Does this sound like a typical week? A doctor’s appointment, a massage, acupuncture, daily yoga, therapy, 25 daily supplements, morning green juice, daily meditation, cardio, cooking, and that’s after cleaning the house, getting the kids to school and finishing the sales presentation. Wow, I’m tired just thinking about it.
Healing your body from illness can seem like a full-time job on top of your regular life ? a job you didn’t even apply for.
How do you manage it all without going crazy or making yourself sicker? One option is to ignore your self-care and go on with life as usual. I’ve seen this work for some, but usually not for the long term.
Alternatively, you can try to do it all at once and get overwhelmed under the weight of juggling all your healing tasks with your family and career obligations. Early on, when I was healing myself from multiple sclerosis, I spent more nights at the dinner table crying from overwhelm than I like to think about.
I eventually found a third way between overwhelm and denying the disease. I found a way that honors the healing process without having it consume or define your life. Here are some those lessons.
Start slow.
It can be natural for some of us to take on all the healing modalities at once. That was biggest the mistake I made. I was so determined to stay out of a wheelchair that I jumped in with both feet. I don’t advise it. It’s not possible and it’s not wise.
Instead, start with a few items and build up your self-care muscle. Start with green juicing or 20 minutes of meditation every other day. Any one of these can give you more energy so you can later add yoga or massage.
Self-care is a project.
While you might not have asked for this job, it is yours. Put it on your to-do list. Not just the appointments, but also the juicing, the baths, the supplements – everything.
But don’t put it at the bottom where you will forget it. That’s easy to do without a deadline. Instead, place healing at the top of your list.
I know this sounds like it will create more stress. But it works to shift your paradigm, and put self-love front and center. If you are notorious for taking care of yourself last, illness marks the end of that.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying sales reports and soccer practice aren’t important. Yet if you are sick or too fatigued, you won’t make those anyway. There is a reason they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first.
Plan, delegate and execute
OK, all your healing tasks are on your to-do list. Great. But that doesn’t by itself make it any less overwhelming. Just like that big project at work, break down the tasks, plan them out, efficiently multitask and engage help when needed.
Here’s an example. You want to make green juice each morning, but you also need to get the kids and yourself out the door. Plan it out. Sunday afternoon clean, cut and prepare all the produce for the week. Then put enough for a day in seven separate bags. You can even have the kids help. Each morning, grab a bag, juice it and head out the door.
Make healing fun.
Ask a person who loves their job what they love about it and they will almost always say, “because it’s fun.” Why not make self-care fun?
Spice things up. Try Thai massage. Practice yoga naked. Dance in your skivvies to Lady Gaga instead of going to the gym. Play soccer with your kid, and score parenting and self-care points. Be creative.
Make healing sacred.
OK, the shot I give myself every day is not fun. Having to down all those supplements three times a day is no joy either. How do you get through the yucky stuff?
Make those moments sacred. Take a deep breath. Burn a candle or put on a relaxing sacred CD. (I love Tibetan singing bowls.) Then as you pop that pill or insert that needle, imagine it is a magic potion going directly to the source of your illness and restoring your health. Not only does this take the dread out of these tasks, you also incorporate the power of guided imagery that may even boost the healing effects of your medicine.
Be kind to yourself.
I imagine self-care like a serving tray overflowing with beautiful dishes. There are so many dishes piled up that occasionally one falls off. No worries, I just place it back on the tray and continue on. The same is true of all your healing methods.
Know that on any given week or day, something will fall off. You will forget your midday supplements. You will be too tired for yoga. It’s OK. Don’t beat yourself up. Expect it to happen. Why? Because you are human.
What do you do when it happens? Get back on the bike. Pick up the task the next day.
But one word of caution: Create boundaries around the ultra-important healing tasks. Those are the ones that will set your healing back big time if it falls off the tray. For example, I never miss my daily injection, no matter what. For you it may be a pill. Or yoga. Regardless, create strict boundaries around those one or two things. And then don’t cry over the other stuff.
How will you organize your week so you have the time to make self-care an integral and non-overwhelming part of your life?
Laurie Erdman is a holistic health coach and the Chief Wellness Hero at Chronic Wellness Coaching. She helps her clients take the overwhelm and confusion out of their healing journeys.
Today, Jonathan Fields shares an excerpt from his book, “Uncertainty: Turning Fear & Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance.” Check out his video – it gave me chills! xo Kris
If you talk to most traditional artists and entrepreneurs, and they’re being honest, many will share their own variation of [Pearl S.] Buck’s…compulsion [to create] that, in many of its traits, seems to rise to the level of addiction, in part because they love what they do so much they start to feel empty when they’re not doing it. Others, who are very driven to get “there” and who know that getting there almost always takes a long, intense effort calculate that the more they work, the faster they’ll get to a place of mastery, genius, respect.
There is some truth to this. But there’s also a very dark underbelly. The lure of creative-obsessive behavior pulls you toward a single vehicle of creative output but ends up pushing you away from everything and everyone else in your life. Connections you once had to people and activities, even those you claim are the most important things in your universe, wither and eventually die of neglect. Stepping out of your something-from-nothing bubble turns into pain, so you stay in, where you know your trusted muse will always arrive at some point to offer up the next hit. It becomes a “chicken and egg” thing fairly quickly.
Was it the bad relationship that pushed you to invest all your energy in your next company or book? Or did the fact that you committed every ounce of psychic juice to your endeavor destroy your relationship with the “outside world” in the first place? It doesn’t really matter.
Either way, the cycle may yield great art or great business, but a great life?
Doubtful.
I’ve dealt with this very tension many times in my own creative life. Each pursuit begs to become all-consuming. It teases you, then wraps its arm around you and lures you in. It’s an amazing place to be, living on the marrow of conception and evolution. The world outside, a ghost of normalcy, can be easily forgotten.
That place where you live and breathe conception and evolution, it’s been claimed, must exist. It’s where great work comes from, where businesses are birthed, legends are made, and art comes to life. To visit this place and then return is necessary. But to believe that this place is a sustainable path to creation or to life is delusional. Trying to stay on that path for an extended period of time always ends in disaster.
Not just because your relationships implode. They do. Not just because your body, your health, and your ability to check back into reality abandon you. They do. Not just because the demise of your outer world brings sadness, which is sand in the gears of productivity. It does.
Most of all, it’s because you cannot sustain the level of conception and execution required to mount a breathtaking, lifetime-worthy body of work when all you do it work.
With rare exceptions, great creations—from paintings to companies to products to movies, songs, and books—don’t come from life in a vacuum. One of the reasons [famed story guru, Robert] McKee says great storytellers often don’t hit their stride until later in life is because they have to have spent a massive number of hours mastering the craft; they also need to have lived enough outside the pursuit of their craft to have something worth saying….
It’s the same with any endeavor, any quest to create something brilliant from nothing. It takes years to master a craft, from building a business to writing music. But craft alone doesn’t get you there.
Genius requires craft plus insight.
Insight rarely comes while you are constrained to the work and only the work. Indeed, it most often comes when you step away from your work, when you spend time with others in seemingly unrelated worlds. When you sit, walk, and breathe into stillness When you meditate. Talk. Listen. Love. Live. Be.
Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s the undoing that plants the seeds of the greatest doing.
What I create in any one medium is made far richer by the fact that I spend considerable time outside that medium. It may mean my path to mastery takes longer. So be it. In the end, I create better businesses because I write. I write better books, essays, and posts because I relish my time as a dad, son, brother, husband, friend, yogi, student, and teacher.
Excerpted from “Uncertainty” by Jonathan Fields by arrangement with Portfolio Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) 2011 by Jonathan Fields.
Just more than two years ago I made one of the biggest decisions in my life. My overall well-being was more positively impacted by that decision than by any other decision I’ve made. It had more of an impact than my decision to become a vegetarian and more impact than my decision to get daily exercise.
Just more than two years ago I decided to quit my job.
How you spend your 40 hours working is how you spend your life.
We usually look at health through the lens of the food we eat and how we move our bodies. Diet and exercise are key factors in health and well-being, and so are a million other things, like the people we love, the impact we have on the world, and what we do with the 40 or so hours that American culture calls “work.”
I’m sure you know this old adage: “You are what you eat.” The same is true for the hours you spend working. If you spend your 40 hours in a job that causes you great stress, what might that say about your life?
For 10 years I worked in a job for which I had zero passion. My job was a means to pay my bills. And it was slowly killing me.
Although I took good care of my body, my job was making me ill. I had stomach aches, knee pain, and allergies, all of which seemed “mysterious” to doctors because according to any tests they could run, I was “very healthy.” I felt constricted in my body, and I needed a lot of down time on the weekends to have enough energy to make it through the week. Something was wrong with me, even though the doctors couldn’t see it. That something was my job.
Finding a new direction
When I finally realized my body was crying for help and telling me to leave my job, I was ready to listen. However, I had two problems. First, I was the primary breadwinner in my household, and I didn’t want to leave without another plan for income. Second, I had no idea what I’d rather be doing. So, I began soul-searching.
I read books. I talked to a lot of people about their work. I challenged “the rules” I had been taught about what it meant to be successful. I asked a million questions. I refused to settle for something less than what my whole being longed for: soulful, meaningful work that wouldn’t make me ill.
After two years of searching, I found a new path and was ready to make a change. Or maybe I should say, I couldn’t not make a change. You see, I wasn’t really ready. I was scared out of my mind, but the alternative (staying in my job) was too painful, and my body, mind, and spirit were suffering too much.
The healing begins
Within two weeks of leaving my job, I got a serious cold. I had bronchitis and a fever, and my allergies were acting up worse than normal. I wasn’t a bit worried, even though having a cold is a very rare event for me. My body was cleansing itself, releasing the old, toxic energy that had accumulated over the years. My whole being was relieved, and, in an odd way, being ill felt good. When the cold was over, my allergies had subsided significantly. My stomach aches stopped. My knee pain became less frequent. My body was rejoicing.
It is the job, and it is so much more than the job
Yes, leaving my job helped heal my body, but it’s not as simple as “quit your job, and you’ll get healthy.” We are too complex for such a simple equation. However, if your job zaps your energy and your zest for life, it is worth checking to see if the benefits of that job are worth the sacrifice to your health.
Take inventory
If you’re feeling stuck in a job that doesn’t serve you, take inventory of your life. Ask yourself questions about all four areas of your well-being: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
- How did I get here?
- What do I believe about work, and are those beliefs serving me?
- Am I giving my emotional self the space to feel what I feel about my work?
- How does my body react to my work?
- How would I like to feel about my work?
- Spiritually, is this work serving my highest good?
- Is the stress or pain that comes along with this work worth the benefits I receive?
These are a few questions to get you started down the path of finding what is right for you and your health. If you decide that you need to make a change, that’s wonderful. The change will not happen overnight, but it will happen if you set yourself on that course. Although much healing will occur once you make the final leap, your well-being will begin to improve the moment you head in your new direction.
Staying on track
Today, I love what I do. It fills me up and satisfies my soul. When I get too focused on working, my body reminds me that I’ve gone astray. It gives me a slight stomach ache or a little knee pain. It gently reminds me what I already know: how I work is as important to my health as everything else.
Does your work serve you and your health? If not, what can you do to take charge of your work and your health?
Jenny Shih is a coach and consultant for creative entrepreneurs who have “big ideas” and want to change the world. She believes we all can make a living using our own superpowers and loves nothing more than helping great ideas get up and flying.
A creative retreat is the quintessential artist’s or writer’s dream. Time to tend your creative spark, think long, interrupted thoughts, meander, recharge and burrow into that project you’ve been flirting with.
Someone feeds you delicious food, you share tea or a glass of wine with other artists at the end of each gratifying day, hike in the bucolic countryside to clear your mind, nap when needed. Best of all, no interruptions: no children, aged parents or social media tugging at the hem of your attention.
Creative retreats are life-changing and can make a tremendous difference to your work and your confidence — as long as you’re a little bit prepared. Otherwise, you might find your expectations suck the creative juice right out of you, and you end up doing a lot more self-flagellation than creating.
Here are the five principles I use when I lead — or take — a retreat.
Lower Your Standards
When asked how he managed to write a poem almost every day (including the day he died!), the poet William Stafford replied, “I lowered my standards.”
The opposite tends to happen, especially when going on a creative (or any kind of) retreat. “I’ll write a chapter an hour, paint a new series of 50 paintings, find a fresh angle for my photography, I’ll eat only green smoothies and do yoga the rest of the time.” All that striving and impossible goal setting? It kills the retreat vibe and the possibility of getting your truest work done — and certainly kills the creative renewal you are seeking.
You know that good advice when you’re packing for a trip to take out half of what you just put in your suitcase? Same thing goes for what you plan to do on a retreat. Cut it in half. And then in half again. I beg you.
Clearly State What Will Be Enough
Last year I was gifted a week’s writing retreat by the venerable Fetzer Institute, and I set very clear “conditions of enoughness,” as I call them, for my week: no email, no Twitter, no Facebook; finishing a first draft of a new project; connecting with the other writers by being present and listening fully each evening. Naming these tangible facts created a foundation that allowed me to do the kind of deep writing and thinking I had been craving, as well as nap, take walks with my new friends and leave wildly inspired and renewed.
When you bring together lowering your standards and naming in facts what is enough for your creative time, the wild goodness you crave has a place to gather, and monkey mind has a bone to chew on (“She’s doing what she said she would … hmm, maybe I can shut up for a minute …”).
Declare a Time Element
On retreat, it’s vital you follow your desires, enjoy plenty of rest and play, and by deciding when and for how long you will work, you give yourself a gentle framework of satisfaction and containment. Otherwise, the endless expanse of time can be paralyzing. So maybe you paint from 9 a.m. to12 p.m. everyday, and meander the rest of the time. Or you write in 15-minute timed intervals with 1-minute breaks for one hour, then take a 1-hour photography break. On the writing retreats I lead, I start people off with 60 minutes and, as the week progresses, the writing periods get longer. This lets people build their creative muscles without getting overwhelmed.
Be sure to lower the bar on your time element! Just because you have 14 hours or so of being awake doesn’t mean you can create for 13 1/2 of them.
Ensure What you Do is Reasonable for You on an Average Day
The lure of a retreat can lure you into believing you are super-human — there will be no dishes, no cooking, no email, so certainly you will be transformed into someone who wears a cape and can do anything! As you are planning your retreat, keep in mind that you will, in fact, still be you. If you are not someone who writes after 3 p.m., this will probably not change on retreat. If you are not someone who gets up at 5 a.m. and writes for four hours without coffee, you won’t be that someone on retreat. Plan for an average “you” day, and you will find yourself supported to get great work done, with plenty of free time to fill up your creative well.
Declare Yourself Satisfied Even if You Don’t Feel Satisfied
This is one of the most powerful ideas I teach. You did what you said you would do — say, write for 2 hours, no checking email, then take a “noticing” walk with your camera, then read poetry and meditate. You get to the end of your day and you feel disappointed, or worried you aren’t using your retreat wisely if you aren’t wringing every bit of writing life out of it. You are so adorably normal!
The very best way to deal with this feeling is to say, out loud (yes, you feel silly doing this — so what?), “I did what I said I would and that it is enough. I am satisfied even if I don’t feel satisfied.” One of the most insidious — and common — ways we undermine our creativity is by belittling what we did. Learn to rest in what you have accomplished, honor it, and you’ll be infused with new energy and well-being. Train your awareness to notice the good and the real.
Writing retreats have been such a soul blessing to me, and to the thousands of creative souls I’ve been honored to facilitate. They can help you unsnarl a plot, dream up an angle for your blog and finally write that book proposal. But most precious of all, they remind you of why you create: how creating brings you in contact with the very heartbeat of life, the connection to all that is, and the overwhelming delight of being alive.
Please give yourself the gift of a creative retreat soon — and be sure and take the tad of time (takes like 10 minutes) to decide what will be enough so you can get the most out of your dream.
Join me, Jennifer Louden, in Taos July 24-30 for the 10th year of my World Famous Writing Retreat. Details here.
Many of us seek soul mates in relationships, but what about “work soul mates”? What about the work we do that helps complete us? That takes us to the next place spiritually? For me, writingOur Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuarywas a soul mate job.
At age 35 I learned about Farm Sanctuary, a national organization (with shelters in Watkins Glen, N.Y., and Orland, Calif) that rescues and advocates for farm animals. I soon became (healthily) obsessed, attending NYC activist meetings, volunteering in the area of publicity, and participating at demonstrations. It was “work,” but with a spiritual aspect, fulfilling in ways my regular job as a publicist was not. As a child, I wanted to help animals by becoming a veterinarian when I grew up. I swiftly changed my mind after discovering some details of what a veterinary education entails. Though I hadn’t found my way to veterinary school, I had somehow managed to use my skills to help save animals. I felt alive.
I explored Farm Sanctuary’s website frequently. All of the animal residents had a name and a story. Truly, every story was proof of the subject’s strong spirit. These beings each had a family, a soul, thoughts, fears, quirks, and loves. In the places they had been (factory farms, stockyards, etc.), most had been abused, confined, separated from family members, and treated like soulless commodities of the food industry. Now they were free in the sun, lounging on the grass, and splashing in the water. And as one of the most amazing testaments to their enduring spirits, many of them now trusted humans.
I realized that Farm Sanctuary was a children’s book, it just hadn’t been written yet. There was a great truth here. It was a truth of peace and love and compassion. The book was (and is) the most important piece of writing I’d ever worked on. Unlike my other work, it had the power to save lives. If people saw what I saw, I hoped and believed they would be inspired to protect farm animals through veganism and other forms of activism.
Once Farm Sanctuary granted me permission to do the book, I found that the reality of writing it had grown truly intimidating. How was I going to know I had successfully portrayed the individuals living at the shelters? My other two books used poetry in an effort to communicate the soul. For this reason, Our Farm was composed of poems written in the animals’ voices. I dove in.
Then I found out I had colorectal cancer. The world stopped. I remember the bright white recovery room, sun pouring in, the uncomfortable doctor, and my mom’s look of uncertainty when I told her. I didn’t cry or start screaming or become overcome by any sort of hysteria. It was more like a message flashed in my brain, “Urgent: Your time may be limited.” After telling my Mom I had cancer, the next thing I told her was that I really wanted to do the book.
In Anatomy of the Spirit, written by Caroline Myss, Ph.D., the author quotes a Native American woman’s words on completing your work before dying, “…you cannot leave one part of your work unfinished before you die. Otherwise, you leave a part of your spirit behind.” When it is not possible to finish, the responsibilities are passed on to someone else, but not left undone. I think back to my desire to be a veterinarian as a child. That same soul, that same mind that began life wanting to help animals, now given a potential deadline, wanted to get that done before leaving.
I had chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is indescribable. It’s beyond words. My feet and fingers tingled, I could barely eat, and I couldn’t leave my apartment for weeks. I could feel the chemo when I cried. I practiced restorative yoga and drank green juices, which helped. Shining bright on my horizon was the book. It was bigger than chemo. It was bigger than cancer. It was close to God. A channel. My own personal ray of sunshine that I had been given to transfer joy, truth, and life to other beings. I focused on it during those horrible, nauseous, dizzy days of chemo.
When on breaks from chemo, I would visit the Watkins Glen shelter to get to know the animals better. Once chemo was done, the chemicals withdrew, and I finished the poems.
Through the eyes of the Farm Sanctuary residents I experienced the world anew. As I put myself in their sweet, innocent bodies and minds, I imagined what it was like to be happy and in the sun after so much meaningless pain. I saw the pure beauty of nature and the peacefulness of their new homes as they might see them.
I also learned from other people like Colleen Patrick-Goudreau who podcasts “Vegetarian Food for Thought” and Natalie Bowman at Farm Sanctuary. The organization’s president and co-founder Gene Baur’s book, Farm Sanctuary, caused me to re-examine the true nature of human relationships with animals. As children, people have an innate connection with and love of farm animals. I wanted to support this in my book.
As with any job, there were days of struggle, days when I didn’t know what to write, or how to communicate what I wanted to express. But I never doubted that writing the book was something I wanted to do, something I needed to get done.
So now that the book is out and I’m cancer-free, does that mean I have nothing left to do? Of course not! The book has brought me to a new spiritual place. I feel stronger, more truly accomplished, and more connected to the beauty, love, and joy that exist in the world. I know I can help others and I want to do MORE! Everything I work on doesn’t have to be a life-saving endeavor, but I look forward to meeting my future soul mates.
Maya Gottfried is an animal-loving writer of poetry and prose for children and adults, as well as a publicist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with two fabulous cats, and drinks a lot of vegetable juice.
