“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Ok, true confession time. I've been suffering from a bit of writer's block. Actually that's a lie. I've been writing a ton, but my perfectionistic tendencies have been challenging me and I haven't been able to hit the publish button on anything I've written. This led me to think about what to do next because, well, I didn't know what to do. The answer to that is very different now than it used to be.
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I was listening to a women's empowerment type podcast recently and the interviewee was talking about something she’d been trying to figure out when she said some of the words I most hate to hear crossing women's lips.
I came across this quote the other day and couldn't believe how perfectly it described something I'd been trying to put into words. "Be patient with yourself. Nothing in nature blooms all year."
I've always loved coffee. Like really, really, really loved it. But I finally hit a point where I was doing so many things to relieve the stress in my life and boost my energy that it started to irritate me that I couldn’t kick my coffee habit to the curb.
I didn’t write or talk about it at first because I didn’t want it to be happening to me. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t “do it all” and was worried what people would think. I was ashamed I couldn’t just suck it up and push through like so many other people seemed to do.
If you listened to your thoughts for even 5 minutes you’d likely see that you’re bringing a whole lot of the past and the future into your present. The idea of being "more present" is easy to talk about, but it can be a challenge to put it into practice, right?
People have many different ways of trying to be more present, but understanding why I was bringing the past and future into today is something that has helped me to actually be more in each moment as it's happening.
Think about some of the things that you might deal with day in and day out—making decisions, brainstorming, negotiating, helping a friend through a hard time, being there for your family as a mom, daughter, sister, wife, the list goes on and on.
Now think about how you want to show up for those situations. I'm guessing you'd choose happy, centered, and calm over miserable, disconnected, and frantic, right? Right.
Do you ever find yourself falling back into old habits and not even really realizing it? One of mine is frantically polling everyone around me and asking them what they think I should do.
And the crazy thing is I know when I'm doing it that what I'm really doing is looking for external validation to either affirm or contradict what I maybe kind-of sorta think I should do. But the thing about searching outside yourself for the answer is...it doesn't work.
It's a simple truth that you must witness your behavior if you want to change it. Obvious, right? Not always.
Often times our unconscious reflex can be to push down any negative or fear based thoughts we have without even thinking about it. We don't want to look behind the curtain to see where they’re coming from, or fact check if they’re even true because...why?
So what does it mean to let our light shine, or to “be the light?" You might not even know what I'm talking about, or perhaps you're surprised to realize you are afraid of shining bright because you're worried about what people would think of you.
Or you might feel like stepping fully into your light would extinguish the light of those around you. On the flip side, some people can feel like letting the people around them shine will in some way dim their own light. But in my experience, quite the opposite is true.