Are you BUSY?
I just love deep conversations, those nourishing moments I have with my close friends and family where I share what comes through my intuitive channel and my reflections from things I’ve seen in my life or from the wow ‘blow me away’ moments I experience from books I read.
I can see how in these sharing, reflecting conversations that something magic happens.
People listen and tap into their own intuition and hear just the right message for them in that moment. A light shines and a shift happens and then they share with someone else and another light shines another shift happens and they share and this is the ripple effect that lights me up and the community I’d love to create.
In this First Blog I’d love to be able to share with my wider community, YOU, through my reflections in a Blogpost and give you doses of intuitive messages. I will be sharing from my heart in the hope that I can be of service to anyone who reads this.
When the universe has the next gem of learning for me to grow and evolve around, I am often attracted to a particular book and may have no idea why.
Recently I was drawn to a book with a title that makes a real statement in our current world “Do Nothing: Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving” by Celeste Headlee.
Once I started reading it, I knew exactly why I was attracted to this book.
For so much of my life I’ve always felt Busy and that I couldn’t or shouldn’t relax, sit down and do nothing.
When I was a child growing up my parents were always busy working, home late and never took time to sit down and relax nor was it something that they valued.
And then I married the same in my husband.
My husband and I had this beautiful and relaxing chaise lounge chair specifically made for luxuriating to melt the worries of the day away.
I could never bring myself to lie on it.
Lying on that chair equated to laziness, a characteristic that I didn’t want to possess.
I would always find things to do, busy myself with as justification for not having time to lie on that chair.
I felt that Laziness meant I was not a worthwhile person.
This feeling of Busyness in order to be worthwhile is so ingrained in us.
And reading this book helped me to understand why and where this compulsion I had to be busy came from.
Very briefly, the author discusses life before and after the industrial revolution.
Before the industrial revolution we worked according to daylight hours as we didn’t have electricity and candles were too expensive. We used to be paid by completion of a task not by the hour.
After the industrial revolution with factories and electricity, this changed and we could work around the clock and we moved towards trading time for money.
This was exacerbated by Protestant theology who tied hard labour and long working hours to your ticket to heaven and viewed idleness as immoral.
I mean who wouldn’t buy into that propaganda.
However, now so many years on, these beliefs seem to have permeated into every cell of our bodies, taken over our brains and infiltrated our lives and not in a good way.
I am not saying that working hard or long hours is bad, however the author cites numerous studies that prove that we are more efficient and productive when we take regular breaks. And that doesn't just mean being productive at work but happier and healthier in our lives too.
I feel we would benefit from getting curious in our own lives about this compulsion to always be busy and always be doing something because busy has become the new status symbol.
In Celeste Headlee’s book, she discusses that in the late twentieth century “the cultural emphasis shifted from luxury to BUSYNESS. People stopped bragging about their flat-screen TVs and started “complaining” about their packed schedules. Status was awarded not because you had an iPhone; everyone seemed to have an iPhone. Instead, people earned respect according to how little free time they had.”
That makes me sad that as a society we are rewarded based on how busy we are.
I feel that many people are not conscious of their constant internal busy chatter and what makes this even more alarming is that people are not enjoying what they are busy doing either. They are not spending time doing things they love and that light them up.
The unconscious way we go about our lives living with this busyness like where I couldn't bring myself to sit down, stop and take a rest or how our typical greeting is “How are you? “Are you busy?” is not healthy for us on so many levels.
This affects our mental health, our relationships, tension in our bodies and our minds, our hearts and our souls as well as our ability to connect with each other and to our intuition. We don't feel calm or feel a sense of power in our lives, all important to feeling fulfilled and a sense of joy and freedom.
Since holding a magnifying glass looking at Busy in my life it just doesn't feel good any longer to go with the status quo and respond “Yes, very busy” and so I wont. I will explain that I intentionally create space in my life to do nothing and just be.
I invite you to be curious…
What is your relationship with being Busy?
Do you constantly fill your head with “I am so busy”chatter?
Do you intentionally take time out to sit and rest, recharge and do nothing?
Are you spending your days doing what you love and what lights you up?
Hope you are having a wonderful day