Dancing Through Life: Indulge Your Dreams and Pursue Life's Possibilities

By Allen T. Brown

Live your life to the fullest

In Dancing through Life, Allen Brown offers his unique perspective: All life starts with the question Wouldn’t it be great if . . .? Allen believes that a true, authentic life begins with this simple question because it signals an awakening to the possibility of more. We can be more than we think we are, and we can do more than we think we’re capable of doing. And the sense of wonder and possibility contained in Wouldn’t it be great if . . .? isn’t just for the young. It’s for everyone!

This book will inspire you to start living the lives you’ve always wanted to live. The author offers his advice on such topics as—

• trusting your intuition

• broadening your horizons and getting out of your comfort zone

• understanding the power of your own thoughts

• adopting a growth mind-set

• setting and achieving goals

An entrepreneur and self-made millionaire, Allen became an amateur ballroom dancing champion in his mid-eighties. Through the insight he provides in Dancing through Life, you will be reminded that if the music is playing, you should be dancing. We only have one life, and we should live it with gusto!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781626347021

Book preview

realities.

CHAPTER 1

If You Have a Heart, You Have a Beat

Before you can follow your own drummer, you have to hear the drummer.

—Srikumar Rao

Through my long life, I’ve observed other people and heard their stories, and I’ve come to a few conclusions about the way most people are raised. Like most folks, I was born dancing to the beat of my own drummer. And so were you. We each come into the world the same way—lulled day and night by the sound of our mothers’ heartbeats as we grow inside them. The rhythm of the heart is the most fundamental sound. But it’s more than sound. Even if we can’t hear it, we can feel the beat within and around us. We are born with—and kept alive by—a steady beat. Hold your hand on your heart for a bit and just breathe naturally. Feel it? That’s your life force pumping within you. There is nothing more beautiful or more essential.

We all tend to forget we have this beat within us—it’s where we came from and what drives us. We forget to take the time to stop and listen to our internal beats. And not just our heartbeat but what our heart wants—our inner voice, our intuition. Instead, we listen to what others tell us we should do, what others tell us we should think, and what others tell us we should become. We stray from our own beats and follow the beat of society, the world, our job, our parents. By the time we reach adulthood, our inner voice is all but muted. We can barely hear it crying out to be heard. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, we weren’t always like this.

Turn on the radio and watch what a small child does. She dances. She moves to the rhythm. Her legs bounce. Her head sways. Her hands wave in the air. She knows what to do. She knows what feels good. She knows what she wants and what her body wants. It wants to feel, hear, and move to the rhythm that she feels inside her from her head to her toes. Her body wants to feel good. It wants to move. It wants, above all, to feel alive and at one with what is going on all around her—a tiny dancer.

Listen to the beat within you

When was the last time you heard music and started to dance, regardless of where you were? How often do you ignore the impulse to be one with the beat within you? If it has been a while, don’t worry too much about it. We can change that. And don’t beat yourself up about it, either. After all, it’s not your fault.

As we grow up, we’re told certain things: No! Don’t do that! You’ll get hurt! Don’t draw attention to yourself! Don’t stray too far! Go sit down and be quiet! Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to! Be polite! Don’t ask for too much; you’ll sound greedy, ungrateful, and spoiled. We are told so many things that are meant to keep us safe but that invariably instead cause us to hold ourselves back and live our lives in fear.

We grow up fearing so much. We not only fear what our parents will think of us, but we also end up fearing the people and things that they fear. And, of course, they learned to fear those things from their parents and from their own experiences, which often have nothing to do with us.

The result is that we wake up one day and realize we’ve spent most of our lives afraid—afraid of death, afraid of the unknown, afraid of what others think of us, afraid of life itself. And we’ve never truly lived life at all. We let these messages of fear become so loud inside our head that they drown out the rhythm inside us. Though the rhythm is alive and well within us from the moment we are born to the moment we die, we can’t hear it above all the fearmongering and internal chatter, and we lose touch with our inner voice, our inner beat, which always knows exactly what to do without being