Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Busy Moms

by Kate Northrup

How can I give of myself while still attending to my genuine self-care? The “solution,” too often, is ignoring our own care in favor of others’.

the power of releasing the burdens of expectation from our shoulders so that we can place ourselves first in terms of self-care, self-worth, and, most important, self-compassion.

It is only when we begin attuning to our inner sense of divinity that we can fully serve those we love.

It all begins with a deconditioning of the old paradigms of doing-more in order to be-of-worth and entering a revolutionary way of flowing with one’s true natu...

A life well lived is no longer measured by a stack of achievements, but instead by a stack of presence-filled experiences.

water. Water is affected by the moon; that’s what creates tides. Our bodies are affected by the moon too.

Focus on quantity and growth above quality and sustainability leaves the soil depleted. Focus on these very same deliverables leaves humans depleted.

Stress, of which overwork is obviously a cause, has been correlated to depleted nutrients that help with hormone production and regulation, such as magnesium, zinc, and calcium. Once again: We are not separate from nature. We are nature and must treat ourselves as such.2

We boldly opt out of the system to create one that works for us, and then we work ourselves to the bone, following the model that we wanted to escape in the first place.

But it wasn’t long into motherhood that I realized that I’m a working mother, not a stay-at-home mother.

I found that as I honored my body and the season she was in, nothing fell apart.

It’s about experimenting with small things we can try every day to do less in order to have more.

What I’m proposing is that if we work in sync with the cycles going on within us and around us, we’ll find that we can do less, yet net more. And that we can feel more satisfaction, ease, and harmony as we do it.

birds coast when they can.

finding as much ease as possible even as we do the things that aren’t all that easy. It’s about finding the places to coast when you can. It’s about living and working in ways that make you resilient for the long haul.

We don’t ask a flower to blossom all year long. We understand that she has seasons and cycles.

As a woman, do you ever feel like the world just isn’t designed to support who you are at your core? That in order to succeed you have to shut down your intuition, your emotions, and other parts of yourself and be more like a man?

The follicular phase

Energetically, it’s when you’re the most primed to plan, to plant seeds of creation and desire, to brainstorm, and to initiate new projects.

Energetically, the ovulation phase is the perfect time to get out there and get the word out about what you’re working on.

While all the phases are powerful, this is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked for the power it holds. The luteal phase marks the time in your cycle when your energy begins to turn inward.

The follicular and ovulation phases are outward times and the luteal and menstrual phases are inward times.

During the luteal phase, you’re energetically poised to complete projects. To dot your i’s and cross your t’s. To bring it on home. So this is the perfect time to be wrapping up the project that you initiated during the follicular phase. Your brain chemistry is supporting focus and the ability to finish things. You may not feel like going out to every networking event or party during this phase, but it’s a great time to hunker down, wrap things up, and begin to slow down before the next phase of the cycle.

Energetically, the time when you bleed is the ideal time for rest and reflection.

Your brain is the most wired for connectivity between the left and right hemispheres right now, which makes you super smart and able to integrate logical and intuitive information with remarkable clarity. Your physical energy will likely be the lowest during this time, so it’s a great time to take a day off, minimize social engagements, do super gentle movement (if any), and just rest.

This is also a great time to evaluate what’s working and what’s not ...

The Universe is a whole bucket of duality. Light and dark. Stillness and movement. Wet and dry. Quiet and loud. Fast and slow. Inward and outward. Without one quality or energy, the other one couldn’t exist, and both are critical to the whole.

Who am I if I’m not doing anything? Who am I if I’m not producing? Who am I if I’m not in action?

So many of us have been raised to believe that our worth is equal to our accomplishments. That we must earn our deserving of life and all things good through doing.

Wishing they’d had the courage to live a life more true to themselves rather than the life others expected of them. Wishing they hadn’t worked so hard. Wishing they’d had the courage to express their feelings. Wishing they’d stayed in touch with their friends. Wishing they’d let themselves be happier.

“and when you look at a day as a circle it’s so relaxing because as the day goes on you’re always moving back toward the beginning of a new day instead of running out of time in the day you’re currently in.”

Our bodies already know that everything is a circle, that we’re coming back here again, that there’s no such thing as running out of time, that the Universe is infinitely abundant, and that everything is predictably rhythmic. But we’ve forgotten this truth for so very long, and it’s sent us running the “race to nowhere,”

When we begin to perceive our bodies, our energy, and time as cyclical instead of linear, we not only feel relaxed on a cellular level in a way most of us have never experienced, we also begin to pick up momentum without having to struggle.

When we honor the distinct and uniquely useful phases of our bodies, the moon, and our creativity, we get further, faster, without having to push as hard.

It’s like having spent your whole life furiously paddling against a really strong current and suddenly realizing that all you needed to do to cover more ground was turn your canoe downstream and use your paddle to steer every now and again.

The current of Mother Earth and the Universe is already going this way. We...

“What we appreciate appreciates.”

I hypothesized that if I paid attention to the cycles going on within me and around me and participated with them on purpose that I could get the same kind of results that Mother Nature gets: massive abundance, beauty, diversity, and life force. I could naturally have more by doing less.

But each time we revisit a certain phase, we’ve moved up the spiral so that we’re visiting it at a higher level of consciousness and from a more evolved place than the last time.

this way of being makes self-care part of our rhythm as opposed to a reward.

The Fertile Void is here to teach us that we are more than what we do, that there is tremendous value in rest, and that rest is even productive.

In a world where we’ve been taught that our worth is equal to how much we personally can achieve, it can be hard to simply relax and receive, because on some level we feel like we’re less worthy if things come easily or we get help.

The feminine nurtures, heals, beautifies, and improves everything around her.

If you’ve ever studied Abraham-Hicks, you’re familiar with the concept of allowing. There’s the ask for what you want. Then there’s the allowing it to come to you. The egg is really good at allowing. She’s the perfect leader for us, as women, in what it looks and feels like to allow our desires to come to us.

Abraham-Hicks says that appreciation has an even more attractive vibration than gratitude because it’s purely about noticing what we like about what’s in front of us instead of gratitude, which is often about liking what’s in front of us as compared to what could be in front of us or what used to be in front of us.

So, for today or the next few days, simply focus on appreciation. What can you find in your immediate environment right now that you can appreciate?

How did I feel if I was bleeding on the full moon as opposed to the new moon? What was my energy like? How was my intuition? What was my focus like? How much did I want to nap? Was I irritable?

As I began to track my cycle, the result of the most feminine part of myself, my reproductive system, my self-compassion and self-love grew by leaps and bounds.

I realized that this was the most practical way that I could love myself, and specifically my body.

No other self-love practice even held a candle to the depth of understanding and honoring that I developed through the daily practice of tuning in to how my body felt, paying attention to where she was in her cycle and in her dance with the ...