Reverie: The Inner Refuge We’ve Been Trained to Abandon

What if the thing you most needed wasn’t discipline—but reverie?

Not structure, not order, not another spreadsheet of goals. But the spacious, slow pulse of your own desire.

The kind that whispers through you like wind through tall grass—soft, low, insistent. Not loud. But unrelenting.

The kind you only hear when you stop performing the self you were taught to be.

Reverie is not escape. It’s return. Return to the feeling before the world instructed you to be useful. Return to the body before it flinched in classrooms and boardrooms. Return to the voice before it bent itself into what would be accepted.

In David Whyte’s poem Reverie, he writes:

"...the invitation that every day offers to the soul, to stop being who you think you are, and to loosen the cemented strategies of others' expectations."

This is not easy. Because most of us have built our lives inside those expectations.

And the soul, though wise, is quiet. It does not yell. It does not force. It waits until we are ready to listen.

To reverie. To longing. To the life that is asking to be lived—beneath the one that was carefully constructed.

To live in reverie is to finally understand:

You do not need to fight for your worth. You were never meant to earn your place. You were only meant to becomewhat you already are.

On Coercive Society and the Refuge of Expectations

We don’t end up in performance by accident. We end up there because we are born into a culture that rewards obedience, image, and predictable outcomes. From the moment we’re praised for being “good,” we begin outsourcing our belonging.

We learn: if I adapt to what they want, I will be safe. If I meet their expectations, I will be loved. If I follow the rules, I will be chosen.

So we study the faces in the room. We perfect the lines we’re expected to say. We learn how to read others so well that we forget how to read ourselves.

This isn’t weakness. It’s survival.

We take refuge in their expectations because our bodies were never taught to feel safe in our own.

And then, years later, we wonder why joy feels far away. Why we can’t hear ourselves. Why rest makes us anxious.

Because reverie asks us to step outside the contract. To risk disappointing those who benefit from our performance. To say:

“I want more.” “I want different.” “I want true.”

The programming resists this. It whispers that you’re selfish. Unreliable. Unrealistic. That only chaos lives outside the lines.

But it’s not chaos. It’s your life.

The life that isn’t curated for applause. The life that doesn’t live inside a script.

The life that feels like home, because it was always yours.

Reverie isn’t an indulgence. It’s the soul’s way of reintroducing you to yourself.

Let it in.

Joy as a Compass Back to Self

Even in a world shaped by coercion, we still get to choose what we orient toward.

Joy is not a reward we earn once the work is done.

It is a compass. A remembering. A radical act of re-choosing life.

When you’ve lived in the echo of other people’s expectations, dreaming can feel dangerous. Unwise. Selfish.

But every time you allow yourself to imagine beauty again—

To wonder what it might feel like to laugh without armor…

To wake up with purpose rather than performance…

To let your inner world be as alive as your outer one…

You rewire your reality.

You shift the question from “What’s wrong with me?”

to “What wants to come alive in me?”

You stop waiting for permission and start following the thread of what feels good, whole, and true.

That’s not bypassing. That’s reclamation.

Because even when the nervous system is still healing,

You can make room for joy.

Small pockets at first. Then wider.

You can tend to your wounds and feed your dreams.

You can acknowledge pain and choose beauty.

Not as an escape from life— But as a deeper, more intentional return to it.