Before we begin let me be very clear that our vision quest done in a traditional indigenous way would last for far longer than one or two nights. On such vision quest you may even take Hallucinogenics or at the least marijuana and ordered to spin you out into the realms of your imagination. For me that is a completely different process and most importantly not valuable for what we are doing here.

The best way to undertake a vision quest is to do it in stages. What we’re going to do here is the first stage. By taking your VIP score, in each of the seven or eight areas of life, and then asking yourself what would bridge the gap between where you are, your current score and 10 out of 10. Now given that you have already scored yourself what it does is reveal that you do have in your imagination what 10 out of 10 would look like right here and now. That fact is very hard to shy away from. These are probably very simple things if we look at the current reality and say right now if I had more intimacy, more pay, more friends, better work, then with all that I would probably score myself close to 10 out of 10 in each area of life. The second aspect of this first stage is to introduce the BD you have scale. That means we breakdown these very simple things into three categories.

the first is the B category. In the B category you are saying something like be happier, be better paid, be in love more. That should be fairly simple. The second part is really important in goalsetting because it asks you what would you do if you had that completion in any aspect of your life. In other words if you achieved all these gap filling objectives what would you do with it? This may take a little more time. For example you might say I would like to be more intimate, what would I do with that I would share more love with my partner and family, and the final step is to introduce the have. When we introduce have we are asking what would I need have in order to be and do that. It is usually financially based because everything that we want to be and do is going to cost. It might cost travel or it might cost a bigger house or whatever so we want to ground ourselves in reality by putting the word have into material assets. The best way to do this is to give it a financial value.

So why not now grab a pen and paper and ask yourself what would you Love to be, do and have in each area of life to bridge the gap between your current VIP score and 10 out of 10.

once you’ve done that it should be a fairly easy score to put down what you would love to be do and have in 12 months. That means that when you achieve your current 10 out of 10, you automatically give birth to new opportunities in the future. So stretch your imagination and say what would you love to be do and have 12 months from now.

so why not grab a pen and paper now and try to jot that down?

the final step is to stretch yourself out five or 10 years. This gets even easier because now your current reality will not limit your possibilities. You can really go to town here remembering to ask yourself what would you love to be doing have in each area of life, but now you add the one riding condition that you couldn’t fail. So the question is what would you love to be do and have 10 years from now if you couldn’t fail?

for this last exercise I recommend sitting outdoors after dinner with a glass of wine if you wish and looking up at the stars and just let I thought drop into your mind and scribble it down on your notepad. Try not to be logical or rational or intellectual about this exercise let it be fun and triggered by your vivid imagination. The difference between a maturing adult and a child is this quality in a mature adult gets burnt. We get trapped in reality. Reality is beautiful but it’s not a great basis for your imagination. The idea here is to stretch yourself beyond your current limits and, with the condition that you couldn’t fail if you tried it, come up with things in each area of life that you would love to be do and have 10 years from now. If this project becomes burdensome you know one of the big problems that you are having in life is that you have lost your imagination.

your imagination gets you out of trouble. There is no greater tool than your imagination to deal with life’s challenges, disappointments and hurt. When a person cannot re-imagine the future after a loss of a partner or a job they become very self depreciating. That can even turn into self harm. There are many children whose parents are paranoid about the future that they can’t imagine for themselves that they start living themselves vicariously through their children and this point in time the children get nailed to the wall with horrible discipline and regimented regimes. The parent who loses their imagination of the future is usually in a marriage that they do not want to be in but they cannot get out of. A person in a marriage or relationship where they lose perspective and cannot imagine the future starts to try to make a vision out of the day and they used quite often their children as the vehicle. They start living vicariously through the child. The child subsequently pushes back and there becomes a war in a home. This is why doing a vision quest for a parent has many more advantages than people think. So if you find yourself struggling with your vision sitting out in the garden with a notepad asking yourself where you would love to be doing have in the future you have just found one of the reasons your children may not be flourishing.

so why not now start preparing yourself for this evening. You’ll need a glass of wine if you wish, are comfortable warm place outdoors and the guarantee that the family, partner and children and phone will not disrupt your time until you are ready. Make sure that you did not get annoyed by temperature or mosquitoes or wild bears. This time outdoors sitting in a comfortable chair looking up at the stars you are asking the universe and therefore yourself a very beautiful question. The answer can change 1000 times it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to be abundant in thought and to enquire about this in all seven aspects of life. The process is called catching a feather. You can find this process in the great Hindu teachings, Buddhism, western religion and many other teachings. Like all things in Innerwealth we have not invented the wheel. What we have done is used the universal laws of nature to distill and simplify some very clumsy human development process into a powerful and simple core exercise.

good luck with it. With spirit,

Chris

that’s the end of this day and the exercises there in.