Today, I am taking a day off.

I am writing this at night, actually, the night before it posts in the morning.

While I love what I am doing every day so much its crazy and I’m really happy most of the time, I realized a few hours ago that I have not taken a day off in… well… almost never since I started this adventure in lifestyle.  But, in this level of intensity and all this greatness of the past year and a half, I haven’t taken a day off… actually… ever.

I had a wake up call tonight that sent me to the most freeing conclusions ever.

I need some soulful Spring Cleaning.

Silence. Art. Love. Time off.

Maybe you could use some, too?

You may need a “time out” or some time off if you see subtle signs of the same things repeating themselves.  Same issues. Same illness.  Same same same.

As a client recently emailed me, “I remember the definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting something new to happen.”

Of course, I lost my voice a week ago when I arrived back from New York.

It seems the cooler that life gets, with every next level of expansion, my voice fades.

Hm…

My intuitively keen friend who was visiting made a point of letting me know that she sees this happen to me each and every time things are getting quite great in my creative life.  My voice vanishes.  Poof. Gone. And along with it comes a wave of worry that maybe I’m not resting enough in a larger way, but still I don’t take a vacation.

“How do you play Dana?”

“My whole life is play.”

“No… really play. Like swimming in the ocean, dancing at parties type play?”

Hm…

For the last week I’ve had a hard time writing.  I hate using the words “writer’s block” in this situation because I could freely write about so much… just nothing I wanted to write about matched anything I had to write about… so in this case it was robotic malaise that was affecting me.  Deeply. Affecting. Me.

Of course, I burned palo santo wood incense and turned my house into a creativity zone and got so excited to write again and… then… my neck got so tweaked out of the blue that I could barely type.

Hm…

For some reason, my ability to have a voice in all ways was wayyyyy out of whack.

If you’ve ever seen my articles about the Fifth Chakra, its the chakra (*energy center of the body) of self-expression, living your truth, aligning your words and your actions and all  of this stuff that makes us all uniquely and vibrantly who we are in the world.

Now, all of this was frustrating… but I’m no stranger to dealing with a little chaos when starting to get organized on a higher level in life… so I was riding it out and I knew it would change.

Then: it happened.

I took the dogs for a walk to their favorite pet store. Bob ate a treat and looked… disgruntled. He didn’t want to walk.  I didn’t know what was wrong, but I sensed something was very very wrong. I carried him half the way home. This never happens.  I gave each dog half a Greenie (a harder, bone-like treat that’s supposed to clean their teeth… that I now know is extremely dangerous) and Bob gobbled it up, almost biting my hand in the process.  Then he turned almost catatonic. He wouldn’t move. He clearly couldn’t breathe.  Its still such a shock to me just thinking about the way things faded so fast… Screaming to the heavens I grabbed him without even a leash and raced out of the house to the animal hospital.

One minute into our death-defying ride he coughed it all out.

Three hours at the vet gave me a long time to think about what matters most.

I had a problem.  It wasn’t just my impossible-t0- ignore issues surrounding all things related to my throat and neck and speaking and self-expression… it was being mirrored back at me in a phenemonally intense way that this was something bigger.

Thursday I’m doing some spring cleaning for the soul.

Care to join me?

I’m grabbing a ton of herbs and lavender for the kitchen, taking both dogs on big walks, doing some spa time, joining the gym again and getting a great trainer.  Maybe I’ll take lots of photos. Or paint.  Or hang out with random people at the grocery store (*its like a night club, my local grocery store, a health-food night club!)…Or just take naps with the dogs.

I am going to make some more great big decisions in this space of doing total and complete life love stuff with not a single email or blur of computer or phone ambiance in my mind.  Making decisions that give me more creative playtime and more time to do what matters most with those who matter most.

Do you need a day off to Spring Clean your own soul?

Spend time in Nature, invest in your wellbeing,  pull the plug on the digital realm, re-prioritize, re-organize…

Do you say “I wish I could…”  more than you say “I have to…”

?

If so… join me in a big day off to Spring Clean your soul.

Every time I’ve done this, its been nothing short of thrilling.

Don’t get me wrong, I do take hours of breaks and do fun things all day… but its been… a… whole…lot… lately.

Do you fill up your creative well?

Do you have the luxury of sleeping enough?

Do you ever take a day off just to do nothing?

I had a notion when I was in fourth grade that I was smarter (*self-taught at home, reading books on my own) than my teacher, and I actually worried that if I got too much bad instruction I would be stupid… and I was tired of school, anyway… so I stayed home.  I said I had a migraine.  A fourth grade migraine. I’m sure it happens to some poor fourth grader.  I made it a cyclical regular thing to have one… and I even spoke of auras and used every word I could glean from the Funk & Wagnalls Medical Dictionary to make it extremely intense.  A few days at a time the migraine would strike.  It was great. I watched soaps with my grandma.  We had lunch together, lots of minestrone and lots of lemonade.  I’d cook sometimes.  Read.  Take photos with my Polaroid. Crochet. Zone out in the garden.

It rejuvenated me.

I guess not much changes?!

If I’m going to give you the best version of me in so many new and cool ways… I need to give that to myself, too, in new and cool ways.

Are you ready to ramp-up your own self-love to give much more to your own life?

Let’s make this a regular thing, shall we?!

See you tomorrow with much freshness…and intense amounts of gratitude!

xoxo Dana

 

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