Why Some Dreams Take Years and That’s Not Failure

A highly sensitive nature and a history of trauma can shape how quickly you can make your dreams come true but that doesn’t mean you’re failing and moon magic can help.

If you want to hear this instead of, or in addition to, reading it, you can subscribe to my podcast Grow Your Business with Astrology and Art Magic here (or search for it by name on your favorite podcast app).

My Heart’s Sacred Longing

I had a dream in my heart for a long time. I wanted to illustrate and write a book and, of course, because me, my art journal and the moon are The Three Musketeers, it had to be about the moon and art magic. Plus, I wanted to help other people experience being held by the moon like I was for the last ten years.

But it took me six years to create it. Not six years of steady, consistent work. Six years of starting and stopping and moving forward then having to pause and work through whatever was blocking me. I had so much inner resistance to completing it. We’re talking layers and layers of resistance that took six years to move through.

It was a lot!

There were so many times I wondered if I would ever actually finish it.

What I learned over the last six years is sometimes dreams take a lot longer than you expect them to not because you’re lazy or undisciplined and definitely not because you don’t want them badly enough but because of what those dreams awaken inside of you.

And if you’ve ever had something you wanted deeply and you can’t seem to move toward it in a straight line, this little heart rambling is for you.

IT STARTS WITH DESIRE BUT IT DOESN’T END THERE

I was taught early on that if something matters enough, I should be able to make it happen. If I really want something, I’ll find a way and if I’m not making it happen, I must be avoiding it. If I just tried harder, pushed more or disciplined myself, I’d get there faster.

Yes, just like the Nike ads I would pin up in my room in the nineties to motivate me, I had a voice that said, “Just do it.”

But what I’ve learned is this advice only works sometimes and possibly only for some people.

For others, especially those of us who are highly sensitive, it can feel discouraging and even shaming. Most often, for me and from what I see in my clients, when we procrastinate, avoid and feel blocked, it’s not because we don’t want it and it’s not because we’re lazy. It’s that what we want touches something deep. It stirs up a bunch of old shit in our system and awakens old memories. There can be fear, grief, resistance or something else we often can’t even name right away that gets activated.

And suddenly, what looks like procrastination or feeling blocked is actually something much more complex on the inside.

MY DREAM WAS SIMPLE BUT MY INNER WORLD WAS NOT.

My dream to illustrate and write a book about moon magic is simple. I wanted to bring something into the world that felt like me but every time I moved toward it, something in me reacted and not always in ways I understood. Progress on my book had to be paused and taking care of whatever was being stirred awake in me became the priority. This sometimes took days, weeks and even months.

Working on this book was never just about making pages. It was about what happened inside me every time I tried. It stirred a lot of things up.

Feelings.
Memories.
Resistance.
Physical sensations in my body.

Over time, I began to see that there were two main things that were making this process so slow for me and once I saw them clearly, everything began to make a lot more sense.

THE FIRST THING THAT SLOWED ME DOWN

One of the strongest resistance I encountered was something I didn’t expect. My body was holding onto experiences of the women who came before me. Anytime I tried to move forward with this book, especially when it came to the idea of sharing it, selling it, earning money from it, my legs would start to hurt.

I don’t mean a small discomfort. It was a heavy, dense, almost immovable feeling. It felt like I was walking through mud up to my thighs plus it caused a lot of pain. I could tell something in me didn’t want to move forward. As I worked with it, slowly and carefully, I started to see that this wasn’t just about me.

CARRYING TOO MUCH

The women on both sides of my family came from strict French Catholic backgrounds. There was patriarchy (that’s an understatement. If you could see me as I’m writing this you would see me rolling my eyes because there was so much patriarchy we were drowning in it.) There was emotional neglect. There were limitations around what women could do, what they could want, how visible they could be and how they could earn money. It started to improve in the seventies with my mother’s generation but not that much. Sure they could work but now that had work plus all the other caretaking and emotional responsibilities they had before. They carried way too much while being depleted.

And especially when it came to creativity and independence, there was a lot that wasn’t safe, supported or, honestly, even imaginable. As if my grandmother had time to dream of becoming a writer or an artist when she was busy helping her family of 13 survive. As if the women before her had time to dream about earning a living doing what they love when they were not even allowed to have their own bank account.

THE PATRIARCHY STRIKES AGAIN

There was a quiet understanding that a woman’s role was to be good, selfless, devoted and to not take up too much space. Wanting something for yourself was wrong. Your desires were definitely not as important as your responsibilities and your voice should be softened and your body should be controlled and your life should follow the path that had already been decided for you.

You didn’t carry your own money. Your husband carried it for you. Standing out felt unsafe. You needed to tone down your power. And beneath it all, there was a deep belief that love, belonging and safety came from being good, not disrupting things and never asking for too much.

Even if these beliefs were never spoken directly, they lived quietly in the bodies of the women before me and they shaped how women were allowed to move through life, what she allowed herself to want and whether or not she was allowed to reach for more.

CLEARING OUT OLD INFORMATION

And what I’ve come to understand is that these ancestral beliefs didn’t always show up to me as clear thoughts like “I’m not allowed” or “I shouldn’t do this.” They showed up much more quietly and subtly. They often felt like hesitation or second-guessing myself or like a flare up of my chronic illness or pain in my body or suddenly feeling tired or overwhelmed right when I was about to take a step forward.

The beliefs I carried from my lineage sounded like, “Maybe this isn’t important,” or “Who do I think I am?” or “I should be focusing on something more practical.” They lived in my body as heaviness, tightness and pain. I carried a pattern of pulling back just as momentum started to build or when I was making real progress. And when I didn’t know where these feelings came from, it was easy to assume that I was the problem and that I wasn’t ready or capable or that what I wanted was not actually meant for me.

But these were inherited ways of staying safe. They were echoes of a time when being visible, expressive, independent, or well-resourced as a woman came with real consequences. As I began to follow my heart, it felt like I was moving against something invisible but very real. And understanding this softened the experience. It helped me see that what feels like resistance might actually be old information that no longer needs to lead the way.

WHY ME?

And something I’ve had to sit with over the years as well is this question of why it affected me so deeply. Most of the people in my family seem to move through the world without it weighing on them the way it did on me. Obviously, we don’t all receive, process, or carry our lineage in the same way and maybe some of us are simply more sensitive to it. Some of us feel more. Some of us have systems and bodies that register what’s unspoken, suppressed and what hasn’t been healed. And the truth is, I have no idea how it has affected anyone else. I can only guess.

But I’m one of those people who can’t ignore it or bypass it or move forward without tending to it. And while that sometimes feels unfair, I can also see that it shaped the way I move through the world now. It’s what made me listen more closely, feel more deeply and eventually create a way of working with myself that is slower, gentler, and more honest.

Not everyone carries things the same way. But for those of us who are highly sensitive there is a kind of awareness and depth that comes with our sensitivities.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

So for good and bad, my body was holding all that comes with being a woman in a patriarchal culture. I spent years working through the heaviness in my legs. Journaling with the moon about it and booking appointments with practitioners to support me was helpful. I listened to MAP sessions. Heck, I even created a bunch of MAP recordings working specifically on clearing ancestral memories from the legs, feet and lower body (if you’re part of The Moon Mapping Year, you can thank my lineage for those helpful recordings.)

For many years, these generational stories, beliefs and oppressive ideas kept surfacing and interrupting my progress on the book. They were experiences that didn’t begin with me but hopefully they are ending with me.

Each time I worked through a layer, I could move a little more. I felt lighter and the pain left.

But it took time.

A lot of time.

THE SECOND THING THAT SLOWED ME DOWN

The second thing was even more tender. It involved my history of childhood sexual trauma. This caused so much inner conflict and resistance. What surprised me most is that it didn’t cause me to be afraid of being seen which I know is a common experience from that type of trauma. I wasn’t afraid of being seen but I was afraid of getting what I wanted.

Somewhere in my body, receiving what I longed for had become tangled with something painful and unsafe so moving toward my dream felt fragile and complicated and most of the time just really overwhelming in a way that didn’t make logical sense, but made complete sense in my body.

There were layers to this too. The person who harmed me is someone I suspect had a history connected to residential schools in Canada. And I could feel, in a way that is hard to explain, that, again, what happened to me didn’t begin with me. There was something of old dark stories in it and I suspect she was doing to me what was done to her so something systemic and heavy was moving through it all and my body is still trying to navigate all that (is it ever really over?).

And I was meeting all of that as I tried to create something I wanted to create since I was six years old.

So I had to go slowly and oh so very gently.

WHY I COULD NOT PUSH THROUGH

I had to go so gently because my body would not let me push through. I live with mast cell activation syndrome and dysautonomia which means my system is highly sensitive. It reacts quickly. It doesn’t tolerate being pushed or overridden. If I tried to force myself forward, my body would react and I would have flares that lasted days or weeks so I didn’t have the option of “just doing it.”

I couldn’t power through or override what was happening or pretend I was fine. And I’ll be honest, I hated that. I wished I was different. Wouldn’t it be nice if I was less sensitive and less affected by the past and more able to just move forward like it seemed other people could.

I felt discouraged and disappointed often and fell into a poor me spiral more times than I like to admit. I’ve watched those inspirational movies with people who stay positive despite adversity. I learned quickly on that, to my dismay, I am not one of those people. I wanted to give up many times and whined and complained a lot.

But eventually, I reached a point where I had to accept something.

This is who I am, what I carry and this is the body I live in.

And if I want to follow my heart, I have to do it in a way that works with who I am, not against it. It’s the same lesson my business keeps teaching me over and over again.

WHAT MOVING SLOWLY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

For me, moving slowly didn’t look graceful. It looked like this working on the book for a while then something would come up and my inner world would react.

Emotionally.
Physically.
Energetically.

And I would have to stop. Something inside me needed attention so I would pause.

No matter how much I would have loved it, I couldn’t have a perfect routine or move forward in a calm, steady predictable way. I had to listen to my body.

Sometimes I needed days to tend to what was arising. Sometimes weeks and many times a lot longer than that.

During those pauses, I wasn’t abandoning the dream (though it often felt like I was) I was tending to what following my heart had awakened. Then, when I could, I would return. Page by page. Layer by layer. Moon by moon.

There were moments when I could feel inspiration moving through me and I would sit down and work on a page, and then, just as quickly, something inside me would shift. My body would tighten or I would feel pain or my energy would drop or my system would become overwhelmed.

WHAT INNER RESISTANCE LOOKS LIKE

Most times my illness would flare. And instead of pushing past that, I had to learn to stop because there is no pushing past a flare. I took the time I needed to recover hoping to get back on track. Going slowly meant letting my body set the pace even when my mind wanted to move faster.

I know inner resistance doesn’t always look like physical symptoms the way it did for me. For many of my clients, inner resistance looks like overthinking. Your mind spins and spins and you can’t take action.  Inner resistance can also look like a voice of self-doubt or self-criticism that gets louder the closer you get to something that matters and it gets so loud you can’t make the next move or you self-sabotage. And it also looks like taking care of everyone else and never having the time to take care of your own dream. You tell yourself, “I’ll do it later, when things calm down,” even though that moment never comes.

These are all ways our inner world is asking for attention. Not because we’re doing something wrong but because something inside us needs to feel safe enough to move forward.

GOING SLOWLY

For me, going slowly meant working in small increments and then stepping back to process what was stirred up. It meant letting rest be part of the process instead of something I earned after I finished. It meant coming back again and again without demanding that each return look better or more productive than the last. And over time, I started to see that the pauses weren’t interruptions, they were part of the path.

The pauses were where I met the parts of me that needed care, reassurance, and space.

When I talk about moving slowly, I’m not talking about delaying your life or giving up on what you want. I’m talking about staying in relationship with yourself and your body while you move toward it. It might mean taking one small step instead of ten or noticing when you’re overwhelmed and choosing to sit with that instead of pushing through it. It might mean gently coming back to your dream after you’ve drifted away for a while, without making that mean anything about your worth or your ability.

Going slowly is not about doing less. It’s about doing it in a way that allows you to keep going. And for many of us, that’s the only way our dreams can actually come to life.

HOW MOON MAGIC HELPED ME TO KEEP GOING

The thing that helped me stay with this dream was my relationship with the moon. The moon gave me something to return to. Every time I sat with the moon and my art journal, I would come back to the same longing. I would name it, feel it and sit with again.

It felt like planting roots. My art journal became a place where my dream stayed rooted no matter how long I wasn’t able to be with it.

The moon held my dream for me when I couldn’t hold it for myself.

WHY SOME DREAMS TAKE YEARS 

Now, when I look back, I understand something I didn’t understand then. Some dreams take years. Not because they’re out of reach but because of what they ask of me.

Some dreams are going to ask me to move through old pain and tend to what I carried from the past and face what lives in my body. All so I become someone who can receive what I want.

Some dreams might ask me to go slowly but that doesn’t mean something is wrong (please remind me of this when I forget). It means something is happening and I’m probably doing a lot deeper work than I realize.

WHAT I WANT SENSITIVE DREAMERS TO REMEMBER 

If you are someone who has a dream in your heart and you’ve started and stopped and you’ve wondered what’s wrong with you and you’ve felt discouraged because it’s taking so long…I want you to hear this. There is nothing wrong with you. You might be carrying more than you realize and more than you or other people can see right now.

You might need more time. And that doesn’t mean it won’t happen for you. You are still allowed to want what you want. You are still allowed to move toward it and create something meaningful.

I just want to encourage you to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt you. And the truth is, if you’re like me, your body, mind or heart are probably not going to let you do it any other way anyway so you might as well stop trying to be a quick little bunny and become like the tortoise who won the race because slow and steady will get you there.

HWO THIS BECAME THE HEART OF MY BOOK 

This is why I created Follow Your Heart with the Moon the way I did. Because I know what it’s like to need a slower, gentle way. I probably should have drawn a tortoise on the cover of it.

Some of us just need a way that doesn’t ask you to push past your body or ignore what you feel.

This book is not about doing one thing and hoping everything changes.

It’s about returning to the same longing in your heart again and again over the course of a year. It’s about moving slowly.

Listening.
Tending.
Staying with yourself.

Because that’s what made it possible for me and I’m hoping it helps you too. Plus, can you imagine bringing the same sacred longing to the moon over and over again for a year? Talk about magic!

Do You Want Your Own Copy of the Book?

Follow Your Heart with the Moon is a year of illustrated moon magic to help you create what you truly want. It’s a gentle practice that helps you stay connected to one meaningful desire over thirteen moon cycles without rushing, forcing, or pushing past what you feel.

In the pages of this book, I’ll meet you under the new, full, and dark moon, guiding you one small, steady step at a time. It’s the same practice that carried me through six years of creating this book and it’s designed to support you in moving toward what you truly want in a way that works and helps you to keep going.

If this kind of support is what you’ve been needing, I would love for you to preorder your copy before April 1st. Preordering helps me bring this book to life and it also ensures you to receive your copy as soon as it’s ready. You can preorder now through the link below, and I’ll take care of the rest.

Preorder Here

Hi. I’m Dana.

If you want to HEAR these updates instead of, or in addition to, reading them, you can subscribe to my podcast GROW YOUR BUSINESS WITH THE MOON AND YOUR ART JOURNAL here (or search for it by name on your favorite podcast app).

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You can also sign up here, to get weekly reminders delivered to your inbox of the moon’s energy for the upcoming week and how you can work with it to practice folk magic, do your deep inner work or, if you’re a highly sensitive entrepreneur like me, grow and expand your business. 

with love,

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