February: Stillness

Stillness:

“Stillness is where creativity and solutions are found.”

~Meister Eckhart

I got an email from a friend today cancelling plans. She was apologetic, perhaps because we’ve rescheduled before. She confessed that she felt as though her commitments were getting away from her, and she wasn’t able to take the time for herself that she truly craved. 

Despite my disappointment in not getting to see her, I wanted to dance around the room and whoop. Finally, someone was doing their damndest to take care of themselves and was honest about it. 

Everywhere I turn people are talking about how busy they are and how stretched they feel. It has begun to be like a needle in my eye, actually. It rankles. At first blush, I feel a sense of irritation to the person in possession of such busy-ness. After all, we have choices, don’t we? We have some ownership over our schedules. We get to choose how we spend our time, right?

I am, I think, particularly bothered by those who wear their busy-ness as a badge of honor, as though the lack of temporal resources increases their worth somehow. When this creeps into martyrdom, I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from rolling my eyes.

AND YET. And yet, to slow down or pause in a world that insists that we stay in the fast lane is HARD. Like, really hard. We’re constantly inundated with messaging that rewards the hustle. The grind. Efficiency. Productivity. To get ahead we have to stay in the fast lane, right? Otherwise we’re getting left behind.

If you have people pleasing tendencies, well. Multiply the guilt and shame of slowing down times ten. Or a hundred. 

I write, learn and teach about stillness a lot. I’ve spent the last seven or so years diving deeper and deeper into the subject, so I feel pretty well-versed. But this last few months I’ve found myself trapped on the rollercoaster of busy-ness yet again. I was launching a new business (hi! Thank you! Welcome!), keeping up with my one-to-one clients, and trying to make progress on the manuscript. I thought, “sometimes you just have to be busy for a bit to get the thing done, Sarah. Just power through and then you can slow down again.” 

What I neglected was considering my exit strategy. I didn’t make a plan to ramp down my jam-packed calendar. Going into the holidays I was just as slammed as I’d been before the launch. My clients were busy. My friends were complaining about how busy and exhausted they were. I was right there with them.

Until I stopped. I closed my laptop at 4pm on Christmas Eve having finished my latest project just under the wire, and I felt like I couldn’t take a full breath. And all the emotions I’d been avoiding for the previous three months—grief, exhaustion, irritation and unworthiness—hit like a tsunami. 

That breathlessness I felt amped up over the following weeks. It landed me at urgent care, attached to a heart monitor and later having a CT scan. Turns out, my heart and lungs are in perfect health. What’s not functioning as well? My brain. My anxiety had me in a vice-like grip around my chest for weeks. My body was forcing me to listen and to slow all the way down.

I was furious at myself, frankly. I spent a lot of time over the last seven years building a life that was off that hamster wheel. And yet, here I was again. Busy. Tired. Burnt out. Short tempered. Frankly, feeling as if my work actually wasn’t really all that much fun.

The culture of busy-ness is a dysfunctional one wreaking havoc on our systems. To truly pause is an act of subversion of the dominant culture. To put boundaries around the resource of our time is akin to a salmon swimming upstream. It is a step towards our home, but it is at least in our current climate, pushing against the current.

The work to find stillness is ongoing and not always easy. I’m doing it right there with you all. This month I’ve got a couple of things on deck for us:

·      A yoga Nidra practice from Lisbeth Overton. Lisbeth also shared a compilation of goodies about the benefits of Nidra that you can find in the Mindfulness link.

·      Letting nature’s stillness inspire our creativity practices

·      Our journaling prompts invite you to unplug from ALL your tech for a period of time and reflect upon the experience.

I hope to see you at our Open Studio Session on February 15th to unpack all this together—link at the bottom of this page.

SRB

SEE YOU IN THE STUDIO SESSION!

As always, we are here if you need any help or guidance. Just send us a note below.