“I don’t know how to relax.”
That’s a bit of straight up truth I’d been saying out loud for a couple of years before I made this life change. Jimmy and I acknowledged that it was certainly true, but I never knew what to do about it.
Maybe I knew. I just didn’t want to do anything about it.
Or maybe I felt too guilty to do “nothing.”
Just the sound of it—do nothing—rubbed up against the way I was wired. My cellular make up. There was always so much on the to do list that ran my life for decades. And when your brand is “Get Shit Done,” doing nothing is, well, not on brand.
“I can’t relax. There’s so much to do. And if I don’t do it, who else will do it?”
And up comes the green bile of resentment—life’s sure sign that you need to make a change. In this case, I needed to make a change to situations I had created.
I’d constructed a life where I did everything—from the writing to the team management to the bill paying to the simultaneous juggling of ten seemingly impossible tasks. I had become very, very good at it.
I loved doing everything until it started to make me sick inside.
When I took an online meditation class with the American Meditation Society, I learned that it wasn’t so much about doing nothing as it was about finding the stillness inside me and just being with it for 20 minutes twice a day.
We were taught that we would not be perfect at it, and that turned out to be true. But it also turned out to be transformative. Finding stillness was beautiful and healing for me. Not overnight healing, but subtly, gradually, profoundly healing.
How do you learn to relax when you don’t know how? Here are four things that have worked and continue to work for me, albeit imperfectly.
1. Put down/turn off your to do list. I had used a to-do app called Opus Domini for years. When the developer stopped upgrading and supporting the app, it became glitchy and unusable, and I felt somewhat abandoned (See? I told you I had a problem.) Finding a new to-do app became another rolling item on my to-do list. I replaced it with an app called Things. I was back in business with an app that met my needs.
In the evenings and on weekends, I would find myself sitting and staring at my to-do list, momentarily paralyzed by it.
There is nothing I can check off here. It’s too late. It’s too much.
The truth: how much of this stuff really needed to get done? And what if it didn’t?
I experimented with not looking at my to-do list for a day and found that yes, I could live through it. Most stuff got done, but I did it without obsessing about it, which was in itself a change. You might try it.
2. Set up a place for the gentle art of doing nothing. Part of re-wiring yourself to find the stillness is creating a place where you can do it—without the judgment of yourself or others. A quiet space. A meditation room. A porch. A comfortable chair away from the TV and away from family/people. We had a cabana in our backyard that became my happy place, my meditation space. There I was free to do very little or nothing. It was simple, humble and judgment free. I began to heal there.
3. Meditate simply. Meditation doesn’t have to be a big production with pillows, incense, statues of Buddha and books that tell you how to sit. A simple way to get started is to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s Walking Meditation. A favorite meditation that has helped me is this:
Breathing in, I breathe in love.
Breathing out I breathe out peace.
Slow, deep in and out breaths for 20 minutes, repeating the words silently or aloud. I always say them silently.
4. Go outside without a goal. When my home became a 2600-square-foot reminder of all the things I had to do, I would exercise the option to open my office door and go outside for a walk without a goal. I would just walk. I’d have a basic route in mind, but I held the route lightly, being open to walking seldom-seen side streets or following bird calls. It helped.
I am and will likely always be in to-do list recovery. I am still using one, but the paralysis happens rarely now. I meditate daily, but not rigidly. That defeats the purpose. I am learning to relax. Simply writing this blog post is a big step for me. Something I couldn’t possibly have imagined five years ago.
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