There is nothing you need to do
In my ‘Monday Musings‘ (title due to change, maybe. Or not. We’ll see.) I mentioned a workshop I had been to over the long weekend – in bio-dynamic cranio-sacral therapy.
After that weekend, I felt GOOD. I felt free – my body felt free – and I felt more grounded (which sorta makes sense, because we did a lot of meditation based on grounding and centering).
This leads to the point of this blog post. As I said, we did a fair bit of meditation. Cranio-sacral therapy relies on the practitioner being in a state of balanced awareness. This allows them to really listen to the needs of the client, and respond with gentleness and specificity.
The meditation & grounding was guided. Twice, the line ‘there is nothing you need to do’ came up. The first time I heard it, my reaction was, ‘Yes, there is!’. I could probably have rattled off a list right there on the spot of at least ten things I ‘had’ to do. (I didn’t, of course, but I stored that line away for later reflection).
And now I am bringing that reflection to you. I find one of the biggest hindrances of my own progress is the worry I feel about the other things that I need to be doing. Like, right now I am writing this blog post, but in the back of my mind are voices telling me I should be catching up on filing, or writing, or painting, or tweeting people I haven’t tweeted for a while, or replying to emails, or going for a walk, or… I think you get the point.
This comes back to mindfulness as well. Fellow writer Amanda Staley and I have talked about this on many occasions (she also picked up on the theme in The Caretaker of Imagination). Mindfulness is the art of living in the moment; of appreciating where you are right now, and doing what you are doing. It is something I need to consciously make an effort to do, or I get lost in thoughts of what else I should be doing – and ironically means that I get nothing done!
Right now I am blogging: there is nothing else I need to do, there is nowhere else I need to be. All I need to be doing is immersing myself in this post, in this idea, and trying to communicate it in a way that brings out the heart of the matter & hopefully prompts you to think a bit more about it.
So, whatever you are doing now is all you need to do. I’d love your thoughts on this topic – please do leave a comment below
