Dream On:
Discovering Your Call
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By Rosemary Williams with Joanne Kabak
In the lives of women I have worked with, and in the course of my own life, I have seen amazing transformations happen around issues of money. Each woman approaches that transformation from a different place. Some are poised to put their money in alignment with their spirit and need only a little "nudge", a little more insight, a new sense of order to make the connection. Others have more work to do and find that they need more time to understand their finances before they can meld its uses with their spiritual energy.
But over and over, I have seen one consistent pattern: When people allow a dream to come to light, amazing "coincidences" do happen. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to simply tell brief stories of women who heeded a notion, a message, or a messenger.
I’ll start with my daughter, Sharon Williams. She arrived at her sense of purpose literally by accident. At the end of a cross-country bicycle trip she was seriously injured in an accident. The trip had been planned during a hiatus from college, at a time when she was looking for a career. She never expected a career to come out of the pain and trauma of a head-and-neck injury...
As Sharon began to recover, she found she was not getting enough relief from the usual medical treatments available to her. That’s when she went to an excellent chiropractor. No only did she improve, she found her call: to enter the healing profession as a chiropractor.
As with many choices of the heart, the reality of money, finances, and the demands of the external world entered the picture. Sharon did not have the money to finish college and go on to graduate school and study to be a chiropractor. She knew well the issue of financial insecurity. She had seen first her father, then me, lose our "secure" corporate jobs over time.
But when a chosen path is in alignment with your soul, a way starts to emerge. For Sharon, that way took shape through borrowing money for school, my taking out a home equity loan, Sharon finding and buying a small house, renting out rooms to pay the loan, and supporting herself with the rental income, as well as living there. Although she continued to be afraid that she couldn’t pay the loans back, the accident and its aftermath made her more willing to take risks, to make the commitment to serve in a healing profession, and to have the confidence to take on debt and the steps to pay it back.
Sharon is now a chiropractor with a successful practice, lives in her little house still, and continues to pay down her debt. All the while she is fulfilling her dream of helping people be healthier, both in body and spirit.
From A Woman's Book of Money and Spiritual Vision: Putting Your
Financial Values into Spiritual Perspective by Rosemary Williams with
Joanne Kabak. Copyright (c) 2001 by Rosemary C. Williams. Reprinted with
permission of Innisfree Press, Philadelphia.
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