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We have all felt tired.  Working too much, too many commitments, too much people pleasing.  This is the tired of being overextended.  Then there is the tired when we are trying to accomplish too much but everything feels off.  I’m talking about when we feel all of this and then feel like we are still lacking.  I’m talking about the feeling where we are soul tired.  This is the tired that sneaks up on us and depletes us.  The energy is just gone.

This is the kind of tired where you are in between wanting to do everything and do nothing at the same time and you don’t even know what the problem is.  I’ve been feeling a lot of this the last week and I know it’s because I’ve been pushing so much.  Quite frankly, I’ve been pushing in every direction. And now I am soul tired.  My mind is craving a break.

One thing I’ve learned is that the only way out of these feelings is to go through them.  There is no point avoiding them and there is even less a point in really figuring out where it came from.  The best thing I’ve found in these situations is to listen to what your body is telling you and just relax and let go.  Believe me I know that is far easier said than done, but the more you can train yourself to listen to your body and recognize the symptoms for when you really need a break, the sooner you will get back to feeling more like yourself.

The easiest way to start this process is to stop what you’re doing and hear what your body is telling you.  Check in with where you’re at right now.  Are your shoulders up at your ears?  Is your jaw clenched.  Are you hunched over?  Is your breathing shallow and fast?  If so, begin by consciously giving each area attention and letting yourself release it.  Tell yourself you are safe and you can let go.  Then turn your attention to your breath.  Make sure you’re taking deep belly breaths.  If you can, try and do square breathing.  This is a four count inhale, a four count hold, a four count exhale, and a four count hold.  Do that for as long as it takes you to feel centered again.

Once you feel yourself physically relaxed, you can start untangling the web you’ve created in your mind.  Pull on one thread at a time and focus on the things you can change, the things in your control.  Sometimes all it takes is recognizing that you’re upset over not having ice cream tonight.  Sometimes it’s deeper than that.  Sometimes it’s realizing that you’re not on the right track.  The good news is that even though we can’t solve all of our issues in one night, we can learn to identify where the issue lies.  Knowing what the problem is and where it started is a liberating thing because then we can take steps.  Even in those situations completely beyond our control where there is literally nothing we can do about it, we have the power to release it.  We still have our power.

Sometimes in the soul tired moments, the only thing we need is rest.  Check in with the body and if by the time you’re done with the physical relaxation portion, you may feel the need to drift off.  You don’t realize how much energy you put into holding tension.  If you do drift off just let yourself go.  Your body is telling you it needs to relax.  The best thing we can do for the soul or the body is to listen to it.

So tonight, I feel the need to share this message, to unwind the tension in my body, and to sleep.  In spite of the million and one things that still need to be done in preparation of the holiday, I know I need to relax.  I need to honor the messages I am receiving and let go.  Everything will get done.

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“The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth of the hole.” (Unknown, heard from The Buried Life). Those words sent me in a tailspin.  When we are making changes, there inevitably comes a point where we are faced with the challenge of either continuing forward or with reverting to what makes us comfortable.  We can find ourselves dealing with fears as we enter a new phase of life and it is easiest to take the path of least resistance.  But if we want to make something worthwhile and more meaningful, we need to face those fears head on and try something new.

I’ve spent the last two months diving into my projects and developing things that I’m really excited about.  But I’ve found myself enveloped in personal drama with my husband as well as at my full time job.  This is a precipice, a pivotal moment where I can make decision about how I want to behave.  And that all depends on the future I want to see.  I know the issues I’m facing right now I don’t want to repeat.  I’m thrilled to be working on the things that give me purpose and drive and it is a feeling I don’t want to give up.  So in making the choice to continue focusing on this endeavor, I know that I am making decisions to NOT partake in other things in my life.

When people see us changing it is scary for them so they often push back with the same old behaviors, forcing us to either revert to the relationship we had or to make the decision to stop.  As I feel the pressure increasing to remain the same in my personal life, I came across the opening quote.  My breath caught in my throat and I swear that my heart skipped a beat: repeating the same patterns in my relationships (personal or professional) have created a rut.  I don’t want to make that rut my grave.

I had to re-evaluate what was going on in my life and I looked at the common thread in nearly every situation.  It was me.  My pushing, my drive, my desire to create more.  I know at a minimum I need a pause.  And I know this isn’t sustainable as I’m going.  So I’m giving up.  I’m giving up the impulse to push everyone around me and I’m going to continue to work on the things at my pace.  The people who are meant to be in my life will be there and as I change those who can’t keep up will fall away.  I’m giving up making people be something they aren’t.  This also means I’m giving up the ideas that I had for the future.  Sometimes the players you think will be with you change.  And I’m giving up the idea that things will magically get better.

It’s time for me to let go of the reins and focus on what I can do rather than force people to play along.  I will be honest that it hurts. I have this compulsion repeating in my mind that “if only the played along and just did X, we’d be fine!”  But we are dealing with humans and they all have free will.  Growth is painful because you find yourself looking at the pieces of yourself that are hidden.  It’s also painful because sometimes you’ve been holding onto something for so long that you’re stuck in that position.  It’s like when you’ve been holding onto the gallon of milk and you’ve got to carry it up four flights of stairs to get home.  When you let go, your hands ache as your muscles relax.  Letting go of an image you’ve held onto for so long is similarly painful.

The relief comes after you readjust and reacclimate to the lesser weight.  That too, is the same for your mind.  We carry so much clutter that we don’t realize how much we NEED the relief until we feel the pain of letting go.  The key in all of that is that the relief does come.  You just have to learn to adapt to the new sensations from the loss.  Don’t fight the release.

I’ve been tired for a long time.  So tired I didn’t realize I was tired at all.  I want to be in a place that excites me and to be surrounded by people who are excited by my success.  I need to be heard.  I want to be loved, not merely tolerated.  I no longer want to be it all, handling everyone else’s expectations.  I’m working on creating a loving and supportive environment where respect flows.  I’m not living in competition anymore.  I’m putting down control and fear in favor of creativity and encouragement.  Just Be.  The rest will take care of itself.

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I felt a lot of residual emotion today.  I felt the leftover anxiety and fear from the tension with my husband yesterday.  I realized that so much of my issue was being afraid of change, being afraid of making a decision about the life we want. I felt discomfort in our home situation (related to making decisions).  As silly as it sounds, I felt like my husband and I have been on fundamentally different pages and it feels like there is a rift developing over what we want the future to look like. My relationship with my husband has been at this point for a while where I feel like we are heading in different directions so it’s not unusual for those fears to spill over into other things—but I have been working on it so I was sad that I didn’t think about it before I let those emotions out.

Aside from that, I felt awkward at work because I blurted out a story about the holiday from a negative place to my boss—and the experience was far from that.  It was annoying but I didn’t need to add the drama.   I had a wonderful holiday but the story I told was negative without me even thinking about what I was saying.  It was so automatic that I actually felt afraid for a minute.  Then I felt disappointed in myself because I let my mind get away from me.  The scared, angry, negative person I was letting out (and feeling stir within me) was not who I wanted to be, neither in that moment or in the future.

The person I want to be is clear minded and fierce.  Fair, but fierce.  She is confident and knows she is walking the path she is meant to.  She owns her actions and her life.  I know I want to surround myself with people at the level I want to be at and that will mean making difficult choices.  I started thinking about the anxiety and realized it is because of the paths in front of me and the fact that I’m trying to walk them both.  At times it’s like I’m being dragged upside down on the wrong track and at others it feels like I have a wheel straddling both paths with the middle getting burnt up- or even one leg on the path and one off.  To be that fierce, decisive woman, I need to pick a path and stay on it.  I need to be committed to my goals and stay out of old habits.

I’m proud I recognize these things now and I don’t let myself spiral.  I don’t need permission to be fierce because I feel this exists in me.  I’m actually making progress in my life. everything going on now is clearing for what is to come.  I love my husband but I love ME more so I know where my focus is and I know my boundaries.  I am a trailblazer, healing my heart and mind and I am ready to move forward.

The unknown is scary but it is also scary keeping a life on hold, hoping that something will happen.  We need to be decisive in order to progress.  The fact that the unknown is scary isn’t a reason to hide or fight it.  If you want something different, you have to DO something different.  The universe responds to energy.  Change your tune and see what’s on the next level.  This, the chaos, discomfort, frustration is all transitional.  I’m allowed to shift and transition with it.  In fact, it’s needed to thrive.  So take it in stride.  Love who and what you have.  Breathe.  Take the step.

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Sunday is normally a gratitude practice day for me but today ended up taking a slightly different path.  I’ve been with my husband for 18 years and I know it’s perfectly normal that couples will not agree all the time. The last few days of this long weekend have been more stressful than rejuvenating so I felt some disappointment today as I had hoped to achieve more than I did.  I found myself blaming my husband.  He has been in a funk over the last few days and very short tempered, taking things out on the whole family and just generally not acting himself.  Now, I’m a very driven person so when there are things to get done, even if I’m in a bad mood, they need to get done.  I don’t let that sway me.  My husband tends to take a turn for the lazy when he’s in those moods and, quite frankly, I wasn’t having 3 days of it.  There was simply too much to do, especially as the holidays are approaching.

We have been in the process of a massive deep clean for roughly a month that has absolutely taken its toll on both of us.  Feeling emotional looking at the things I’ve held onto, feeling angry for holding onto so much, feeling guilty for not purging it prior to moving here all made a nasty cocktail for some hair trigger reactions.  Throw in an unreasonably moody husband and we were volatile to say the least.  Now, going into this long weekend I was thrilled because I had every intention of finishing this purge and being done with it.  We are entering the holidays (which we are hosting this year) and working full time and throwing in side projects and making gifts on top of it, I know time is precious.  My husband has no interest in preparing for things like this in advance, and normally I get annoyed but just deal with it myself.  This year that could not be done—we NEEDED to do this together and handle the mess.

I wanted to respect his boundaries in case something truly was wrong, but I also knew that the usual pattern of handling it myself wouldn’t work.  I am entering a phase in my life where I don’t want the chaos or the laziness anymore.  My skin crawls at the sight of clutter and mess and I am no longer taking the responsibility of taking care of an entire household on my own.  We did this together, we get out of it together.  That sparked some fires between us this weekend.  It actually made me question our compatibility in some regards because I am simply not the person who is ok with a lazy partner anymore.  I am not ok with holding all the weight and doing all the running while he sits and enjoys.  Partnership doesn’t work like that.

While I was having a moment of questioning who we are as people now, I started thinking of the ways we are differently motivated.  He is motivated for the now while I am thinking for the long haul.  Again this isn’t a terrible problem because he has helped me stay grounded in the moment many times and I know I still need that in my life.  But I am beyond the point of dealing with a petulant partner who reverts to a teenager and me taking the role of scolding mother.  I know that it is a matter of focusing on what we want to create the life we want.

The card I drew today was “Directing my focus onto what’s thriving creates more of what I want” Gabby Bernstein, Super Attractor Deck.  As soon as I saw the card, I knew I was on the right track with my line of thinking.  People change and evolve and that is natural for the course of a relationship as well.  My husband and I met when we were young and it is natural that we have found different things.  we are not the people we were when we met.  I no longer want to be that person and I also no longer want to fight to make him be the person I want him to be.  It is a matter of focusing on what works in our lives.

I’m not saying I want to end our relationship, but I have to respect the natural course that it is taking now.  I want my focus to be on things that have return and value.  He chooses to focus on things that make him happy in the moment.  I know that this is a source of contention with my husband as I tend to be critical of his interests—I am working on that.  He enjoys things like video games or fishing.  Neither of those things accomplish what we said we wanted for our future.  I’m not saying there isn’t a time or place for them, but those things can’t take precedence over creating the life we said we were going to.  I am perfectly willing to allow him to decompress with a video game for a while.  But if I need to shower and he needs to watch our child so I can do that in peace (and decompress myself!), I am not going to wait to bathe until he is done gaming for the night.

I really believe in the life we said we wanted and I truly still want to do that.  I remind him of it all the time because it is something we said we would do together.  But with diverging interests, it’s hard to see the path we need to take sometimes.  It’s also hard to make it so it doesn’t feel like a battle of the wills.  I do believe there comes a point where you need to question what the end result may be of your actions.  Is what you’re doing now going to be of value to what you say you want?  Are your words and actions aligned?  That is the state that I’m trying to get to and my goal is to be consistent with it.  And for the first time in my life I feel like my goals are important enough to question who I surround myself with and to make decisions about who I let close to me.

Growing up and changing means accepting your own evolution and learning to set value and priority to what you do.  The good news is that everything changes, life is malleable, and we can tune in at any time.  The most important thing is to look at what works for you and follow what feels good.  Like the card said today, if it’s thriving and you feel good, focus on that to get more of what you want.  For me, I intend to continue the process of purging and cleaning and working toward my goals.  THAT makes me happy.  I also intend to continue to focus on what I am grateful for—and that includes the things my husband does for me that ARE in alignment with our goals.

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Bukowski says, “We’re all going to die.  All of us.  What a circus!  That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t.  We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities.  We are eaten up by NOTHING.”  I love this quote.  The truth of it is so simple and so stark but it is just that: TRUTH.  We are all given on precious, beautiful life.  Think about the things we waste our time on in a given day.  The fights, the emails, the gossip.  We let the need to consume and obtain and possess devour us and rob us of what life is really about: living.

To live is to be open to the possibilities and to create.  It is to dance with the song of our days and get in touch with the inner desires.  It is to kindle the flame of the inner voice that says “Go, do THAT!”  We live every day—a single lifetime with a million possibilities strung out in a series of days.  Knowing there is a finite number of those days should be enough to make us question why we would spend a second doing anything we don’t love.

The other aspect of living is something we really struggle with: connection.  It is plain to see that humans are social creatures.  But we are taught that we need to conform to the social norm in order to be accepted so we spend more time comparing and criticizing than we do relishing the flavors of people that cross our paths.  The lessons we need to learn are more than just acceptance.  Acceptance is absolutely the first step.  We need to know that it is perfectly ok and totally normal to be different from one another.  Then we need to celebrate those differences.  I’m not talking about the kind of hype where everyone gets a trophy.  I’m talking about truly developing that which makes each of us unique.

Ironically it is in celebrating the uniqueness of every individual that we understand what connection is.  Rather than teaching how differences divide us, it is important to focus on how differences can bring us together.  There is an inherent need between people to fulfill what each of us lacks.  We rely on each other.  I spoke in an earlier piece about the primal brain and it comes up here again.  There was a time when someone who didn’t fit the mold was a liability and would cause someone else to get killed.  It caused us to panic and to learn to conform.  We no longer need to function from that state of mind.

What are the things that keep you up?  What are the things that hold you back?  What trivialities eat you up?  Those are the aspects that you need to heal.  Those are the fears you need to release.  In the end we all end up in the same place so we have a choice to make: spend your life living someone else’s expectations or open up to the joy and take the chance to live your live exactly as you want to.

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I’m not a particularly religious person but that isn’t to say that I don’t have faith.  In fact, I have a very strong faith.  But the following quote hit me right where I needed it to; “God does not say, ‘First be good then you can experience me;’  God says, ‘Experience me within yourself, and your life will be an expression of all that is good.’”  Dean Jackson.  Many of us are taught that we need to attain a certain level of worth in order to do the things we enjoy doing.  We are taught that life is meant to be a struggle in order to prove our worthiness.  As we shed the layers of a paradigm that no longer suits us, this inherent message we are all taught no longer resonates.  We feel the discordant hum pulling us further and further off key.

The new message that the world is slowly waking up to is that we are inherently good.  We are born worthy of the lives we desire and that can look different for everyone.  There isn’t one answer for living life—we are all given a different role to play and our only job is to play that to the best of our ability and to work on leveling up as often as we can.  Our job is to fulfill our purpose.

If we look at this as a simple problem of numbers, it doesn’t make any sense that nearly 8 billion people would be expected to run the same exact path and fulfill the exact same purpose.  There simply aren’t enough of the same resources for us to be required to do the same thing and achieve the same goals.  There is a reason we are not only born diverse, but have diverse tastes and interests.  We have unique talents and abilities.  Why in the universe would we be expected to ignore that which is within us in order to be the same thing?  That would be like expecting the cardinal to roar as a lion.  It doesn’t even make sense.

We all have a unique message and it is important to share that message.  We are ALL born with the ability to express ourselves.  It is our societal norms that teach us to quiet down and play it safe and to question our abilities.  It is our system that forces the same message down all of our throats.  It is our basal instinct that teaches us to blend and hide and question ourselves and forces us to mock those that are different.  Our primal brain still remembers a time when those who were different were culled from the herd.  It is our job to heal ALL of those messages and let our voices ring loud.

The key to all of this is to know that there is nothing we have to prove.  We are worthy.  We have immense power and dimming that light won’t make anyone else’s shine brighter—it will create a suppressed volcano inside of ourselves.  Let that out, express everything you can, and be true to who you are.  The universe needs you to create that orbit to balance things out.  The universe wouldn’t put you here for no reason.  You have to remind yourself of your ability and your purpose.  The things that call to you call to others as well—let your light shine and be the spark for someone else.  The stars don’t dim when another begins to shine.