The Great Ding Dong Ditch from patience salgado on Vimeo.

Join us in the Dream Lab (it’s not too late!) and meet our second Secret Mission Leader Patience Salgado (aka Kindness Girl). Intrigued? Here’s more about Patience. We’re so delighted to have her…

While it would not be unusual to catch Patience Salgado singing like The Sound of Music while skipping through fields of berries, don’t let her gentle exterior fool you. Underneath those mild manners, you’ll find a wild and strong woman fiercely committed to the kind of bold love that invites you to sink into the power of knowing you can be seen and loved for who you truly are. A lifelong advocate for birth and personal development, Patience illuminates strength and the wonder of becoming a family in her birth photography practice. When she and her kids aren’t running around her beloved Richmond plotting out their next act of guerrilla goodness, you can find Patience hiding out with her one true love Jorge Salgado. Patience writes about child development weekly for PBS Supersisters and RVA News. She’s a big fan of candy necklaces, silly string and Twizzlers.

Dream Lab starts today and it’s not too late to register! I’ve already gone through several cans of silly string in preparation for this session and my soul is all the better for it. We need to have you with us!

The photo above is a little behind-the-scenes shot. In order to get ready for this session, I solicited the neighborhood kids (and my own two kids Madeleine and Carter) to help me do a Dream Lab photo shoot. It was one of the most fun afternoons I’ve had in a long time, and the kids were both horrified to see me acting so silly (especially when my underwear started showing while jumping rope) and delighted to see me really letting go.

I don’t quite understand it, but there’s been something really life-affirming and exciting about getting the content ready for this class. We’re taking a risk to build an entire summer around rest, play and kindness, but I can’t think of anything better.

There’s a way that we keep moving in this culture that really doesn’t help us get ahead. There’s a way that we’re suspicious of taking care of ourselves (even though we know we should) that keeps us from really savoring what we already have.

I hope you’ll join us this summer. Session lessons come right to your inbox this time around, making it easy to follow along wherever you are, all summer long!

Here’s a little snapshot of the goodness that awaits you this summer. If you haven’t signed up for Dream Lab, there’s still time. Here are some of the amazing women who will be on board with us this summer.

You are enough. Yes, you. Tracey Clark knows what it’s like to be hiding out, trying hard and then deciding in one key moment that being kind to yourself is a seriously better way to go. Read her breakthrough moment here.

You can let the love in. No one knows better than the inimitable Katherine Center who with her stories and her heart can convince you in a flash that it’s really just fine to be yourself after all.

Your kindness matters. Patience Salgado (aka kindness girl) is convinced you can find your bliss piled up in the car with all your kids (yes, all four of them) cruising around town doing random (and unbelievably creative) acts of exceptional kindness. Read about her life as a kindness worker and get inspired!

Me, last year when I was feeling more Superhero-like!, Canon Digital Rebel XSi

Create what you most need to find… I’ve come back to this thought so many times and see it’s truth revealed over and over. I can see now that this is what happened when I was going through those years of infertility. I felt alone and afraid and deeply wanted the comfort of other women and their stories. When I started blogging about my journey (miscarriage and then struggles around pregnancy later) I thought I was offering up a gift to my community, a gift to other women who might be going through the same thing. This was true, yes. But like with any real gift, we often receive even more than we could have imagined, just in the giving of it. The outpouring of love, support, prayers, wisdom and kindness I got was what carried me more gracefully through that painful time.

Create what you most need to find… I’ve been needing to find rest rest for a long time. Or rather, I’ve been practicing rest (and failing at it too), which is to say, I am wanting to feel like enough even when I’m standing still.

I’ve gone on media cleanses, joined my public library, gave myself permission to not go out on the town even when I’m afraid to miss out. I’ve taken the leap of winding down my jewelry business and made a big clearing so that I could tend my family, my home, and this exhausted body of mine. And still, even now, even today, I go to so and so’s web site and see this person’s book and that person’s speaking at a conference and look how often she blogs and tweets and how does she do it? and I am right back in that old groove of not enough. The difference now is that I notice more quickly when it’s happening.

This pregnancy has been humbling and my teacher in lots of ways. I wasn’t sick with Ben but this kid is taking me on a wild ride. I’ve fallen off the map in nearly every way, still spending entire days in bed (yesterday happened to be one of them!) where I have to surrender to the demands of my body. Even in this so called energetic second trimester I have bouts of low blood pressure which cause a curious mix of dizziness, fatigue and nausea. I have to take each day for what it is, each moment really, and surrender to it even when I have bigger plans. This is very hard on my ego! (so is the extra 20 pounds I am already carrying!

I know from the creative process that there are times to “fill the well” and times to create. Too much of either will have you overflowing or wrung dry. The trick I suppose is to be in some kind of balance… This is true for the creative process of manifesting a dream as well. We need cycles of rest, time to leave the land fallow before planting new seeds.

Create what you most need to find. That is how Dream Lab was born! When we asked ourselves what class we most needed to take the answer was obvious– We needed a summer! We needed to learn how to play, to rest and to be kind to ourselves. As we thought about it more, we realized that these are key ingredients to manifesting dreams but they were glaring holes in our curriculum. How could we have missed that? Jen and I asked each other. Turns out we’re terrible at those things!

So we’ll be learning right alongside you.

This is the thought that inspires me to no end: What would happen if we set aside our lists (our goals, our drive, struggle) for eight weeks? What would shift in our lives as a result of radical acts of play? of kindness? of rest? What would this clearing create space for in our hearts and in our lives?

I can’t wait to find out.

Will you join me? Doing this in community will be all the more powerful and exciting. Oh, and we will be led on secret missions each week by some truly fabulous mavens of kindness and play. (Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Tracey Clark,Andrea Jenkins, Patience Salgado and Katherine Center.