Getting Out of Stuckness and The Benefits of Solitaire

I was overwhelmed. Interesting that the very topic of the TEDX I was working on, was to transcend overwhelm in times of great change. The irony was not lost on me.

Ever put pressure on yourself? Or pick up on the stress of other people and make it your own? No? Never?! LOL. We all do it.

I had not read my word of the day for 5 weeks, since I’d been focusing on my TEDX project.

I had to laugh when I read my word of the day in the morning after ending a huge amount of struggle. Again, the irony was not lost on me…. but I’ll get to that.

So, in my journey of trying to condense 25 years worth of lessons, stories, and bridges into an 18 minute TED talk (which is definitely a leap for someone who is used to speaking for at least 3 hours or 3 Days to weave stories), there have been so many opportunities to transcend struggle. There have been so many parts of the journey that involved ego stuff coming up for everyone involved, certainly paradigm shifts, and absolutely gifts from the Heavens about my life, finding flow and grace.

I am grateful, don’t get me wrong. There’s a saying that I share with my clients:

Yet, it doesn’t matter who you are, when you get under enough stress, you can forget even the most yummy and helpful life lessons. And I did.

The morning after a late night working ‘hard’, I had an epiphany.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love contrast as I know it always leads to powerful expansive leaps in my paradigms about life. I’m in love with those leaps……and I probably made this one a little more long-coming than I could have.

There’s a practice that I love to do. It’s called “Future Activating in the Now”. I talk to myself and allow myself to feel into the future by speaking about it like it has already happened. In the past tense.

When I use that technique, it always puts me in flow. I do it every morning. Or at least I had been, until the three days prior to getting unbearably overwhelmed.

I was not living into the beauty of the power of what I was about to share with 500 people. Everything started getting hard and stressful. I ended up in that state because first I was putting pressure on myself to get it right, then I let the stress of the organizers seep in, and then I started carrying them because I don’t like to see people I love in distress.

OMG, the teacher is the student yet again.

I love how persistent I am.

Overall, though I know cellularly that it was all happening FOR ME, it is embedded in my cells that there is “always a way” to get back to flow. It is absolutely a law in physics. Entanglement Theory says that if a problem exists, its complementary answer also exists. I live knowing this.

I needed to get to the frequency of the answers.

I knew that it was time for a pattern interrupt. When one is being right that something is serious and HARD, it becomes difficult to step away when all we want to do is solve the problem so we can feel good.

Do you do that?

But the answers we need always come from the space between the atoms. They lay in the dark matter, that is not yet in reality. In order to access answers to get my talk done in flow and ease and getting out of Fight or Flight, I would need some spaciousness. I would need to do something that puts me at the frequency of the answer instead of the frequency of the problem, like changing the channel to the good vibes where all good vibe things live.

I put on some great music, and I started to play solitaire. Solitaire puts me in connection to my greater wisdom for some reason. It gets my mind out of the way, like a meditation. And all of a sudden, in my humming, chair dancing solitaire game, the first of the shifts happened.

I was winning the game…and knew that I would win. It was a tough game. I realized that I love to prove my ability to figure it out, by playing tough games. WHAT? Okay, no. I LIKE EASY…WHY WOULD I WANT TO PROVE MYSELF THROUGH MAKING IT HARD. Then when I knew I would win, I wanted to restart the same game because I saw I made a mistake….and INSTEAD I PRESSED THE ‘NEW GAME’ BUTTON. Noooooo!!!!!!

I laughed, because (and this is big), the contrast in life is just as important as the flow or winning. AND it is not something to complain about. It can be embraced in the same way winning is embraced, as the catalyst to cause us to win in new and fun ways, is almost always a little contrast.

You cannot as a Creator Being live without contrast. It is built into the fabric of life on purpose. It is what causes us to come to new insights and create what has never existed before. Like what was now part of creating my TEDX Talk. Like asking my hubby to help me at a whole new level. Like understanding my glass ceiling on stress, and now embodying a way of being that I will never forget. Like knowing that the contrast I was now experiencing was going to help me embody flow at a whole new level. I’ll be able to move through this level of intensity with grace and ease because I took action that proved to me that flow and grace is available whenever I want…..even when I reach a glass ceiling.

I just need to get to the channel where it exists.

That is why I followed my solitaire game (that I gleefully lost by the way) with the perfect Qiqong class, followed by an awesome dinner with a friend last night and then came home and watched an amazing Youtube video about love. It started with interrupting my dogged, serious pattern by going out and focusing on something else…….instead of doing what most people do when they get stressed…..they “hunker down”, and I had been hunkering down.

Normally, I am a master at stepping away when: my computer’s not working, my friends are in a huff, or I’m everyday frustrated. Seriously, a master. I have so much evidence for the miraculous happening. Sheesh.

The morning after coming remembering myself anew, I read my “word of they day” for the first time in 5 weeks:

It means perseverance or stick-to-itness with a side order of suffering a little. Yep. That’s what I was doing.

Remember to stay with your journey and return to the practices that bring you back to your flow. Future Activating is one that we teach in our Embodiment Workshop, because I love to make flow my default not just remembering to flow when stress is happening. I’m an efficiency nut. I used to be so tired of excavating myself, I just wanted to embody thriving practices as a different faster way. Yes, I still need to look at old patterns occasionally (like with this TED), but my biology is already in that future, so insights are easier to come by most of the time.

I don’t like fixing myself from the same energy as the problem. After all, the only reason I want relief is so I can fly. So, I love to teach people to fly first, and come at their stuckness from a future higher perspective. Solutions are exponentially more forthcoming…but that’s all for another article.

Your consistent practices, and particularly Future Activations in the Now, will get you way out ahead of this crazy world and make you not only resilient but regenerative in nature.

It’s easy to forget that we are not alone and that we have tools, when the world around us does not live that way. We compound our self-imposed pressure with the stress of others because if we are not conscious about it, the frequencies simply match up. The contrast is still a blessing however.

It’s easy to have independence when we are in stress, and just hunker down and be a lone wolf. But in an intense world like ours now, we need our friends, we need to do the things that interrupt the grease line slippery emotional slope to hell, and we need to get out ahead of how our day goes so our biology is already living an inspired future.