Dream a Little Dream

Many years ago, I had dreams of co-hosting a retreat with my dear friend Little Sarah in Jamaica, which had become her home over the years following graduate school. Sarah is a ball full of fierce skills, including yoga teacher, massage therapist, and fellow Psychologist. We would discuss making this plan a reality, merging mind and body therapies to create a self-work intensive. This dream began to solidify until all was derailed by Covid-19.

Enter 2020, one of the hardest years for most of us, including me. During a global pandemic, forced to quarantine at home with a 2 and 5 year old, learning how to work a computer well enough to offer continued therapy, my military spouse was sent to Baltimore to work for a year and my mom was diagnosed with an aggressive type of breast cancer and began treatment. I understood that the only way that I would get through the year was to employ all of the strategies that I shared with my clients. I entered therapy (again), began working with a massage therapist, and enlisted all of the supports I could imagine.

Holy whirlwind, and fast forward a year later. My mother was doing well, kids were back in school, my spouse was home. It became clear to me that the time for me to act was now since the lesson of the previous year was that time waits for no one. Dreams are only as powerful as the steps that are taken to bring them to action. My dream would not escape me any longer. In my 2020 struggles, I had formed a strong bond with my massage therapist and came to learn that we shared a similar passion for helping other business women navigate (and hopefully dodge) the various difficulties that we had experienced personally. Me being an Aries with a quick pull trigger saw an opportunity for our passions to unite and asked her if she wanted to co-host a retreat with me. Luckily, she said yes. With that, the goal to gain knowledge and to prove to myself that I could do this was set.

Though the original vision had to be tailored to meet the safety and comfort level of the world’s pandemic landscape (re-imagining a far away location to a local beach and a lot of painful nose swabs), it would continue to be a place where I could offer a space for women to feel empowered (hello my life mission), to learn business + therapeutic skills, and to model that dreaming big dreams followed by big footsteps will always prove successful. The goal of proving to myself that I could, without a doubt, even when life got really, really, unimaginably hard, make my dreams a reality and add retreat leader to my list of ever-growing quirky talents was satisfied. If you’re ever in doubt of your abilities, or fear is blocking your path, I invite you to take a deep breath, write down your vision, and pull the trigger. If you keep your goal on gaining knowledge or experience, you can never lose.