I've surrendered my big dreams...

And shifted focus to the simple ones

I’ve had most of my life being told to dream big and shoot for the stars. 

I know even in that sentence I’m luckier than many. 

My parents always supporting us to be creative and challenge ourselves. 

When I found the personal development very early on, in some very impressionable years of my life - the subtle and not so subtle message was GO BIGGER. 

Push yourself. How delicious can you make your life… (and if it’s not there yet, there’s something up with you that needs fixing/ more personal development so that you can achieve the hugest of dreams). I’d hear story after story of multimillionaires going from broke to rollin in it in only a few years. 

Partners retiring spouses. Families traveling the world full time. 

I get it, 

It’s pretty normal for an element of ourselves to want more ease, more peace. And often these dreams are painted as the solution to all the problems of our current lives. 

I dreamt big as a 17 year old. 

My last year of high school, I was taught at time network marketing was an avenue to freedom. 

For some it absolutely is. 

I hustled hard, and within a year, I was traveling Aus with my then boyfriend in a $54k motorhome we bought together, and we were making close to 2k a week through our NWM business while we traveled the country, guest speaking at live events, interviewed for the companies magazine and honestly at 18 life was pretty great. 

What people forget to mention when it comes to dreaming, 

Is there’s the dream in the golden light, and there’s the dream in it’s shadow form. 

And often they come hand in hand. 

Theres pros and cons of almost any life circumstance. 

The con of this one is that even though I had hustled for “residual” income, it wasn’t true residual, and unless I kept up the workload, things would “go backwards.” Though how things were going - was not sustainable. Just a few years, I’d tell myself. Then we’ll be set up. 

The pros of course were traveling full time, so young. We were making friends with all the grey nomads, exploring lots as the kids we were. 

And making great money doing it. 

As the relationship broke down, 

And I needed space to breathe, to recalibrate and to heal, 

I need space from the business. 

And as I took it, the business crumbled. 

I flew to Indonesia. Eat pray love style. 

My dream changed. 

I didn’t want a business or a life that wasn’t sustainable. One I couldn’t maintain healthy relationships within. One with a high level of responsibility in managing a huge team. I didn’t want to make something - no matter how great, only for it to not be able to survive without my 247 attention (lol future Kat, what do you think a toddler is). 

My life flipped upside down living in Indonesia. I healed from a sore heart. I realised I was actually great to be around even though the end of the relationship didn’t reflect that. I found contact and ecstatic dance. I found my body. I connected to emotion and disconnected from suppression and hustle. 

I decided I didn’t want to make a business that was a coping mechanism and addiction out of facing the hardness of relationship and the shadows of the self. 

This was almost 9 years ago now. 

I connected to a part of myself that therefore shifted and changed my dreaming. 

In more recent years, Since becoming a mother, I really stepped myself out of the personal development and entrepreneur industry and even though many of my personal values align with some aspects of both of these things, 

The energy in which I relate to them has changed. Instead of hustle, lean in hard, Discover everything there is to know about myself, break myself down and build myself up, hustle again, start businesses, money, finances, wealth etc

It’s shifted to allowing a slow reveal of myself as my life moves and changes. It’s self reflection and unpacking and processing when necessary and also enjoying and indulging and receiving my life as it is. 

It’s learning about wealth and money and also - in this season, focusing on creative work and how that FEELS in my body rather than how BIG I can make something as quick as possible. 

And not to say there’s anything wrong with the former, but I do believe it suits a season - and it’s not the one I’m in right now. 

My dreams shifted. 

I wanted a baby. I dreamt of laying in bed breastfeeding. Dreams of colouring in at the dining table. Dreams of hand building a mud kitchen and sitting on an outdoor couch watching my children play. It simplified. 

Though again, there’s gold and there’s shadow. 

The gold - Simplicity, peacefulness, Heart fulfilment and pride when I witness Raf master a new skill or light up like the nights sky in the desert. 

The shadow - The boredom. The mundane. The repetitive routing. The feeling a lot less sexy than I did half naked on the ubud dance floor all those years ago. 

I find things moving again for me now. 

Firstly I’ve been craving the innocence of the Personal growth industry again. Not network marketing, or Big seminars or even the instagram world of the echo chamber of Personal development and self help. 

When I was 16 I attended a summer camp in the jungle in bali. There were 50 kids from around the world there, all different backgrounds and lives. I was there on a scholarship which I applied for as there was no way my parents would be able to afford to send myself and my two young brothers. 

We all got scholarships to go and we spent the week learning mud fighting, speed reading, memory improvement, team building and communication skills. We had time to reflect, time to be vulnerable. We had a lived experience of community and what it felt like to overcome challenge and be celebrated by 50 others around you cheering for your success. It was uncomfortable at Times, and perspective shifting too. It wasn’t about social media, it was a private experience of beauty and change and though it was over a decade ago now I still consider it a pivotal moment in my life. 

I share that because that FELT to me so wildly different to ANY form of book, podcast, course these days. 

The closest I’d get is a retreat. 

But that’s what I’m craving. Lived experience with real people, less expectation to create perfectionism within the self, 

And mores simply having an experience that transforms and reveals the spirit. 

To me, birth comes to this too. I’m excited for the day I birth again. My birth with Rafi was better than any seminar I’ve ever attended haha. 

I’m craving a simplifying of my dreams.

Because I have many, as I’m sure you do too. 

I’d love to spend 1-2 years living in bali with my family 

I’d love to spent 1-2 years in Europe, Italy and Greece with my family. 

I sometimes imagine of a group of friends all buying converted school buses and convoying in the traveling village over NZ

Or Hawaii homeschool life for a hot second. 

I dream of an acreage and cows and chickens and my kids playing outside everyday in a very slow and peaceful homesteading life. 

I dream many dreams. 

And they’ll all have a season. They’ll also all likely evolve and change as I do. 

They all also have their shadows. 

I know living overseas means less time with our family here in aus. 

I know it takes learning a new system of currency or language or trusting a medical system in the case of an emergency. 

I know that bus life isn’t as glam as insta makes it out to be and often you’re in a back carpark trying to find a safe place to sleep for the night. 

I know that homesteading is a lot of responsibility and anchors you to a place in a way that travel doesn’t. 

I’ve learned to (mostly) acknowledge the season I’m in. 

Anticipate the next. 

Have reverence for the ones that have passed rather than yearn for them still. 

Right now in this very season, We have recently switched from “BIG dreaming” to “Simple dreaming” and it feels SO light and welcomed in my body. 

we have been traveling the last month. Moving beds every few nights. 

There have been many joyous moments of this last month. Many challenges too - like the expenses of this style of travel, and having rhythm and routine for our toddler. 

We have another 6 weeks of slow travel. I’m grateful it’s slowing down. 

I’m craving to nest. Make home. 

We’ve lived in other peoples furnished homes since Raf was 18 months old. He’s now about to turn 3. 

18 months in beautiful places and grateful for the opportunities but I’m craving to craft a home that actually feels like ours. Has our family flavour. 

I’ve surrendered the dream of buying a property to another season. Maybe the next. Maybe a few from now. That dream is refining and changing and I can appreciate the time I’ve got to allow it to reveal more to me. 

This season I’m happy to rent, To create a home, somewhere for the next couple of years. I want more babies, and to be very connected to community. That’s the focus. 

Then to have the opportunity to up and go with my little family when the time comes. 

Overseas will call us inevitably and I look forward to the time where it feels good to answer that all. 

Maybe homesteading on a legacy property we “own” and can pass to our children comes after that. I’m not sure. 

I want to stay open to opportunity and the mystery of life. 

I want to make sure there’s space for my dreams to move. 

I also need the simplicity, 

Instead of choosing between 3 dreams all the time, 

There’s a beauty in committing to the one dream that suits this season and going two feet in. 

Knowing there’s space to change later. 

Right now for our family what feels most important is groundedness, learning to grow food, investing our time and energy into community and the people who make space for us. 

To focus on these early years of parenting and having some form of rhythm. I desire to focus on ritual and not feeling too busy to celebrate a winter solstice and creating special opportunities for core memories with Raf. 

I want Tully to feel like he has the space to melt into his work which he is so passionate about but he often feels there’s a pull between life and family and work. I want that pressure to release for him as we find a flow. I want to make with my hands. Clay. A mud kitchen. Art. I want to write and write and write and have time to sit in my creative exploration rather than just what I know. 

I want to be present and HERE for my friends in their own seasons of change. Many are having babies, moving houses, and wanting to gather community and I love being apart of these important moments. 

What feels like success to me is being present with my child. Feeling like I can regulate my emotions because I’m not constantly at capacity. 

It feels like making love often and feeling desire pulse in my body. 

It’s growing our family sometime soon, and traveling to the depths of the birth world with presence, and openness for what’s available there. 

It’s having quiet moments to write or having evenings with a glass of wine, my beautiful husband and a slab of clay. 

It’s having chai with my friends while the kids play, and Rafi having learned more about his socialisation boundaries so playdates become more peaceful haha 

The simple things. 

Thats the focus for the next year or two. 

Then I can anticipate gears will shift. 

I talk to Tully often about how 30 years from now, when I look back, what story do I want to have told. 

Honestly for me, it’s not that we found a home to buy and we lived in the same suburb for 15 years and sent the kids to school and stayed put until they all left high school then we went on a cruise ship for a month. 

But I get that for some people that’s heaven. 

I want to tell stories of packing up little ones and moving to the hills in Italy or spending a month on a boat in Greece. 

I want to reminisce on living in bali and the kids thriving at the green school for a a while until the winds took us somewhere else. 

Of course I want to buy the homestead where the kids will be able to remember their family dog, and how they all raised animals and collected the eggs in the morning. 

There are many lives to be lived within this one. 

There is vulnerability and courage in dreaming BIG and BOLD

But this season for me is finding the gifts in dreaming simple. Not small. Simple. For taking the BIG pressures off to live every season as the biggest.
And acknowledging that slow and steady may actually fill the desire and fulfilment that is thought to come from big. When it actually grows from simple. 

That there are many lifetimes within this. Many pathways and timelines to pursue and to breathe. Theres time for it all AND what does THIS season right now call for me to be. 

Enjoy the big dreaming AND enjoy the simple life

My current musings

I trust the evolution of my life. 

I love witnessing my dreams reveal themselves to me. 

There is vulnerability in dreaming big, 

 also magic in simplicity. 

I’m exactly where I need to be

My dreams want me too

I honour my seasons and find the gift in each.

What are your BIG dreams that you may have surrendered to a season (Or maybe this is your season) and what are your more simple dreams that make your heart sing?