The power of clear visioning

By Rachel Carroll | October 20, 2021 |

During the extremely challenging holding pattern we are making into a life, this picture provides a daily salve for our stressed souls and a welcome reminder of the power of clear visioning.

An update

Superman and I are now living in a lovely little seaside town, on The Bellarine Pennisula, VIC.
After our return trip to Queensland one afternoon at the end of August, we were informed that unless we wanted to swim to Auckland, we’d be waiting a while for the two governments to decide when planes would begin taking off from Australia and landing in New Zealand.

We’d already had quite enough of living life according to the whims of government, so with the prospect of getting to our family in Queensland and our new life in Auckland put well and truly in the who knows? basket, we decided to reclaim our life. We decided to choose how we wanted to be living, where we wanted to be.

As hooligan construction workers threw an ugly tantrum in the inner city and helicopters buzzed our high rise temporary home in Docklands and even an earthquake shook our foundations, we were feeling very stressed indeed and struggled to see a clear vision for our future.
What did our future look like?
Where were we going?
Where was it best for us to be for the next, who knows how long, awaiting the opening of borders?
Would we get into New Zealand before we were permitted entry to our home state?!

Without a fixed address and legally allowed to relocate, we chose to get out of town, to a quieter pace of life.
But where?

Trying to make a decision when stressed is very difficult.
Because when humans are stressed, our brains work purely to help us survive.
To survive at all costs.
This is because it wasn’t that long ago when stress equated to something actually life threatening, like an enemy tribe entering our camp or the wilder beast we are hunting for food turning on us with its enormous horns.

Stress used to be about survival.
Life and death.
Not likes on Facebook or finishing that audit on time.

When we encounter stress, we go into fight or flight; the blood runs out of all but our limbic (reptilian) brain and into our skeletal muscles – to help us fight those tribesmen or run away from that wilder beast and its horns.
We don’t think with our limbic brain, as much as react.
We do what we’ve always done, just to survive.
And that’s important when it comes to horned wilder beast!

But during stressful times, it means our frontal lobes, the part of the brain responsible for new thoughts, new ideas aren’t getting enough juice to have any – new thoughts and new ideas that is.

So with riots on the CityLink, police choppers in the air and no idea when we’d see our family or have a home of our own again, these stressors made it really difficult to get a clear vision for our future.

I’d run, do yoga and balance my chakras each morning and ask for a vision of my future – day in, day out.
All I got was this:

The feeling of walking from the kitchen, onto a wooden deck and down onto grass
A place with no gutters
And old wooden telegraph poles

Makes it a little tricky when searching on Google Maps!

But…
The power of clear visioning is so immense that when it came to considering the options we were presented with, our choice was clear; any place that did not have these three meagre pieces of my vision were out. The power of clear visioning empowered us to make what seemed an irrational choice – a place without internet or linen – instead of a place that had it all, or so it seemed to our rational brains.

The power of clear visioning and maintaining our faith in that vision has us now living in a quiet, bird filled, natural paradise.
Just what we needed after the turmoil of the last few months.
And sorting out internet and linen turned out to be very easy in the end.
Of course!

For me, the greatest gift of clear visioning is being freed from my rational brain and its list of pros and cons.
You know?
That tennis match, backward and forward between two rationally good options.