Wilma and Ann-Marie working on do-ing enough during a WomenLikeMe meeting.
‘When is enough enough’ is a question I am sure Shakespeare would have loved to tackle if he had had a blog.
But seeing as he didn’t, I will give it a shot.
Life is busy.
There is a lot going on.
I have things to attend to, people to take care of and many tasks to complete.
On top of all that, I also have this blog as part of our fledgling business.
I am rushed off my feet most days and while at the end of some days I am knackered, I still question if I have done enough????
Hello Hello! What do I think I am so knackered from? What do I mean; have I done enough?
Yet, that question does pop up.
In the worst case scenario it causes anxiety and feelings of overwhelm. I even seriously consider that indeed I might not have done enough and that I should go and do some more.
Jeez, here I am knackered with a lot to show for it and I still want to flog this tired horse because it has not done enough?
If you too get a feeling that something doesn’t compute here, high five to you, because it doesn’t.
It does not compute as there will never be a state of having done ‘enough’.
NOT in this world, how it is today anyway.
Even if I did work harder, I will never be able to answer; “when enough is enough.”
When I was pregnant, I was totally in love with my life. It rocked.
In this week’s post Learning from experience to do things differently Wilma shared how she created a different world for herself in order to gain access to her indigenous self and to LIVE her life even though she did not initially know how to do it.
Her desire to do life another way was strong enough to propel her forward into the depths of the unknown in order to be free and LOVE life.
She has certainly achieved this.
She has arrived in style.
Wilma loves her life, it oozes from every part of her, it is in every cell in her body and she is IN love with everything that she does, from washing the dishes to writing her blog posts to spinning and knitting to dealing with the fresh produce from the veggie garden and to building her WomenLikeMe business.
She is consistent, she LOVES it all.
John, noticing that I am not where Wilma is at, asked me this question on Monday “Ann-Marie what do you love doing?”
Learning to do things differently alright on my 17 days ocean trip on this vessel.
I was in my late forties when it hit me how boring and dead end my future looked.
We had a nice freehold house, enough money to do what we liked with, I had a great job as a career consultant and yet it suddenly hit me that there was nothing left to explore, that there was nothing left to discover!
I had that horrible feeling of boredom, of having seen and heard it all and I probably had, within the confines of the life I was leading.
My job as a career consultant contributed to my awakening as well.
I so often saw that predictable career paths and work solutions were not as crash hot as they were first made out to be.
I heard a lot of work and career related stories and I noticed that people who chose a different way, people who carved out their own path were far more interesting and joyful to talk to than the ones that had gone down the what we would call ‘normal’ route.
The ones who had successful careers according to the definition of society were often pedantic, dumb, self absorbed, arrogant, not observing what was going on around them and absolutely scared of everything new.
Being made redundant for them was death, they often could not see their way out and they were hard to deal with.
Creating the Experience to Learn is where the gold lies.
The Little Voice, the ego was the topic of this week’s post as Wilma shared how a weekend of guests sent her into a mind spin of upset and how she got herself out of it.
We are all familiar with our ego; the martyr, the doormat, the manipulator, the stronghold, the unknown quantity or as Patty put it; “I like to think of her as my martyred caregiver. She gives and gives and gives, and darn it, why can’t people just see all that I’m doing for them?”
Most of us agreed that in order to be free of the ego we first must be present to it, to be aware of it, what it says and the results it causes. The Little Voice is powerful beyond measure and something not to be taken lightly, it has many ways to hide out and mask its appearance, and it is cunning and operates under the radar.
We did live happily ever after, phew.
Well, with the worm compost toilet fixed I thought I was ready for the guests.
I had picked all the veggies and prepared all the food as much as I could. The beds were made and John had put up the tent for the twins to sleep in.
And then it was time for the troops to arrive. And arrive they did.
First three delightful and boisterous boys aged between two and nine tumbled out of the car and shot off in all directions, followed more calmly by their sister.
Behind the kids came their parents and immediately the house was filled with their presence.
Within seconds there was chaos, which is what you expect with live wire kids and two adults who are not present.
Part of the preparation to receive our guests was to mentally psyche myself up for the fact that I would be on duty the whole weekend and that I would be observing my ego, my Little Voice.
Thus I started out by cheerfully being love-in-action while watching out for my Little Voice.
I watered and fed everybody as well as trying to keep up with the adult conversations.
So far so good, but not for long.
Aligned relationships keep the Ego in check!
This week’s post explained the difference between aligned and parallel relationships.
From Wilma’s sharing we could see how being aligned with our loved one achieves wonderful results, almost effortlessly.
There is flow; problems still arise however they are dealt with in a constructive, productive way that supports each person.
We may indeed be causing results in our relationships but the point to note here is; how are we going about creating these results?
Are we aware that there is a third person, the Ego, lurking around in the foreground of our relationship and are we aware of how much turmoil and upset the Ego wreaks.
Oh man, to deal with this malfunctioning compost toilet, lovingly and manually is a miracle.
Learning to see a wholesome ‘what is so’ has been extremely valuable for Ann-Marie and me and from the comments, I can see that has been the case for some of you as well.
It sure showed up the flaws in my previous relationship and how unaligned we were.
We were just two egos marching alongside each other, seemingly together on the same path and going for the same outcome.
NOT.
‘What was so’ was that we had a parallel relationship.
While, we loved each other, it was conditional on behaving a certain way, on fitting into our respective perspective of what constitutes a ‘good’ partner and when that was not the case, we lost interest and started to complain about each other. In hindsight our conversations were repetitive, covering the same safe things over and over again and we preferred to talk about other people rather than exploring intimate topics such as ourselves, our dreams, sex, finance and child rearing.
- Are we playing heart centered team in all our relationships?
This week’s post ‘What is so’ in relationships talked about looking deep into what is going on with our relationships and no matter how confronting, it is required to get to the wholesome ‘what is so’.
And without this level of ‘what is so’, we don’t get access to acceptance and we miss the opportunity to bypass our ego to get to our heart centered self and be the change we want to see.
Lance highlighted the point with this comment about his marriage
there were moments where accepting “what was so” was not easy at all. I suppose I came into the relationship with preconceived notions, based upon all of my past experiences. There was definitely a period of time where I didn’t want to see beyond my own limited horizon. And while things were never terrible, there were times where our relationship suffered.”
And Wilma’s response gave us lots to think about . . .
We all kind of know we have an opinion and a conditioning that can skew how we perceive life. BUT how are we going to really see how that affects our daily life where it counts?
Who is there to point out that what we see is usually NOT SO as we seldom come from wholeness . . . AND then are we open to really see the ‘what is so’, because normally when you do, you are open for a shock, a big BIG shock . . . as I discovered.
What is so? Who is trusting whom?
In last week’s posts I wrote how once Ann-Marie accepted ‘what was so’ with her two year old daughter Molly not sleeping on Monday afternoon, she had access to thinking and doing things differently.
There is more to this ‘accepting’ business than just accepting how things appear in the first instance.
There is a vast difference between first ‘appearances’ coming from a very limited perspective and ‘what is so’ coming from a more whole and connected place, especially when it comes to relationships.
When we think or talk about our relationships, we describe them in a certain way, we describe them as they appear to us through our so called colored glasses. How our relationships ‘appear’ to us is of course often not the ‘what is so’ for the other party when you come from a wholeness point of view.
Accepting how things appear is not going to give us access to thinking and doing things differently; all THAT is doing is giving us more of the same or resignation.
The greater level of ‘acceptance’ is not a case of accepting appearances, but going to a place of wholeness about ‘what is so’.
Ann-Marie and I learned from this experience that wholesome acceptance needs to be preceded by finding out what is the ‘what is so’ to accept in the first place.
And finding ‘what is so’ is a skill that we rarely think to develop, especially when it comes to seeing what is going on in our relationships.
Our lack of skill has us easily miss ‘what is so’ and have us miss the starting point which will allow us to think and do things differently, that will allow us to develop heart centered team play that has us fly in relationships.
This week’s post Only acceptance has you do things differently questioned acceptance and our perception of it.
And by using an example that is familiar to most people it brought home how our acceptance of a given situation can lead us to doing things differently by creating solutions that work for us.
Joy’s take on this was; “sometimes our thoughts around certain issues have become so automated we don’t even realize it, and always *always* when you start from scratch an insight pops in. Far different from your original thought.”
Now that’s what we’re on about Joy, coming up with a creative and conscious way to proceed instead of the usual reactive default way.
How our thinking about Molly tripped us up.
Ann-Marie and I loved reading how you have taken doing things differently on board. And the results that have been created thrilled us to no end, to use Angelia’s words!
However despite all that, Ann-Marie and I still got stuck this week while we were talking about doing things differently.
It all started when Ann-Marie began talking about Molly, her 2 year old daughter.
For some months now Ann-Marie has had an issue with Molly refusing to have an afternoon sleep on Mondays even though she obviously needs it.
Monday mornings are spent at Playcenter where Molly loves to be with other children. She gets so excited by the whole experience; totally wired and come the afternoon she will not sleep although she is clearly exhausted after her morning’s adventures.
With no sleep, by the end of the day Molly, of course has become very cranky and doesn’t know whether she is coming or going.
Ann-Marie also is no longer at her best having dealt with her over-stimulated and then overtired child for most of the day.
Thus Ann-Marie feels she has a problem.
She would so like Molly to have an afternoon sleep to avoid her wee girl becoming over tired, frustrated and upset. Despite this and trying every method to get her to sleep, nothing seems to work on Mondays.
- We can do life differently with conscious thinking
George is an extraordinary teacher for us all given your responses to last week’s post, To create, we have to think more.
Wilma’s day out with George highlighted how much we go about our day relying on auto pilot and hence shutting off opportunity to create, be present or do things differently.
Diantha said it so well “It takes a George now and then to wake us up out of our dream state we often live in doesn’t it!”
There were a great number of realizations in what was said in the comments.
Our collective understanding is extremely encouraging given that this conversation is about change and doing life differently. It is the continued generosity of the sharing that gives us such powerful insights into ourselves.
We are deepening our understanding here and together we are coming to grips with what ‘being present’ actually means and what is required from our self in order to do creative thinking everyday.
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