**This is an adaption of a post I wrote in my teacher’s container, DEVOTION, digesting an assignment she had given me. It felt true to share it here too.
My assignment was to stop stuffing my time.
To do one thing a day. That’s it.
Just one practice. Just one work item. If more was true, I could do it, but there was only one intention I brought to each day.
When I got the assignment from my teacher Perri, I shuddered. I wondered if it was out of range. I had a lot of thoughts about how it was impossible. I am a mother of two small babies I have to make the absolute most of every single minute of my time. Pack it all in. Stuff every last moment.
When I got the assignment I also knew it was exactly what I needed.
After working 3 years with Perri I still feel astounded by the precision of her strokes sometimes. It’s like I say 3 sentences and she’s got the whole context, story, and down to the deepest thing and the adjustment into alignment comes sharp and quick and more masterfully than there are words for. This is not ungrounded praise and “fan-girling”, it’s just truly my experience time and time again. Every stroke; a stroke of absolute Truth.
I saw how this stuffing of my time was just like over eating. When you take too much in, you cannot digest it. No matter how good quality the cake ingredients, if you eat a whole cake in one sitting you’re going to feel unwell and not be able to assimilate the nutrients.
Same with my practices.
If I try to stuff sxbmb, journaling, breath work, writing, meditation, sun bathing, reading, watching calls, and on and on, every day I will not be actually receiving any of the nourishment of these things.
And so the first piece I saw is that stuffing is unreceptive. I want to pack it all in so I don’t actually have to receive any of it. It’s a great way to “look” like you’re doing the work, without actually opening to the work.
The second piece that’s come up is how much this made room for punishing and self flagellation. Being hard on myself is my favorite. I didn’t fit it all in today? What the fuck is wrong with you? Focus. Work, you bitch. You’re not committed enough. That’s why you aren’t changing. You can’t do anything right.
This is Extraction of the feminine. A Pimp/Ho dynamic. Mean masculine. I didn’t have this voice directed externally at me in childhood, but I can see now how both my parents have inner punisher voices similar to this. And I recognize, now, how this voice of mine came from their inner voices.
The first week of the practice, l realized that this was not another “practice” I could muscle my way through, because of the two pieces I outlined above.
So I simply held the intention to do only one thing a day, but very loosely. I made space for getting caught up and stuffing on accident.
I made space for there being facts in my life that required me to do more than one thing.
I made space for not doing the practice.
I used zero force. I just kept coming back to the intention and holding it loosely.
My mind actually hasn’t really thought that much about the practice, but what I’m coming around to realizing after these last two months of holding it loosely, is that this what open reception feels like.
This practice actually gave me an embodied experience of opening to a practice without force.
And because of that I’ve been able to titrate from this place and bring more reception into my other practices, my work, and my relationships.
I am in this place of remembering who I am, on the deepest level, and I am someone who has a very equal masculine and feminine system. I am very, very capable. I can do and stuff and do and stuff, all day, every day.
But it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t make me joyful.
And I am learning to value my own aliveness more than my capability.
My capability is amazing, but my life force comes first.
And openness feels alive.
I am open to nourishment here. I am open to assimilation. I am open to integration.
I am open to the way the energy wants to move and I’m not fighting with it anymore.
I am ready. Here we go.
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