I have been trying to write a second blog post for weeks
Thursday August 24, 2023 |South Africa
I have been trying to write a second blog post for weeks. There are drafts for seven different topics to write about, but each gets stuck along the way.
Yesterday I sat down to write again but 15 minutes in the momentum was gone. I couldn’t feel where the piece was going, and I lost interest. I left it alone and went on to do other work.
At the end of the work day, when I got up from my chair, I felt a sharp pain in the area below my ribs and above my stomach –my solar plexus. It felt like indigestion. The pain and discomfort persisted all evening. At first, I just went about my evening, wishing it would go away. Then just before going to bed, I breathed into it and listened for what it was trying to tell me. As I breathed with it, I felt tears well up and I started to cry. I felt a younger part of me say, I don’t want to write it. I don’t want to write the blog. I let the tears fall and sat with my younger self.
I managed to fall asleep after that, but in the middle of the night, the pain woke me up again. I breathed through it and eventually fell back to sleep.
When I woke up this morning the pain was gone. But during meditation, my younger self showed up again. I sat with her, and she simply said, I don’t want to. I don’t want to, over and over. I let her speak; she repeated the words for a while. I listened and gave her time to get it all out of her system. As she did, I felt how she was speaking those words out loud, for all the times I wasn’t allowed to do so, as a child, and for all the times I was too afraid to say them as an adult.
The experience showed me how much I’ve been pushing around work and leading from my head, not my heart and body. I realise now, the words didn’t flow yesterday because I had an agenda about what to write, and what I wanted the post to do and speak to. But my heart asked me to create this space as a way of sharing my process –not sharing perfectly rounded pearls of wisdom, and, performing as if I have it all figured out. And this is what my younger self was objecting to: the need to be perfect all the time, the need to get it right, the rigidity I had unknowingly imposed on this space.
After the meditation, I did a gentle yin yoga session. It helped me come back to my body. Slow down, I felt and heard my body say. Slow down, come back to my pace.
I am starting to see and feel just how often I unconsciously live and move from fear, and how this fear has me thinking, It’s not enough / I have to finish it now / I’m not moving fast enough / I’m behind on things. It is a tiring way to live.
The sense of tiredness is still here. Today, I am focusing on moving slowly and being in my body. Because when I do, I can feel and hear the quiet voice within me that guides and leads. I can hear my younger self and actually trust her voice. I can let the words and myself just be.