When doing means not doing.

All I want to do is pretty much everything. I want to work on my book, I want to work on my website, I want to do a watercolor sketch, I want to do that linoleum block print I have had on my mind for about a month. I can barely move with all the things that want to come out of me—it’s clogging up the works here. Desire. It can really ramp up the pressure and make it so nothing actually gets done. And then I get frustrated because I can’t find the outlet for my creativity which now has the power of a tidal wave and is destroying my sense of peace.

Here’s what I don’t want. I don’t want to continue feeling ineffectual, I don’t want to keep beating myself up for not being productive, I don’t want to fight my anxiety that I’m not living up to my potential. I don’t want to want anymore.

I’m learning to wield all this powerful creative energy in me. I felt it just a few minutes ago, before I opened this laptop and wrote this blog post. I felt the surge building and began to feel myself lose control and get frustrated and then a thought bubbled up through the swell and with it a deeper breath. It was so different that I actually paused to think about it and name it. I was intuitively encouraging myself to take a sacred pause. Something my coach has opened me up to. It was effortless! And this is what surprised me most. Usually, even the breaks I give myself to just “be” are the end of conversations with myself that go like this, “It’s ok, you need to take this break, you are responding to something deeper, you are taking care of yourself, not procrastinating. It’s ok to choose to read a bit and relax after your work day and not go right into working on your own stuff because it’s your “real job” and if you don’t show up now, it’ll never happen for you.” And even after I let myself read a book, watch something on tv, play with my cat, I’m still taking deep breaths, reminding me of all of the above, shielding my energy, grounding it down. I’ve been very good at making relaxation a stressful job.

But not this time.

It was an automatic knowing, I’m doing this. No dialogue, no debate, no frenetic rationalizing. And wow, did it feel good. I felt powerful. In charge. The woman I always imagined myself to be.

I guess all the work I’m doing is taking effect. Huh.

Ok, then. I’m fueled to keep going. I think I’m on the right track.

Especially because the moment I felt that, and then the next moment when I named it, I had the creative power focused enough to sit and 5-4-3-2-1 type this out—thus fulfilling one of those things I superduper wanted to do.

Huh, I say again. You read about it, you just know it’s the right way, but you don’t really understand it until that skin sloughs off and you experience it firsthand. That mental image just gave me another something I want to do—sketch out another linoleum block print.

I actually, for the first time maybe ever, know I’ll get to it. When it’s time. And by continuing to keep doing all of these things I’m doing now.

But first, I’m going to take a delicious, luxurious, all-about-me, sacred pause.