Finishing up my yoga and meditation this morning I couldn’t help noticing how utterly present I was. No thinking. No direction. No needs. No “I better get going on that book or blog or email.” No need to run to the bathroom or the kitchen or the grocery store.
Absolutely no impulses in any direction.
So, I just sat, watching the dragonflies zip around as the light breeze riffled the leaves on the almond trees in the orchard. I don’t know for how long because there was no impulse to keep track of the time.
Eventually an impulse did show up and I followed it. Coffee! And my latest experiment with a new creamer, substituting almond milk mixed with a little organic coconut cream instead of using my usual whole milk … which I love. But having just finished editing a health book on gut repair and ketogenic diet—including a chapter on all the various reasons milk isn’t a good health choice for the vast majority of humans on the planet—I’d finally gotten serious about finding a different kind of coffee mate. And this particular combo was a taste treat success.
Bye-bye milk and half and half!
Then I followed the next silent internal impulse and wandered out to the back porch where I just sat, drinking my delicious decaf coffee blend.
Having just come off a six-year writing binge churning out four books (seven if you include two horribly long and depressing sequels to my memoir Unearthing Venus that I wrote following a disastrous love affair, plus my latest book—a very passionate spiritual romance novel called Apollo and Me) you have no idea how amazing and wonderful it is to have rediscovered the gear called:
Neutral.
In the midst of preparing The E Word for publication this year, I actually went through a phase where I believed that “I and my work are one” … that there was no separation between my writing and my work and the rest of me. My life was my work. My books were me.
I listened to friends with their own businesses talk about how they compartmentalized their work and social life, smugly congratulating myself on my spiritual advancement and profound life integration, not having the slightest clue that the only reason my life was integrated was because I had no life outside of my writing.
Nothing like writing a book on the ego and getting a little perspective. What’s the old saying?
We teach best that which we need to learn the most.