Imagine my surprise in learning that January 13 is National Make Your Dreams Come True Day. I suggest we celebrate this day in true THRIVER spirit!
Manifesting your dreams– or making your dreams come true – is the essence, I believe, of the journey from surviving to thriving after abuse. In conducting the My Avenging Angel WorkshopsTM over the last 20 years, I have helped hundreds of women – survivors of abuse (domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse) – take that journey from victim to survivor to thriver and live the life of their dreams.
Do you want to manifest the life of your dreams? Who wouldn’t?! Come on, try it out! I’ll make it easy for you with The Road Map for the Journey to the Real YOU!TM. Follow each of the four Map Points below for a simple but intense journey beyond abuse to reclaim your life. I talk about this part of the journey – manifesting your dreams – in my workshops and in my book, Staying in the Thriver Zone: A Road to Manifest a Life of Power and Purpose.
The word “manifest” in our language is used to describe some pretty intense experiences. Check out the quotes below about manifesting from people in various spheres including martial arts, spirituality, and politics. All of them have used the word to signify a transcendent experience, something that takes us beyond the human realm into the more divine or sublime.
You are here to manifest your innate enlightenment. – Morihei Ueshiba, a martial artist
We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. – Marianne Williamson
Life is about, every single day, getting up to manifest your truth. – Cory Booker, United States Senator
In any process that involves what I call the Real YOU – your whole and authentic self – you should feel exhilaration, ecstasy, and pure joy after accomplished goals that transform your lives. I’ve seen it happen with many of women I’ve helped over the years take the journey from victim to survivor to thriver. When you do, you can start to manifest your desires and live your life in a way you never thought possible.
Why is this journey so transformational? The first part of my “working” definition (still not big enough!) of a thriver does say:
A thriver is a happy, self-confident, and productive individual who believes she has a prosperous life ahead of her. She is primed to follow her dreams, go back to school, find a new job, start her own business or write her story. Living well is her best revenge!
So when you get happy, self-confident and feel productive, you can have a prosperous life ahead of you, even after a lifetime of being a victim or merely a survivor. It will be amazing! Judging from my own experiences and observing the courageous women I have seen get there, you begin by Entering the Thriver Zone and then by Staying in the Thriver Zone and finally Living in the Thriver Zone. You manifest your desires and build, piece by piece, a new life that matches the values and passions of your Real YOU. That’s truly a life of power and purpose!
MANIFEST A LIFE OF POWER AND PURPOSE
Let’s do a quick review step-by-step of the motivational model I have developed – The Road Map for the Journey to the Real YOU!TM It is laid out in my books in The Thriver Zone Series and also in the workshops that I conduct.
MAP POINT A — Get Positive Energy
You begin the journey by inviting pure, positive energy into your life. You see yourself as a thriver, not just a survivor, of abuse. You are no longer a victim — hopeless, helpless, and alone. When you choose to go with your positive thoughts, not negative ones, you can propel yourself forward on your journey to the Real YOU and get your life moving forward.
MAP POINT B — Focus Your Desires
Bring out your dreams and long-held desires and take them out for a spin! Don’t worry if you don’t know right now exactly what you want to do with your life. Start with a simple desire and let them build in bigger and better ones. You are in abundance! Nothing is out of your grasp. You are clear, hopeful, and inspired at this point of the journey. Take those focused desires and make them come true.
MAP POINT C — Overcome Your Fears
Fear is a crippling thing! It can bring on anxiety and despair blocking you from moving beyond abuse. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, or even fear of success can limit your beliefs about yourself and keep you from taking the risk of finding out who you really are and what will make you happy. But you can push through your fears and limiting beliefs, knocking down the barriers that keep you from connecting with the Real YOU! You have momentum now! Go for it!
MAP POINT D — Find the Real YOU
You’ve done it! Congratulations! You have reached the Real YOU – your Happy Ending. Your reward is that amazing feeling of being in contact with the part of you untouched by all that has happened to you. You are whole and complete! Being there makes you feel happy, content, and fulfilled. This euphoric feeling of being in the Real YOU gives you more positive energy to fuel your next focused desire.
THE MOTIVATIONAL MODEL WORKS
With this Road Map you can successfully manifest a desire like going back to school and then celebrate your graduation with the sweet, wonderful feeling of how fulfilling this desire connected you with your Real YOU. Then you use the positive energy of that powerfully good feeling of accomplishment to begin to work on your next focused desire — get a great job in your new field or career.
After successfully using this model myself, I now teach it to women who have experienced abuse with much success. How successfully have they used it? You can judge that for yourself with a story of manifesting below from Sophia, who has been part of the My Avenging Angel WorkshopsTM program I conduct for many years. Others have also been in this amazing community like Sophia for a time, while other have come more recently into our Thriver Community. Yet no matter how long you have been on this journey, soon you too will have a story of manifesting to tell!
MEETING OPRAH
Here’s Sophia’s story of manifesting her lifelong desire to meet Oprah Winfrey. A few years ago, I did a weekend retreat for the women in our Thriver Community at a beachside retreat center on the Long Island Sound. We were definitely in the Oprah energy that weekend. As the wind howled and the rain fell around us, nature’s energy matched our own as we worked on focusing our intentions and visioning that all of our wild, wonderful dreams would come true. We put together vision boards – collages of pictures and words that included our intentions and how we’d get support to accomplish them. All the boards included a picture of Oprah, and above mine I pasted a phrase from O, The Oprah Magazine: “Here We Go!”
That weekend we celebrated Oprah, not just as a very famous woman talk show host, but also as an amazing example of what it is to be a THRIVER in one’s life. A survivor of child sexual assault, Oprah’s life journey paralleled so many of ours – from VICTIM TO SURVIVOR TO THRIVER! We danced around the room that Saturday afternoon, each of us in turn pretending we were on the Oprah show and presenting to her, as if in the future, how the intentions on our vision boards manifested and came true. Several of us played Oprah, wearing the Oprah crown that we made on Friday night with her picture on the front and words that epitomized her energy decorating it — courage, compassion, power, and purpose.
As you can imagine, Sophia was particularly good at being Oprah! Sophia inhabited the role, showing, like Oprah, an exuberance, passion, and a sense of how when you work together with others, you can change the world. Sophia was fabulous!
The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is to praise. – Oprah Winfrey
That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I got a very excited phone message about five months later from Sophia. She had entered the “LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE EVER Spa Week” contest on the Oprah website and had gotten a call that she had won! That March she joined Oprah and Gayle King at a famous spa in Arizona with all her expenses paid! We were ecstatic for Sophia. She had worked so hard and done so much to inspire all of us. But that week at the spa with Oprah and Gayle was only the beginning of her manifesting adventure.
Here’s what Sophia wrote about it several years later:
I am grateful for my LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE EVER experience. When I arrived at the spa, I could not swim. I was open to learning how to swim there, and that experience aired on national television. But when I returned home, I was still paralyzed by my fear from nearly drowning in high school and being molested as a child in the water. Today with the help of God and many women friends in my life, I have triumphed over my fears. I started taking swimming lessons with teachers who help those who have a fear of water, and I finally swam across the pool. Last year I jumped into the Long Island Sound with women friends at a weekend retreat. Today, I AM A SWIMMER! I have also left a marriage clouded by domestic violence that could have put me on the eleven o’clock news. I am free of thirty-two years of strangleholds that had crippled me mentally, spiritually, and physically. Today, I am an advocate for women, helping them take the journey from VICTIM TO SURVIVOR TO THRIVER!
– SOPHIA
Sophia’s story is a great example of how to doing something that you thought you couldn’t do. I bet you could have a story like that too. Think about it. Maybe it was just last week or a few years ago or even something that happened to you as a kid. Write it down. Do it now! You’ll find the writing prompts and worksheet I use, Manifesting A Fairy Tale, on my Thriver Zone website. Try it out! Spend some time writing through the worksheet and you’ll see how it parallels each of these Map Points in my book, Staying in the Thriver Zone.
Finally, if you feel like you regularly get stuck on one or more of them — for example, not enough positive energy in your life, can’t focus your desires, you are overwhelmed with fear or have NO idea who your Real YOU is, consider taking one of my free, virtual My Avenging Angel WorkshopsTM. In those two-day workshops, I can help you get unstuck and move forward to manifest your dreams! JOIN US! The workshops are free and virtual on ZOOM. Or you can refer a friend, colleague, client or patient. See flyer for next workshops here.
You can manifest your dreams! Not only on January 13 – National Make Your Dreams Come True Day – but every day of the year.
You are a thriver! Live your best life! Live the life of you have always imagined!