It has become my tradition to take the last week of the old year and the first week of the new year off. No students, no clients, and no pressure. It’s necessary. Anyone who teaches anything to anybody needs a break to clear their buffers, and anybody who sees clients for healing, coaching, mentoring, or otherwise, knows the value of stepping back and doing some reflecting and recovering.
Or if you don’t, you should do.
Several years ago, I starting having . . . we’ll call them accidents, but what they clearly were, were messages from the Divine telling me to stop all the outgoing energy for a while and spend some time doing only what I want to do, with nothing scheduled and nothing obligatory–and screw the holidays, just stay home and chill. I tried to ignore them and just barreled on ahead, so of course the accidents/messages started getting unignorable. “Don’t wanna slow down, huh? Well, here’s a nice shove down a flight of stairs onto your hard-shell instrument cases. Have a nice week on the couch!” So after a couple of those, I figured out that spending a week on the couch would be a lot more fun if I planned it. And I was right. And the accidents stopped happening.
I may have told you this story before, but trust me, it bears repeating. We don’t take enough care for ourselves, ever. It takes a serious injury or illness to make us slow down. If you are female, sometimes even that isn’t enough. I will bang a leg or arm on something in my rush to do something else and not even slow down, and later Michael will say, “Woah, where’d you get that bruise?” and I will have no earthly idea. At any given time, I have scrapes and bruises that I have to assume came from aliens. They just . . . are. Sound familiar?
All of those little scrapes and bruises start to add up. We can’t just keep going indefinitely. We can’t keep walking around like we’re wearing body armor, because we’re not. And eventually the body says, “Okay, enough. Time for me to heal. Now.” And if we don’t listen, we will suffer the consequences.
You might not end up a scraped, bruised and swollen heap lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs; your consequences could be completely different. Anything from indigestion to cancer is possible.
We are not our bodies, but we are responsible for taking care of them anyway.
So here’s what I think. I think Source/God/Spirit broke itself into bits and incarnated in order to learn how to be resourceful and creative and invent crazy things and write incredible stories and play music that requires hands, lungs, lips, and feet. I’m sure it’s all well and good being an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient and eternal energy being being blissed out on the eternal sound current that flows from the Source of All Everything, but Jesus, that sounds like it would get dull after a while. I’ll bet S/He just wanted some entertainment, a diversion, some limits, some challenges.
Have you ever noticed that when you have limitations imposed on your creativity, you have to get way more creative in order to create at all?
If you have no limits, no restrictions at all, you might just do whatever you would ordinarily do, instead of having to do what you do in a whole different way. So I think that Source/God/Spirit decided to incarnate into these really silly carbon-based bodies on a planet that is so far from perfect it’s not even funny, in order to be creatively challenged. To learn how to love from a place of astonishing imperfection. To learn to overcome flaws and handicaps and poverty and ignorance and find a way to flourish.
Clearly we have a long way to go. No danger of the world ending any time soon.
But it was these bodies that Source/God/Spirit stumbled upon after some millions of years of evolution that offered the most possibility for creativity and intellectual growth, and so these are the bodies that we are wearing now as our infinite selves, which are part of Source/God/Spirit, learn how to create within the strange limits that life imposes on every single person born. So yes, we do have a duty to regard this body as something we’ve borrowed for a time. When we die, we have to give it back. And most of us are probably not gonna get our deposit refunded.
This is our purpose, and in order to live that purpose we need these bodies to be in good working order. We need to be listening to them, because they are wise in the ways of being a material thing, and we are ephemeral little wispy things. Let your body tell you what it needs to be healthy and happy, and do that. Once you have given it a chance to rejuvenate and restore, you can go back to regularly scheduled programming. But at least once a year, and let’s face it, what better time to hang out at home in pajamas doing as little as possible as slowly as possible than the winter holidays? The weather is largely going to be crap, unless it’s downright deadly, so stay in, chill out and be kind to this borrowed body. Buff out a few dings. Shine it up. Let it have some really good, clean food so it can reset and restore internally as well as externally. It will thank you by being healthier and more productive, until it’s time for another break.