On letting go, moving for your future self, and developing patience

Published 25 days ago • 1 min read

Plunge into Calm

Happy Tuesday! Here's what is inspiring me this week...

Breathe.

Would love if you would try this with me:

Breathe in through your nose.
Softly exhale out of pursed lips.
Now this time close your eyes (but read the rest first).
Inhale through your nose.
Drop your awareness below the neck.
FEEL into the body.
Softly exhale, but this time pay close attention to the felt sense in the body.

Did you feel that subtle letting go in the exhale?
The feeling of taking your hands off the wheel, even for just a millisecond?

That’s the feeling I get when I'm doing things that bring me joy. It's the same feeling when I'm around people who make me feel safe, and when I'm living with integrity. It’s the feeling I experience in meditation, when I remember there's a way of existing in this world without constant efforting (which is apparently not a word, but I'm still using it).

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”

— Chögyam Trungpa

Move.

I think of aging and physical fitness sort of like climate change. Once you start to see the side effects of not taking action, it could be too late. You have to move now for your future self. Now is the time to create habits so they become second nature when the going gets tough. Eventually you may find you don't need to motivate yourself to move, it just simply becomes who you are.

Be Human.

Rick Rubin on the need for patience in the creative process:

"Patience is developed much like awareness. Through an acceptance of what is. Impatience is an argument with reality. The desire for something to be different from what we are experiencing in the here and now. A wish for time to speed up, tomorrow to come sooner, to relive yesterday, or to close your eyes then open them and find yourself in another place."

"When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control. We can't force greatness to happen. All we can do is invite it in and await it actively. Not anxiously, as this might scare it off. Simply in a state of continual welcoming.