Creating awesome things every single day is the ideal. In my perfect world, we all wake up excited, shower life with positivity that’s mirrored everywhere you look, things fall into place easily and everything is fun.
While you can have that bliss lots of the time, every day has inherent challenges, variables that are impossible to predict and things that happen that don’t all fit the ideal.
Someone told me 7 years ago when I was facing the hardest year of my life that I couldn’t control what happens, and I could only control how I reacted to it. Only bad things were happening, it seemed, and the way I reacted was to become more and more defensive and overwhelmed.
When I thought about what this wise woman told me, I realized I was actually creating more stress.
When you’re in a state of stress, the creativity stops fairly quickly and the coping begins. We get into defense rather than creativity. We start shielding and protecting ourselves instead of living and risking and creating. Or, when stress is constant or extreme, it’s tempting to check out of present time and start living half-here, wishing the days away and sort of floating.
If you’ve got stresses in your life, you can eliminate more of it that you may realize. Today’s Feng Shui is all about shifting your thoughts and energy to create much more light and much less stress.
I was able to let go of so much of my own overwhelm 7 years ago after I stopped feeding it and started creating in spite of it. I couldn’t magically make deaths in the family, huge illnesses, big administrative messes and family crisis go away. I could start looking for ways to make things lighter and easier for myself, and… when I did… things started to become grounded and sane again.
That time in my life challenged me to hone my own skills – changing my home space, changing my habits, changing my energy- and it gave me a very powerful personal example that I would have never felt so viscerally had it not been me sitting in the spotlight needing so much help.
The tools and routines and principles that helped me to unload a lot of stress have become a mainstay in my life. I’m not in the slightest bit immune to stressful situations, and when I feel them bubbling up, I remember what’s kept me in flow and what helps my clients so much.
What you push against will push you back. When you’re confronted with anger, rage or anything else, it’s really hard to do that now-popular-in-America phrase, “When they go low, we go high.” But it’s also extremely powerful. When’s the last time you’ve seen a screaming match or watched rage that’s met with more rage turned out victorious with a real solution?
I had to get myself to a higher and more courageous place when dealing with so much coming at me. Meditation, personal prayer, walks outside, great food, quiet at home… and as I felt stronger inside, I felt less need to rage back against anger and push back against things pushing toward me. The less energy I gave to what I didn’t want- the better things became.
Flow is more powerful than force. If you can accept that things might be less-than-ideal for some time, you’ll have an easier time setting them straight. Rushing, impatience, unrealistic deadlines… all of it makes things anxiety-laden and difficult. Flow instead of force will take you much further. It’s really hard to give things time to sort themselves, but often with some space and breathing room, energy will integrate in ways that become easier to deal with. Easy emotions reach solutions and fever pitches just create more hard-lines of opposition.
Art is healing. I charted my own healing process in wild ways by sitting for an hour every day and intuitively finishing just one drawing in pastels every day. I made myself a tea, lit some candles, shut off my phone and let myself create without judgement. My “art” changed from frenetic abstracts to freeform flowers and plants over the course of a month, and with each drawing, my mind would pop free with ideas. You can do this in your own ways, making art every day to open up new channels of expression and understanding.
Stress can be an opportunity. This is the hardest thing to see, but it really can be. The stresses are a roadmap to change, or they were for me… and they are for my clients. The stresses are also a signal of where you can heal, confront things and grow. If patterns repeat themselves, there’s often an energy block (an unresolved trauma, unhandled anxiety, clutter, things unsaid) that can be handled within ourselves. It’s not to excuse the bad behavior of others at all, but it will set you free to handle within you what makes this stuff get stuck in your life.
Your home is an amazing mirror. When you’ve got leaks, you can ask yourself what they mean. Where are you leaking your resources or wasting energy or holding things in until you burst? Or, is there a sense that you’ve been too depleted? If something breaks, is it a reflection of a broken system somewhere else? There’s no “one way” to interpret the mirror as the mirror is personal, but it always exists. Looking at my own home, the breakdowns are often preceding the breakthroughs.
Share love, not stress. I can’t emphasize this enough: talking about bad things just to talk about them doesn’t make things better. If you’re not proposing solutions or looking to fix something, sharing negativity is helping it to grow!
Be fluid with the process. I know that in an ideal world, things seem like they should go one way: we should all meet soulmates and get married young, we should have the right jobs with certain amounts of preparation, there should be a clear path from A- B. But… “should” is a deceptive word. It implies that if life isn’t seamless, it’s wrong. If you have to go all the way across town to get to a meeting three blocks away from your house to avoid blocked roads, so be it. Instead of anger and frustration, trust more that the detours and obstacles and information that pops up and changes and switches are a part of the process and not the end of the dream scenario.
All of this helped (and still helps) so much.
And this is just the start.
Eating well, sleeping well, doing everything you can to focus on the positive, staying lighter, avoiding negative news, living with more ease and grace, taking more time to relax… all of it will help eliminate stress rather than “managing it.”
I’ve always been a fan of the fact that breakdowns can be the precursor to big breakthroughs. If things have been really hard for you, sit with that idea and it can help you start to see the calm after the chaos.
We’re all sharing the same world. Be as compassionate as you can and stay as light as you can for yourself. There’s no way to control the world or other people in it, but we can stay as light as possible for one ourselves and for one another and let that be the new, brighter, easier, more peaceful way of being.
xoxo Dana
P.S.: If you want to really immerse yourself in the light of joy so much more, my favorite Feng Shui and cutting-edge energy-shifting tools that I use almost every day are HERE for you in the Joy Immersion: 30 Day Negativity Detox!
I’m so excited to share this with you!!!
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Welcome to Creating Genius!
I spent the last year creating this e-guide to balancing and unblocking life by pulling together the best of a decade of space-changing and life-shifting feng shui! It’s 50 days and 50 ways to use feng shui to shift your space and your routines to move from “stuck” to creatively inspired and alive.
Start Creating Genius right HERE!
Gather up your magic & make gorgeous dreams come true!
xoxo Dana
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