Apply this picture now to your life. Have you ever wanted to restart and for example change something fundamentally in your life, but in the end did not succeed? Well, the reason for this could be that you have overseen some important steps. To powerfully restart, 4 steps are essential:
- Take possession of your vision
- Consciously bring your passengers on board
- Loosen your personal fixing rope
- Start and lift off
1. Taking possession of your vision
When you want to do a powerful restart, you usually have an idea, a vision, a longing or a dream. Take into consideration that everything you can imagine, already exists. Whatever you can imagine and authentically originates inside of you, is already one of several options in your life. Otherwise you couldn’t imagine them. It is like an already existing other version of yourself that you haven’t focused on so far. The aspect of authenticity is very important. It is not about challenging the universe in an arrogant way and thinking you could be the president of the United States. In his book “Parallel Universes of Self” Frederic Dodson writes: “Find something that you want to be, do or have that seems to be achievable to you. You have to be ready to take a stand for it. If you don’t know what you want, then define something you don’t want to experience anymore and put it in opposite words.”
A common mistake is that people project pictures of their vision into the future. They imagine that their dream or vision will become true at a certain point X of time. However, doing this, you are not in your power. You are living in the future. The energetic impulse that you send out is that your vision or your dream keeps being something in the future. You don’t really take possession of it. However, it is about bringing your vision into the here and now. How do you do this?
In order to take possession of your vision, it is important that you become silent, close your eyes, let all thoughts pass by and become a neutral observer. You become an empty vessel. Then you let an image come up that represents the version of yourself that already experiences the desired reality. Frederic Dodson describes it like this: „It is rather like receiving in a relaxed way the version that is already available and close. You don’t need will power…instead you recognize the version of yourself that already exists in a parallel universe. Look at the version of yourself for which the desired reality is already real.”
To fully take possession of your vision or the new version of yourself, you finally enter the new standpoint and the energy field of the new version of yourself. You are no longer a neutral observer, but dive into the reality of this new person.
Dodson specifies it as follows: „Do not only experience this image as a mental event. Instead touch it, sense it in your body, feel it. You don’t do this in order to experience the reality at a later point of time or to experience the reality in the outer world. You enter this new version in order to experience the joy here and now… Stay there for some minutes before you end the process with closed eyes.”
2. The passengers for your personal re-start
As soon as you have taken possession of the vision that you would like to experience, it is important in a second step to consciously bring your passengers on board. You might ask now who the passengers are for your personal re-start. Well, they are not the people that surround you. The passengers are your different bodies.
Even if you clearly know from your mind (intellectual body) that you want to do a powerful re-start, you might not be successful if you forget to bring the physical body (with its senses, muscles, bones), the emotional body (the emotional heart with its feelings) and the energetic body (the being with presence and vision) on board. You can logically plan and think everything through, but it won’t serve you if you are not steeped in inspiration of the energetic body and ignore your feelings.
As described above it is also necessary to smell, taste and sense the new version of yourself and move and look through their eyes. It is therefore important that you become aware of your physical body, which has all these senses.
Especially the emotional body plays a considerable role as passenger during your re-start. Starting over usually means that you let go of something old or known and walk a different path. In this case, it is appropriate to allow and express sadness. Become aware of the fact the starting over means that something old dies. You can ask yourself the following questions:
- What exactly is it that you let go of?
- What do you leave behind?
- Which habit do you give up?
- What do you cross of in your life?
- What is going to die?
These can be small or big things. For example, if you did a certain job for many years and now want to start over and do a different kind of job, it is helpful to take the time, feel the sadness and also let go of the old job and the colleagues inside of you. Most people skip this part, because in modern society sadness is considered to be weak, unprofessional or bad. Yet, even if you didn’t like your old job at the end, it is still a chapter that you close. Sadness is the feelings power that allows you to go inside of you, let go of things, heal and create space for something new. When you don’t consciously allow it, it might happen that you get stuck, because you are still attached to the old. It is not necessary that you cry for hours (although this might be appropriate). It is about consciousness.
Before starting new, it is also appropriate to feel fear. You need the fear to enter new territory, to be able to stand in not-knowing, to be creative and courageous. It helps you being present and awake. If you rationally try to talk yourself out of fear, you cut yourself off from a driving force that is necessary for starting new.
Also anger and joy are important for re-starting. You need anger to create clarity (e. g. say what you want and what you don’t want any more), set boundaries and take action. The joy will automatically set in when you start taking possession of your vision. You need joy to be enthusiastic about your vision and try new things.
When you are conscious about all of your 4 bodies and have them as passengers on board then you can BE your vision.
3. Loosening your personal fixing ropes
As mentioned earlier, a hot-air balloon cannot start when all passengers are on board, but the fixing rope has not been loosened. So what are your personal fixing ropes? The personal fixing ropes are most often assumptions, beliefs and opinions you have. It might happen that these cause hidden competing commitments that unconsciously prevent you from living your vision or the new version of yourself. In order to loosen these fixing ropes I invite you to take some time and write down the answers to the following questions on a piece of paper:
- What have you not been able to realize although you really wished for it? What are your unsuccesses?
- What are your fears if you were successful? What are you afraid of that could happen?
- On which assumptions are these fears based? (e. g. it happened before)
Take your time for these first 3 steps. Reflect. Be radically honest. This experiment can change your life. As soon as you have written down all fears and assumptions go again through the list of assumptions and answer the following questions:
- Are these assumptions from today’s point of view still valid? Are they true or false? (mark each assumption accordingly with T for true or F for false)
- With regard to which assumption marked with F would you like to make a new assumption? What would it be like?
Doing this experiment you will realize that your fears are based on old assumptions and stories that have kept you in the position or circumstances you find yourself in right now. To be able to start new it is therefore helpful to make new assumptions. Doing this, there is another step to consider:
- Create little experiments in your daily life that back up your new assumptions. Write them down.
You might now ask what you should do with the old assumptions that you still consider to be true. Well, you can keep them as long as you want. Just be aware of the fact that each one represents a small fixing rope that might prevent you from fully starting and lifting off.
4. Starting and lifting off
After going through the steps 1 to 3, i. e. taking possession of your vision, consciously bringing your 4 bodies as passengers on board and loosening your fixing ropes in the form of assumptions then there is just one thing left to do:
Start and lift off into the unknown!
It takes courage to do this. You will most likely feel fear (because you have your emotional body as passenger on board). It is totally appropriate to feel fear, because you don’t know what the new will be like. You might have a rough idea, but in the end you can never know exactly what it will be like. That’s called life!
Do I feel fear when I re-start in life every now and then? Yes! Was I afraid when I quit my highly paid job back then and became self-employed? Yes! Was I afraid when the hot-air balloon started to move and lifted off? Yes! On a scale from 0% to 100% I felt about 25% fear. The moment I was standing in this basket and it started moving, it was clear that I would enter completely new territory and that a hot-air balloon cannot be navigated. You never know where you are going to end up. A few seconds later we lifted off with astonishing speed until we reached our cruising altitude. A really powerful start and lift off experience!
So, re-start, lift off and allow the wind to blow you where your inspiration goes. Don’t try to control it. Oftentimes something much better is waiting for you than what you have imagined before.
Visionary greetings,
Nicola