Taking my own medicine
School is staring everywhere, Fall is coming, and there is some urgency in the air.
Can you feel it?
After the languid heat of the last few weeks, the air is quickening, she becomes crisper, and nature gives us her last beautiful harvest. All to get us ready to pull inward for the winter.
I have some projects I’m working on (which I hopefully can share with you soon!) and can feel that same quickening and urge to get things done.
I noticed how I felt an external and internal push getting stronger over the last few days as I promised to finalize a draft, finish an intake form for the web person and contact my coaching clients for housekeeping issues, and, and….
Deadlines. They make me anxious. Even though I set them myself.
I love the spaciousness to feel all the ups and downs while I create. I love a pace that fits with my body’s rhythm which in the end is the exact speed for my world.
It’s a privilege to work that way, and it is honoring the awareness of how I work best. Knowing that there is contraction and no flow if I neglect my body’s signals and impulses.
And sometimes I forget it all!
As I did over the last few days. Pushing, pushing, letting my head lead with never ending thought loop after thought loop. Overthinking. So focused that I lost the big picture. My head feeling like a pressure cooker. Every creative thought squeezed into a little corner.
What was I doing?!
Where did the commitment to myself go. Where was I savoring life and what I love doing so much? Where did the spark, joy, the excitement go? The pleasure?
What old pattern and trap was I falling into?
Who’s rhythm did I try to follow?
I had to take a good dose of my own medicine. (Putting the thoughts down, knowing full well that I could pick them back up at any time.)
My own medicine being that of moving.
Not directed moving like yoga or walking or working out but the unstructured moving that is my body’s mother tongue.
Where I get into a conversation with her, where I get curious about what she feels.
I explore the contractions, where they sit in my body. This time they are in my lower back and my stomach. Through gentle movement I feel them, feel their texture, their shape, their color, their temperature.
I’m being with them. Not aiming to change them or make them go away.
Just noticing and being present.
I move, I feel, I respond.
And I’m ready to continue towards my deadline but with ease and flow and expansion.
I take this medicine in short sips, meaning one song at a time when I feel the pressure building up.
One song is all it takes.
What is your medicine to take the pressure off, to keep your juices flowing?