Today I am hon­ored to have as our guest, Megan Bord, from It’s All About Joy.  Megan writes deep and mean­ing­ful pieces that touch very much upon that spot deep within us all, that con­nects us to our soul.  And in that spot, she seeks to explore the joy we all have within us.

Read any­thing Megan writes, and you’ll quickly get a sense for just how deeply she believes this, that there is joy within us all.  And that this joy is some­thing we’re all enti­tled to.  Isn’t that a refresh­ing thought!  Joy is there for all of us, no mat­ter where we are in our life jour­ney.  No mat­ter what our past has been.  A won­der­ful exam­ple of this is a recent piece she wrote, enti­tled Being The One, all about accept­ing our­selves as we are, today — and that being just where we should be — that there’s some­thing very good about this place we’re in.  I find that thought so life affirming!

Megan is a great friend, and writes words that come deep from within her soul.  To keep up with what she’s doing, sub­scribe to her blog right here.

Today, Megan shares… 

The Evo­lu­tion of Our Heart’s Desire

  
photo credit: jah~ swamped

“For my part I know noth­ing with any cer­tainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” ~ Vin­cent van Gogh

Lance recently wrote a post enti­tled Detours on the Path of Life, which dis­cussed life’s unplanned detours that force us to take a dif­fer­ent path than what we may have intended. Davina at Shades of Crim­son also wrote some­thing com­pelling recently that ties in with what I’ve been think­ing about related to my heart’s desires. (See her post enti­tled, A Sink­ing Feel­ing)

In my mid– to late-twenties, I had a lovely vision of how I wanted my life to go. I could see my big Vic­to­rian house on the New Eng­land coast, the part­ner I’d cho­sen to spend my time with, the one cat I would assuredly have, the career I’d excel in from the com­forts of a home office, the car I would drive, the places I’d travel… You get the idea.

Like many spir­i­tual seek­ers and stu­dents of a hap­pier mind, I learned to mold my real­ity through the thoughts that I’d think. The more pos­i­tive my frame of mind, the more pos­i­tive my life turned out to be. I began this quest at age 25, and by the time I reached 30, I had read and stud­ied a lot about law of attrac­tion tech­niques. A cou­ple years later, I became what some of my friends called a mas­ter man­i­fester to the point that I could think a wish­ful thought and within hours or days, it would come true. Sud­denly it’s as if in the blink of an eye I could have any­thing I wanted.

A funny thing hap­pened, though, just after hon­ing that abil­ity: I became less inclined to seek things and more inclined to seek inner peace, gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of my God-self, and come from a space of love in all that I do. The dreams I once had, while still lovely in their own right, no longer held the mys­te­ri­ous appeal they once did. 

I think the shift took place ear­lier this year. In com­ments I’ve left on Kaushik’s blog Beyond Karma, I’ve talked openly about a moment of sur­ren­der I had this past spring. For ten months, from last year through the begin­ning of this year, I relapsed with an addic­tion that got the best of me. I fought it tooth and nail, too, argu­ing against every­thing it rep­re­sented and pulling out every man­i­fest­ing trick in the book to get beyond it. My dream at that time was to escape addic­tion once and for all.

The thing I hadn’t thought to do, though, was sur­ren­der. I was so busy try­ing to quan­tum leap my way past addic­tion using var­i­ous visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques that I never acknowl­edged the truth of the moment I was in. My denial kept me stuck, and that grip­ping feel­ing of being stuck pet­ri­fied me. As a result, I kept spin­ning my wheels more and more until I was so jammed into the very state I tried to get out of that I had a minor breakdown.

One day in a flash, I spon­ta­neously woke up to real­ity. I sort of fell to my knees in an all-out sur­ren­der, and for the first time in nearly a year, saw clearly the per­son I had become. I saw not what my con­scious mind had been try­ing to por­tray I was all that time (the dream ver­sion of me), but instead I saw very clearly who I actu­ally was. I saw what addic­tion had done to me, how I fooled myself into try­ing to dream my way past it, and how scared I was to face the facts.

In that very unmis­tak­ably awak­ened moment, I was freed.

Since then, recov­ery has been effort­less. It seems less like some­thing I do, and more like some­thing I am.

And the same goes for those dreams of mine. I used to look at my dreams – the things I thought I wanted – and see them as some­thing to strive for; some­thing out­side of me.

But now, as I look around with a fresh set of eyes which love the very moment I’m in no mat­ter what that moment is, I see how my heart’s desires have evolved. Wher­ever I am is exactly where I want to be; how­ever life is going is pre­cisely what I want for myself right now. The day I woke up and embraced my addic­tion is the day I could finally release it. What a gift, since the process I went through helped me to real­ize that I’m liv­ing my dreams every sec­ond of every day and there is noth­ing I must wish into real­ity in order to be hap­pier than I am right now. What­ever is, is my dream. And more sim­ply than that, I am the liv­ing, breath­ing, walk­ing and talk­ing evo­lu­tion of my heart’s great­est desires.

What about you: what do your dreams look like now com­pared to even a few years ago? Have your heart’s desires evolved over time?