Step Into Your Future

Here in Canada, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October. This month, our American friends are preparing to celebrate it too. My heart is so grateful for the beauty of this turning season — and for the long, sunny days we’ve enjoyed this Fall.

I am grateful, too, for all of you who honor me with your time, attention, and your presence in my world. For the rich gifts I receive and offer through my business — creative freedom, right and abundant livelihood, loving service to my world, the companionship of brilliantly creative colleagues and clients, readers and friends.

Thank you so much for your willingness to show up, to be yourself, to contribute your gifts and genius to shaping a world that works for everyone.

Business is a sacred container for creative growth and transformation. It offers support for our lives and those of the people we love. It gives us the opportunity to expand into our fullest, most vibrant selves, and to do the work we are called to do.

It challenges us to release old stories about who we are and what we are capable of — and to shape new ones that expand our inner being, so we can inhabit and incarnate all of who we are.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I offer this simple exercise to help you step into your future, and create vibrancy, prosperity and delight in your business.

Begin by naming all the elements that make up your vibrant, healthy business – coaching, writing, speaking, teaching, creating and marketing products and services. Your clients and customers, colleagues and allies, resources of time, money, energy, skills, knowledge, experience… everything that makes up the ecology of your business.

Write these down, or create a visual map of the ecology of your business. Extend your love and appreciation to each and every one of these elements that contribute to the life of your business. Together, they weave a sturdy container that holds and expresses the qualities you want to share with your world.

Don’t forget to include yourself, in this map of the ecology of your business. Without you – your vision, heart, energy, work, devotion, skills and commitment – your business would not exist. You are the central element in this creation that is your business.

To grow a vibrant, healthy business, you must grow yourself. As you expand into your potentials, deepen your capacity to hold more complex relationships with the world around you, you will grow your business organically and with greater ease. You become the person who has the business you want.

So, let’s take a trip to meet your future self – the one who already has the business you dream of.

You may want to record this next bit, so you can listen to it with your eyes closed.

Attune to the energy field of the You whom you are incarnating — the You who has a growing, thriving, vibrant business; the You who is teaching, writing, playing. Who has an abundant and steady flow of income, clients, students, readers, community members.

Invite Future You to meet you at the edge of your own energy field — about two feet out in front of you.

Close your eyes, invite your soul’s presence into the space behind your eyes and up a bit, into the center of your head. Let your soul’s presence radiate out from there through your whole body, and out into your energy field, all around you.

Feel your deep love for the Earth, and let it flow down from your heart, into your belly, and from there deep into the heart of the Earth.

When you feel present, stand up and walk directly into the energy field of Future You, whose inner ecology includes your flourishing business. Turn around and face the chair in which you were sitting.

Stand in your Future Self’s energy field and experience it.

How does your body feel? How are you standing, holding yourself? How do your muscles feel, and your bones, your breath, your pulse and heartbeat? How is the weight distributed across the soles of your feet?

What do you experience, in your body? Constriction? Spaciousness? Where? In your chest? Shoulders? Belly? Mid-back? Knees?

Continue to experience the You who has your flourishing business, coaching, teaching, writing, speaking — whatever the elements of your own particular business happen to be.

What feelings are you experiencing? Certainty. Joy. Creative enthusiasm. Spaciousness.

How do you experience your mind and your thoughts? Clear, precise awareness? Expansive, including the whole ecology of your Future Self? Something else?

How do you feel, spiritually? Connected, coherent, integrated. Fluid, in Flow. Radiating. Whole.

Invite your allies — those who love and support you in this new incarnation of yourself — to come and stand in a circle around you. Ask them to hold the space in which your Future Self can unfold, so she is grounded, sturdy and strong. Feel the support and love in which your Future Self is held.

Now look around. Expand your awareness so you have a bird’s eye view of the world, the universe, the cosmos, with your Future Self as the central point of view. Notice how your self-with-the-flourishing-business affects the world around you.

Who and what is changed or transformed by your Future Self? How? And how do those effects ripple outward into the larger world?

Continue to stand in the energy field of Future You. Invite Future You to begin transforming the You that you are right now. Honor your Present Self’s sovereignty, so the process is loving, gentle, and goes only as deep as s/he is willing to be transformed.

Invite those aspects of your Present Self that are ready to blend with your Future Self to flow into the shape of your Future Self now. Invite those aspects of your Present Self that are ready to be transformed, to reshape their elements into the pattern and form of your Future Self. Experience what’s happening inside you as you do this.

Now ask your soul to create a direct, clear path of radiant golden light from your Present Self to your Future Self. A sunlit path from where your are now, to where you’re going to be.

Ask your allies to hold this path with you, to hold it steady and to help you walk it with strength, power and confidence.

Still standing in your Future Self, ask your soul to give you a gift that will most directly help you get from where you are now – from your Present Self – to your Future Self. Receive the gift, no matter how odd it might seem, and experience how you feel as you hold this gift in your hands.

Now step back along the path of light from your Future Self into your Present Self, carrying the gift with you.

Step back into your Present Self, and experience how you feel there now.

Let the gift you’ve brought back with you find its rightful home in your body. Where does it belong? Let it flow into your body, and settle into your muscles, blood, bones, and cells. Experience how you feel, in your body, now that this gift is part of you.

Now invite a circle of your inner selves — all the different aspects of yourself — to come and meet the gift you’ve received from your Future Self, here in its new home in your body. Invite them to touch the gift, to smell and taste and hear it, to ask it questions, to get to know it, to come into relationship with it.

Do any of your inner selves have something they want to share about their experience with the gift, and with what it brings to them?

Invite the gift to expand and to transform each cell of your body and your energy body — to transform your Present Self so s/he can travel more easily along the path to your Future Self.

Offer thanks and appreciation to all who have participated in this process with you. To your Present and Future Selves, to the Sacred, to your allies, to your inner selves, to your soul, to the soul of your business. Ask that the work you’ve just done may bless and serve your own unfolding future, and the life of your business, your community and your world.

Open your eyes, stretch, wiggle your body, dance – do whatever physical action you feel called to do, to help anchor the changes you’ve just made, into your body.

Enjoy! Radiate!