The Value of Sitting Still

Me? I am the champion of projects. Before I even finish one great idea, I am contemplating the next.

I say I am a planner.

Hubby disagrees. He says I am a dreamer.

Here is how it usually goes.

Hubby and I have finally carved out some time when both of our schedules allow a day trip. We are in the car. Perhaps we are barely backing out of the driveway.

Suddenly, without warning, I am blindsided by a passing thought, "we should come up with a date for our next beach trip!"

Understandably, hubby is annoyed.

"Let us enjoy today before we start planning for the next."

To his point, I am the one who comes up with the ideas, at least when it comes to our couple's activities, and he is the one who plans out the details.

When I reached a certain point in my life, I was ready to retire from the Post Office and connect with Spirit for clients full time, I took classes on marketing, I researched "hashtags" and "keywords" and "SEO." I was a little stressed that I would not be able to make up the difference in salary, but at some point, I threw caution to the wind.

I took the plunge.

Bye Bye Post Office.

I told Spirit how much I needed to earn per week in order to meet my budget.

One day Spirit told me that it would be a lot easier if I sat back and allowed my highest good to find me than to spend so much time manifesting a specific dollar amount I needed to make.

Surrender.

Let go of the need to control the outcome.

Period.

Oh I did not learn the lesson easily. It is hard to relinquish control! It is hard not to be always in a forward trajectory!

I am a Capricorn. Yeah, there are not a lot of Capricorn psychics, I am well aware. But the Capricorn in me has a tendency to want to do all of the things necessary to move forward. And I have done a lot of that work.

But at some point I realized I wasn't in as much control as I wanted to believe myself to be.

At some point, too much productivity is counter-productive.

I am relatively okay when I have nothing on my calendar. (okay that is not exactly true, but I am working on it!)

I realize the mantra, "if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward" is meant to combat procrastination or inspire you to take small daily steps forward in the direction of your dreams. I understand that perhaps many people do not realize their dreams because they never take any steps forward. However, at this point in my life, I am beyond the need to constantly be making progress forward, despite my Capricorn tendency to constantly be productive.

This does not mean I am moving backward.

To me, life is like a tulip bulb. In the fall, you plant the tulip. You may water it, you may add the necessary ingredients to the soil to make it healthy.

Then winter comes.

You don't go digging in the dirt in December to see if it is growing. It probably isn't.

In January, you don't start to fret because you don't see any progress. You don't go digging up the bulb and throw it away because it didn't bloom. You probably aren't even thinking about it in January.

Timing is everything.

In April or May, depending on where you live, you may have a tulip! If the weather is just right, if the squirrels didn't dig up the bulb and move it to your neighbor's yard. If you didn't over fertilize or over water or over think.

I sometimes need time to stop and do nothing. To plan an impromtu trip to the beach. To sit and watch my grandson's YouTube videos or watch cartoons with my granddaughter. Or sit on the front porch with hubby and watch the flowers grow. To not be thinking about what I "should" be doing instead of these things.

When my latest book, Whispers From Another Room was released, I was obsessed with checking Amazon to see how it was rating. I researched Amazon ads and proper descriptions and made sure it was in the right category. Every day I tried to post something on social media.

One day hubby said to me, " you know, the goal of writing your book was not to see how many you could sell. You wrote the book because your soul had something to say. Your book is an expression of your soul. Stop worrying about what its ranking is and whether or not it is a best seller (okay it was a number 1 new release on Amazon for three weeks! Yay me!). Allow your book to be what it is. An expression of your soul."

Sometimes I think we forget the real reason why we are here. I don't believe we are here to do, do, do, to manifest manifest manifest. We must meditate five hours a day or attract this many clients or make this much money. The real reason we are here is to experience life, to enjoy the moment, to feel joy at the colors of the sunset and the stray cat that sits in the window looking in while we sit looking out. And if in the process of enjoying life we experience joy by writing a book or assisting someone find a missing piece of their soul or chat with someone's dead grandma, then all the better.

Let us stop wondering if we are fulfilling our purpose or making the right decisions or planning our next move correctly. Let us ask ourselves if we are experiencing joy or not. If we are, then we are okay. If not, perhaps we need to make a course correction.

This does not mean you do not have to do any work to manifest your dreams.

You still have to plant the tulips. You have to give them nutrients in their soil and make sure they are getting sun and moisture. But you don't have to stress.

Not one moment of stress will make your tulips grow. In reality, the real growing process is completely out of your control. You have to let the tulip do what it does.

The truth is, I do what I do because Spirit talks to me and I can hear them talk. I love allowing myself to be used as a mouthpiece for Spirit. I find joy in writing blogs and connecting with Spirit and posting my message of the day on social media. The day I stop loving it is the day I will stop doing it.

While writing this blog, I couldn't publish it due to the website telling me there were network issues. Okay. I checked my internet. Fine. I did all of the necessary checks to make sure it was all good. Still no luck. So I decided to go to my blog drafts and choose a different one to schedule for my weekly blog. Success.

Okay. So I saved this one as a draft and to my surprise it posted anyway!! If we think we are in control, we are fooling ourselves!!

The point is, sometimes when forward progress seems to come to a standstill, maybe there is a reason.

What do you love to do? Can you imagine yourself doing anything else? It doesn't always have to be about what you do for money, but sometimes it might.

It may be that all that is required of you to fulfill your spiritual purpose is to shine the light of your soul wherever you happen to hang your hat.

Don't be so busy moving forward that you forget to enjoy today.

It does not have to be hard, or complicated.

I love this quote from Abraham-Hicks: "Today I am going to do whatever it is that makes me very very very happy. And then I am going to whatever I have time to do after that."

Just for today, allow yourself to experience your highest good. Don't worry about what that is or what it is going to look like or how many people are going to notice or "like" it.

Be very very very happy. And then do whatever you have time to do after that.