Pain can be a guide

I embody the change I wish to see in the world.

I craft new thoughts, feel them change the very structure of my bones, so I move confidently towards new solutions.

In conversation yesterday, I realized that I'm not "merely" redeveloping my house into condos, I'm inventing a new industry. I'm at the "this is clear enough, how do we get started?" stage. A friend emailed me about Project Row Houses, an urban redevelopment project with an arts theme. They got seed money with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. What an ingenious way to buy housing! The grant process is opaque to me; but surely I can explain what I'm up to well enough by now that a grant writer can be strong where I am weak? Perhaps a green building grant, an urban development grant, a clean energy demonstration grant, are possibilities?

I am strong in so many ways. I'm strong in creating vision, in inspiring. I finally figured out, with the help of my coach, how to approach this retrofit project when I talk with others. The entire urban-redevelopment and retrofit permaculture part is what excites me. And truthfully, that part excites others too. But I have to start with reassuring everyone that the project will make money.

And I've figured that step out. People are getting how much money is to be made doing this.

My strength comes from finding where my energy is blocked, and unblocking it. Through chiropractic, yoga, and meditation, I discover the places that I'll be sabotaging myself, and I release them. I spent most of the last few days in excrutiating upper back pain, as I grappled with trusting that this vision, of creating affordable housing with investors and tenant-owners, is what I am to be doing right now. Having the faith that this is my task to be doing, the courage to set aside other things, the willingnes to get absorbed on a path to a destination only partially comprehended, showed up in my body as some pretty sever torquing though my chest and shoulders.

At one point, I had the intuitive flash that I'm making the choice to cast aside all the "shoulds." "Shoulds" that weren't even mine, in that I didn't even tell me "I should do that." Rather, ideas, tasks, even soul expressions that came along with me into the world, whether from ancestors' unfulfilled hopes to spirit entities looking for channels to the physical realm to stuff I am still carrying from past lives, are sloughing off me. I've set some new thoughts in my brain, and my body is a willing accomplice, letting go of tensions and blockages that I've lived with my entire life.

Is this the reason to take on the biggest goal imaginable? The one thing that is truly a passion? So that all the erroneous "self" elements get burned away?