Ebbs and Flows
In the flow.
You’re well rested. You’re on top of all your projects. You show up for practice and your body enjoys it. You experience peace and clarity in your heart and mind. You even feel lighter, as if your worries, your intergenerational trauma, have been touched by understanding and compassion. You look out into the world and see beauty.
Sounds wonderful, yes?
Against the tide.
Sleepiness is overtaking you. Light nausea. Headaches. Decision making is messy and slow and scattered and uninspired. And yet, you keep going, because if you “just do it” you can pat yourself on the back for doing the productive, responsible thing. You skip practice, because, deadlines.
Sounds familiar, yes?
External vs internal drivers
We’re incredibly well-trained. We’ve internalized all of the messages of success and happiness, goals and drive, celebration and achievement, merit and worth - even to the point of believing that they are good and pure and worthy, and not capitalist, exploitative, or harmful. (If you haven’t done it yet, take some time to examine each of those seemingly “good” ideas to unravel the ways they keep you focused on productivity).
If we’re not careful, we bring that framework of achievement, goals, and success into our practice, when actually, our practice is the antidote to this internalized self-harm.
Our practice asks us to be present. Here. Now. With this breath. In this body.
Present in these conditions and circumstances that seem permanent but that aren’t.
Present to tend to the suffering, all the layers of it, and present for the joy of awareness, healing, and love that is also there.
In the present, there is no measurement of success or achievement, no evaluation of merit or worth. There is just breath. Just life. Just deep awareness and the joy of it.
But today, I’m just tired.
It takes repeated effort, and support, to let our practice take up enough space in our lives to have a real effect, to bring us to those moments of present awareness, those moments of “YES, THIS is the beauty of being alive.”
A daily practice is where it’s at. It’ll work. It will.
One of the brilliant messages this year from one of my own teachers is taking root: “Prepare yourself for practice by getting enough rest in between practices.”
Yes, all the work, all the feeding, all the organizing, all the adulting, is also happening between one practice and the next, AND I am learning that without the rest that I also clearly need, my practices turn into a string of shallow moments. Passing moments. Moments of distraction, strung together.
Rather than bring the “just do it” attitude to practice, let’s bring awareness, compassion, and the knowledge that whatever is present is your guide. Nourishing the internal guide of your body beautifully disrupts the hold that external drivers have on your decision-making mind.
Ebbs and flows.
Knowing ourselves can create such a beautiful peace. Acceptance is key, and a true appreciation of impermanence is another.
When we bring the insight of impermanence to our fatigue, our lethargy, our frustration, we remember that within a few breaths, that energy will shift. We need not fall into it completely.
Not that a few breaths will reverse fatigue that needs hours of sleep, hours of play, hours of love, to be transformed, but within a few breaths, we can catch ourselves from falling into negative thought patterns and behaviors that will feed the fatigue, and instead, find peace in the knowledge that we are aware that rest is needed. Internal cues, yes. Externally guided but internalized “shoulds”, no.
The moment we choose to act compassionately and lovingly toward anything that comes into our awareness is when the real transformation starts to happen. This takes practice. Over time. This is why I am always going on about practice, but this post is not about that per se.
This post is about the joy of awareness.
These words are here as an invitation to take some time to get real about the energy that moves through your days, your weeks, your seasons. Embrace the knowing that you have more energy in some seasons, and less in others, you have more energy at different times of day/night and less at others.
The activities/people/projects that take up your day also come with different energy patterns. Tuning into the ebbs and flows of all of the different energies that move through my life each year has been such a joyful project (thanks again go out to Kate Gibbs for this exercise in personal awareness).
Mapping is a happy tool for me, but you can fit this exercise into whatever format that works for you. I start with categories, and give myself plenty of grace to adjust them along the way:
teaching
parenting
backend work - admin
backend work - development
on retreat - offering
on retreat - participating
museums (new this year)
ecotherapy (also new this year)
rest
practice - movement
practice - stillness
These are the activities that fill up my days. Once I see a list, I notice what’s missing:
1:1 with spouse or kids
reading books
sangha
trainings
collaborations
volunteer work
Give your list a couple of rewrites. Look to see that you’re including activities that nourish your creativity, your spirit, your relationships, and yes, your pocketbook, too.
Then map it out.
Calendar view, spreadsheet, journal, white wall, whatever works for you. I love both spreadsheets and notebook planners for this, on screen and off.
I started with work, as many of us will. I look at the sweep of a year and see that both administrative work and teaching ramps up or drops off at different times during the year depending on what clients, students, and studios are up to. When I add in the trainings that I’m taking over the course of the year, I see a better picture of the quiet pockets and periods of overdrive, and can choose to adjust.
When schedules are already overlapping, signaling overdrive, I can see clearly that I need to pause on developing new programs or collaborations. I can map the timing of retreats to create more realistic timelines for volunteer work.
I don’t advocate putting work first, but know that many of us will, and must.
Before the work schedule takes over completely, pause to map your own physical energy levels. Do you need more rest in the winter or are you full of energy to take on new projects? Is there an imbalance between your seasonal energy levels and annual work deadlines? Once you see those imbalances, you can choose to prioritize rest and rejuvenation above other things, and shift the balance.
You get to prioritize where your energy goes instead of feeling like you’re behind the curve, or that you have no agency.
My favorite outcome in this mapping is that I see new patterns emerge that can create ease around practice time, rest, museum trips, ecotherapy walks with friends, and all of the very necessary, high-priority activities that bring beauty and joy into my daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal calendars.
From the forest view, I can see that the ebbs and flows of business inputs & outputs, the ebbs and flows of rest and outdoor activity, and the ebbs and flows of creativity and rest each have their own pattern. Seeing how they all interact has been eye-opening, thought-provoking, and inspiring.
What’s happening right now?
As I write this, late summer has me swirling in the chaos of a new school year and the anticipation/excitement of new adventures (trainings, retreats, family stuff). And at the same time, the heat is wearing me down.
Once I have the annual view drafted, I turn to a weekly calendar that truly honors the amount of energy I have at hand. There’s work to do, and also rest and sunshine to enjoy.
With a forest view, I can see the shifts coming, which reminds me to attune to understanding, compassion, and grace for myself.
When I see the whole picture, I affirm that seasonal fatigue is not permanent, but in fact attuned to mother nature. The visual of the annual flow affirms my own felt understanding that my energy ebbs and flows across weeks and seasons, and I need not force myself to perform more or less than the energy that I have.
When I see the whole flow of a year or a season, I affirm my intention to rest, to make time for creative pursuits, to nourish my spirit and my relationships, and that I need never again feel like I’m doing any of those things too much. The work also gets done.
If seeing the visual of an annual energy flow map could bring understanding, compassion, and grace into your life, please give it a try. At the very least, I hope it might loosen the grip of the idea that your time, or practice, should be measured by levels of productivity or achievements.
