Timeless Radical Dreaming
Written by Melissa Andrada, MSc (mel - they/them)
CEO & Cofounder, Fairground
The Impossible Dream
“to dream the impossible dream
to fight the unbeatable foe
to bear the unbearable sorrow
to run where the dare not go
…
to reach the unreachable star
this is my quest to follow that star
no matter how hopeless,
no matter how far”
Sunrise at the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Festival October 2025
Dear reader: How can you embody the vision your heart is calling for in 2026?
In 2020, the day before Thanksgiving, amidst the height of the Pandemic, my father and I were in a devastating car accident that resulted in his tragic passing. Years later, I lost the capacity to dream, to imagine a joyful reality that existed beyond the unbearable post-traumatic weight of sorrow and grief.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow. After five years of deep intentional healing through yoga teacher training, somatic music & dance therapy and beloved community & chosen family, I re-gained my capacity to be present with the practice of radical dreaming.
“Trauma and the ongoing traumas of oppression can keep us hypervigilant, limiting our ability to dream and vision.
Believing we can conjure new worlds is part of how we heal our relationship to imagination and creation.”
May your dreams soar as high as the hot air balloons
As the end of the year winds down, as we are bombarded with the need to set new year’s resolution and goals, I want to share an approach to dreaming and goal setting, grounded in trauma-informed ambition, rooted in the latest research in clinical psychology and somatic art therapy (in year 3 of 5 of my part-time masters at the California Institute of Integral Studies). If you’re reading this another time of year, perhaps because of a major life change, I want to remind you always have the capacity to dream. You don’t have to wait for the end or the beginning of the Gregorian calendar to make a commitment to transformation. As a survivor of Big T trauma, it has become a deep responsibility to dream, imagine a different reality for our own lives, our own families, our own organizations, our own communities. Amidst genocide, violence and the attacks on human rights, the capacity to dream matters more than ever.
Our living Theory of Change is inspired by the hot air balloon festival:
Let Grief Be Your North Star: Connect With the Values You Hold Most Dear
Imagine Your New Year Somatic Experience: How Do You Want To Feel?
Create A Vision Board: Translate Your Values Into A Starry Sky
Let Go: Gently Hold And Release Emotional Blockages
Get Practical: Create A Constellation of Goals & Rituals
In Conclusion: The Practice of Radical Dreaming Is The Embodiment of Hope
“Extraordinary grief is an
expression of extraordinary love.”
Let Grief Be Your North Star.
Connect With The Values You Hold Most Dear.
Radical Dreaming Memorial in Big Sur
Photo by Spencer Ian Harris
November 2022
Grief and love are the lingua franca of the human experience. Heart-breaking loss brings you face to face with our own mortality — and the hard fact that one day everything and everyone we love one day will be gone. This invites a joie de vivre, a life force centered around purpose. An invitation to journal to these questions listening to a song that evokes the possibilities of the new year:
Vision: What is your vision for the next year? The next ten years? Someone once shared with me, “We overestimate what we can achieve in one year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten years.”
Values: Author Annie Dillard once shared, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” How do you want to spend your days? What values do you hold most dear?
Purpose: What is your reason for being? What legacy do you want to leave behind? What do you want people to say about you during your eulogy?
2. Imagine Your New Year Somatic Experience:
How Do You Want To Feel?
Our Collective of Queer Yoga Teachers Celebrating Queer Joy and Pride at Arise in Oakland
Photo by Hannah Franco
The somatic emotional experience of your dreams and desires matter just as much as the tangible outcomes and achievements. As author and illustrator Annie Tarasova writes in Manifest, “What is the point of manifesting…if you still don’t feel whole?”
After my father’s passing, I achieved many personal, professional and civic goals: making more than a quarter of million dollars a year as an equity consultant and facilitator, completing yoga teacher training and delivering keynotes on confidence and inclusion to thousands of people across the world. Yet, despite the copious evidence of traditional and non-traditional forms of success, I often didn’t feel whole. I had to process the profound trauma and grief evoked by our car accident and my father’s tragic passing to fully embrace the goals I had spent my entire life manifesting. It has been half a decade of intentional somatic healing to reclaim the practice of celebration and manifestation — to celebrate with my whole body, mind and spirit.
Climb Ev’ry Mountain
“Climb ev'ry mountain.
Ford every stream.
Follow every rainbow
'Til you find your dream”
During the fifth year anniversary of our car accident, I felt a deep spiritual and somatic calling to visit the Hot Air Balloon Festival in Alburqueque, New Mexico. It was one of the most heart-expansive community practices of joy and dreaming I’ve truly ever experienced. It was a visceral reminder of what it means to be human, what it means to feel whole, what it means to be alive.
It inspired me to design an Art Therapy Tool called the Hot Air Balloon Prayer to unpack the somatic experience that centers:
Radical Dreaming: Hot Air Balloon Day
I treat the anniversary (the day before Thanksgiving) of our car accident as a celebration of joy and life
The Fire That Fuels the Vision
What purpose and values do you hold most dear?
The Emotional Geography
How will you feel when you’re embodying your dreams?
The Somatic Experience
What do you notice in your body?
The Themes
What areas of your life do you want to focus on?
The Basket of Community
Who do you want in your hot air balloon?
Expressive Arts Therapy Tool: Hot Air Balloon Prayer created by yours truly with the support of Google AI
“The winds have welcomed you with softness,
The sun has blessed you with its warm hands,
You have flown so high and so well,
God has joined you in your laughter,
And set you gently back again,
Into the loving arms of Mother Earth.”
3. Create A Vision Board: Translate
Your Values Into A Starry Sky
Photo by Spencer Ian Harris
Our work in Expressive Art Therapy largely focuses on the subconscious dreams and desires that might be hidden within the body. Going beyond the limitations of speech and words, creating a vision board helps reveal the dreams we may not even be aware we have — or even the blockages that might be creating self-sabotaging behaviors that impact our most important values and goals.
Supporting a coaching client to connect to their vision
I encourage clients to have a monthly practice of vision boarding as a practice of both intention setting and celebration. Collect magazines from thrift stores and Buy Nothing Groups. Let your intuition guide your creative process, you don’t have to immediately understand why you chose an image. The meaning will reveal the subconscious through personal observation and reflection alongside external witnessing.
Place the vision board somewhere you can see it in your home or office, as an embodied reminder of where you want to move your life, your family, your team, your organization, your community.
PRACTICE / VISION MANIFESTATION
-
The Miracle Question comes from Solution-Focused Therapy
We invite you to take a compassionate pause, finding a comfortable seat, perhaps leaning against a tree or comfy arm chair, perhaps playing a calming piece of instrumental music. An invitation to close the eyes or bring a soft gaze to the earth.
Imagine you go to sleep on December 31. While you are sleeping, a miracle occurs and your problems have disappeared.
How do you feel on this new year’s day? What do you notice in your body? What might be the first small thing you noticed that a miracle occurred?
4. Let Go: Gently Hold And Release Emotional Blockages
You may be wondering, “I set clear and quantitative goals last year, yet did not achieve what I wanted.” The practice of Morning Pages inspired by The Artist Way can help unlock the subconscious inner critic and unknowing self sabotaging behaviors that may prevent you from manifesting your dreams and goals.
Marcom Rose Garden
Oakland, California
Photo by Spencer Ian Harris
The Morning Pages is a therapeutic art practice that consists of free writing subconsciously for three pages without judgement, letting your hand move untethered across the page. Even if you feel like you have nothing to write, to paraphrase author Julia Cameron’s advice, you can literally write, “This is stupid. I have nothing to write.” This daily practice is intended to clear anxieties and emotional blockages to access deeper clarity and creativity. You are encouraged to begin your mornings with this practice. I find it works best for me when I am in Oakland, not traveling, late morning after I’ve had time to ground myself in the Marcom Rose Garden.
I encourage clients and students to lean into gentle curiosity and care. I encourage clients to use somatic grounding techniques, such deep diaphragmatic breathing, sound healing, humming, vocal toning and touch, to provide a compassionate container for the swell of overwhelming thoughts, sensations and emotions that may arrive. It can be unnerving to the nervous system to reveal what is in the subconscious and the self-limiting beliefs and behaviors that are holding us back from manifesting our dreams.
Practice Compassionate Dreaming
We most effectively release self limiting patterns through gentleness and care
Compassionate Morning Pages Prompts
Your Morning Pages might take inspiration from these prompts. Let’s take a deep breath together before writing:
What is holding you back from embodying your dreams?
What and who do you need to grieve and release?
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
How do you feel as you’re reading and journaling? An invitation to give yourself a hug. According to self compassion expert Dr. Kristen Neff, “research indicates that physical touch releases oxytocin, soothes distressing emotions and calms cardiovascular stress.” Touch can support you to regulate your nervous system as you’re writing.
The Guest House
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor…
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”
-Rumi
Bringing a trauma-informed pyschoeducation lens, I remind clients to have compassion as the inner critic is a survival strategy to protect our nervous system and keep us safe. Rather than punish the inner critic, we need to honor its role and find alternative strategies to create safety in the nervous system. When we hold space for the most tender and wounded parts of ourselves, the inner critic starts to soften and release, providing space for new futures and actions.
Release is a form of loss, and any form of loss must be honored and grieved. Once clients have provided enough compassionate somatic holding for their subconscious self-limited beliefs, I will literally have clients write down and burn what they want to release. The practice of burning creates an embodied external metaphor for the transformation that is occurring within. When we have a practice of grief and release, we create space for our purpose and vision to birth into the world.
5. Get Practical: Create A Constellation of Goals & Rituals
Grounded Pragmatism
Translate dreams into tactics and tools
As a former Chief Operations Officer of a VC-backed startup in London, I am obsessed with translating art into strategy and operational rigor. We need both art and science to embody the changes we want to see in our bodies, our families, our organizations and our communities. We invite you to reflect on these questions holistically across personal, professional and civic spheres:
Embodied Leadership
How do you want to grow as a human and a leader?
How do you want to impact your family, your organization, your community?
Embodied Values
What are your most important values?
Which value do you want to prioritize and embody this year?
Embodied Vision
What will success look like at the end of this year?
What projects do you want prioritize?
1.
2.
3.
An invitation to make your goals S. M. A. R. T., grounded in lived experience, qualitative and quantitative data from past years. A collective invitation for Gentle Ambition, staying boldly ambitious for the future yet being mindful of what is rooted in the current reality. According to a study by BCG Global, nearly half of workers are grappling with burnout and a state of exhaustion.
Specific
Measurable
Action-Oriented
Realistic
Time-Bound
Embodied Rituals & Community
Community is an accelerator of transformation.
What rituals do you need to maintain or begin to embody your purpose and goals?
Who can support you along your journey?
In Conclusion: The Practice of Radical Dreaming
Is The Embodiment of Hope
Hope Lane
“Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
Vaclav Havel
Dear reader,
Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end.
May we collectively keep orienting
towards hope and possibility.
May new year fill your life, your team, your community
with all that your heart dreams and visions.
We’d love to support you in manifesting your dreams, join us for a somatic leadership retreat on Radical Dreaming for 2026 rooted in clinical psychology and the neuroscience of change.
Virtual
Somatic Leadership on Radical Dreaming for 2026
Thurs, Jan 15, 2026 from 9-10:30am PST / 6-7:30pm CET
Learn more
In-Person
Somatic Leadership & Dance Retreat on Radical Dreaming for 2026
Sat, Jan 17, 2026 in Oakland, California from 2-4:30pm PST
Learn more
References & Recommended Reading
Andrada, M. (2025, December 21). Gentle ambition is radical ambition. Melissa Andrada. https://www.melissaandrada.com/blog/gentle-ambition-is-radical-ambition
Andrada, M., & McDaniel, B. (2025, June 23). The future of psychological safety: A trauma‑informed vision to safety within the workplace. The Fairground Collective.
Cameron, J. (1992). The artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity. TarcherPerigee.
Cacciatore, J. (2017). Bearing the unbearable: Love, loss, and the heartbreaking path of grief. Wisdom Publications.
García, H., & Miralles, F. (2017). Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life. Penguin Books.
Hemphill, P. (2024). What it takes to heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world. Random House.
Hendricks, G. (2009). The big leap: Conquer your hidden fear and take life to the next level. HarperOne.
Mohr, T. (2014). Playing big: For women who want to speak up, create, and lead. Gotham Books.
Rubin, R. (2023). The creative act: A way of being. Penguin Press.
Tarasova, A. (2025). Manifest [Handwritten illustrative guide to practical manifestation]. DreamyMoons. https://dreamymoons.com/products/manifest-book
UncommonPractitioners.TV. (2014, April 10). 3 miracle question therapy examples demonstrated [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAVetI4I3_w