We’ve been thinking about our dreams a lot lately. Three things collided together this week to make me think that maybe I should write them down after all. As an educator, I understand the value in articulating goals as you are far more likely to bring them to fruition.

The first was @mountainjewel’s invitation to share our dreams and there has been some beautiful, heartfelt and wonderful sharing already – check out some of the incredible dreamings of SUCH Steemlegends - you'll find their posts on the bottom of Wren and Ini's post here.

The second was @eco-alex's post on how emotional intention can heal and alter lives:

Our world is made of electrical and magnetic fields, and when you change them you can change atoms. The strongest electrical and magnetic field in the body is our heart which is up to 5,000 times stronger than the brain! When we have a feeling we create waves of electromagnetic feelings / energy that change our world on the physical level. This has been proven by science and this is what our ancients knew and understood and is what they left us in their texts in their temples. Beliefs change our physical world. Beliefs change matter itself.

I loved the idea in this post of saying: ‘It’s already happened’ – it’s like the ultimate belief mantra. If it’s already happened in your imagination, how can there be an alternative future? This speaks a lot of the power of intention in shaping your life.

Wayne Dyer has much to say about this in his book ‘The Power of Intention’. It speaks to me of how determination, focus, imagination and, yes, dreaming, can change the course of our lives:

“When you’re connected to the power of intention, everywhere you go, and everyone you meet, is affected by you and the energy you radiate. As you become the power of intention, you’ll see your dreams being fulfilled almost magically, and you’ll see yourself creating huge ripples in the energy fields of others by your presence and nothing more.”

The third, and the clincher for me, was finding this statue of Lakshmi on the weekend. Isn’t she just beautiful?

Lakshmi is a Hindu goddess that symbolises abundance and prosperity, and finding her was like this big slap in the face to manifest a dream or two by setting some intentions. She's this beautiful force of creativity and prosperity that'd you'd be silly to shun.

As Dyer says:

“When you shift to an abundance mind-set, you repeat to yourself over and over again that you’re unlimited because you emanated from the inexhaustible supply of intention. As this picture solidifies, you begin to act on this attitude of unbending intent. There’s no other possibility. We become what we think about, and as Emerson reminded us: “The ancestor to every action is a thought.” As these thoughts of plentitude and excessive sufficiency become your way of thinking, the all-creating force to which you’re always connected will begin to work with you, in harmony with your thoughts, just as it worked with you in harmony with your thoughts of scarcity. If you think you can’t manifest abundance into your life, you’ll see intention agreeing with you, and assisting you in the fulfillment of meager expectations!”

Last weekend Jamie and I sat in the bath after a long weekend and worried about what we were doing. When we first met, we had a million dreams about establishing a permaculture smallholding somewhere – in England? Spain? France? – and whilst we tried our best, there were things that prevented that reality happening – namely, cash and bureaucracy. I didn’t have a visa that would enable me to buy land in Europe and we didn’t have the money to do it anyway. Plus, I was missing my family in Australia. We definitely fulfilled one dream of owning land together, which was awesome – by manifesting that dream of abundance, we ended up with 5 beautiful acres in Victoria, and have a gorgeous house and vegetable garden, fruit trees and chickens, and Jamie’s fulfilled his dream of having a landrover and a truck, which certainly keeps him out of trouble. # But life goes on, doesn’t it? And we’re not the kind of people to stagnate. We’d go crazy! We're both airy in our natures, so our dreams don't stick - they tend to morph and shift. We're happy to go with one another on the ride, whilst reigning each other in if we go too off tangent.

So, in the bath (outside, under the setting sun with a big bottle of wine) we talked about where we were headed. What was our plan for the next 5 years?

1. Be the best people we can be.

Be kind. Be loving. Be considerate. Care for others. To me, that was central to the idea of seva – of service to others. What form would this take? Well, teaching was already fulfilling this. We change lives every day just be helping kids. We aren’t doing this in a major, loud way but by encouraging people to be their best, we could make the world a better place. It’s a noble profession and we are lucky to have had this as our career for the last ten years. Teaching is both our dhamma, so even if we quit it as a formal career, there's other ways we fulfil this path.

As soon as we articulated that, Jamie went up to the local supermarket and engaged in a conversation with someone about the youth club in town and how they can really do with some help with tutoring. Talk about the power of intention!

For me, it's also fulfilling my yoga teaching dream. I'm battling with my Mara demons a bit at the moment - am I good enough? Will people want to come to my classes? Do I look like a yoga teacher? Am I enough? Even sharing this photo of me in yoga mode is scary, because I don't look like the woman on the cover of the yoga journal magazine. I know that's my brain monkeys or Mara dancing around and limiting me, and I'm working through that.

I completed my yoga training last year, feeling a strong pull to teaching mindfulness and yoga to students at my school, which I've started to implement with some great responses. I really want to start a local community class, but I'm terrified. The thing is, I know it's my dharma to do so. I've always felt that teaching was my jam and I've been doing yoga since I was a teenager, so that's a massive part of the future in which I see myself.

2. Leave our mark on the land

In every single place we have ever lived, we’d left it better than we’d found it. When I was young(er) I'd always get cuttings from plants at my parents house and create gardens in my rental properties, leaving magnificent herb gardens behind. I left mosaics and vegie patches, retaining walls and greenhouses, courtyards and gazebos. It never mattered we didn't 'own' it or wouldn't be there to enjoy it. We (because it became 'we' when Jamie and I met) always loved just making our environment more beautiful than it was before.

I've written about that concept a little more in a post this week about warding off eco-anxiety by planting trees, and that's part of it for sure. But we also love creating art and little bits of beauty amongst the greenery, like this mosaic we started this weekend. Sure, we might not stay here forever, but someone's going to move here after us and they'll surely appreciate the work we've put in and love it as much as we do.

3 Travel

Here's where things get a little crazy. We've always wanted to drive from London to Melbourne or vice verse. From Australia, that's tricky, but it's been done before. Jamie's from England and I'm from Australia, so it makes sense to unite us through traversing the physical distance betwixt the two places. This means putting Buttercup, our Series 3 1973 Landrover, on a container to Singapore. We then want to drive through Burma and India and onward, doing a couple of vipassana on the way (Insight meditation in the Theraveda tradition). If we don't do that, we'll do an equally epic trip somewhere. Africa? South America? I don't know - our bucket list is very changeable. Both Jamie and I are air signs - Gemini and Libra - so we're bound to be a bit floaty about this. But check Tim Slessor and his team driving through Burma in the 1950's! Jamie was gifted two copies of this last year, so it seemed like a bit of a temptation to do a similar route. And if you've met Buttercup, couldn't you just see us doing that?

Sure, we've got a lot of internal travelling to do, but, as Australian band 'The Triffids' knows, it's a wide open road:

The sky was big and empty
My chest filled to explode
I yelled my insides out at the sun
At the wide open road

4 Find a place where we can create a place that will bring people

We're lonely. We used to live squatting land in England in trucks, and there was always people around. It's one of the reasons I'm on Steemit - it's a reaching out to people, to connect. But as much as I love you all - and I really, really do - the Steemfam is just beautiful. I've learnt so much and I'm continuing to learn every single day.

Yet it's not the same as good old face to face. It's not so hard for me, that has a yoga tribe to cleave to, but harder for Jim, who's a bit more eccentric and introverted.

We've always had this idea of making a spa retreat, but not one of those wanky ones. We'd love to build one out of natural materials and resources, with a steem sauna (aha - can't even spell steam right, wonder why that is??) and steem buildings. Kinda like sweat lodges. We'd also build a heap of tiny homes - either in vehicles, like what we're good at and we really love -

or in little self build huts or gyspy caravans, like some of the ones below:

All these can be found in a Google image search for Lloyd Kahn's books, which has the most INSPIRING self builds!

It'd be both a business venture but also something that could draw people in, like free accomodation and food for labour. And of course, Steemguests could stay for free :)

And if that doesn't pan out, we're going to go and live on a narrow boat in the UK. We were nearly going to do that before we moved to Australia, and we have friends that do so. Jamie's read a lot of books about the waterways or canals all the way from the UK, across the channel and through Europe, and that really tickles us. I'm sure we'd meet lots of people on the way and have lots of stories to tell.

In my musings I have been thinking about what I'd do with that extra steem power and to me, it all ties in nicely with my Dhamma - to help others, to teach. People have been so darn nice and helpful to me in the last few months here and I'd really like to return the favour. To crave the cash would be the shadow side of Laksmi and that's never what my life has been about anyway.

Here's wishing all you dreamers everything you wished for! May abundance be yours!