A Personal Confession
I have something I want to be honest about and then something I want to be brutally honest about.
First, I want to be honest about the ebb and flow of having a self-discovery practice. I've been in a true ebb (def: gradually lessen or reduce) for the past couple of weeks.
I over-committed my schedule and sacrificed my practice time. That means no meditating, no freewriting, no pause in my day to sit down and spend purposeful time processing my thoughts and emotions.
I consciously chose to skip it for a few days while my schedule was jam-packed, but that conscious decision for a few days slipped into unconsciously not making the time for a couple of weeks.
That's when my body started sending me signals that I needed to pay attention and come back into practice. Those signals were:
Anxious thoughts greeting me first thing when I woke up (and once in the middle of the night, which was a huge red flag to me)
Taking others' actions very personally and dwelling in it + not feeling confident/safe enough to voice what I was experiencing
Thoughts about how I'm not “far enough along” in my fledgling business, even though during the month of May I've had two amazing PR opportunities and have two new clients starting their programs
Those are some examples of what things start to look like for me when I step away from my practice for too long.
But they're also the things I now recognize as my body's signals to remind me I need to come back.
Now, the brutally honest piece?
Sometimes I get frustrated about having to be disciplined with a practice to “feel ok" (like I have a great life, so why can't I just be naturally content?). I don't hear a lot of people talk about that, but it's true for me.
But here's the thing – at our most basic level, humans are wired for survival. That includes feeling safe and connected.
And when we let our minds run the show, they're going to go to their default setting of keeping us safe based on our lived experiences (that default setting is all of our unconscious habits and responses to the world around us).
So yes, it would be lovely to just feel naturally content and at ease without any effort, but that's not how it works for most people. That's definitely not how it works for me.
But as someone who's had a consistent practice for years (let me be clear about what consistency means for me here – it means more days on than off, and “on days” can be finding even just 5 minutes for my practice) I can tell you the effort is worth it. A thousand times over.
In the past, those body signals I mentioned above (anxiety and negative thought patterns) would have just spiraled – sometimes to the point of feeling depressed.
But now I recognize them as my body's way of saying, “hey, you need to pay attention and use all the tools you have so this doesn't get worse."
All this to say, it's important to pay attention to what your body is signaling. But it's also important to give yourself some grace because it's not always easy.
If this is something you'd like to work on for yourself, my virtual door is always open. Even if my work isn't the best fit for you, I most likely have a referral who can help (I have a pretty stellar community of practitioners who help in a wide variety of ways).
Ok, time to go sit myself down on my meditation cushion and get back to it…