[New Year, New You] Day 6: Creativity: Not Just Some Artsy-Fartsy Idea
So here you are. Day 6 of our 21-Day New Year, New You Challenge. In light of your persistence, I hereby certify you as a spiritual freakin’ ninja. By this time 90% of people who signed up would have given up.* But here you are, going strong and diving in for the big win. BRAVO!! It takes sharp teeth to show up and take life on, but you’re doing it!
Over the next couple days I want to share with you a few tools that will help make standing up to life even easier. They’re not common tools, but they work. The reason they aren’t common is because they cannot be patented and nobody would make any money for sharing them with you. The only mistake you’ll make over the next two days as you read these blogs and podcasts, is fail to apply the information and try it out. If you decide you’ve “already been there and done that,” or “already know that” and so neglect to physically put the information into action, you’ll miss out on what you don’t know about it.
We talked about presence, the importance of staying in the moment and seeing what’s there for what it really is. We’ve talked about the importance of taking things one step at a time, and being willing to swim with crocodiles instead of being stuck on an embroidered meditation pillow. Today’s blog post and podcast is your chance to put wisdom into action. What you’re about to read is painfully simple, but 99% of people still won’t to it, even it if will change everything about their lives and propel them toward their goals.
So let’s see if you’re in the 1%, or not, shall we?
A Ticking Time Bomb
Have you noticed that when you’re a kid, time trickles soooo slowly? You probably thought to yourself, “when I grow up, I’m going to…” And that time of being “grown up” felt light years away. When you’d take road trips, were you in the back seat calling out every five minutes to ask, “Are we there yet?”
When you’re young life just can’t happen fast enough! You’re breathing down life’s neck asking, “What next? Can’t you go any faster?!”
Then after a few years of being busily distracted with more and greater responsibilities, you realise to your surprise, that now you are “grown up.” But it’s not quite as you’d imagined it would be. Now it seems the clock is breathing down your neck, and there are never enough hours in a day to get it all done. You look back at all those years of growing up and what seemed so long and drawn out back then, looks like a flash in the pan to you now. The grey hairs are coming… now wrinkles… How do you put a stop to this rapidly ticking time bomb, the clock?
And yet, there is the exact same amount of time in a day when you are 4 as in a day when you are 44. Time doesn’t change. You do.
How you perceive life and response to it changes over time, and your perceptions and viewpoint about life are heavily influenced by others–much more than you may realize. You may feel like many of your thoughts are your own, but just look at how your viewpoint on time has changed! A slow drip of seriousness sucked your spirit of play! The same person who once felt time dragged on and life couldn’t happen fast enough, is now over-spending on age-defying skin care products, collecting pictures and memorabilia hoping to stop time in its tracks.
And while so much of your attention is on trying to hold on to the past, and another big chunk of it is spent worrying about what’s coming in the future, guess how much you will have left to keep you from being eaten by crocodiles? If you do not have enough free attention to be fully present and engaged in life , you will not have the courage to reach for and achieve your goals and dreams.
Unfortunately, we can’t turn back the clock and give you that cute, cellulite-free butt you once had, but we can do something even better to help you master time and feel in charge of your life and have the confidence to overcome any obstacle!
How to Put Time (And the Whole Freakin’ Universe) in a Bottle
This is one of my favorite songs; Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce. Now, he’s speaking metaphorically but I want you to think about it in another way–creatively. To explain myself, let’s dive into a mini-science lesson for a moment–a lesson you should have had a long time ago, but the “educational powers that be” decided you should learn the Pythagorean Theorem instead. 😉
There are only really four elements to the physical universe. Time is one of them, but the other three are energy, matter and space. Energy is that flow of life from one point to the next–it’s condisered the potential for work, in physics. End energy collies and explodes and disperses and glues itself together comes together and condenses itself to make different kinds of matter (objects and physical things you can see), that sit around in space.
But that’s pretty much it, and all the various physical universe forms and experiences can be understood in those four component parts. But that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to LIFE. Things like the “spirit” or “soul” get so muddled with various traditional and new-age religious jargon that matters of a “spiritual” nature can sometimes feel hard to decipher through a cloud of incense and chakra talk.
I LOVE all major world religions and have dabbled in most of them, but the general message I get from a lot of spiritual teachers and preachers comes across to me as something like this;
“It’s all too big for you to understand. So you should probably just spin your chakra, pay your tithes and say your prayers. I’m not exactly sure of the details on the other side of life, but you’ll figure it out when you’re dead. If you do what I say, it will be good. If you don’t, it will probably suck really bad, so you’re best off doing what I say.”
NO THANKS!!!
I’m not waiting until I’m sitting in a cold grave to figure out what life is all about when a few simple tricks and brave actions can teach me most of what I need to know right now! There’s a neat exercise on today’s podcast that I encourage you to complete. I’ve made today’s podcast a little longer with the promise that I would keep it a bit shorter on the blog. When you do the, “Fluffy pink cat” exercise, you’ll notice you may have some interesting responses to the fact that you’re staring at a long-haired pink cat.
I won’t ruin the punchline for you, but I will say that when you observe your reactions to that cat, consider where it lives, how much it costs, and if you really did that exercise and put yourself into it, then consider how it made you feel!!
You’ve had a lot of lessons about the “way things work” in life. So many, in fact, you’ve actually started to believe them! But the world’s biggest and brightest people were rebels who never bought into the stories they were told! They broke the rules and changed the game and all our lives are different because of them.
As you reach for your goals, you will encounter obstacles. You will encounter challenges and difficulties and there will be moments when you doubt yourself and your ability to make things happen. But the only reason you doubt yourself is because with the information you’ve been presented, it doesn’t seem possible.
With the information you’ve been given, the math of making it all work just doesn’t seem to add up.
And that’s because you’ve been given insufficient information, it’s NOT because it can’t be worked out. You are WAY more powerful and capable than you realize, and the biggest ball and chain you’ve got is your own self-doubt! But there’s a long-haired pink cat part of yourself that you really need to tap into. When you do, you’ll see that there’s something much more important influencing life than an incessantly ticking clock bomb.
There’s something much more powerful making life work than the wheels and cogs of a physical universe. There’s a long-haired, fluffy pink cat. When you find it and learn how to use, there’s just going to be no holding you back. And in case this felt a little vague and confusing, feel free to get the rest of the picture on the podcast. ;-)
Love and lots of cat hair,
Tera