Awaken Your Genius: How to Free Your Creativity and Manifest Your Dreams

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

Over the last 40 years I have been helping men, and the people who love them, to live well.  I’ve learned that we never heal alone.  There are always helpers and guides along the way that give us the love, support, and the wisdom we need to find our true selves and manifest our dreams.

One of my greatest guides has been my son, Jemal.  He was born 44 years ago and is a fantastically creative artist.  In the delivery room on a dark November morning he came into the world and I made a vow to him that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and I would do everything I could to fulfill my dreams to make a positive difference in the world.  He continues to inspire the best in me.

It’s clear to me that if we don’t find and live our dreams we get sick in mind, body, and spirit.   We get everything from rheumatoid arthritis to Alzheimer’s, depression to chronic pain. Our current medical system focuses on treating symptoms, not the real  causes of disease.  More and more people are getting sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Carolyn Elliott is one of those people.

In her wonderfully helpful book, Awaken Your Genius:  A Seven-Step Path to Freeing Your Creativity and Manifesting Your Dreams, she shares her journey and offers the wisdom of her experience to all those who are ready to become the person they were always meant to be.  “Back when I was a young dreamer,” says Elliott, “I did drugs.  A lot.  And not just the good ones.  I did the nasty ones too.  Nearly to the point of killing myself.”

She continues to share her truth from the honest center of her soul.  Many of us have struggled as she has.  “I was suffering from my genius.  I wanted to feel different.  I wanted to feel better.  I want to live my life in ecstasy, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask for myself or anyone else.”

Are You a Dreamer Ready to Manifest Your Genius?  Take the Quiz

Here are some questions Carolyn asks:

1.       Are you brilliant, far out, and sexy (Even if it’s hard for you to admit it)?

2.       Are you a little bit obsessed with magic, theater, tantra, poetry, and ritual?

3.       Are you drawn to alchemy, the tarot, psychic phenomena, shamanic journeys, and, in general, the dreamy side of life?

4.       Do you often have profound experiences of synchronicity?

5.       Have you been told that you’re way too weird, been made fun of, or put down?

6.       Do you feel a lot more aware and awake than the folks around you appear to be?

7.       Are you always interested in learning and creating, and not so much interested in consuming or getting conventional success?

8.       Does the vast majority of television and popular entertainment bore you?

9.       Do you find it difficult to fit into mainstream society?

10.   Do most regular job descriptions out there sound to you like a circle of Dante’s hell?

On her website, appropriately entitled Awesome Your Life,  she offers helpful guidelines for getting start.

1.       Try Emotional Freedom Technique.  It helped her greatly when she was suffering from a depression that just wouldn’t budge.

2.       Eat a vast quantity of kale.  Kale in chili-coconut broth with black beans is a major favorite, as is creamy-garlicky tahini kale with roasted eggplant and also purple kale with shitake mushrooms, ginger and wasabi radishes.  She just discovered this. If you haven’t tried it, you’ve got a treat in store.

3.       Get involved with gift economy. Also known as Sacred Economics or the Gift World, it’s all about being generous and being supported. Here’s a rad short film about it.

4.       Join, create and foster communities of dreamers.  There’s a group of dreamers brewing over at our private Awesome Your Life Facebook group, The Dreamer’s Tantra. It’s free and you’re welcome to join us. We welcome new members each Monday. Just hit “ask to join” on the page. The Evolver Network is a place to meet fantastic dreamers.

5.       Get down with some practical organizing skills. Make stuff happen. Here, she explains an overview of how that works.

The World Is Ending; A Better One Is Being Born

“People don’t seem to realize it that it is not like we’re on the Titanic and we have to avoid the iceberg,” says Rob Watson, CEO and Chief Scientist of The EcoTech International Group, who Pulitizer-Prize winning author Tom Friedman calls one of the best environmental minds in America. “We’ve already hit the iceberg. The water is rushing in down below. But some people just don’t want to leave the dance floor; others don’t want to give up on the buffet. But if we don’t make the hard choices, nature will make them for us.”

Most of us creative types know that the old “ship of civilization” is going under.  The good news is that a new way of life is being born.  In an article I wrote for the Huffington Post I described the “7 Things We Need to Do to Survive and Thrive.”  The seventh was to “Let go of our addiction to Empire and return to our roots in the Earth Community.”

It’s going to be a wild ride, my friends, but it’s the best ride on the face of the planet.  Let’s join together, scream our lungs out, and create a more beautiful life and reflects the genius of who we are.

Jed Diamond, PhD, MCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Though focused on men’s health, MenAliveis also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.