose to trust yourself? If we want to clearly hear this inner voice, we need to silence the other voices that distract. This takes a tremendous amount of awareness of who you are as well as who you are not.
Trust is something we easily develop when the call is strong and clear, but the real test of trust is having it when the call may be faint or foggy. Many people wander away from their vision when the call seems to diminish or simply disappear. The lesson in this is to know that everything is in movement and change. Everything is perishable. To have the courage to trust is even more demanding than to have the courage to make mistakes.
So let me tell you a story. It’s a story I hear over and over. It starts like this. People come to me and say, “I have wanted to take classes at wildernessFusion for ten years, and I am finally here.” In response I ask, “What changed? Why now?” They usually reply with a confused look. They haven’t a clue as to why “now” was the fulcrum point rather than some point over the last ten years. If I push them further their answers always boil down to “I finally got out of my own way.”
Getting out of your own way takes tremendous effort. We have to practice. We have to learn when our mistakes are our teachers, not excuses to give up. We have to learn when we’re the ones that have to create trust, that the lack of trust is just another form of getting in our own way. At wildernessFusion we spend four years learning how to get out of our own way. I often say to students, “This journey is not hard. However, you will make it hard.” It takes practice to know how to step around our empowered images and patterns.
We create these images and patterns to avoid knowing the real answers. We will do anything to avoid not knowing what is going to happen next, even if the “alternative known” that we create as blinders is killing us. When we listen to the call we are probably moving away from the long-established known, away from home, comfort and into the vulnerability of that moment when we chose to take the first step.
So, how do we refine our vision? How do we follow the call that inner-vision is moving us towards? What we need to do is practice, make mistakes, refine our choices, and do it all again. Then do it all again and again. Silence the things we find in our internal that will undermine trust and determination. Don’t seek comfort. Just keep moving. My favorite Tom Brown Jr quote is “ Do something— anything—even if it’s wrong.”
I would say the same thing a little differently. Keep moving. Question everything. Make a choice. Communicate that choice and see what happens next. Most of us are too impatient to wait for what happens next. Remember this is a journey and we do not always get to what we envision in one step.
Ready to finally move?
See you in class?
