Why I Stopped Making Vision Boards
They’re fun to make. They’re beautiful to look at. And they’re powerful as f*ck.
Which is precisely why I don’t make vision boards anymore. Because I’ve had so many instances where the things I’ve put on them—the images and phrases I’ve cut out of magazines and pasted down while listening to Apple Chill Mix and sipping my classy boxed wine—have fairly peeled themselves from the bristol board and crashed into my life, breathless and jubilant, like a kid who’s landed her first back flip on the trampoline.
Of course, that’s how vision boards are supposed to work. The idea is that you collect pictures and words that represent what you want more of in your life; you stick them down on the poster board and put the board up somewhere you can see it every day; and then you go about your life with those things at the front of your mind. And then one day they arrive.
Nonbelievers will pooh-pooh vision boarding, saying this manifesting business is just a bunch of bunk from The Secret, but after 25 years of making them and 10 years of leading workshops, I could quite confidently challenge any of those doubters to a vision boarding gunfight and I’d walk away, spurs jingling, in a cloud of small-town old-west dust. There’s just no arguing with the universe’s power to manifest our intentions.
Where focus goes, energy flows.
I’ve manifested love affairs, partners, careers, clients, experiences, and ways of being. I’ve even manifested a work retreat in a very specific, very tucked-away place in the coastal BC wilderness, down to the wood-fired sauna floating in a quiet inlet. That one was a real head-spinner.
See the sauna on the middle right? YEAH, WEIRD
I’ve also manifested complexity—and the attendant messes arising from that complexity.
As I’ve learned more about energy, attention and desire, I’ve grown a little more cautious. I am shocked and humbled by the power of volition. Walt Disney had it right: If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
I have underestimated the power of my dreaming.
I have also come to realize that I perhaps am not the very best judge of what my path should be. Of where I should go. Of what I should want. In the last few years, I’ve come to understand that there is a path and pattern to my life—and I’m actually not the one in charge. Well, I am…but I also am not.
Let’s call it destiny. And it’s actually not mine to define.
What Alex wants on the surface is much more short-sighted and limited in scope than what is actually possible. Alex is human, and while she’s getting wiser and more present with every passing day, she’s still wired and mired in the complicated, chaotic world that all of us humans have created together, complete with its absurd rules, arbitrary inequalities and broke-down systems.
Alex is a tool. (That sentence might come back and bite me in the ass one day 😂) She is the interface between that bizarre, painful, lovable human-created world and what is truly real. The arbiter of experience.
And while Alex has a pretty clear understanding of what is possible in that human-created world, she’s still pretty new to the power and energy that arises from the non-human, the nonspecific, the universal, the divine.
But as a tool, Alex is mighty powerful, because she has figured out how, by manipulating attention and focus, to connect that universal energy to the things she thinks she wants in the human world.
Emphasis on those words: the things she thinks she wants.
The things I thought I wanted in 2010. I mean, it was a KILLER year, but my power of intention also called in a level of complexity that’s still rolling out across my world.
I no longer think I should go after the things I think I want with the concentrated energy of vision boards. Because they—both the desires and the boards—are limited in scope. They’re limited by what my brain can dream up. They’re limited by what I believe is possible. They’re limited, in truth, by the things I want to avoid and therefore don’t want to experience again: “I don’t like that, so instead I’ll wish for this.” They’re birthed out of my human desire to control, to dictate parameters, to set the stage for what I think would be nicest.
Even peaceful things, like my more recent boards reflect, are a bid to direct things in a way I deem suitable:
Three months into the pandemic, and a more discerning view of what’s important.
But invariably, those things—especially the material ones—are short-sighted. And when they arrive, I’ve discovered they’re not always as I-will-solve-your-problems as I thought they’d be. I mean, sometimes they are—sometimes they’re fucking FABULOUS—but often they introduce complexity that I hadn’t anticipated.
Steering my own unfolding is like shaping a bonsai tree: it’s easy to manipulate a specific profile. But it’s not the profile that would have resulted had the tree been allowed to develop in a more wu wei way.
To be a true servant of the universe—to do what I came here to do as well as I can do it, to live into my highest purpose—I need to let go of control, surrender to what comes, and respond from that place. I need to wait, do less, want less, empty myself and open myself to the plans the universe has for me instead.
And it’s hard. I want things all the time. I can’t stop wanting them. I want a Toyota Tacoma. I want a house that isn’t on such a busy street. I want horses (but do I really? that’s a big-ass housepet with a bitchin kibble budget). I want whisper-thin cashmere turtlenecks in every earth tone (okay, that’s pretty harmless and I can’t see how that would go sideways), and a man who will love me fiercely and patiently as I make messes when I act out my old wounds on my way to becoming something limitless.
As I read back over that paragraph, I realize that maybe it’s not the wanting that is dangerous, perhaps it’s the framing. I want wonderful things, but instead of going after them in the way I’ve been known to do, driving them with my fierce Sagittarian fire-woman energy, I’m happier now to just put it out there and surrender to what happens.
Setting preferences in a low-key way—and meeting with nonresistance what I am offered.