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How To Let Go, as taught to me by the adult swim instructor

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Every week I send out a love note filled with resources, musings, and inspiration about walking this path of yoga and liberation. Click here to subscribe!

I never learned to swim as a kid. I got a few haphazard lessons from a family friend when I was in elementary school, so I could get into water without fear of imminent death. I always joked, I won’t drown...immediately. *shrug*

So last fall, I signed up for free adult swimming lessons at the community center. Every Friday at 4pm I showed up to reluctantly change into my deeply unflattering one-piece in the clammy locker room, and made my way into the lukewarm pool.

We started with the basics: putting my face in the water, blowing bubbles, learning how to kick my legs on a kickboard. I made some progress, and then got to try putting all the (very basic) pieces together.

Swimming is a complex exercise. It was no easy feat coordinating the movement of the legs, the head and the breath simultaneously. (I wasn’t even using my arms yet, except to hold onto the kickboard for dear life!) It was super challenging, and every week I left exhausted.

After a few weeks of lessons, I had a revelation in the pool.

I was so uncomfortable going underwater that even when I put my face in the water, my neck was still gripping fiercely to try to keep my head from going fully under. I would put just my eyes, nose and mouth under, and grip hard to keep myself from having to put my ear or throat or hair under the surface.

I was exerting so much effort trying to keep myself from letting go, even as I was in the process of letting go.

It was incredibly exhausting.

I had to chuckle at myself. This tendency to let go a little, but still cling fiercely to some modicum of control, was laughably familiar. This is how most of us go about trying to let go of control.

We want to surrender, but not all the way.

We want to let go, but still hold on.

We’ve been so well practiced at gripping and grasping and clinging, that to let go feels unfamiliar, and for most of us, pretty scary. For a long time, holding onto the perception of control is what kept us safe. So to let it go can feel utterly terrifying.

Releasing my head fully into the pool felt like a death wish. It made my heart pound and my pits sweat. Honestly, it still does.

But here’s the thing--we have to let go in order to grow.

Surrender is the prerequisite for transformation.

And I want to keep growing. Even when it requires relinquishing. Even when it scares the shit out of me. I want you to keep growing too.

So look around--where are you half in the water? Where are your old habits and coping strategies keeping you from really letting go? How are you holding yourself back, even as you’re diving in?

This is how we truly let go of control.

I’m not there yet (wherever “there” is.) It's still hard for me to relax my neck in the pool, but at least now I notice that when I’m holding back. I'm on my way to being able to make a different choice.

I can imagine a day when swimming will feel relaxing, intuitive, pleasurable even. This is the future I’m practicing towards.

Can you exhale? Soften? Can you release yourself fully with faith that the water will hold you? Can you breathe out and trust that you won’t drown?

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. If you like what I write each week, I'd love to keep in touch. Sign up for weekly love letters direct to your inbox by CLICKING HERE. If you have the means, consider making a financial contribution to support my work

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Finding Our Way

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Every week I send out a love note filled with resources, musings, and inspiration about walking this path of yoga and liberation. Click here to subscribe!

On our third night in Delhi, we got tremendously lost on our way to meet a friend of mine from high school who lives there now for dinner. We got in the Uber at our hotel and began to drive. We’d been in the car about half an hour when the driver pulled off the main road down a dark lane lined with trees.

“The restaurant is over there,” he communicated with a series of gestures in the direction of a wooded thicket. “Ummmm....pretty sure that’s not where the restaurant is,” we said. But he swiped to end the trip and opened up our door.

Perplexed, we got out of the car and began walking to one end of the road, and then the other, and then back again. We had not yet acquired our tourist SIM cards, so we were sans cell service and thus, relying on our intuition and an offline map app. We wandered for nearly an hour, asking any random stranger if they knew where the restaurant was, to no avail.

I grew more and more frustrated. Sensing this and trying to appease me, Johnny, my travelling companion, began loudly and enthusiastically narrating our every move. “At the end of this block, we’ll make a right. And then walk five blocks down, dog leg left then right, and then it *should be* on the left.”  

My face burned. His bombastic orienteering was not helping. I wanted to shout at him, would you just shut up already??

But instead I paused.

I walked a little slower, and when I was about ten paces behind him, I had a little convo with myself (in my head).

I asked myself, “Hey, how are you feeling right now?” And when I paused to inquire, I realized that I was feeling shame. “Oh,” I said to myself. “You’re ashamed. Okay. What do you feel ashamed about?” “I feel ashamed that we’re going to be late to meet my friends. I feel ashamed that we have to ask for so much help. I feel ashamed that people in this hip neighborhood might perceive that we are hapless foreign travellers lost on our way to dinner.”

And then I just talked to myself kindly. I said, “Oh honey, it’s okay that you’re running late. It’s okay that you’re lost. It was an honest mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. You are trying your hardest and everyone knows it.”

And then, miraculously, the shame dissolved. I felt the hardness drain from my abdomen, the tension soften from my throat. I laughed at Johnny’s (eventually fruitful) attempts at navigation.  We finally found the restaurant and had one of our favorite dinners of the trip. And I carried on.

Travel holds up a mirror.

Like yoga and mindfulness practices, travel shows us all the parts of us. All our habits and tendencies, good and bad. And I got to practice meeting myself in my flaw-ful-ness with love and sweetness. With patience and compassion. With acceptance that I am still growing and changing.

But a past version of me (and, let’s be real, probably some future version of me too) would have flipped out.  I would’ve blamed Johnny for the discomfort of my unaccounted for shame. I would’ve raised my voice and picked a fight.

I never would have asked, listened, or soothed. I would’ve picked a fight and felt some release but I wouldn’t have actually resolved the issues.

But I’m learning how to do better. I’m learning how to listen to myself on a deeper level. I’m learning how be present with what’s actually happening. The practices are having an effect on my ability to navigate the world. 

I am suffering less. That's the whole point.

And that feels really fucking good. 

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. If you like what I write each week, I'd love to keep in touch. Sign up for weekly love letters direct to your inbox by CLICKING HERE. If you have the means, consider making a financial contribution to support my work

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The Land of Never Enough

Photo by Keit Trysh on Unsplash

Photo by Keit Trysh on Unsplash

Every week I send out a love note filled with resources, musings, and inspiration about walking this path of yoga and liberation. Click here to subscribe!

There is no such thing as enough.

Perhaps our sense of scarcity is innate. Our ancestors, always seeking their next meal,certainly never had the type of food security available to most of us in modern times. Or perhaps it’s a result of living in a financial system that mandates constant growth in order to be economically healthy.

Whatever its origins, for most of us living modern lives, there is only (real and/or perceived) scarcity.

For example: a 2010 study of very wealthy people (those who have 25 million in assets or more) asked if they generally feel financially secure. “Most do not consider themselves financially secure; for that, they say, they would require on average one-quarter more wealth than they currently possess.” (from the Atlantic Monthly)

If even the wealthiest people do not feel stable, how can the rest of us expect to ever overcome financial insecurity? This sense of financial scarcity can spill over into all aspects of our lives. This can be especially true at the axis (axises? axes?) where we fall outside the default norms of power and privilege (for me as a queer person, for instance.)

We end up feeling dissatisfied with everything, like we must always be improving ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our lives.

Do any of these sound familiar?

I would feel better if I just....

  • Made more money

  • Had a better partner

  • Lived in a nicer house

  • Lost some weight

  • Had a more successful career

  • Healed all my wounds

  • Was a more “evolved” person

Unless we set clear criteria for what enough is, we will never know if we’ve reached it.

All of these goals are vague, nebulous targets to aim for. And what’s worse, many of them have been predestined by our deeply oppressive culture. We have to get clarity about exactly what enough looks like for us, and here’s a hint: it’s probably not a weight on the scale or a dollar amount. It may not be anything that even vaguely resembles what we’ve been told should satisfy us.

In order to undo this deep attachment to scarcity, we have to get to know contentment. Unless we acquaint ourselves with this most unfamiliar of feelings we will never be satisfied. In yoga we call it santosha, and it’s one of the five niyamas, the guidelines for self-governance for living a yogic life.

Think about what “enough” would look like in different aspects of your life. What would need to feel satisfied in your work? In your family? In your self? Where have you internalized a culturally dictated norm about what you should have in order to feel satisfied? When you get to “enough,” can you let yourself enjoy it before setting the bar higher?

Can you let yourself attain enough?

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. If you like what I write each week, I'd love to keep in touch. Sign up for weekly love letters direct to your inbox by CLICKING HERE. If you have the means, consider making a financial contribution to support my work

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You Are An Ecosystem

Photo by Jeff Cooper on Unsplash

Photo by Jeff Cooper on Unsplash

Every week I send out a love note filled with resources, musings, and inspiration about walking this path of yoga and liberation. Click here to subscribe!

You are an ecosystem.

You are not required to constantly grow.

Capitalism teaches us that the right way, the only way, is for things to consistently and constantly grow. Our economy must grow in order to be healthy. This need to always grow means there is only scarcity or abundance. In our current economic model, there is no such thing as enough.

This isn't natures way.

In nature there are seasons. One time of the year is for growing; another is for culling. And even in spring time somethings are dying. Something is being culled. In nature one tree is growing while another tree is dying. 

Even after some devastation like the current California forest fires, the mycelium are working their magic beneath the soil and the bugs and grubs come to feast.

In nature everything is growing and everything is dying and all of it is happening all at once.

In coaching culture, and in self help culture, we prioritize constant personal growth. But this isn't healthy. This is an effect of living in capitalist culture. As in nature, it is vastly important, vital even, for us to take breaks. To allow for fallow periods. To not need to constantly grow.

And to allow for the complexity of being human, being a living breathing ecosystem in which one thing is going great and growing and another isn't doing so well.

To wit: This year my five year relationship went up in flames. I've felt creatively blocked in most every endeavor. I overdrew my bank account a half dozen times. I'm currently crashing with friends and I don't own a stick of furniture.

But/and/simultaneously:

My coaching business is doing better than ever. I'm healing my relationship with myself in ways I didn't think were possible. I'm about to travel to India for six weeks for no reasons except my own pleasure and edification.

It's a pernicious myth that we can grow constantly.

I am an ecosystem. And you are too.

Parts of my life are alive and thriving. Parts of my life are shriveling up and dying. And it's all happening at the same time.

Just like nature (and Arcade Fire), its everything, now.

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. If you like what I write each week, I'd love to keep in touch. Sign up for weekly love letters direct to your inbox by CLICKING HERE. If you have the means, consider making a financial contribution to support my work

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On Spiritual Stewardship

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Every week I send out a love note filled with resources, musings, and inspiration about walking this path of yoga and liberation. Click here to subscribe!

It is difficult to keep up with all of the tragedy and trauma constantly happening in the world around us. I read recently that we were not built to be empathetic on a global scale. I don't know if I think that's true but this week (month...year...decade...) I understand the sentiment behind it.

I do think that we have to examine our privilege in relationship to our responsibility. I think that the more privilege we have the more responsibility we have to stay tuned in and not checked out to what's happening around us.

The less personal impact these tragedies and traumas have on us, the more important it is that we stay open to helping, feeling, and just generally staying engaged with them.

The problem with this line of thinking, is that the more privilege we have the more comfortable we have tended to be. And the less capable we are, therefore, of staying present when intensity arises.

Unless we have made it our purpose to get better at being uncomfortable, either through yoga, meditation, or some other spiritual practice, we are likely to be quite sensitive or fragile when faced with our own discomfort, even if that discomfort is based on having to witness the discomfort of others.

So it might be, then, that some of the best and most useful work that we can do is to get better at being uncomfortable.

The more able we are to sit with our own discomfort, the more we will be able to show up for the quite uncomfortable work of undoing systems of oppression. We can aim our spiritual practices towards building up a capacity for discomfort with the explicit intention of getting better at engaging with the difficulties of the world.

What if, instead of thinking of our spiritual practice as for our own growth or well-being, we envisioned it as part of our work towards a more just world?

Perhaps this intentionality is the more active counterpoint to spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassing, as discussed last week, is a phenomenon that happens in which people use spirituality to avoid dealing with the difficult things in life in the world around us, often by choosing to focus on only things that are "positive" or "high vibration".

The opposite of spiritual bypassing may be spiritual responsibility. Or perhaps, spiritual stewardship. (Thanks, Lynn, for this language.)

It’s a good first step to stop bypassing. And then, can we  make conscious choices to spiritually engage? To take responsibility? To see it as our responsibility to keep growing our capacity for discomfort?

This may be a growing edge for most of us. Look any area or identity where you have privilege--how can you keep getting more comfortable with your own discomfort? Can you use your practice with purpose to steward your own growing edges?

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. If you like what I write each week, I'd love to keep in touch. Sign up for weekly love letters direct to your inbox by CLICKING HERE. If you have the means, consider making a financial contribution to support my work

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Against Spiritual Bypassing

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Every week I send out a love note filled with resources, musings, and inspiration about walking this path of yoga and liberation. Click here to subscribe!

I wrote last week about the effectiveness of yoga and other spiritual practices, if we know what they’re there for. But just like anything, we can manipulate spiritual practice for other needs, other ends. The concept of “spiritual bypassing” was coined by psychologist John Welwood in the 1980s to describe the tendency of spiritual seekers to use the practice as a means of going around life’s difficulties.

As Thich Nhat Hahn says, “No mud, no lotus.” We have to get down in the muck in order to attain the beauty of the flower. Spiritual practice may make our lives better, but it's because we get better at engaging our life, not because it takes us around the parts of life we don't like. To use an oft-referenced metaphor, spiritual practice doesn't take us out of the ocean, but it can teach us how to ride the waves. 

But spiritual bypassing shows up in more nefarious ways when we use our spiritual practices to overlook or disengage with the suffering of the world around us. This might look like people who say, “It’s all love and light.” It’s folks who think, “All this talk about racism (sexism / homophobia / ableism / etc)  is an illusion because we’re All One.” It’s demanding, “High vibrations only.” It’s saying, “I’ll pray for you,” and doing nothing more.

Spiritual bypassing is requiring niceness over truth, positivity over authenticity.

This is a profound misunderstanding of the spiritual path.

Here’s the thing: I do believe that we are “All One.” On a divine level, I believe we are inextricably interconnected. The web of life binds us to one another--our shared humanity, nee our shared sentience--links us to each other in ways we can’t always understand but we can often sense on a deep level.

And beyond the woo, on a purely physical level, we must be symbiotic on this fragile planet if we are to have any hope of surviving the impending crises of our changing climate. (Thanks to K for reminding me of this salient point.)

But when we pretend that this inherent interdependence negates the very real inequities that exist in our world, we are inadvertently perpetuating the systems that create those imbalances.

When we presume that our similarity as humans means that injustice isn’t worth talking about....

When we feel more bothered by the “negativity” of people talking about (or taking a knee over) racism than we do over the racism itself....

When we aren’t concerned about people who experience oppression because they have “created their reality”...

We are probably spiritually bypassing.

And inadvertently, we are helping those unequal societal conditions to continue to exist.

One of the most important mechanisms of systems of privilege is to make itself invisible, and when we choose to look away, we are upholding the status quo. Another mechanism of systemic oppression is to silence anyone or anything that would draw attention to the inequalities of the system. So when, in the name of spiritual evolution, we shut down someone’s righteous anger at injustice, we are participating in their oppression.

This silencing is deadly. This tuning out and willful ignorance has grave effects.

This is not what spiritual practice is for. When we choose to tune out the world around us, we are abusing these sacred practices for ends they were never intended for.

Rather, these practices are to make us, as Donna Farhi says, “more attuned, more sensitive and more resilient.”  

I’m here for it. Are you?

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. If you like what I write each week, I'd love to keep in touch. Sign up for weekly love letters direct to your inbox by CLICKING HERE. If you have the means, consider making a financial contribution to support my work

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Yoga Works

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In the past six months, I have been in close proximity to so much trauma, tragedy, and pain. So many of my friends have been experiencing the real hardships of life. In my close circle of beloveds there have been dying parents, cross-country moves, gravely ill children, sudden divorces, houses flooding, and violent crime. I’ve been dealing with my own personal heartbreak, the demise of my five-year relationship in May.

This is to say nothing of the daily-life hardships of never enough money and always too much to do that most of us live with on the regular. And all of this is happening alongside political upheaval, the threat of nuclear war, powerful hurricanes churning in the golf, wildfires, earthquakes, police violence, and on and on.

The list of tragedies, small and large, is endless.

But all along I have been so humbled and grateful to see the way that my friends just keep showing up. For me, for themselves, and for each other. So many of my loved ones are practitioners: of yoga, meditation, and artistic practice. My people are healers, whisperers, and listeners to the universe. And they are the evidence that these practices work.

These practices work.

These practices make us able to sit with the terror of real life. So that when the shit hits the fan, we are able to stay present. When our big feelings arise, we know how to process them, how to compost them into a rich and fertile soil from which to grow. And when our friends go through their own big trauma, we are able to be present with their pain without needing to minimize or problem-solve.

Because we have struggled against our own physical weaknesses and our own flighty attention span, we now have strength and presence. We have built up the capacity for staying present with difficulty.

So this is my reminder to us this week, that these practices work, and that we do them for a reason. Because your life might be smooth and easy for now. But they only guarantee we have is that that will change. So keep practicing. 

Much love,

Bear

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The Path To A Meaningful Life

Photo by Michael Suriano on Unsplash

THIS POST IS THE FINAL POST RELATING TO GET SHIT DONE, A PRODUCTIVITY FOR WEIRDOS SIX-WEEK COURSE. CLICK BELOW FOR DETAILS OR READ ON! 

Most of us have figured out that the path laid out for us by the world doesn’t fit. In some way or another, we are too wide or wild or weird to walk that narrow way.

For some of us we’ve known it since childhood, sitting in our desks in a fluorescent lit classroom while a perfect blue sky smiles from outside the classroom window.

Maybe you learned to hate school. Maybe you figured out that the educational system was training you to be obedient rather than intelligent.

For some of us it took longer. We walked down the predetermined path, sought after the predetermined goals. We maybe even achieved them. But at some point along the way, we thought, “Is this all there is?”

Regardless of when it happened, what’s important is that it did. At some point, you looked around, were dissatisfied, and you walked off the path.

Congratulations! You figured out correctly that the main path, the path of nine-to-five jobs, spouse and 2.5 kids, the white picket fence path, THAT path was not for you.

(To be clear, this isn’t a dig at traditional lifestyles IF that’s what really works for you. It’s a dig at the systems that set us up to feel like failures, degenerates and perverts should we deviate from that.)

And it might've felt like liberation for awhile. It felt like freedom.

But then bewilderment set in. You started to confused the prescribed path with all paths. You thought, well THAT path wasn’t for me, so there is no path for me.

You’re so triggered by the pain of not fitting on the main path that ALL PATHS seem intolerable.

All systems remind you of the drudgery of the system that held you down.

All obligations feel like the confinement of obligations you don’t care about at all.

All containers feel like those small boxes that couldn’t contain your effulgent brilliance.

And what happened next? Well, if you’re like most of us path-leavers, you’ve been winging it ever since. You flail around, sending your energy spinning in the direction of whatever strikes your fancy. Occasionally you end up somewhere awesome, but it seems more like dumb luck than any kind of intentionality.

You had dreams of what your life could be like beyond the path, but now it feels like you’re just wandering aimlessly in the woods. You see pretty things out there, and it’s definitely not stressful the way being on the path was.

But are you actually getting anywhere?

It doesn’t have to be this way. I want to tell you:

There are systems that don’t suck the life out of you.

There are containers with soft edges that cuddle rather than confine.

There are other paths, paths that are not a straight line forward but that twist and wind and double back on themselves.

And what happens when we start down these other paths is that we are able to actually show up and do our work in the world. We have systems that keep us attentive to our art making. We have containers that hold the depth and breadth of our healing work. We walk new paths that take us to unexpected places, paths that lead us into worlds we have not yet imagined.  

And it’s in these other worlds, on these other paths, that meaning is made. Meaning is not the opposite of banality. The opposite of banality is simply non-banality. But to find meaning, to find transcendence, you have to pick a direction and start walking.

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I want to walk on the path with you!

Get Shit Done is a six week course that teaches productivity skills for weirdos. This is not another listicle of productivity hacks or a corporate efficiency bootcamp. This is real-life strategy for how to get clear, take action and Get Shit Done. 

CLICK HERE to learn more! 

Registration closes September 15. Space is limited! 

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Struggle For Softness

Photo by Olu Eletu on Unsplash

Photo by Olu Eletu on Unsplash

Do you blame yourself for your limitations? You’re not alone.

Here’s an example:

I struggle to write when I’m at home. I can always find something else more interesting, more fun, more urgent to do instead of sitting down at my computer to write. And when I do manage to get my butt in a chair and my laptop open, I so often end up scrolling Facebook and watching cat videos, and then poof, an hour has elapsed and I’ve written exactly zero words.

For years I lambasted myself for this. If I were a real writer, I told myself, I’d wake at dawn and bang out 500 words before the sun had fully risen in the sky. If I were a real writer, I’d never get distracted by social media. If I were a real writer, I’d be able to write every day without resistance or procrastination.

Then I discovered something: I write so well at coffee shops. Something about the ambient noise, the lack of sock drawers needing organizing, and the threat of someone seeing my laptop screen as I watch one more video of cats riding on Roombas all combine to make me an effective, efficient writer inside a coffee shop.

Now I still sometimes feel that persistent inner judgement coming up. If I were a real writer, the little judge says, I wouldn’t need to go to the coffee shop to write. If I were a real writer, I wouldn’t have to rely on the shame of someone witnessing my actual internet habits to motivate me to write.

But here’s the truth:

I am a real writer. I write 500 words (and often much more) every week for these blog posts. I write poems and essays and scripts for plays. I write grant applications for my own work and for other artists. If I can let go of my illusion of what makes a “real writer,” I can see that I am a writer because I write.

I am a writer (a real writer) because I write.

But if I got stuck feeling terrible about the accommodations I have to make for myself to get myself to write, I wouldn’t write. If I didn’t let myself go to the coffee shop in order to write, I’d write a whole lot less than I do now.

We have to learn to work with our limitations instead of against them.

We have to learn to meet ourselves with kindness and compassion.

We must learn to hold our weirdness and quirks and strange habits with tenderness.

We must struggle with softness. 

I am so grateful that I figured out that I can only write when I’m in a coffee shop. I’m not mad at that anymore. Because now I actually write every week.

So if you struggle with being soft with yourself, try this personalized mad lib affirmation:

I’m a _______________ (way that you identify) that struggles to ____________ (do the thing you identify as) unless I ________________ (your weird habit or limitation.) I’m not mad at ________________( your weird habit) anymore. I’m thankful for ______________ (your weird habit) because it helps me to _________________ (do the thing).

Here's mine:

I’m a writer that struggles to write unless I go to the coffee shop so no one can see me shop for shoes on Amazon for an hour. I’m not mad at coffee shops anymore. I’m thankful for going to coffee shops because it helps me to write.

What do you watch on Youtube when no one's looking? I’d love to hear about your weird habits. Leave your mad lib in the comments below if you’re open to sharing!

Want to learn to overcome these obstacles? 

Get Shit Done is a six week course that teaches productivity skills for weirdos. This is not another listicle of productivity hacks or a corporate efficiency bootcamp. This is real-life strategy for how to get clear, take action and Get Shit Done. 

CLICK HERE to learn more! 

Registration closes September 15. Space is limited! 

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Quit The Cult Of Busy

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

We’ve been told since birth (or at least since grade school) that your worth in the world is based on your ability to produce. I don’t believe that, and I bet you don’t really either, yet we’re in the habit of acting like it’s true anyway. For the next three weeks I’m writing about common mistakes most of us are making that keep us locked into the lie that we can’t do the things that matter most, and what to do instead so you can Get Shit Done.

 

The Cult of Busy? Yeah, you’re probably a member.

 

Someone asks how you’re doing and the refrain is always, “Busy! Good, but so busy!”  

We’re addicted to our busyness, and it keeps us from doing the things we really want to do. We take on projects and responsibilities that are “good enough” and it interferes with our ability to do the things that are most meaningful.

This summer I had three interesting yoga-related opportunities come my way. A friend from high school asked me to teach a monthly yoga class at the bar she owns. Another friend asked if I wanted to teach 420 yoga (where both students and teacher get high before class--yes, this is a real thing.) A fellow yoga teacher connected me with a therapist who leads yoga+trauma therapy groups.

These first two were easy to say no to: I rarely drink and I don’t smoke, so neither is really a fit for my vibe as a yoga teacher or a person. The trauma therapy group, however, was harder to parse.

On paper, this collaboration was totally in my wheelhouse: I teach trauma-sensitive yoga, I’m a trauma survivor myself, I love talk therapy, etc. But for some reason, the emails from the (very nice) therapist sat unanswered in my inbox. Finally I remembered this little piece of meme-gleaned wisdom:

If it isn’t a “Hell yes!” it’s probably a “No”.

I replied to the therapist and said politely that it’s just not a good time for me right now, and I connected her to another yoga teacher who’d expressed interest.

It’s not easy to say No. We’re trained to be compliant and obedient, particularly those of us socialized as girls/women. But as writer Cheryl Strayed says, “No is the power the good witch wields.”

No helps us to stop overfilling our days.

No gives us the ability to clear away our temporal clutter.

No gives us our power back.

Here’s a little mantra to work with as you practice saying No this week:

I’m divesting from the cult of busy. I do not subscribe to the hustle. My value as a human is not connected to my productivity. I say No to the “good enough” to make space for my best.

Much love, 

Bear

P.S. Want to learn to overcome these obstacles? 

Get Shit Done is a six week course that teaches productivity skills for weirdos. This is not another listicle of productivity hacks or a corporate efficiency bootcamp. This is real-life strategy for how to get clear, take action and Get Shit Done. 

CLICK HERE to learn more! 

Registration closes September 15. Space is limited! 

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