Claim It with Love

Own Your Greatness. Claim the name of your being and purpose. Why you are here. Your gifts. Your vision. Your greatness. Maybe it’s sleeping or lying dormant. And the way to claim it is in the name of love. Wake it up. Wake up the power and capability sleeping within. Claim your name. It is time for Owning Your Greatness.

Do whatever it is at the root of your being with great love and care. Do it with love for the words you use in the creation and about and around the creation. Do it with love for the backstory behind the creation. Do it out of love for the challenge you address. Love the problems you solve, because those “problems, issues or challenges” are the gifts that have tested you through the fire to create the person you are today. And love the solutions and answers and suggestions and approaches you can offer to others out of the fire of your own experience.

Of course you do it out of love and care and compassion for the people in your circle and community, the ones who can only hear it from you. You love your peeps! They are the reason you do all that you do.

Awaken yourself. Claim your own true self that emerges from your deepest love and compassion.

Creation and Commitment

Love is the continuous birth of creativity within and between us.”
–John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

On the near side of the bridge, where you are looking across and seeing your circle or community across the gap of where the bridge needs to be, there with you, on your side of the bridge, is your creation.

How is it doing? How is your book coming? How is your business thriving? Are the paintings being painted? Are you teaching the classes, connecting with the clients, creating from the heart?

Does your creation have your full commitment behind it?

Yes, it’s two more Cs for the near side of the bridge. Are you creating your creation, your creative project? And are you fully committed to creating it and imbuing it fully with your gifts?

Fully committing to your creation means nurturing it with love, with passion, and with dogged determination sometimes.

I just watched  The Road this evening with my son. It’s a dystopian future as envisioned by Cormac McCarthy.  It is love clothed in a dogged determination of the father to care for his son, even when all else  fails.

Somehow the sense of commitment to his child, even in the midst of a flat, colorless and sometimes horrific world, is the level of commitment that we too are called to bring to our creations.

We create out of love, because creation is the nature of love. We commit to create, then we love and nurture our creation into manifestation. The act of creation strengthens us, as creators. It strengthens our community. It draws forth the creation itself, as it sings into the world something new.

Have you measured your commitment to your creation today?

Embrace Your Vision — Project, Message, People — Blog Challenge Post 23

Embrace your vision even if it sometimes feels like you are hugging an elephant.

Embrace the heart and soul of your Vision.

Why would you not? Well, sometimes it’s the very bigness of it. The profound meaning it holds for you goes right into your bones. Or owning that the vision really is yours — it’s  your project, venture, or creation; it’s your message, and it’s all directed to your tribe, community, circle — this is just more than you can take in, especially when you are feeling small, depleted, or lacking in self-esteem or self-confidence. (Or, as my colleague Evelyn Roberts Brooks in the #blog30 challenge pointed out, “Hey I’m feeling fragile today.“)

Sometimes it’s like trying to get your arms around an elephant. It’s impossible. It’s too big. You’ll get trampled. It hurts. A million reasons to not embrace the big vision that unfolds along with the purpose for why you are here.

To embrace the vision, we have to own the bigness and greatness of ourselves, to stand in owning our gifts and greatness AND the greatness of the project we are here to create.  We have to be strong enough, big enough, flexible and adaptable enough to be able to open our hearts and wrap our arms around the big vision. Hug it. Cherish it. Encircle and enclose it.  Welcome it. Call it forth into the greater whole of our lives. It lives inside as the gift of our expression we are meant to bring out into the world as our service to our people.

It’s important to embrace these three elements that make up the vision, so as not fail it or yourself or your greater purpose.

First, you need to create the thing, the creation –the “art” as Seth Godin would call it in Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. That is, the business, the painting, the writing, the project, the novel, the web site, the passion for service however it plays out in your world. Your need and desire to create it? Driven by love, a profound love for the project.

Second, you need to be willing to share the creation, to find a way to communicate the essence of what you have created. It’s the message of the creation, the ways that it can transform the lives of the people you have created it for.  This second step is the bridge between what you create and the people it is meant to serve. It means sharing the story of the creation. It means loving the telling of the project’s story.

Third, you have to love the people, your people, the ones who can only hear it from you. Without all three, all powered by love as the bottom line, the vision does not stand strong out in the world. This is all another way of reiterating the importance of embracing these elements as part of your foundation

We have been taught, in every situation, to play small. We’ve been admonished — from the time we were great spirits inhabiting small bodies — not to be “too big fer yer britches.” I officially deem it’s time to bust the seams on those too small britches. You are WAY too big to play small. Your project, creation, and message are far too important to the people you came here to serve, the people who need to hear it from you. Britches be damned.

Go ahead. Hug the elephant.

Post 23 in the 30 day blogging challenge, #blog30 on Twitter.