Just Dive In!

Into your heart and soul you must dive deeply and fearlessly.  There is no other way.  I often think about my childhood – diving into the swimming pool, plunging into the ocean from the perfect perch on our family’s sailboat.  I was so courageous then.  I would stand, planning my smooth entrance into the water, taking in the other divers around me, watching how the sunlight bounced off the bottom, reflecting back to me all my bravado and beckoning to me to just dive in.

Just dive in.  Dive into life.  As part of a group of inspirational facebook pages, I write and post and share hundreds of thoughts every week that speak to this concept.  We all need to be inspired.  We all want to be encouraged and supported in our efforts to create a life for ourselves that we are proud of, that we feel good about, one that feels productive and rewarding.

But alas, it is more difficult and precarious to just dive in to life in the way that I would like to do.  I imagine my young lithe form breaking the surface of the glassy water, creating a channel for me to flow and glide into and through.

I had a dream once…. a long time ago….. I was swimming through a maze of creviced tunnels and grottos that were in the middle of the college that I attended – I would swim under the crystal clear water, rising to the surface on occasion, breaking for air like a graceful creature of the sea, each time taking refuge at an edge that I could hold onto, get my bearings, and then survey the next leg and swim on.  I remember in the dream that it felt like it took forever…that I swam for what seemed like an eternity, the dream long, dimensional, and involved.  I continued to move through the dark and light and finally came to the last part of the complex maze.  The sun shone brightly into the deep-sea blue waters of the last grotto.  There was an ever so gentle current now…calm rather than the forceful and choppy waters that I had just swam through.  And as I followed the diamond stream of light, and came out into the world, I knew something was very different, and that I had changed.

Each life experience is exactly that.  You swim in the grotto of the experience.  You cling to the edges of what is safe, familiar, figuring out as best you can what the next step is, the next move, the next relationship, the next job, just the next.  And after each grotto, you have grown, if but just a little.  There is at least a slight if not noticeable shift in the way you look at something, the way you perceive the world, but most importantly, how you view yourself.

I have thought about this dream so many times.  I have even discussed it in the context of dream therapy.  And it is just now, just today, that I finally understand what it is trying to say to me.  After all, dreams are windows to your soul.  I have been wondering lately about what great lessons the universe is trying to teach me, as there are some pretty interesting situations and things that I have been challenged with in my life.

At the end of my dream, I come out into the light, into the world.  For years I kept hoping that I would have the dream again, and that when I did, I would figure out how to swim back in to the maze…. swim back to the college and university years that I had progressed through.

All along I thought it was about trying to get back…but now I see it is about letting go, and that you must always continue moving forward.  Like a diver, you can only go in one direction.  Life is one directional – you are born, and you live – Fully, completely, just as you dive, fully committed to the action of plunging in and swimming through whatever you may meet.

Jill Alman-Bernstein

Jill Alman-Bernstein is an Intuitive Empowerment Coach, Soul Realignment Practitioner, inspirational writer, freelance editor and writer’s coach, deep sea soul diver, mother, and mermaid. She is the creator of the platform I Must Be A Mermaid focusing on inspiration, empowerment, personal growth, and transformation.

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