This Ain’t Hollywood

When you work towards a massive dream and finally experience its realisation, a unique sense of achievement wraps around you. It’s a feeling that only you can fully grasp. Those who have supported you through the challenges to get there – and no one sees a dream fully realised without massive challenges – will cheer for you and share the relief that you made it.

But no one else knows the true suffering you’ve gone through to make it to the other side.

They can’t know, even if you tell them. They can’t experience the same level of resistance you had to work through to fit your new experience.

They could imagine it, empathise with it, and have a heart that ached with you. But no one can ever fully know what we suffer to get where our hearts call us, because it’s our own experience. And our own result.

Life doesn’t stop there, though. The learning, the adjusting to the new dream, the time of letting it settle in – they all continue.

The big happy ending that Hollywood glorifies is rarely as clean-cut as that in real life.

It’s an ongoing transition to own that dream, to embrace it, to celebrate it, and to live it.

This has been the case with me and my dream of home.

It feels beautiful to be living out here at last, on 30+ acres in my tiny hempcrete home, but the settling-in time has been quite stormy.

For over two years, my heart was challenged with the deepest, primal fears as I grew into the dream. For over two years, adrenaline pumped quietly through me as I navigated both the physical side of the build onto top of the emotional side.

Now it is time to let it all land. So, land I did – flat on my backside with a broken tailbone, followed immediately by a full dose of Covid. It has taken over a month of being here before I could start even preparing the soil for spring. Things have had to wait … and I’m grateful for that.

Life has reminded me that there needs to be a nesting time before a renewed time of action.

This isn’t Hollywood.

There’s no moving in and then wham, a whole new energetic chapter starts.

Instead, I am embracing this surprisingly forced rest and letting it all sink in with more ease and less pressure.

Whenever I think about embarking on the new project I’ve been contemplating for a while, my heart says, “No. Just rest.”

Things are taking longer, more suited to this time of life I am in as a post-menopausal woman who fits gentleness and slowness better. My old life is gone. It’s time to allow this new pace to truly become a part of my new life.

If you’re feeling under pressure that you have created for yourself, I recommend taking a pause too, before life lands you flat on your backside and insists! We learn the easy way or the hard way, but either way, it’s not Hollywood.

We don’t wake up one day where everything is perfect and the learning stops.

It never does.

So the best we can do is trust in that learning.

It is on our side.

That’s what I’ve done in the latest vlog: trusted in the learning! It’s called Moving On From Mistakes with Our Tiny House Build. We all learn through mistakes, both our own and those of others. This vlog is an example of that. The vlog is a place for storytelling, which is an ancient art and one at risk of being lost with ever-reducing attention spans. I’ll keep telling my stories as long as there is beauty to share and I can carve out the time. I hope you enjoy it from this wintery paradise.

Whatever season your own life is in, I wish you the courage to honour it with grace and trust.

With love,

Bronnie.

PS. The eBook for Bloom is currently on sale through all leading online retailers. I often hear back from readers who say that it’s such a good book and they’re surprised that it is not as well-known as Five Regrets. But how can we know what paths our creations will follow when we send them out into the world with love? They have their own paths and will reach who they are born to support. Bloom has already helped thousands of people trust in their lessons with more courage and the willingness to surrender into them. It may help you too. Check it out through your favourite eBook seller.

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