Busy

Hey, Janika here.

It's good to feel productive, right?

To feel busy?

To feel like we are an arrow that's shooting towards a specific target and ticking off our to-do list along the way?

But you've clicked on busy today, and so something tells me it is not because you enjoy all that you carry on your shoulders at the moment.

Busy can, yeah, feel purposeful, can feel good, but it can also feel draining and exhausting and make you feel scattered.

We wear these busy batches of honour without even taking a second to understand why we hold so much value in the term busy.

And when someone asks you, you know, how's work going?

How are you?

Your immediate response is, oh, it's great.

It's really busy.

It's really busy at the moment.

Everything's going great.

And when someone asks you, you know, how are the kids?

How's life?

Yeah, it's fantastic.

We're really busy at our house at the moment.

And what does that even mean?

Because society checks that off as a success in a capitalist world.

If you're busy, you must be purposeful.

You must be useful.

You must be good at what you do.

You must be successful.

You must be happy.

But what about the downsides to feeling busy all of the time?

That constant mouse in a wheel feeling to have the pressure of needing to be productive in everything that we do, everything that we produce, everything that we touch has to have purpose, has to contribute to the realities of stories that are filled with a sense of constant busyness.

What does that do to our life story collectively?

Well, that's exactly what today's story power is about.

We're going to take a moment to talk about the need to breathe and pause.

So let's take a moment to drop into our bodies together, to just drop into the now with a few breaths in and out in your own time.

I want you to do three.

Good.

So today is a reminder to let yourself press pause on the busy and simply have a moment to breathe.

To do that breathing exercise that we just did because we're so busy being busy.

We're spread thin, we're continually rushed in our stories and this is meaning that we lack the ability to hone in on them with presence.

We stop breathing.

We become overwhelmed and burnt out with the multitasking and the rushing.

We lose our sparks.

We lose that access to our joy and peace within the task that inspired us to be busy in the first place, right?

God, I've been there.

So the next time you're tempted to overwhelm yourself with duties and tasks in the name of productivity, come back and take a breath.

Come back to this present moment and allow yourself a sense of presence.

Allow yourself to take the breath and breathe in the presence so that you can take the next action required for your story in the moment.

You don't have to do it all in one day.

You just have to step in the right direction little by little and let yourself be present in those moments.

So pause the busy and remember to breathe.