Why I Wrote A Book About You

“I dream

and the dream breaks

the dream forgives its brokenness

but the broken ones never let go of the dream”

Gu Cheng

Some dreams we hold very very tightly. Others we might forget in a secret drawer because we don’t believe they will ever find a life. Some dreams take us through a sharp unexpected turn while others are not even ours, but are inherited from people in our lives we considered as ‘knowing better’. There are short dreams and long dreams, yet we can dream only a single dream at a time, just as we can breathe only one inhalation at a time.

There comes a point, after holding the shards of a broken vase,

trying to fill it with water

and watching it leak more and more

over time,

that you give up

and simply ask

well then, what other container can

hold my flow?

There is one thing in common between our day- and night-dreams — they don’t tell us how to pave the way to meet them in real flesh and blood. They speak to us through symbols and archetypes, like drops of water that we will never know whether they belong to the river or to the sea. The dream borrows your gifts as its legs and your heart as its wings.

After my miscarriage at the beginning of 2019, I was quite broken. My body was broken, my spirit was broken, and so was the dream of being a mother. And if that wasn’t enough it looked like my coaching practice was falling apart as well. It wasn’t so much about losing a livelihood as such, but about letting a passion and calling die right in front of my eyes.

To tend to our dreams,

those with the broken wings

and those that we haven’t yet dared to even conceive

is to reimagine a whole from the pieces.

Towards the end of 2019 I felt the breeze tickling the feathers of my broken wings and witnessed how the burden of fulfilling a dream doesn’t have to be a width you carry alone on your shoulders. Life can dream for you.

I had a lot of free time and ample experience of working with women, helping them find their way to trust themselves deeply and express themselves clearly, confidently and lovingly as they healed a wounded heart. The shards of all those women’s dreams began to come together, and I knew I had to let it out from the temples of my memory and heart. So I started writing.

One of the most painful broken dreams I know of is the loss of a mother’s love. Throughout my years as a meditation teacher and a life coach, many women who suffered from some kind of pain of a severed relationship with their mother found me. Healing my own pain of being abandoned, lied to and betrayed by my own mum forged a gift within me that I learned to acknowledge and appreciate for the richness it has enabled in my life.

In 2019, life had a way of showing me how that gift could kindle the light of other women out there who didn’t know how — getting caught repetitively in the trance of feeling not enough, feeling the belly churning when wanting to speak out their needs, being pushed by an instinctive impulse to be strong for others while struggling with their vulnerability, feeling somehow exiled by their story and without a satisfying sense of belonging, all of which is in many ways the result of the invisible effects of what I call the mother-wound.

And so this week I slide into the last paragraph, and the last line, of the book.

Some dreams move like glaciers,

like when you want to forgive someone

or want to forgive the broken pieces of your dream.

We cannot live without dreams but when we let our dreams dream us we discover how our brokenness is an open window that lets a caged bird fly.

I’m looking forward to sharing with you more about this book in the coming months as it becomes more and more tangible, and hopefully a vessel that can contain and kindle your own dreams.

I may not know you but I know that we are one.

I may not recognise you on the street but I will always feel your heart.

We may have different dreams but I know that for sure, you and I, have some broken dreams that we want to let go off and be free to dream the new ones.