🌀🌀Make Way For Dreaming🌀🌀
May I remind you that revolution, whether political or personal, begins with a commitment to wellness?
Highly influenced by the questions and ponderings of Amour Solomon; one of the most beautiful minds I know.
What’s good World-enders?
In establishing this page I realise that I haven’t given you the most concrete prelude to me. However, I’m sure that by reading these monthly posts, you’ll start to get a good sense of who I am.
Here’s an important fact to get you started;
dreaming is my most powerful and lucrative superpower.
Excerpt from my Dear God prayer
It’s a painful reality that dreaming has been stigmatised as ‘running away with yourself’ or, equally, just as bad - running away with the fairies. I need you to be critical of the world around you and what it pressures you to let go of as you enter adulthood. I need you to be cautious of leaving behind the things that have done nothing but serve you.
When did you find that you were being called away from dreaming?
Assess: was it in an attempt to empower or limit you?
Who does you being unimaginative truly serve?
What agenda is there behind limiting your expansiveness?
Put simply, I’m here to rectify the false notion that dreaming is a thing to be reserved for children or those who live aimlessly. My argument is that dreaming underlies all of what takes place in our lives. It is not mystical or a thing solely for the women who wear stones and gems or flowy skirts that encircle them.
Dreaming is a declaration of one’s humanity.
Visual Musing of WavyPakistani
It is in dreaming that we recognise that we want more than survival. It is the mind's way of holding out hope. In centring our imagination, we are giving way to an existence that constantly bears new fruit. You cannot push towards meeting a goal that you have not envisioned the outcome of. Dreaming is simply the first step in the planning stages.
It is practical to summon the life you want, first in dreaming then in careful planning followed by action.
Here is the blueprint. Take it.
Have the [*insert genitalia organ*] to Dream
I know from experience that it takes a lot of balls to dream, and it takes even more balls to stand behind your dreaming.
The practice of dreaming is essentially prodding at possibility. It is an investment into constantly looking forwards. It is a keen and creative exploration of what has the potential to be. For anything to have come into being, someone dreamed it first. Someone held it in their mind's eye and decided on it as a possibility, to begin with. Recognise that systems that flourish at the cost of human hardship cannot prevail without complete mental submission. Therefore, consider a revolution in thinking as the portal to a revolution in being.
Your livelihood and wellness become at stake when you decide that you don't know how to hope and dream anymore. Sunlight, if not stripped, becomes contained. With change and forward movement, you will require deep imagining from yourself.
Have you ever ridiculed centring possibility? If so, where did that instinct come from?
What needs to be done to cultivate a safe (mental, physical, emotional) space that invites dreaming?
The Mental Stuff
Imagine for a moment that all the world is good…
What does that look like?
How do people engage with one another?
What are you doing?
Visual Musing of WavyPakistani
That there is you dreaming.
That there is you deciding that there’s still room for alternative and better ways of living.
To create another way of life, you must first live it out in your dreaming, see that it is possible for you to arrive there mentally.
Dreaming, hoping and imagining are all of the same class. All three concepts invite freedom. First, they create mental freedom by taking you outside the systems you’ve been placed in and beyond the conventions that restrict you. All three ask you to tap out of participating in the drag of everyday life even if briefly so. They are acts of centring possibility and replacing the capitalist value of being grounded in exchange for being free.
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Dreaming can be an act of political rebellion. Seeing more in your mind's eye and then with your hands going to grab it, with your human authority going to attain it simply because you have decided on it for yourself, is a radical concept that many of us have yet to embody.
In Times of Uncertainty
As unwidely held as this belief may be, uncertainty is a great place to be because it makes way for possibility. It signals a future that can be dreamed up again and again until it holds all of us in the ways we would like to be held.
I say this with love - the excuse of uncertainty is not enough to justify limiting yourself and complying with systems that defeat your spirit. Most things, you will never be one-hundred per cent sure of. Possibility is the silver lining and upside to uncertainty. Often people feel ungrounded by limitless possibilities. Get past that. Ground yourself here. It is safe here, simply because you are the constant that you are counting on.
In fact, it is not only safe to want more - it is wise to.
In hopefulness, I am not promising you stability, complete knowing and unchallenged positivity in all that you do. I do not have that to promise you. But I can promise you direction, true to the person that you want to be.
With this in mind, put each day before you as an opportunity to centre and demonstrate hopefulness.
See what comes of life following this.
Building a Relationship with Hope
Develop a strong and solid relationship to hope because hope is what will remain in times when it feels like all else has left you. In dreaming and hoping, you are keeping beauty in front of you so that you are always moving towards it regardless of any dysfunction occurring around you.
I want us to begin to look at acts of human perseverance differently. Not from a place of centring productivity at the expense of your wellness and grinding yourself down to the bone. That’s capitalist speak, and I don’t speak it. Perseverance can show up as daring to dream and remaining hopeful.
Holding on to hope is an act of perseverance. In fact, I define hope as:
‘Having the audacity to believe that it is not all in vain. Choosing to live a faith-filled existence in spite of what the odds may tell you. Existing first as a visionary and then a pursuer of visions.’
@IamKia.K
What emotion or experience are you dealing with that is getting in the way of you reaching for more?
One of the best things about hope is that it’s free, it’s time well-spent, and it’s yours. It is an act of mental preservation, opening the door to thriving. To actively decide what is possible for yourself and not allow it to be defined by your situation at hand is superhero level shit. Maintaining a commitment to wellness is inevitably a decision to commit to hope. You see the light at the end of the tunnel before it shows itself. You maintain that the impossible is, in fact, possible even in the face of adversity.
A poem that speaks to me when it comes to centring possibility and dreaming is Maggie Smith’s poem; Good Bones. I hope you find that your heart softens with each line, as I found was the case with mine.
Letting My Creative Direction Take the Lead
The systems we comply to inform our limitations. You cannot talk about a prohibition on imagining and dreaming without mention of destructive social systems. Dreaming is forbidden in an attempt to keep harmful and fruitless systems intact. Capitalism, for one, requires that we remain unimaginative and hopeless so that we are complacent in our own suffering. In taking away our compliance, we lead the way to make systems fall. And guess what the first step is to do that?
That’s right - D R E A M I N G new and alternative ways of living and being.
First and foremost, believe that your creativity wants what is best for you and is constantly reaching for new ways to clear your path and bring you to a higher place emotionally and mentally.
Part of trusting your creativity is trusting your intuition, the two are deeply connected.
Affirm:
I meet every creative direction that takes me with indulgence rather than questioning.
My creativity brings an opportunity to move beyond what is not serving me to instead create something which will.
My creativity is constructive to the direction that I am heading in.
The sheer existence of my imagination affirms that I am a hopeful being and that I have direction built into me and underlying my dreaming.
Each time I follow my creativity in its process, it leaves me feeling fulfilled in my expression of self. My intuition is constantly guiding me in the ways I tell my story, it must be that my body is housing a deep sense of knowing. Each time that I let it lead me, I am rewarded with the deep pleasure of understanding myself and embracing myself in all the ways I am presented with her.
My imagination asserts that there are plenty of opportunities available for me to reach my envisioned destination.
Due to the nature of imagination being refined by lived experience, it makes sense to view it as a muscle that needs flexing and exercising often. In light of this - in what ways are you tending to and cultivating your imagination so that it can best serve you again and again?
(i.e what experiences are you creating to feed your imagination?)
What would developing your creative practice look like?
What does centring your creative spirit offer?
In this clip, Kanye West essentially talks about what it would be to centring your imagination in your life and what the alternative option leaves you with:
In other words, in centring your own imagination and dreaming, your future is entirely up to you.
In the context of community
Let us not forget that collective dreaming is something that can and has shifted culture.
Visual Musing of WavyPakistani
…But community doesn’t get brought up any more . We’ve been removed from the context of a shared hood for so long that we can only approach wellness from an angle of how we benefit from it and how we benefit from it alone. Consider that dreaming can be a communal act. Notice how by centring community in our dreaming, we can ensure that we are always dreaming for good.
What does it mean to dream big enough so that it extends beyond you and touches others as well?
What does it mean to view dreaming as an act of love for the community you belong to as well as yourself?
What gets in the way of dreaming communally?
If the concept of the community feels foreign to you, don’t worry, we are on the road to recovery, and together we are learning how to be with one another again.
Closing Questions for Further Reflection:
What does it look like to have unwavering faith in your dreaming?
What mental inhibitions show up when you think about living hopefully? What do you need to do away with them?
How can dreaming play a role in challenging limiting beliefs and ideas about yourself and the world around you?
How does dreaming reaffirm the boundless and limitless strength that you are?.
And again, I’ve got a gift of sound for you. Be in wonder this month and stay in hope.
Wishing you all the love and light this world has to offer,
IamKia.K ♥