Tag Archive for: passion

Feel Better, Not Bitter, Working Alone at Home

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When you love your work it’s easy to mistake it as play.

The danger, in our present times of 24/7 on-call home offices, is you can become isolated from unstructured exchanges with the world. You lose touch with where you BELONG. And, a bitterness starts to fester.

Belonging leads to intimacy, inwardly and outwardly. And, it’s the underlying juice of your passion.

Intimacy develops when there’s an exchange between your inner self and outer world. But what does that mean?

In the last year my home has become a working gym, recording and editing studio, and virtual classroom. The long cold COVID winter was spent imagining my brand: The Mind Body Adventure! I love the subject, so with the COVID isolation in full force, it was all I focused on!

When the first days of Spring arrived I was feeling uncharacteristically deflated and unmotivated. I found myself hungry for a distraction from the very thing I love doing?

Happy Hours we’re beginning to spill out onto the sidewalks in NYC. So I started to stop by sidewalk tables and connect with neighbors. I laughed. I played dress up. I made new friends. I started to be drawn to playing, rather than working.

It was a draw that interrupted the workaholic lifestyle I had adopted.

As entrepreneurs and creatives, we often get consumed in projects and lose the balance between work and play. When we love what we do, balance between nurturing what we love and nurturing ourselves can feel confusing.

When busy working, my body would feel exhilarated; while my mind would worry about whether the world would want what I was creating?

When out playing, my body would relax; while my mind would wonder about what I wanted that the world was offering?

What I learned was, no matter how much work feels like play, it’s a giving, while playing is a state of receiving.

As I balanced giving and receiving, an intimacy with myself and the world created a greater sense of belonging. Stretching into the world through my work’s message and mission started to feel less scary. I stopped feeling alone in the world.

To feel better, not bitter, I needed to stay connected to all of me. What I wanted to give and what I wanted to receive. My attention had gotten too narrow. To stretch into the world with my work, I needed to stretch into the world with my self first.

Life ignites your passion, when you allow it to nurture you.

Balance giving and receiving, mind and body, work and play, and you will celebrate the process, as well as, the destination.

How the Body Aligns You on Your First ______! And how you align it thereafter.

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Malayan porcupine in nature

You meet someone new. Maybe in an interview or on a first date or a spontaneous introduction, and your heart responds openly. Your chest naturally rises, as if your body were smiling; and, the width between your shoulder blades retreats, like a porcupine retracting its quills.

 

More often than not you trust your heart’s message. You, almost without noticing, reorganize your inner self and let this new person into your life. Your passion to create alignment in business, creativity, friendship or love is ignited!

 

Then one day your body responds differently. Your chest contracts and your back widens—you are on high alert.

 

It is accepted in the West that the heart is our emotional seat and that the chest’s carriage expresses our heart’s emotional state. But in the East, it is understood that the heart carries our joy and the lungs carry our sadness, including the back’s carriage in the expression of our emotional wellbeing.

 

… Trust your natural responses;

And everything will fall into place.

                                                                   Tao te Ching

 

Your body expresses a smile of truth through your chest muscles that relate to your heart’s joy. It expresses the need to protect your smile of truth through your back muscles that relate to your lung’s sadness.

 

Cocooned between chest and back muscles the Heart Center’s rainbow of emotions are communicated through your chest and back’s alternating rise and fall. This oscillation acts as your barometer regarding what you want to align with in each moment. Your chest and back muscles take turns aligning with the situation in question.

 

When passion turns to high alert this emotional yo-yo, exhausted by extreme alignment swings, locks into one extreme or the other. Tension is the result—a physical holding pattern—that steals physical strength and mental resolve.

 

Here’s the thing…

Passion leads to purpose. What you are passionate about does not.

 

When what you are passionately aligned with is leading you away from what feels purposeful, a deliberate realignment is being asked of you. The internal alignment that happened initially, without much thought, is now demanding thought.

 

Allow your body to express what you’re feeling before you try to reason through the situation. Restructuring does not mean your more assertive—yang —nature of your back shadows the more sensitive—yin—nature of your chest, or visa versa. This restructuring asks you to meet the conflict as an aligned team that represents your smile of truth.

 

The conflict is about your relationship with the other person, not the other person.

 

Posture is the first thing that cues you in on how you feel about your relationship with something. Dialogue with your body before it shouts out with pain and fatigue. Listen when it gets energized, relaxed and sits upright. Ask yourself:

 

  •      Can passionate choices be, less about the choice and, more about being lead toward your purpose? The teaching tools that ask you to explore your values and value.
  •      Can protecting your passion be training the muscles needed for you to be purposeful? The call to action that asks you to step into unfamiliar territory.

 

What have we turned our backs on because we didn’t know what questions to ask ourselves? Living life in shades of gray offers way more options that living in black or white choices.

 

If you let yourself be blown to and fro.

You lose touch with your roots.

If you let restlessness move you,

You lose touch with who you are.

                                                                Tao te Ching

 

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