Personal Growth Planet Blog

Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels, moving but never quite getting anywhere and especially not getting to where you want to go?

To me, this is the road to nowhere.

Goals are set, plans are made, dreams are dreamt…and yet I seem to stay stuck in the same routine. I don’t appear to be moving anywhere nearer to those aspired places.

Of course, this isn’t entirely true. If I take a step back, I can see that I am actually living the kind of life that I envision. In many ways, it’s exactly the kind of life I have envisioned. I do occasionally reach my goals– especially those “little” ones. But, it doesn’t really feel that way.

The 4th of July is an important date in the history of the United States. It marks the anniversary of our founders adopting the Declaration of Independence. This was the date when it was officially declared that this collection of states (former colonies) were now a free and independent country.

Setting aside the fact that on July 4, 1776 not every person living in what was becoming the United States of America was truly free…

I’m going to talk about what freedom doesn’t mean to me and also what it does mean to me…

This is NOT a blog post urging you to dream the impossible dream, fight the unbeatable foe and other such sage advice.

Of course, there’s something inspiring and amazing about a person having a vision for a desired future and, despite huge odds, he or she is able to manifest that dream. It becomes a reality.

Impossible dreams do come true. Your own impossible dreams may very well come true for you.

This is also NOT a blog post that attempts to tell you which of your dreams are possible and which are impossible. Actually, I believe that pretty much anything is possible and that any of us can live the kind of lives we envision for ourselves.

I’m 1 week ahead as my visiting father departs my home and my mother-in-law arrives for a visit. I bid farewell and welcome this flurry of guests.

Now, I’m 24 years in the past, with friends at a high school show choir performance. We are singing, dancing and having a great time together.

Next, I am a year from now at the beach with my husband and sons. The ocean swells and we play together in the surf and the sand.

All of that time travel happened for me in the span of about 15 minutes (more or less).

Swirls of color on a canvas. Voices and dance on stage. Handmade crafts of paper, cloth or found objects.

All of this will come together tomorrow in a Columbus, Ohio art show called KidzArtz that I have had the privilege of helping to organize with some Mother Artists at Work friends.

The creativity and imaginative spark that have gone into each craft, visual art piece and performance are amazing…all the more so because every artist is under the age of 18.

There is nothing quite so precious in both a child and an adult than the ability to imagine.

As a child, I dreamed of being a Country & Western singer (I don’t even know if such a musical category still exists today). I would sing as I did my chores, sing as I walked to school and sing every other moment I could.  I even had a stage name picked out for myself– it was Dusty Rose, I think.

I’m not sure if my elementary school-aged self really believed that one day I would be a professional singer, but it was certainly an enchanting dream. As I got older, my aspirations for what I wanted to be changed.

If you were a warrior on a battlefield or even playing chess or another board game, uttering the words “I surrender” would probably not be a desirable thing to do. There is a definite association between surrendering and failure or weakness in predominant understandings of the concept.

Nobody wants to be considered weak or a loser.

In order to allow the kind of life and success that you want, however, surrender may be the key.

When conditions in your body, your relationships, your job, your bank account– your life– start to feel out of control and are not what you had in mind, you may try to force things back into“line.”

By Amy Phillips-Gary

Recently, I re-watched the late 1980s movie “Field of Dreams.” In the film, Kevin Costner plays a somewhat new-to-the-vocation farmer in Iowa named Ray. One day, as he stands tending the corn in his fields, he hears a voice call to him: “If you build it, he will come.”

Ray ignores the voice, jokes with his wife and daughter about it and loses sleep over it. The voice doesn’t give up! Finally, a vision of a baseball field right in the middle of his corn crop accompanies the words.

By Amy Phillips-Gary

Do you ever feel like you’re boxed into a room with a very very low ceiling?

I certainly do at times. It’s as if there’s some imaginary boundary that’s preventing me from moving ahead with my plans and intentions.

Whether it’s a ceiling on my finances, my relationships, my creativity and career or my ability to have a healthier fitter body, that blocked feeling is oh so real.

And I put the ceiling there.

It is almost epidemic the way many of us erect ceilings on our own capacity and then act as if we’re helplessly trapped.