Busyness is both a distraction and an addiction.
It takes many forms, depending on our life….It can be an all-consuming work project. It can be running around after children with their numerous after-school activities. It can be a focus on helping the many people and animals around us who are struggling and in need.
It can also be a busyness of mind, where there is no stillness, where one thought follows another with no pauses in between.
Let’s face it, it’s often easier to be busy (with anything) than to really be present with ourselves, in a way that allows us to take stock of our life.
So what happens when we remove that busyness?
I have many things to be grateful for in my life. Yet I’m always busy. And I realised over the past month that the busyness is merely a mask. Whilst it feels productive, it doesn’t produce happiness.
When I’m overbusy, I’m spending all my time giving out to the world, and I’m neglecting that very important human need of being nurtured.
Retreating into the mountains like a hermit isn’t my path, and it may not be yours either.
So how do we keep our life, our work and our relationships in balance, and still have time left over for ourselves. And when we have that time, what do we do with it?
This has been my million dollar question! And do you know what works? At least, it’s working for me, so I hope it will also work for you.
It’s 3 simple things....
Step 1: Start the day with a Miracle Morning
Hal Elrod wrote a great booked called “The Miracle Morning”. He interviewed some of the world’s top entrepreneurs, and discovered they all had one thing in common. They all had a very specific series of things they did each day to get themselves into a miracle mindset.
It often involved journaling, or visualisation, or gratitude.
My Miracle Morning is my 7 Oil Ritual. I wake, shower, and do my anointing ritual with essential oils. It goes like this:
1. Ground into your body
Place 3 drops of Young Living Valor oil under each foot, and hold your left palm under your left foot and your right palm under your right foot. Hold like this for a couple of minutes, until you feel a shift in your energy. For me, this often looks like a sudden deep breath. When that happens, it lets you know you’ve arrived fully into your body, and you’re ready for the day ahead. Valor oil has the same frequency as our skeleton, so it allows our entire body to be anchored and balanced.
2. Connect with nature
Put 2 drops of Young Living Sacred Mountain oil on each shoulder, then look out at nature and remind yourself that it’s safe to be vulnerable and authentic. Sacred Mountain oil was created to give us the feeling of being a little animal, protected by the canopy of the forest. It creates an aroma of safety and security, where we are free to be ourselves.
3. Strengthen your Chi
Put 1 drop of Young Living Gathering oil onto your Solar Plexus chakra (10cm above your navel), and imagine a ball of sky-blue light there. With each inbreath, draw energy from around yo into this ball, allowing it to glow brighter and brighter. Gathering oil helps to gather scattered energies together, in this instance working like a magnet to draw energy to you.
4. Approach the day with Gratitude
Put 1 drop of Young Living Gratitude oil on your Heart chakra (lower centre of your chest), and acknowledge someone or something in your life outside of yourself that you’re grateful for. Gratitude oil is our anti-resentment oil. No matter what is happening in our life, it turns our thoughts towards gratitude. After all, we always have things in our life to be grateful for, even amidst the darkest times.
5. Practice Self Love
Put 1 drop of Young Living Sensation oil on your Sacral Chakra (5cm below my navel), and acknowledge something you love and appreciate about yourself. Sensation oil connects us to self-love and pleasure. It’s a great oil for empowering orgasms, and it’s equally powerful for amplifying our love for ourselves.
6. Affirm Abundance
Put 1 drop of Young Living Abundance oil on your wrist, and rub your wrists together. Sweep your wrists up and over your body, acknowledging out loud that you deserve Abundance and you deserve Love, and that you are Abundance and you are Love. Abundance oil contains essential oils that the Egyptian Pharaohs used to attract prosperity. It releases fear of lack, allowing abundance in all forms to flow naturally into our life. Using this oil on its own can produce often miraculous results around finances and love. But to truly be able to hold that abundance, we need to have our giving and receiving cycle in balance. So many people give easily, but aren’t great at receiving. That’s why we give gratitude and we receive our own self-love as part of this 7 Oil Ritual, before we anoint with Abundance.
7. Create a Happy Bubble
Place 2 drops of Young Living White Angelica oil into your palm, rub your palms together, and anoint from your neck to your shoulders. Any spare oil can be wiped through your hair. This seals your aura, allowing you to hold inside your bubble all those positive energies you’ve just built up in the 7 Oil Ritual, so they can nourish you throughout the day. White Angelica oil was created to seal our aura, and protect us from the negative words and actions of people around us, and from psychic and spiritual attack.
Step 2: End the day with ecstasy
This might sound pretty strange, but it works. Try it! When I don’t have a specific “wind down” routine at night, I get caught in the trap of working until I go to bed. That’s easy – there are always so many things on my plate that I can be super productive for 15 hours a day. But it doesn’t make me happy.
So I have developed evening rituals that I do my best to stick to. That means walking away from the productive part of my day, making myself a beautiful meal, then having some “wind down” time.
There are many things I can do in that wind down time, from a meal out with a friend, to a Zouk (Brazilian Salsa) class, to curling up and reading a great book or watching my favourite series on Netflix, to meditation practises, to soaking in a hot bath with essential oils, magnesium flakes, and my friend’s friendly python Lilith suspended above my head, kissing my hair (because she loves the smell of White Angelica in my hair!). I know – call me crazy, lol.
But I’ve just started doing something a little differently recently, which has been a game changer for me. I’ve started singing. I go up into my treatment room (where I see clients). It’s a beautiful room, suspended above the forest, separate to the rest of the house. I lay on my massage table with my far infrared amethyst heat mat set to 52 degrees Celsius. And I play music. And I sing. And sing. And SING.
And somewhere in this journey, I get sooooo connected to the music that it carries me into my heart, and brings me so much ecstatic joy that I feel completely connected to my Spirit and covered in tingles.
Ensuring that I end the day with ecstasy is all about bringing my
fluffy duck to bed with me. It means that I’ve reconnected with myself at the end of the day, in a way that brings me JOY.
I’m very good at relaxation, but joy is taking a bit of practice to achieve. And it’s the real game changer here. Relaxation at the end of the day is a good thing to do. But JOY at the end of the day is what really makes the difference.
So whether you are dancing, singing, baking cookies or making love (to yourself or your beloved), find what you love and give it some time at the end of each day.
Step 3: Take time off each week to Free Fall
I have a confession to make. I was sooooo bad at this. In fact, I was really proud to proclaim to the world that I only take 2 days off in the year (my birthday and Christmas day).
I made working hard part of my personality, and the idea of having idle time simply didn’t factor anywhere into the equation. Why would I waste my time being idle, I’d think?
But now I have a completely different viewpoint – a 180 degree shift. The magic in our life happens when we create a void. That void, that empty space, it’s a vacuum that draws things to it.
So now I have a dedicated day off each week. That day off is unstructured, and I wake up and decide what I most feel like doing. I look for my fluffy duck, rather than pre-determining what it should be.
My day off will often start with a beach walk. It will often include going out for lunch or dinner to explore a new (or favourite) café. And it will often include time spent creating some Zen space in my home (something that brings me deep satisfaction, and which I’d always neglected in the seeming importance of all the other tasks on my plate).
But not always. It’s a day of free falling, where I can “spend” those minutes and hours doing whatever my heart desires. And that day of free falling refills my cup, so that I can tackle the coming week with energy and a light Spirit, rather than dragging the tension and stress from the previous week with me.
Happiness is as necessary a commodity as money and health, so invest in it, and watch it flourish in your life.
Give yourself the gift of dancing on the edge. Connect with your feelings of invigoration and aliveness. This is where you will find your balance and your joy, so you can traverse this (sometimes) difficult world with a happy heart and a light Spirit.
