Desire, Discernment, & Choosing What’s Next

If you’ve arrived at a brave new horizon in your business and don’t know which dream to activate next; or if you’re crafting a new body of work that makes your scalp prickle with delight, makes every little hair on your body stand up and wave…

…and, the shape of your emerging work is a haze, a blob, an unformed, not-yet thing…

…here are some questions to carry in your pocket as you explore this new terrain:

What are the fluid, vibrant, dancing elements, in your work and in your business? What has power, depth, vitality, that sparkles and surges like the sea on a sunny day, but has no discernible shape, at least, not yet?

Ask the folks in your community: What do you dream about? What do you long for, that makes you breathe so deep you didn’t know your lungs could hold so much air? What lends thrust and power to your legs, lifts and lofts you onto your feet? What lives in the belly of your joy?

What restlessness wakes you at night? What do you truly, deeply desire, that brushes past your fingertips as it flies by, just out of reach?

Now, ask yourself: What do I long for? What dreams thrum in my bones, widen my wingspan?

What urgent hand shakes me awake at night?

What do I truly, deeply desire?

Where does my desire live in my body?

Touch the body of your true desire. Caress its outlines and curves, its secret folds. Breathe in the scent of its scalp, trace the soft mound of its cheek, feel the huff of its breath on the nape of your neck. Kiss its crooked pinky finger, its belly button, its knobbly knees.

Feel your profound love for it filling your whole body. Feel its great longing for you, for the life you will make together.

Now, enter the canyon of your own body. Follow its contours of light and shade, its free-running rivers of blood and lymph, its singing winds, the rare metals buried in the vault of your brain.

What does your body know, about your desire? What does it show you about its capacity to drink in your desire, to digest and transmute it into cell and organ, muscle and bone? What will it keep, of this infusion? What will it expel?

Next, step into the daylight of your discernment.

Given the truth of your life, the truth of your business, what can you say Yes to that makes your whole body sigh with gratitude, soften with delight? What makes you feel round and contented, wide as the sky, fertile and rich as the soil beneath your feet?

Now, turn to the Deva of your business and ask for its illumination. Where does its desire live, in the body of your business? Is it twin and sister to the desire that arises in your own body?

Where is the shoreline, where the treasure of your fluid, creative heart meets the body of your clients’ desires?

Walk this boundary. Hike its height, breadth, depth. Take in its dappled light, its smells and sounds, the various textures of its terrain.

What animals live here? What birds, insects, fish, reptiles, fungi, plants, trees, mountains, valleys, rivers? What do they show you about themselves, about the story of their borderlands?

Feel its place in the body of your business.

Then map it out. Draw it, sing it, sculpt it in clay. Paint it, write it, make a mess and another and another until it shows you its true shape.

Build an altar in your garden, or under the roots of a sheltering tree, to welcome its soon-to-born being.

When you know it in your bones, when you love it with all of you, craft your offer to reflect its shape.