They say it takes 21 days to form a habit, and in the three weeks since I started my new job, I can certainly see that I’m already slipping back into bad ones. I’m hoarding stress and irritation for fuel, I’m not sleeping, I’m living on toast and I’m talking myself out of self-care as a waste of time. It’s so, SO easy. And so quick.
The good news is that this time around I recognised the signs a lot sooner. It took me three weeks and not five years, and maybe this time I can do something about it. And maybe that thing should be the thing I am the absolute worst at. Which would be meditation.
Noise is so often my tool, my defence and my fuel. I work with words, and my thought life is a barrage of ideas and criticisms that I lack the discipline to turn off. Quiet is not my natural state. But I know it can be healing. And I want that. So I need to work at it and do so in a disciplined way. That starts with an end to making excuses, finding “worthier” things to fill my time, and regularly reminding myself that Action Changes Things... aka “quit talking about it and do the darn meditation Rose”.
For the next 21 days I’m going to try and form a new habit, a daily meditation of 2 minutes or more, and I’m going to post my progress here to hold myself accountable. It’s very possible I will fail, the same way I invariably fail to prevent my mind wandering when I occasionally do sit down and meditate, but as with then, I’m going to acknowledge that I’ve wandered and try and start over. As many times as it takes.
If anybody else would like to try and form a good meditation habit with me, drop a note in the comments/get in touch and we can share our frustrations and successes and cheer each other on. Or any good habit! We’ve got this. right?
Why on earth would they change the cover of “We - a Manifesto for Women Everywhere” and translate the title into “We - a Manifesto for Women Who Want More in Life”?
I don’t get it! The original - both cover and title - is so much more powerful!
Just in case they did so with the content as well, I’m glad my English is good enough to be able to read the original version.
We all have hunger. For love, for friendship, for change or peace. We all have holes in our lives and longings that keep us awake. Love, compassion and female friendship can help to fill those gaps and feed our souls. Lift someone up today and rise with them.
21 Day Meditation Reset: Day 6 - Do It When You Don’t *Need* To
I made it five days, through work hell and late nights and that’s great, but today I feel peaceful already... today I am settled, centred and grounded, and that’s really all a meditation would give me anyway? I’m pre-relaxed, so there’s no harm in taking one day out. Right?
Wrong.
I’m my own biggest saboteur, I’m the person who skips the last two days of a course of antibiotics because I’m “cured” and then gets sick again, I am the queen of treating the symptoms and not the cause. I’m trying to learn to meditate, to form a habit, that will get me through all the hard days and return me to a good place in the midst of any madness. Which means I need to practice on days when things are good too, to take the supplement of peace every day and invest in and sustain that mindset long before I need emergency intervention.
I dipped back into the Meditations (Essential Practice 4) to remind myself why I need to be disciplined right now, even if it feels a bit like nothing is happening, even if it feels like I am going through the motions, the act of doing, of actively choosing to try and meditate is training my mind into a habit that I truly believe will be beneficial. So the timer is set, five minutes I can easily afford to save ahead of a bad day.
Whatever your excuse is today, whether you are desperate for a quiet moment or lethargic in your contentedness today, stop thinking and do it, meditate, and let’s end the week right!
Our bodies react to what our mind thinks and experiences. Some of these things can trigger a fight or flight response in our brains which releases stress hormones, flooding our bodies. This would be advantageous if we were in a life or death situation. But typically, these are released in everyday situations and can lead to heath issues. We must try to reduce our stressors and monitor what our minds are telling our bodies- avoid unnecessary stress, remove unnecessary fears we create in our heads and stop the synthetic pain we can create for ourselves.
When we live in constant fear, we become self- fulfilling in our prophecies of gloom and doom. Living in constant preparation for something bad to happen prevents us from living our best lives and realizing our best selves. Pg. 141 (US version) says (...living in constant preparation for [bad things] is like always keeping an umbrella above your head to be ready for the day it will rain. All that time we spend sheltering beneath it , we're unable to enjoy the blue skies that exist between the storms".
Exercise #2: An Upgraded Operating System
Mapping out a new direction for your life:
With exercise #2 we are asked to write in a page of our journals or on a piece of paper the word Fear on one side and the work Trust on the opposite side of the paper. Around the word fear, we are to circle it with all of the fears that we have created for ourselves in our everyday lives. Some are real and some synthetic. Now, flip the paper over and write what our life would like if we did not have those fears. We are to visualize that life and enjoy the peace it brings.In our daily lives, we should visual how we replaced the fear words with our trust words and how we flipped the paper, no longer able to see or focus on our fears.
Our choice is simple: we can live in fear or we can live in trust.
It's one am where I am. I can't sleep and I am sipping on a drink in hopes of passing out and getting a little sleep before work in the am. Out of blue a second, I recently remembered Mod Liz's recent post from awhile ago and looked for it again to reread tr. I became inspired myself to pick up 'We' again to try and get myself back on course. So just wanted to say thank you all for still being here and inspiring in the most random moments. 😊🤙
We know all too well the middle of the night, brain-gnawing need to just have something happen when sleep won’t show up. Aren’t brains fun! Hopefully you nod off, but if not then we hope you can find some peace in the pages of We. I know I speak for all of us mods when I say that we have fallen on and off the self-care wagon endlessly, and that starting over every time is the best that any of us can do. It’s our privilege to share this space with so many inspiring women, and we’re here if you need us. Hopefully you find some peace of mind in the practices, and always remember that you’re enough, just as you are, eve when you’re off course. Thank you for reaching out :)
Mod Rose on trusting your past self when the present is overwhelming
I walked away from a career six months ago without looking back, energised and feeling courageous for leaving a situation that made me unhappy and optimistic for the future. I left behind things I liked, things I was good at for a “clean” break and I was sure I wouldn’t need those things again.
I think perhaps I was wrong.
I had thought, perhaps foolishly, that if I could shed the toxic environment and the stress, everything would be okay, I could put all of that vaguely related stuff in a box and bury it. I thought I could cut off a whole side of who I’d been and that with time and space, I’d find opportunities to resuscitate the good and resilient qualities that these adverse circumstances had brought out in me. I’d be free and fixed; happy and healthy and fulfilled.
What actually happened was a slump. Having spent so long desperately struggling to stay afloat, life without something to fight, something to rail against felt odd and purposeless. The novelty of free time wore off and the worries of financial stability set in. My initial enthusiastic rush of optimistic job applications started to come back as commentless rejections and I began to feel that just as I hadn’t had it in me to keep fighting in my former career, I also wasn’t strong enough for this emotional roller-coaster of hope and disappointment on a rapidly dwindling bank balance.
After two months I got a job in a cafe. After three I got a second job in a bar, the realities of paying rent and buying groceries superceding my aspirations of an entry level arts job or some way of moving sideways from publishing to… well anything else that had a little soul. I told my friends, laughing through gritted teeth while sipping tap water at Christmas dinners that, “at least I don’t have to take my job home with me anymore”, and they applauded my “bravery” and said “how exciting it was to just be a free agent and think about what I wanted”.
Except I wasn’t. Because all I took home with me was a need for sleep. It turns out working back to back eight hour shifts is a lot harder at 26 than at 18 and “what I wanted” was sleep, a holiday and a magical unicorn of a job that would pay me more that £7.50 an hour without making me fill in a ten hour application and endure two months of waiting and worry.
Last week I got offered a unicorn, but it came with conditions.
A young, energetic publishing company that approached me shortly after my resignation about a “conversation” had kept coming back, enthusiastic about my skillset and my reputation and unafraid to tell me that they thought I’d be great for their business. I’d been honest with them about my desire to explore outside publishing and had expected they would lose interest. But they didn’t. They kept coming back, and this time they had a job available.
I went in for an interview because I liked the people, had a good chat and remembered how good I really was at what I used to do, and a week later got the call that the job was mine. If I wanted it.
Which leads me to now, to trust.
I don’t know if I want it. I don’t know what I want any more. I want to stop worrying about money. I want to feel purposeful. I want to climb out of the rut that I’ve somehow only dug deeper since making a break for it, I just have no idea how to do any of those things on my own. So what I have decided to do is to trust the people who are offering the opportunity.
I told them about my hesitations to rejoin the publishing industry and they offered me a six month contract which we can renegotiate at the end if it’s a good fit in both directions. I told them that I had lost the edges between work and life in my last role, and they’re going to find me a desk in the office so I don’t have to work from home. I told them I was overworked and undervalued, they’re going to pay me more for a smaller job. I told them I felt like a last resort, like a resource an not a person, that I lacked input, and so I’m going to get a say in the process, a seat at the table, months earlier than I ever did before.
Somehow, despite all my conditions and my relative lack of enthusiasm, they want me. The work I put in before I walked away from the industry was good enough that they will take a chance on me despite the fact that I’m not telling them I can work miracles and want to stay forever. I’ve been honest about not knowing what I want, and so now I’m going to trust their judgement that I’m what they want to guide me through the next six months.
It’s a very alien concept to me, handing over the reins. I’ve always held tightly to control over my choices, often going so far as to actively not choose what people want for me, but in this moment I’m trying to practice trust. I know that I’m stuck and I don’t trust myself right now, I don’t trust that if I stay where I am, stuck in a mire of looming debt and rejection and self-questioning things wont get worse.
I’m trusting in past me, in what she achieved and what she offered. I’m trusting in the judgement of those who know her on paper and know current me in person, and perhaps see me more clearly than I am able to right now.
I’m trusting that this is an opportunity to change things, and not a step backwards, and that by taking it and taking action I’ll start out on a new path, even if at first it looks like the old one, and that I know what danger signs to look out for.
I’m trusting in the version of myself others seem to seem to see even when I cant, in the unpredictability of life and hoping for the best, knowing only that staying still would be worse.
