Nurture Big Dreams through Resistance

People come to me with big dreams and big books. I believe big dreams are natural phenomena that coincide with being connected to your higher self. That’s where your most unique, authentic prose reside.

You may have visions of spreading your message to the masses, being a part of a larger conversation, giving life to the characters inside of you, having movies made from the stories you’ve written and establishing a better life for yourself and others. These dreams are deep truths, because your higher self plays on a big stage and sends visions of what’s possible. Furthermore, the more you take action on your dreams, the more specific they become to you and only you.

Nobody else combines the same inspiration with the same life experience. Just so you know, I’ll be referring to your higher self throughout this book. It’s your soul, the part of you that came here for a reason and has a unique passion to pursue. But choosing your higher self over your ego isn’t as easy as choosing buttons, like the green one is your soul and the red one is your ego, so you just keep pressing the green one.

I like to think of the higher self as an ink stain on cheesecloth that grows into a bigger and bigger blotch; the ink being consciousness and the cheesecloth unconsciousness. It’s an inner clarity, benevolence, and sometimes awe that seems out and permeates more and more of your daily experience.

This ever-blossoming infusion of inspiration is exactly what the symbol of the crown chakra represents with its expanding petals. In fact, this ink and cheesecloth model of enlightenment is quite compatible with the chakras. The word chakra means wheel, and they’re described as spinning funnels of energy. It depicts the soul as an ever-unfolding spiral.

What your higher self sees as an exciting challenge, your ego sees as a frightening creative risk that you’ll never be able to accomplish. The ego can get whiney, moody, impatient and even arrogant. The ego blows you up and then cuts you down. If your ego was watching a flower grow, it would probably just keep yelling “Hurry up!” until it drove itself mad. It makes creative life a mangled and tortuous venture. All of these harrowing ups and downs distract you from your work can be referred to as resistance.  Luckily the

The spiritual response to resistance is surrender. Surrender is the fundamental mechanism that puts you in conversation with something larger than yourself. It allows you to shed the ego and center yourself back in the higher self. First you recognize that agitation or resistance and then you let it go. Easier said than done, I know. But the more you do it, the better life gets and the more creative you become.

These are some general guidelines toward that end:

Surrender accepts the situation as it is.

Resistance argues with reality.

Surrender pauses until the hidden path forward reveals itself.

Resistance gets negative and impatient in difficult circumstances, usually making things worse.

Surrender embraces the nature of the adventure with all its twists and turns.

Resistance struggles, criticizes, blames and complains.

Surrender has a sense of humor.

Resistance does not.

You get the idea. The trick is to recognize when your ego pops up (be warned: the ego has the adverse effect of getting sneakier the better you get at recognizing it). It’s that ongoing practice of following the straight and narrow, the way of the Tao, becoming a Jedi master. Like I said, it’s a practice, but by taking small actions every day toward your dream it will multiply and through this practice, creativity can spiral into something the size of a galaxy.