Part Three of Barriers to your Ideal Life: Let's talk about desire

This is part three of a series. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.

In the last few posts I’ve written about the ways we build barriers to living our Ideal Lives.

I'm interrupting our "barriers to living our dreams" series with a palate cleanser. 

Namely, as I was writing the next email in the series I realized that it could feel kind of negative. And the whole point of having dreams and desires is to delight in them! 

And bonus: our dreams don't have to be huge to be meaningful. 

As I mentioned the other day, it's easy to get caught up in having Big Dreams for yourself like new homes, relationships, bodies, bank accounts, writing books,  making art. 

Nothing wrong with a Big Dream.

But that's not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the tiny desires that you have. 

What, exactly, is a tiny desire? 

Some years ago in my community we had a thoughtful discussion about the word "goal." 

In essence, we (I and my fellow rebel mystics) hate it. 

We brought up all kinds of other ways to speak about that which we dream of experiencing and came up with some fun alternatives including: 

- dreams

- desires

- intentions

- visions

- creations-in-action

- magic made real

- target

- summit

 - thrilling destination

- my pretties (lol)

- potent possibilities

Maybe you vibe with some of these terms and perhaps you really don't. No matter, the point is that it's easy to get caught up in the grandness of a goal and forget that mystics relish the process AND that ultimately the day-to-day is where we live so we might as well make our days as delightful as possible.

How to do that, though, remains a conundrum for many of us of the modern/post-tech world. 

So, I decided to use the words "tiny desires" as my cue to take a step back from Big Dreams and remember that the small ones matter too. 

Tiny desires are just that- small. They fit into the pockets of your day. They can be simple one-offs, daily rituals, or even part of a more complex process that takes you towards a Big Dream. 

Here are some examples of Tiny Desires: 

- painting your nails with glitter polish

- practicing an elaborate tea ceremony for your morning beverage

- just picking a super cool/beautiful mug or teacup for your morning beverage

- rocking out the process of your adornment (hair/makeup/clothing/accessories) 

- sitting down to handwrite a letter 

- spending 10 minutes spraying and cooing to your houseplants

- dedicated cuddle time with humans/pets

- painting or coloring or drawing 

- taking a nature walk

- learning a language by reading in that language

- mobility exercises

- recording a voice memo to preserve a story from your life 

These are just a few examples. as you can see, mine tend towards the nature/beauty end of the spectrum but your Tiny Desires could be really anything. Tiny Desires are quite clearly connected to joy even though we might not always feel joyful when undertaking them. They need not be daily parts of your life and you could even choose a different TD to pursue each day. 

Someone (hey V!) sent me an email after my last message about one of her TDs- it's to paint a piece of furniture before July. 

When you have a TD that is a bit more of a project it can feel difficult to engage in the TD on a regular basis so here's what I do: I set up a pre-school style station (aka centers!) in the house for it where I put all the materials I'll need for that project and then go to my center when it's time. 

For example, I'm thinking about making Nutcracker-themed paper stage with spun cotton characters all from recycled materials. Basically it's winter here in South America and we do not get the payoff of all the Nov/Dec/Jan holidays so I figured I'd just do something festive regardless to break up the monotony of cold weather. This weekend I'm going to gather my materials and put them on a specific table with paint and glue and xacto knives and brushes (and I need to find the darn glue gun which means I'll most definitely need an extension cord) so that I can slowly dip into my Tiny Desire when I have a minute without having to get all precious about it. Don't let lack of an extension cord derail your Tiny Desires!

I'd love to know what some of your Tiny Desires are- leave a comment and tell me :)