There is a future unfolding before me that is exquisite, I can feel it in the air I can almost touch it with my hands. I can breath it in. I can rest in it.

I normally don’t like to do the kind of exercise where I do one 1,3 and 5 year goals, intentions or visions. I know that is the kind of thing we are supposed to do (maybe why I don’t like to do it LOL). I run across the idea all the time and I always side step it in some way or avoid it completely.

I think what happens is that I start thinking about it and then I get this sense that I have to know all of it, or be sure of all of it, before I write it. The other part of my hesitation is that I know once I write something down the potential of it coming into being goes up dramatically. This, I am pretty sure, is the reason why everyone tells you to do this very thing!

So here I am a person who knows about manifestation, teaches it even and so why wouldn’t I do it?

Well one other reason is that if I felt that the act of stating it would make it so and if I wasn’t totally sure about what I wanted some things in my life to look like exactly, then perhaps it was just safer to just not go there at all.

So this last month I found myself in a situation where this came up once again. I am retaking some New Thought classes I took long long ago. They might as well be totally new classes given all the new information I am enjoying in them.. However I found myself with home work,  in it I was asked the question:

“How would you like your life to look in 1, 3 and 5 years? And the second question was “What role does faith play in it?”

Well the faith part was easy for me to answer since I know that faith and belief are the directors of Universal energy, they point the way; or maybe it is better to say that they make the way possible for the energy to come into form.

But here I was left again with the nagging question of looking ahead. I had a week to do this and I spent most of the week pondering the question itself, looking at it from all sides (read trying to avoid it…I even lost my homework page). I had committed to answering, and so I wanted to find some way to reconcile with this process.

First I realized that I didn’t have to micro manage as much as I was thinking I would have to, to answer the questions. I realized that I could answer in whatever detail I wanted, I could be vague in some areas or more defined in others and since it was me answering I was the one who got to choose. There wasn’t someone grading this, telling me what I was supposed to write, or supposed to want, or supposed to say. This started to help me feel that it was at least possible.

I left the assignment to the last day of the week I had agreed to do it in (this would surprise no one who knows me well 🙂

I sat down with my journal out on my lanai, took my pen in hand. I started with the 1 year mark. I started writing things that were pretty obvious..have all my debts paid, selling lots of books etc. Even though these things were things I did want to see; I felt static as I was writing them, they felt like cardboard to me. I felt frustrated, I wasn’t lying but I wasn’t being completely honest either, where was my enthusiasm??

So I stopped. I sat there, I pondered. Then I came up with an idea: first of all I took each time frame
1-3-5, and for each I took a page; at the top I wrote the age I would be and also the year it would be; that helped give me some form to work within that I could wrap my mind around.

Then (and this was what ended up being the biggest shift for me) rather that starting with 1 year, I moved all the way to 5 years. When I thought about 5 years, it was far enough away that I wasn’t bound by limitations in the same way; 5 years is long enough away for me, that anything could happen.

I found myself opening up to all kinds of possibilities. I realized that in 5 years it will be 2015, and that is on the other side of 2012, so I let myself totally go with anything being possible and I wrote from there.

What ended up happening is that I moved into this wonderful feeling vision space and I wrote from the first person present tense; much in the same way I do when I write in my gratitude journal now. The world and life I described thrilled me, made me feel warm and filled with possibility. I was having such a good time doing this…why hadn’t I done this before?

So then I moved back to the 3 year mark, and since I knew where I was going in 5 years it was much easier to find where this point in time corresponded to that, so 3 years is 2013 and I wrote again from the 1st person present tense perspective. This time I found myself also describing how the various communities I was involved in were thriving and all that we were doing and how that looked and where I fit into it. I could (and still can) see it in my mind, it was describing this thing that exists on some very real level.

Now that I had moved my energy so much by doing the 5 and 3 year journals I found that the 1 year was much easier, I could see how it all fit in. I had some more specifics, but they were resting in this feeling of impending Good 🙂 and there were things that I had originally worried about stating, that I found all I needed to say about them was how grateful I was that I understand what all of it was about and how good I felt about how it all turned out. If this seems vague I guess it is in a way, but what it did give me was this wonderful warm contented feeling that yes indeed within a year there will be questions I have now that will be answered and I will feel good about the answers. And for me that is really the bottom line of what I wanted about these specific things.

The exercise left me feeling energized and also it gave me something that I hadn’t realized I was missing. It gave me a really big vision of Good to look forward to; and to not only look forward to it, but to feel as if it already existed.

Have you ever had that feeling when you get ready for a vacation you have already booked and paid for; you still haven’t left for it, but you are totally jazzed about it anyway? You day dream about it at work (ahhhhh) and it makes all the things that might have gotten you down, not bug you anymore cuz you are almost on vacation… That was the kind of feeling I am talking about.

I love my book and I am so into getting the word out, but one of the things about finishing a big project/goal like that is that it can leave this large space waiting to be filled with something new. This visioning gave me a view of a future I really want to participate in. That is worth more than I can say. And it wasn’t just this intellectual game, it wasn’t just cerebral, it went way beyond that into my heart and my body and my dreams. I felt calm and totally happy.

I am writing all of this because it was so profound for me and it took something that I had hated the idea of (the 1,3,5 year “plan”) LOL, and turned it into one of the best things I have done for myself so far this year.
and since once I like something myself, I have to pass it on to everyone!! I am inviting you to join with me in  the invitation to positive visioning.

take three sheets of paper in your journal.
three pages out write at the top of the page
5 years, the date (2015) and your age in that year.

then on the page before that write
3 years, the date (2013) and your age in that year.

then on the page before that write
1 year, the date (2011) and your age in that year.

and starting from the 5 years, close your eyes and imagine your life in the way you would write it, how would you like your life to look? Write without limits, be a science fiction writer, what would you love to see? Write about the world you live in, the communities you are a part of, don’t concern yourself with how this could ever happen, no one is going to grade you and YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SHOW IT TO ANYONE :):)

Write what makes you feel really good inside. It’s a wonderful exercise. I won’t tell you most of what I wrote at this time because it is one of those lovely private precious journal moments. However I will tell you a couple of things that made me especially happy.

One was that in my 5 years vision, we had successfully made this wonderful transition in consciousness as a human race and planet, and we were now in community with races beyond our solar system. I envisioned new wonderful energy sources and new ways of travel, I also envisioned that our expected life span had doubled. All of a sudden I felt totally young, I had 150 more years to look forward to and I was at the beginning of a whole new life.

We spend so much of our time thinking about the future, or worrying or wanting to change the past. Why not take some of that energy and play “let’s pretend”. Paint a picture of a future that you would love, that you would enjoy living in.

Remember this isn’t a test of who can predict the future correctly, it’s an exercise in joy.

What would you like your life to look like in one year, three years, five years? Write it for yourself, look at it often just to feel good.

Aloha and Blessings!
Erika