Reflections for beginning the new year.

A new year brings about a natural period of reflection and often a desire for change. For me, it's important to remember that choice, both conscious and unconscious, can include both the choice to DO something, or similarly NOT to do something. As I think about making a choice to take action, I find it helpful to remind myself the importance of making conscious choices.  

I recently read about the trend of downshifting. Downshifting can be defined by the idea  "Downshifting means working towards simple living by making conscious choices to leave materialism behind and move on to a more sustainable lifestyle."

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with the idea of making conscious choices in our lives to achieve more health and well-being. The question is how do we bring to light the "conscious" part of the conscious choices?  Conscious choice is when we begin with mindfulness to see whether the intended action is going to bring about the desired result.

The Sparkle of Unconscious Motion.

There are many expressions for the idea of perpetual motion- of doing for the sake of doing. 

• "stuck in the washing machine"
• "like a hamster on a wheel"
• "running on a treadmill"

These all bring to mind the idea of perpetual energy that does not lead to change or an end-goal.  What if we take, for another example, the Christmas candle spinner.  The beautiful ornaments turn and turn in place, moving always in the same circular direction. The spinner is moved by a burning candle expending all its energy to make the ornaments go ‘round.

Our unconscious choices use energy like the candle’s flame pushing around our beautiful little ornaments in a never-ending orbit. The show is dazzling, mesmerizing even, but eventually the candle will burn out. The ornaments are simply reacting to the energy that is being directed towards it.

If we try to downshift without using consciousness, it will look more like a prescribed list of actions to take. A simple to-do list can be as similarly dazzling as the Christmas spinner, promising to provide a new and refreshing experience of life if we can just do the thing without having to make the choice about what exactly to do.  

For example, take the idea of the capsule wardrobe. I thought by pairing down and buying less I would save both money and time.  After a few years of chasing down this idea I found on the internet, I finally leaned into conscious choice to realize it was never going to bring my relief from constant wardrobe frustration.

What helped me was accepting that, as an adult female with ADHD, I actually thrive on a good amount of clothes in similar colors. This provides me with lots of options to fit my sensory and emotional needs at the moment, and most importantly enough clothes to meet the reality that laundry is more like an occasional party than a nightly ritual.

Without conscious action, we end up following the same pattern of simply "doing" in order to create change and avoid discomfort. Now this isn’t to say that we can’t, or shouldn’t, take a look at how to bring about meaningful change in our lives.  More so, for the change to matter, we need to do the work first of deciding what is really needed for us.

Learning how to drive manual

When we think about our needs, it is important to incorporate the reality that our lives are constantly changing.  Each and every moment is new and different, and no two circumstances are exactly the same.

If we take the analogy of our lives as a car with a transmission, we can zoom out to include the reality that cars have multiple gears for a reason.  Just like in life, we need to shift gears to climb up and down hills.  We will inevitably sit in traffic.  Even if we live in the flat plains, with no other humans on the road, we still will run out of gas and need to stop to fill up.  And we all must park and go to sleep sometimes.  

Furthermore, downshifting can happen in a variety of situations.  You can downshift going downhill to help the car break.  You can also downshift when going uphill to increase the energy in the engine.  Therefore, we actually downshift for completely opposite reasons depending on whether gravity is pushing or pulling the car.

In order to support our downshifting, we need to know both when and how to shift so we don’t burn out our transmissions. So how do we increase our shifting skills?  We can do this by accepting that our energy will move more like a hilly road, and less like the Christmas carousel.  Nothing is linear - energy changes all the time both forward and back.  Also, we can find the support of the road.  Just like downshifting downhill, we can harness the energy of the road and transmission to do the work without having to break.

Consciousness brings clarity to action

This spring, my husband and I were in a great pattern of spending time together.  We regularly watched T.V. after the kids went to bed, managed to grab lunches or moments together while the kids were at school, and even get a drink alone when picking up weekend take-out.   

In mid-spring, our lives changed pretty quickly.  We started renovating a house that took a massive amount of time and energy. Over the summer, we moved in while it was still under construction. By the beginning of the fall, I was exhausted, overstimulated, and burned out emotionally. On top of my mental state, I injured myself and began a lot of physical therapy.  As a result, my great spring rhythm with my husband fell by the wayside.

I kept telling myself that it will be easier once the workers are gone at the end of October. Then of course Thanksgiving hit. Then Christmas. In between the holidays rush - workers were in and out to repair something in the house or work on unfinished details.  And because we have three kids, I get hit with a new wave of teacher meetings and medical issues.  

During this time, I kept trying different things to reduce the schedule. I continued to blindly tell myself that things would be less busy very soon. All the while I was spending less and less time with my partner.  We became disconnected. I became frustrated with myself and my ADHD. This led to shame and avoidance, which made getting anything done even harder than before. I started questioning my life choices and began to lose my sense of self and place. 

Subconsciously, I feared that if I slowed down without first finding a solution, I would have to experience the real pain of my own failures.  

When we left the house on holiday vacation, I was forced to stop all the doing. With this tiny, forced break, I was able to do what I needed to do all along- just take a moment and breathe out. Rest back and drop back into myself and my body.

With this process I saw that my problem was so much simpler than the situation built up in my mind. The real issue was that I wasn’t physically scheduling in the time as I did most other things. In order to spend more time with my husband, all I had to do was put “time together” as an appointment on my electronic calendar.  As in google calendar.  Click "new event." Add it in. With this new plan I knew I was on the correct path to relief.

Due to our life events, I was driving uphill.  When I brought in consciousness, I realized I was in the correct gear already, I just needed to turn on my headlights.

I spent so much time getting wrapped up in the idea that I was doing something wrong.  I was blind to the supports and systems I put in place that worked in so many other areas. I know for me, when I write something down, I am more likely to work it in. As opposed to what I was doing to my time with my husband-hoping that magically the time would just appear on its own once everything else was "done".

Practice creating SPACE

When I stopped and created a sliver of space, I found the capacity to sit with my uncomfortable feelings. To my surprise, instead of suffering there was some self-love and support from those around me. I needed to bring consciousness to my actions by creating space.

The availability of space depends on our surrounding energy. When we are in a period of low tide, where the waves come in gentle sets at a slow pace, there is more space between them. High tide often brings things quickly and with force. There is less physical space between the waves and the sets. By creating any size of space, no matter what the circumstances, we can use mindfulness to help separate the stories in our head from the reality.

Whether in a moment of suffering, or ease, try these steps to practice creating SPACE:

- Stop your body and your mind. You can do this either at regular intervals or also using the cues from your body to let you know when stopping will be helpful.  

- Permit yourself a moment to rest back. This doesn’t mean sitting down, as much as dropping the thought, noticing where you may be holding tension, and letting it go.

- Allow the feelings to come up. Bring your attention to the energy and aliveness that may be moving in your body. Try not to attach labels to sensations, but experience what it feels like to just let the sensations come and go.

- find Clarity in what arises. Not always, but often, by dropping down into our body we start to hear those deep thoughts that are buried underneath the day to day noise in our brain.

- and then, we can Engage with consciousness. Here we can try to make choices more aligned with our relative needs- as we let come to the surface a clearer understanding otherwise buried in motion and noise from our brains.

"If we are splashing about in the water, we can’t see what's surrounding us below the surface.  If we stand still, we are better able to see what we are standing in." - Aly Fick

The real work is in acceptance

With consciousness, I was able to accept the truth that I was not prioritizing my husband in the same way I had learned to accomplish many other things in my daily life. This was hard and certainly uncomfortable. But, at the same time I was able to see the truth that I was far more capable of problem solving than I was giving myself credit for. I wasn’t ruining my life or making terrible choices.  I was not doing everything well, but in fact was doing many things well. This was also hard to see but felt really good once I did.

So is it possible, or even necessary, to really slow down in a meaningful way? To drive more often in low gear? Perhaps… but it helps to accept that we need to do the inner work before we can do the shifting.  By leading with mindfulness, we learn how to make our unconscious thoughts conscious. Mindfulness grows our ability to make choices that are not fixed, but responsive to our needs as life moves and changes. 

Over to you