Welcome to Day 25. 

Our choice all week is simple and remains the same — though simple is not necessarily the same as easy — and you can find the resources for both Nadi Shodhana and Kirtan Kriya here, on the Archive page. 

I thought I’d use these daily posts to plant some more seeds to inspire our curiosity around what growth can look and feel like. 

So, if you want something more — ahem — less, today, keep reading.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m caught in a never-ending consumption loop.

(These days, that sounds like an understatement, to say the least…)

There’s simply SO much content out there ready for us to consume. And it’s all at our finger tips, on demand.

Some of it feels inspiring, elevating, vital, essential. 

Like if you’ve been lucky enough to walk into an actual bookstore in the last year (socially distanced and safe) to purchase a book you can actually hold in your hands. It’s like no other feeling.

That’s the beauty of consuming another’s creation.

And yet, I feel like those moments can be so rare, especially compared to the hours lost going down the rabbit hole of the nonstop news headlines or social media.

It’s so easy to feel inundated by all the noise whirling and swirling around me that sometimes I forget I have a choice to say no.

I can choose to unplug, not look, not go there.

Put down the device and back away.

In Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, she assigns a week of “reading deprivation” — no books, no poems, no blogs, no news (!), no emails (!!), no consumption of other people’s content for a week.

I usually have about 3-23 books on my desk at any given moment. So this was a challenge, to say the least.

But my regular weeks of reading deprivation, bring me SO much clarity.

With seemingly endless inspiration and posts about everyone else’s bright ideas, it can be easy to lose sight of yours.

When you take in less of other people’s voices, you can more clearly begin to hear your own.

So, today, I’ll assign you a silly, lightning quick exercise from Julia Cameron’s reading deprivation week. To see what might emerge when we stop looking to others for answers and turn, instead, to ourselves.

“As recovering creatives, we often have to excavate our own pasts for the shards of buried dreams and delights. Do a little digging, please. Be fast and frivolous. This is an exercise in spontaneity, so be sure to write your answers out quickly. Speed kills the Censor.

1. List five hobbies that sound fun.

2. List five classes that sound fun.

3. List five things you personally would never do that sound fun.

4. List five skills that would be fun to have.

5. List five things you used to enjoy doing.

6. List five silly things you would like to try once.”

Try the reflection exercise and have a little fun with it.

Let it bring you some ideas about what you might get up to when you’re not taking in yet another news cycle.

And try the reading deprivation exercise. It doesn’t even have to be a week.

Right now, an abbreviated version just might be setting some boundaries around your devices at certain hours of the day or days of the week.

A simple restful revolution for any of our nervous systems at this moment.

LEAVE A COMMENT: How does it feel to STOP consuming for even one day? (just even the THOUGHT of it?)

To the pause, 

Cath

P.S. I HAVE to put my money where my mouth is. If I can’t walk this walk along with you, I better go get that lawyer day job again :) Which is why from today through Friday, my husband and I have disappeared to the mountains to stare at the forest, to walk through the woods, and to do … not much else. Between the outpouring of creation during these 40 days and what I have coming next with my work (stay tuned for that :)), I need the blank space or else I can’t keep going (trust me, I’ve tried to keep pushing through many times before and it’s never been pretty!). So just a moment to say: I see you + I’m right here with you.