Felicia Soleil's 5 Philosophies For Moving on After Divorce: #4 Foresee

After 25 years spent helping my clients move through and beyond the dissolution of their marriage, foreseeing or envisioning the future can be a happy exercise.  Now that we have proactively forgiven, forgotten, and foregone, we have made room for the good stuff! What do you want for yourself?  Your Self.  This is no time to minimize your dreams and ambitions.  Think BIG!  See possibility! 

You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny.  The pen that writes your own story must be held in your own hand.  --Dr. Irene C. Kassorla.

What are your deepest values? Now that you have relinquished the role of caretaker, what have you been neglecting, pushing aside, or denying that needs to see the light of day?  In order to see dreams realized, you first need to specifically identify them. Then visualize them as being possible. 

Vision Board Exercise

Now’s the time to have a little fun!  Being a left-brained lawyer for so many years, I had never heard of creating a vision board until I was in my late 40’s.  And, many thanks to Julia Cameron, creator of The Artist's Way.  My long-dormant creative side awakened!  It became blatantly clear what I value most.

Here are simple steps to creating a Vision Board:

  1. Gather a big pile of your favorite magazines, a large blank poster board, a glue stick, and a good pair of scissors.
  2. Give yourself a limited amount of time, no more than 20 minutes.  Set a timer. The point here is to engage your sense of first impression and refrain from over-thinking. Now, rapidly begin to flip through the magazines and rip out any pages with pictures, words, phrases, and photos that speak to you.  These would be things you really like, things you would like to have in your life, things you believe represent the soul of who you are to yourself.  Release any negative self-talk, such as “Oh, that’s nice, but I’ll never be able to afford it.”  Or “That will take too much effort to look like her.” Or "My [INSERT PERSON] would never let me have OR do that."  Completely release your inhibitions while doing this and just enjoy the process of identifying all these wonderful things for yourself.
  3. When the allotted time is up, you are going to put the ripped up magazines aside and concentrate on the stack of the pages you have unabashedly collected.  Sort through them slowly. See what comes up for you.  Do you notice any themes, patterns, similar colors, or other common elements?  If you have more pages than room on your board, group similar things together and winnow to images that most strongly speak to you. 
  4. Now, trim and stylize with your scissors in order to adhere them to your poster board. Arrange them on your board in any way that appeals to you and, once you have things in place, begin to glue them to the board.  There is no right way or wrong way to do this, and no way that the finished product is supposed to look.  My images were circular and oval with soft, overlapping edges.  A friend of mine created a board completely out of squares and rectangles, lining up the edges.  The point is to make the arrangement appealing to your eyes only.
  5. Once all of your images have been glued to the board, stand back and take a look.  Standing back gives you a different perspective than you may have had while up close trimming and gluing.  Ask yourself:  What emerged? What am I feeling?  Pay attention.  This may be your “here and now” calling.

Whether you create a vision board, or engage in another form of visualization exercise, I encourage you to allow the emergence of dreams and goals you may have been suppressing. Begin to foresee what it would be like to honor those dreams and goals.  I congratulate you as you move forward with this next chapter of your precious life. 

If you are ready to move on, not just simply move out, I am here to help.  Together we can reduce and resolve conflict as part of your marriage dissolution.  It is a gift you give yourself to implement what may be needed to bring those visions for yourself to fruition. 

Published on Sepember 18, 2018