Break with to Breakthrough
My youngest son is 9 years old and, as many children are, wise beyond his years. A few months ago, when I was completing the final work to publish the Essential Light Oracle Deck, I had rewound my way to an old stress pattern. It was perhaps the third night that week that I was going to bring us out for a quick meal, and he said to me, "Mom, I just really want to stay home. Can you make something for us at home? It tastes better, and it's healthier too. When you get really stressed out and eat out, it makes you more stressed out, and when you make dinner, you are calmer, and you relax. I'll help you." He was so right. And I heard him. We stayed home, put some music on, and made dinner together. Well, he drew at the kitchen table, and I made dinner. It was cozy and calm and nourishing.
My son helped me to recognize a stress pattern, a habituated tendency towards overworking and cutting out self-care to get more done. Another aspect of that stress pattern was too much caffeine and a binge working style that has been with me since college. It is one of the things that had kept me from being an artist for so long. I was unsure of how to balance this desire to "work straight through" with being a mom. The tendency reinforces itself. I work really hard, skip meals such as breakfast or lunch or both, and feel sort of frenzied at dinner time. And that frenzy causes less powerful meal choices and less self-care. It is an old pattern that is deeply linked with my creative process.
I was working with one of my coaches at the time and pondered. "Can I work at the height of my creativity, stay in the zone, and take excellent care of myself?" In other words, how do I let go of this pattern and get my deck done? I was reflecting to her my son's insight, and she pointed out to me that I had listened and re-routed. In other words, I had interrupted the pattern. As so often is the case with moms, I was able to really hear it when it was coming from my child; when the pattern was hurting him. He wanted a stable, cozy connection. He wanted the mom who is not caught in a crazed work mode. Because he wanted calm and steady, I was able to shift.
The stress pattern has arisen again since, and I get off track sometimes still. But it is less all-encompassing, and I catch it sooner. Recently, I had a terrible migraine. It was one of the worst migraines I have had since high school. I used to get them monthly, but now they are very infrequent. This one had a profound message for me. I was in the process of completing my Let Your Light Shine Private Coaching Program and received a clear message that this stress pattern was not allowed in the program. It was clear that I had to find an entirely new way to be productive. Which led me to ponder, if not stress, then what? That "what" is a flow state of pure joy and excitement where ideas come freely, and time is irrelevant. I used to only be able to access this kind of space when painting, meditating, or playing the gong. I had always created work for my "business" in a very different sort of mental/emotional space.
With nudges from the universe in the form of 9-year-old wise one and a terrible headache, I'm finding my way to a new pattern of creating, one that feels like joyful, creative, flow. It was hard for me to claim a new work mindset. It took a lot of inner work to get to a place where my work, in all of its aspects, could feel fun. I used to believe that if I wasn't stressed, then I wasn't "working." I did a lot of reflection and processing to allow myself to fully enjoy my business, genuinely love my work, and build in time to take care of myself during my workdays.
Upleveling our lives is hard work. Claiming more of our dreams and making them manifest in our everyday lives brings us up against our edges. We are faced with the question, "Do I get to have this?" Getting the deck published was a dream come true for me and was five years in the making. So it's not surprising that an old stress pattern surfaced and was released in the process of completing it. Our stress patterns hold us where we are and keep us from the magic that is waiting on the other side. We want more out of life, but our patterns tell us that it's an either/or world, and not an and/more world.
It's the work through coaching others and myself and my work with studying the yoga sutras that allows me to see this in action. I had to believe that more was possible for my life and that I was worthy of having more to release the stress pattern and create the deck and my coaching program. I had been inclined to believe that work and play were opposites, serious work anyway and that if I was enjoying myself, I wasn't working hard enough.
Also, I had been inclined to believe that if I took outstanding care of myself, I was being indulgent, selfish, lazy, and inefficient. My favorite painting mentor, Dimitri Wright, has said many times that a breakthrough is a break with, and he is exactly right. To break through to joy, I had to break up with caffeine and too much stress. The trick was shifting my belief system so that I know I deserve it.
Are you ready to break your patterns, push through your blocks, and find the life you deserve? I have a new Let Your Light Shine private coaching program that will get you there in 13 weeks. Want a faster way to get started? My 6 week Let Your Light Shine group coaching program is starting soon.