In this week’s newsletter, I posed the questions:

• Darling, sweetie, honey baby, what one habit would feel really delightful this week?
• What one habit or practice or choice would feel as supportive as a personal chef, assistant, and massage therapist all rolled into one?
• What do I want to do to support myself?

Now what in the heck are my answers? Hmmm… taking a moment to check in with my self……………..

Here’s what feels right: Every time I feel a surge of anxiety, instead of taking it as a sign I’m utterly lost and headed for creative dead end and that I have completely forgotten how to create anything at all, I will gently replace that ugly noise with the remembrance, learned from my great friend Micheal, that what I choose to do is both overwhelmingly meaningful and overwhelmingly
insignificant or to put it another way, I will get over my hand wringing little self via a dose of lightness.

I’ll also cultivate the habit of watching Saturday Night Live reruns and maybe even a few Monty Python oldies to help this lightness bubble along.

I want to commit to more new supportive habits but that’s a fantastic way to pull the self-flagellating knot even tighter so I’ll stop right here. Stopping now.

How about you? Love to hear what you’ll be choosing to do.

Which can be really really fun, if I am keep coming back to the place of “Nothing is required of me, there is nothing to do, nothing to complete, nowhere to get to.” (I learned “Nothing is required of me from Maryam Webster.) When I’m not in that place, that gluttony is far from fun–it’s desperate, grasping, and driven. And did I mention unattractive?

Building on my last post, the best way to get to this place of acceptance / nothing required is through the body. For me, that could mean screaming, shaking, rolling on the floor moaning: letting my body vent the frustration it feels at being pushed and shoved into proving or accomplishing, letting my mind clear itself, letting my energy settle.

Then I like to practice what spiritual teacher Adyshanti calls True Meditation: “In true meditation all objects are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to manipulate or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness (consciousness) is the source in which all objects arise and subside.” SoundsTrue has two good introductions to his work.

It means being aware without changing or manipulating what you are experiencing (that would include judging yourself for having said experience or wishing it away or blaming it on someone else);

These days, it’s a very challenging practice for me because it means being aware of my intense hunger to DO. To be aware and not act on nor judge nor push away this desire is, at times, agonizing.

Can you relate? Are you a glutton, do you get trapped in doing? Do you find yourself going from one idiot task to the other (and feeling very virtuous while doing it–my favorites include folding the blankets in the living room, cleaning up art supplies, and cleaning up the kitchen). I’d love to hear about your doing…

Could it be time to practice what I preach?

At the Writer’s Spa and other retreats I teach I blather on about how important it is to know your own work process, so of course, I thought I knew mine- but perhaps I have, gasp, a blind spot.

I think the best way for me to work is terrifically, terribly hard and then take a vacation in which I do all the things I have been wanting to do while I was working so hard- read novels, take naps, make tons of art, take yoga classes, hang out with friends. I like my story that being intense and working around the clock proves I am diligent and good and serious and smart… and then, I will enjoy slow days of relaxing in a hammock, so entirely pleased with myself, romantically recouping my creative energy…

News flash, Jen- This is not what happens! I rarely work long hours because it is not how I work best, and in fact, I find it impossible to sustain! Yet I was not realizing how I subtly believed my story that that is the best way so I’ve been subtly feeling like less than a good, creative, intense, real artist because I don’t work this way. And when I do, like I have been lately? I collapse and feel like shit afterward and the “vacation” sucks because…

I LOVE TO CREATE. I love to flow back and forth between writing and gluing and reading… the flow and mix makes me happy. I don’t like extremes. DUH!

By George, I have discovered a romantic bullshit artist story lurking, like you have to be a drunk and poor and suffer to be a really good artist. Seem I believe(d) I have to work really hard and then collapse in a very comforting and self-nurturing way, while looking wan but beautiful.

The truth has knocked on my head, direct from my heart: I work best in a steady healthy way, days where writing and art and a sit-down lunch and time with my family and exercise is all wound together. And you know what, I mostly do that!

How ironic that the gal who writes about comfort has been harboring a hidden story that comfort and creative work should not work and twine together or she isn’t a “REAL CREATOR!”

I love being a silly imperfectly perfect human being. How often our undiscovered stories are all that stands between us and happiness, ease, acceptance.

P.S.
Of course, sometimes I have to work hard to get a project done within a given time period. In the case of the book, it’s because the book I’m writing a) expanded (like it always does!) and b) took longer to come into focus (which it also does). So to get the book out by the end of the year, long hours were needed. Yet my story made me suffer, as those pesky stories masquerading as the TRUTH always do!