This article was originally published on Rian Bevan's personal Wordpress blog, the original article which can be found here:
My normal tendencies of procrastination have made me need to reevaluate some things in my life. I know what I want to be doing, and the relative steps to get where I want to be, but my mind is doing a good job keeping me stuck in a kind of almost existential paralysis.
The paralysis isn’t because of some ungodly amount of work, or because anything is intrinsically hard. I feel like it comes from a sense of knowing that setting off in this direction will cause some changes in my normal routine and lifestyle.
It’s as though my mind, fearing it’s own potential of what I can ultimately do with my life, wants to double down into self pity and feeling lost. All the while, the direction of clarity and my path out of this is as clear as it has ever been.
The nagging tension of this procrastination is starting to reach a climax, and I feel like I’m ready to change the potential energy of this stagnancy into momentum to propel me forward.
It feels like like a two sided energy. One side full of ideas, inspiration and creative flow; the other is clinging to the way I’m used to living and spending my time.
I have to make this shift to the creative flow inside of me. It’s like an energetic tickle that comes out. If I try to ignore it and just do my usual thing, than the tickle is irritating and anxiety-producing. If I focus into the feeling, it’s filled with raw ideas ready for me to mine and develop.
Part of it is like a small voice in my ear. I get struck with an idea, and the voice tells me not to put myself out there, that I’m not good enough, and on and on. Often we want to get rid of this voice, or fight it off with our thoughts. But it can’t be about fighting the voice, as that makes it fight back harder. It’s a matter of taking in my own self doubts, and instead of letting them hinder me, use them to accelerate myself beyond how I think I am.
I’m going to try to make it a goal of mine not to feed the anxious side of this energy. I have to focus on self expression and creation, rather than the loop of constant consumption of external media and attention grabbing we seem to be plagued with in our modern society, which ultimately drives our inner anxieties and prevents the flow of our own creativity.
It’s not a question of having the willpower to accomplish my goals, it’s just a shift of focus of importance. To not get caught in the flashy lights and recycled novelty of our Facebook pages or Netflix, at least not as much as I used to.
And isn’t this anxious energy the same thing we are all facing individually, and as a species? We are at a point of clinging onto a dying paradigm, and seeing the immense suffering these growing pains our species is imposing on the planet . We need to step out of the adolescence of our species, and fully step into the role we need to stay on this planet, just as I need to for my next stage of development.
If making the shift to focus on creative expression, connection, and self-fufillment can help calm the storm on an individual level, imagine what shift we could see occur in our world if we were to all work on this. Not to get trapped the same pitfalls we’ve often come to as a society, but to expand beyond our own beliefs of what we deem to be possible.
But how can we act on this shift and not revert back to our unfortunate comfort zones? Luckily we live in a time brimming with opportunities for us to connect deep internally, and through these methods try to manifest the ideal vision of how we can be in the world.
Methods such as floating, meditation, prayer, yoga and beyond can help us immensely in quieting down the monkey mind and bring us into more clarity about the predicament of our lives. Through these processes, we can tune into our rich inner worlds, manifest our true desires, and live from a place of more content-ness in our lives.
The studies coming out about floating, meditation, psychedelics and yoga are extremely promising. There is a method for everyone to get back in touch with their inner nature. May you find what works for you.