Have you ever felt like you were afraid of your own Big Dreams? 

I see it all the time: Smart, successful people who are crushing the game for other people keep failing to reach their goals, because the goals they are setting aren’t really theirs. 

People are setting goals they hate. They are setting their mama’s goals and their grandmama’s goals…

And the pattern I see is smart, successful people who stay living their shadow lives and working their shadow careers, because their Inner Critic is so active and spiritually self-silencing, they either can’t get clear on their purpose, or they set soulless goals they don’t even really care about 

And that’s why they don’t achieve them.

Because their own Big Dreams spark fear. 

The fear of failing. 

The fear of success.

The fear you might die still full of un-created ideas.

The fear you might die without really having LIVED.

Your true, sacred, BIG Dreams, by definition, will make you feel exposed. Vulnerable. At risk. 

They will spark fear.

But why?

The perform-conform-produce-to-prove-your-worthiness lies of this culture have more than a little bit to do with why you may feel afraid of your own Dreams. 

Because you’re good at performing. You’re GOOD at getting external validation. You’re good at getting raises and promotions. 

And that becomes a template for your LIFE and for your WORLD.

Perform, perform, perform >>, get external validation >> WHEW! Feel like I’m OK. Feel certainty.

So it’s untethering to even contemplate letting all of that external approval go. 

How will you get the greenlight to feel OK, if you opt out of the same structures and agreements that bind you and constrain you and keep your genius and your joy small.

The other thing that’s comforting about the shadow life is that there’s a blueprint for it.

And there’s a blueprint for the “Dream Deferred” life. You go to college. You get a job. You get performance reviews. You get a raise. You get a better job. 

You trade notes with other people about the fantasy of moving to Belize or when you’ll finally have enough money in the bank to be who you really are. 

“Someday”, you think.  And you keep thinking. And you keep thinking.

So it’s scary to wonder what north star you’ll navigate by if you get off that treadmill? 

How will you know what to do next when you’re no longer living the blueprint, Dream Deferred life? 

Scary. 

If you’ve ever gotten an inkling that there’s a Big Dream in your heart, and felt an immediate surge of fear, you are not alone. 

We’re afraid of ending up weird and by ourselves if we opt out of the chronic fear, outrage, scarcity and unworthiness everyone else seems to be okay living in.

We’re afraid we’ll vomit or die if we try to start a business or write a book and it doesn’t go well.

But in my work helping people get their Big Dream Energy back, here’s what most of them are really afraid of:

You are afraid you will fail at doing the work their Big Dreams will require you to do.

Almost everyone would rather stay in a chronic state of wanting it and not even going for it than pursue your Big Dream and feel like you’re failing at doing the work your Big Dreams require you to do.

And THAT fear surfaces a really important fallacy: 

You think your Big Dreams will require you to do a bunch of work.

But the truth is that your Big Dreams want to do a bunch of work within YOU.

Symbolic work. Psychological work. Neurobiological work. Spiritual work within you.

Shadow work. Trauma healing. Ancestral curse-breaking within you. Through you.

Healing the primal wounds of your heart and soul. Within you.

Healing the primal wounds within the collective unconscious… through YOU.

Your Big Dreams want to take you to these depths. They want to take you to some extremes. 

And yes: This is some heavy stuff, the inner work of building the capacity to do your dreams.

But we don’t do all of this deep work for the sake of it. We do it for the DREAM. We do it for the sake of our lives, our liberation, our JOY.

I don’t want you to do your shadow work for the sake of it. 

We do it so we can be and do and have and learn and create the things we came here for. 

We do all this deep, inner work NOT to get STUCK in the inner work so we can come back into our real lives, and play tennis and run, and surf and raise children and have wonderful love affairs and have wonderful lifelong partnerships, and wear beautiful clothes and travel and write and sing and dance and build empires and brands and homes… and we do all this deep inner work so we can do all of those things masterfully: with the tools, skills, rituals and healing we got from the deep stuff.

Don’t get stuck in your season of shadow work, Brilliant One.

Do not get stuck in the shadows.

The Psalm says “yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” It doesn’t say, “yea, though I pitched a tent, set up camp, built a home and a village and a nation in the valley of the shadow of death and lived there for generations.”

And just to stay Old Testament for a minute, even the Israelites only wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, Brilliant One. 

They did get to the Promised Land eventually.

Your Big Dreams are your symbolic promised land. 

And ultimately, the work they want to do within us is not just the shadow work. 

Your Big Dreams want to do sacred light work within you, too. 

They want you to live in the light and the joy.

Your Big Dreams ain’t just about the before and the during… there’s an AFTER to this. 

Not one in which everything is super perfect and nothing unwanted ever happens, but one in which you get to reap the rewards and get to lick up the juice from the squeeze of the fruits of all that deep inner work. 

There is a time to get out of the shadows and come back into the light.

And I want you to know that you and me and that one and even that trouble maker over there, all of us doing our Big Dreams—not just the inner work to get the capacity to do our Big Dreams, but that’s how humanity evolves. 

Doing your dreams is how YOU, individual brilliant human, reclaim the fragments of your soul and come into a new season of wholeness, liberation and joy. 

And it’s how the old, rotten institutions of our world will be replaced with a new world of the wondrous. 

It’s how all art gets created. 

How science progresses. 

Individual human people doing their inner work and then doing their Big Dreams is how the next generation of humans shows up just being… different than all those who came before, in wonderful ways.

So don’t pitch your tent and build your village in the valley of the shadows, Brilliant One.

And don’t let the fear of your Big Dreams stop you from answering your own personal, cosmic call to adventure. 

I want you to let the love for your own as-yet-uncreated Big Dreams energize the journey of your awakening soul—aka your SoulTour. 

It is a journey of recalibration, actualization, through the shadows, through every corner of your Life and your Self…and into alignment.

It is a journey where you then let your Big Dreams lure you back out into the light.

Back into your LIFE. 

Along your journey, keep in your heart these words of The Writer-Philosopher Queen Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote: “even if you are not ready for day, it cannot always be night.”

Head up + heart out,

P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranichollekirke on FB | TW | IG | LI