Productive & NOT Busy

This has been one of the most productive, and not busy and not stressful weeks that I have had in ages.

One contributing factor is I have reduced caffeine to a minimum. I stopped drinking coffee a long time ago because the caffeine was driving me up the wall. My drink of choice became a chai tea, soy latte – yes I know it sounds airy fairy but I can handle it.

Chai tea is also loaded with caffeine so I have cut myself back to one a day and drinking loads of water instead. As I write this it is 8am on Thursday morning and I haven’t had a chai tea as yet and have had three glasses of water … drinking water really helps to cut back the appetite too.

Coming off a holiday on Salt Spring Island also helps.

What has really helped with my production is staying mindful and awake and taking the time to pause over the course of my day. Being mindful and awake requires taking an ongoing responsibly for my ongoing consciousness. To be mindful and awake, over the course of the day I pause and consciously ask how I am feeling in my body. When I feel happiness and joy I take the time to breathe it in.

When I am not in these feelings I take the time to compassionately feel the feelings. This means mindfully feeling the feelings without getting hooked into my ego mind about how unworthy I am. Just breath … feel the feelings … staying conscious and the more I do, the more the feelings eventually subside without falling unconsciously into the story created by my ego mind.

These other feelings can include anxiety because I may be feeling rushed because I fell unconscious and not only created too many things on my to do list but I actually start engaging into trying to do all of them without even considering if the time is right. My unconscious ego mind will do its best to make everything into an A priority. I suppose it thinks by accomplishing all this stuff it would get some insane form of approval. Staying hooked into this in the past would have pulled me into the trap of feeling unworthy because I couldn’t possibly get it all done.

Another feeling could be feeling angry with myself because I did not manage something perfectly … ha, ha! You see, what I am about to tell you is without judgment … it just happened and I can move on. Because I had too many things on my to-do list, I made a hasty decision about shipping a used king size bed from Texas without taking all the factors into consideration like the weight of the bed and two night tables. The bed and night tables turned out to be twice the weight that I, yes I, hand guessed and the shipping turned out to be double. Oh well, the bed is still half the price of a new one which has been discontinued.

The point here is I took the time to be mindful and awake to pause and observe that I was feeling angry and then breathe through the anger to enable it to subside and flow right through me while staying conscious to make sure that I didn’t get hooked into my ego mind’s storey about I am not good enough which would have been a form of attack which would have just taken me deeper down the rabbit whole.

As I have been staying mindful I have been far less inclined to pack so much into my day with the various ideas that come to mind.

For fun this week, I decided to journal the idea that came to mind and not act on the idea until I had time at the end of the week to list all of the ideas and evaluate their importance.

What does this leave space for? Writing my book … fore as I wake up from putting so much energy into the Blogs, the energy could be easily steered into completing the writing of the book.