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Class OverviewThere’s a big difference between not doing what you love and not knowing what you love. Do you want to live the life of your dreams but have no idea what those dreams are or how to find them? (Check out the Top 10 Big Ideas from the class below!) Your ProfessorChristy Harden is an author, animal fanatic, commercial model and actor, SLP and Lover of Life. She holds a Masters in Speech Pathology, and English, and a BA in Environmental Studies.How to Connect With Your Inner Voice and Discover Your DreamsThere’s a big difference between not doing what you love and not knowing what you love. Do you want to live the life of your dreams but have no idea what those dreams are or how to find them?  Maybe you’re at a crossroads:  divorce, retirement or a newly empty nest. Maybe you’ve inherited money and you’re ready for a new start. Or maybe you’ve just had enough of compromising yourself to bring in a buck or make others happy and it’s time to take your life in a YOU direction. But what the heck does that mean for you, exactly? The good (and the bad) news is that there’s only one person who can tell you exactly what living the life of your dreams looks like for you–and that’s YOU. But all you need is a map to get to your map so that you can find your way back to where those dreams lie buried. No matter how distant your dreams feel to you, they’re still there, waiting for you to come along with your shovel and dig them out. I’m about to hand you a giant shovel. The reason we lose connection with our dreams is that we’ve lost connection with our authentic selves, with who we truly are. But how can we reconnect? Reconnecting with our true selves and staying connected can seem like a mysterious and daunting task. The truth is, it isn’t. There are some very concrete actions that can be taken to get you back in touch with you and with your dreams. As a bonus, these actions will also vastly improve the quality of your life in general! Here are my Top 10 Big Ideas on how to reconnect with yourself and discover your dreams!  The Top 10 Big Ideas1 Get Clear On What the Inner Voice Is and Why You Want to Reconnect What IS the Inner Voice? We all have one, and you may already refer to it as your intuition, gut feelings, hunches, inspiration or something else. The Inner Voice is the part of you that knows without using logic or reason. Have you ever thought of someone and received a call from them immediately afterwards? Or have you ever been inspired out of the blue to try something new that grew into a favorite hobby? That’s your Inner Voice. Studies show that when asked to choose between two options based solely on intuition (the Inner Voice), participants chose correctly 90% of the time. The Inner Voice also guides us toward people, activities and places that reflect our authentic selves. The voice of our inner wisdom is available to us all the time, we just have to tune in.2 Tame Your Mind: Meditation For the Inner Voice to become consistently audible, we need to first quiet the noise that drowns it out. A good portion of that noise emanates from within us–from our minds. While our minds are useful and necessary for everything from breathing to picking up the kids at school to understanding Quantum Physics, the deeper part of us, the Inner Voice, can be drowned out by the brain’s constant yammering. If we don’t realize that the mind is merely a tool for that deeper self to use, our inner guide’s whisper becomes inaudible. Simply distracting the mind or “zoning out” won’t do the trick. What we need is a way to get to know the mind and its antics and practice placing our attention on our Inner Voice instead. A fantastic way to do this is through meditation. 3 Tame Your Life: Simplify Most of us hustle, bustle, rush and multitask through our days, compromising the quality of almost everything we do. By the time we slip into bed at night our heads are spinning. By implementing these three practices: 1) Prioritizing Activities2) Leaving Enough Time For Those Activities 3) Performing Only One Activity At a TimeWe start to get some sense of inner calm. This is absolutely necessary for hearing the Inner Voice. Keeping a simple calendar and daily list of consciously chosen activities, cultivating a sense of flexibility and organizing your environment will do wonders to tame your life! 4 Be Here Our minds are always focused on the past or the future, constantly analyzing, connecting dots, interpreting and predicting: What will I make for lunch? What did that comment mean? How will I get there? This is absolutely vital and useful for living our lives, but we get stuck there! Who we really are is the awareness underneath all that brain chatter. Practicing placing our attention on the present moment is critical for hearing our Inner Voice’s guidance, which only speaks in the Now. While meditation provides a strong foundation for this skill, practicing dropping our attention from brain-spinning and returning our focus to the Now in our active lives is essential as well. 5 Listen to Your Body For many of us, our jobs and careers include logging a lot of time in front of a computer screen and/or sitting at a desk for hours on end.  In our culture, unless you’re a dancer, bodybuilder, stunt person or your career otherwise directly relies on physical abilities, we tend to largely ignore our bodies. Tuning in to our physical selves is a key component in becoming aware of the Inner Voice. Paying attention to our bodies includes an awareness of information relayed to us from our five-senses as well as stretching when we’re stiff and eating when we’re hungry, for example. The Inner Voice speaks to us not only in gut feelings, but through physical sensations as well. If we’re used to tuning those out, we miss the messages! 6 Find Out What Energizes and Depletes You Some folks can easily list things they like to do, people they enjoy and places where they feel energized. Many others, when asked, “what do you do for fun?” respond with a blank stare or mumble, “watch TV.” Paying attention to what actually gives you energy and what is depleting are big clues for what to follow up on to get you on the right track to finding out what it is you love, and to your dreams.7 Accept Fear Fear comes in many forms and is a big bully that will keep you from finding and realizing your dreams if you let it. Recognizing that fear is a normal and healthy part of life will go a long way toward being able to recognize it and take the next step toward finding out what your dreams are. Common fears that hold us back include: fear of the unknown, fear of not being good enough and fear of loss of security. With practice, these fears can be understood, recognized and met head on with kindness and appreciation (after all, fear is necessary and keeps us from harm). They don’t need to hold you back! 8 Stay Inspired Providing yourself with a structured framework of available aids such as supportive friends and/or family, books, and maybe even music is key to sustaining motivation and connection with your Inner Voice. Making a collage of inspiring people, attending related events or classes and joining groups focused on your areas of interest can be powerful supportive forces on your journey and help to keep you plugged in.9 Connect With Passion and Purpose Identifying your passions and purpose is as simple, and as difficult, as finding out what energizes you to a high degree. Taking the next step and the next and the next and the next with activities you find highly energizing will lead you to what you love, to your passions, your purpose and your dreams. This takes bravery and commitment, but if you want it badly enough, you can do it! 10 Live Love Once you’ve done the work to identify what it is that highly energizes you and you are intimately familiar with what that feels like, begin to fill your life with those things–with what you love. This is what the life of your dreams is made of! Being your true self all the time, no matter the circumstances and living from a highly energized space is true freedom. Living the feeling of love through the circumstance of our lives, however, is the cat’s pajamas! Being our authentic selves, living our passions and the lives of our dreams benefits not only us, but everyone around us. The whole world needs you and your passions; tune in to yourself and enjoy the ride!