I have told myself a story for years that goes like this: I need to try hard - you know, so I'll be more likely to get it right and I'll be more right.

From this story, I made up, come behavioral and emotional repercussions.  One repercussion is  I sometimes work with a sense of strain -  feeling like I'm trying and trying rather than just doing.  I may fixate on aspects of my work, my mind in overdrive.  This leads to exhaustion and in turn, not working, or going so slowly (perhaps to try to counterbalance all the mental effort),  it all becomes unpleasant.

To do the things I most want to do in life, I must DO them but maybe I don't need to make an effort.  The difference between doing and making an effort is that the latter involves mental exertion, a summoning of force and will, whereas the former does not have to.

Several years ago, I saw a profile of a baby girl born with another head.  This head was part of a twin that never took full form.  Though the other head had independent feeling and thought, its existence was parasitic to the girl's  system and over time would kill her.

When Doing and Effort get accidentally linked, Effort becomes Doing's extra head - a superfluous mental process that drains energy. The idea of Effort is a story of Trying Hard - completely unnecessary to actual Doing.  Effort is a pull on our natural balanced system, which already intrinsically knows when to begin, when to do, when to rest, and when to let go.  If we allow it.

I have always operated from the premise that the more effort, the increased chance of a better result.  But now it seems I can allow myself to do things, or I can make myself do things.  And one feels like freedom, the other - jail. 

In the ill-conceived conjoining of Doing and Effort, Effort appears necessary but is actually not.  Because we are already right as we are - whole and complete - built to move, made to create and express, in this light Doing becomes synonymous with Being - and absolutely no effort is needed for that.

   My son has a proclivity for scaring himself.   He has a very active mind that sometimes seems like it runs him rather than the other way around.  His internal world is so vivid that  it's easy for him to forget his thoughts  are just thoughts.  And if those thoughts are scary, understandably, he feels scared.

Recently I told him that a frightening thought is like a bee. When it comes by and we react strongly and try to swat it away, it's more likely to sting -  and we're probably going to feel like a victim.  But if we hold still, it's likely to simply move on.

When our minds are overly active, they're inclined to inspire fearful feelings.  And that's what his does.  I once saw a video of a woman who'd been diagnosed as schizophrenic and bi-polar.  She described how, after becoming aware of her power to settle herself internally, she found that when she stilled her mind, "there was no mental illness".   This served as a profound insight for her in her healing.

Fear, worry, and anxiety are  byproducts of an overly active mind. And an overly active mind exists because of the attention we pour into our thoughts.  Our attention is what keeps those thoughts alive and multiplying.   We always have thoughts and we can either let them go by or we can grab hold of them with our attention.  When we do the latter - it's easy to forget it was we who grabbed them rather than the other way around. 

But there is more to this story.  In life, we hold still so the bee flies away, but we also hold still so the butterfly might stay or even come to us.  The same thing occurs internally: inspiration, transformation, love, and beauty tend to come when we allow ourselves to be still. It's not difficult to do, but it does require a decision.

    Lately, I've been paying closer attention to the things I do and say and their impact.  It's been sobering.  Though I do not have a personality, in general, that tends to light fires, like many  - I  have a reactive side.  What I've noticed is: reacting doesn't work in service to what I really want.  Responding does, but responding requires taking a moment to take in what's transpired. 

Here's an example:
My 13 year-old son went out in the snow the other day, while I was in my bedroom exercising.  Soon, he started throwing snowballs at the sliding glass door of my room.  Agitated and jarred, a reactive impulse arose.  But my son tends to push back fast and I didn't want war. As an experiment, I  said nothing and waited.  Things seemed to calm down.  But then he started again, returning to the door, snowball in hand, making a ruckus.

 I took a beat and spoke to him through the sliding door, pointing out that he might damage the glass.  He balked: the snow was too soft.  Then I did something my reactive habit would never have done: I agreed.  There was nothing screwy with his perspective; it made sense.  Then I shared mine - packed together the snow wasn't as soft- and there was a chance it might crack the glass ( keeping my claim moderate, rather than exaggerating and making the situation seem bigger than it was).

All I wanted was peace and for the glass to be left alone. If I told him to stop doing what he was doing, I would be making what he was doing wrong.  And the ego always takes that as attack.  I'd be starting a war.  And there was no need to make him wrong.  Peace came when I acknowledged the truth - not an overblown, reactive version.  Peace came when I made no effort to make myself the RIGHT one.  In this way, I  answered the situation with balance (all perspectives being equal) and there was nothing for him to fight against.  I had let go of being right and so did he.

    Our eyes are part of a dynamic system based on movement.  They move freely and easily in order to see well.  If they stop doing this, if they stare - for example, vision is diminished.  I learned this years ago after getting a prescription for glasses and choosing to do eye exercises instead .  In order to see better, I had to embrace the idea of relaxation as productive.  Allowing my eyes to take things in, in an easy way became the goal, rather than trying hard to see.

In my work and my personal life, my inclination has been to try harder - the eyes' equivalent of straining.  I often strive intently - going after problems with an intensity that ends up more like self-flagellation than focus. But like our physical eyes, true vision ( in-sight) requires the same room, softness, and ease to work its best. 

Resolution of any problem comes through clarity and clarity comes, ironically, from a soft focus. Gentleness and ease  stimulate new, progressive thinking and vision. To see a situation more clearly, to step outside of a perspective that's frightening, requires me seeing it without the judgments and definitions I've originally placed upon it.  I don't get to mentally stare at what scary thing I think is before me and simultaneously see clearly;  in order to see clearly, I must relax - whether I like it or not.

Ruminating on things we love to put us in a better frame of mind makes sense to me (as in the song My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music).  After all, it's our thinking that sets the stage for our feelings.  As Michael Neill (Life Coach & writer) says, "We feel our thoughts."  

Though I'm not that moved by  warm woolen mittens, I've got stuff on my list that works pretty well for me.  The only thing is, I find it's not enough to think these things - I must be willing.  I must have decided that feeling good is a better idea than feeling horrible.  I must have determined that I wish to influence the way I feel, that I can influence the way I feel, and that I am going to influence the way I feel.  All this focus and determination  sets the table for a meal of something more palatable than misery. 

The reason we're not always singing the My Favorite Things song to help one another (why it sort of teeters on the line between cloying and uplifting), is we know that one doesn't mention brown paper packages tied up with string to another who's looking upon their grimness as a part of them - like an internal organ. The image of raindrops on roses is not going to reach a person conjoined with depression.  But it's not because it can't work or doesn't work, it's because there is something else to be addressed as well.

We must see the unhappiness as separate from us. We have to de-identify with the emotional reaction and identify with  ourselves as One Who Beholds.  Reacting is very different than Seeing.  From willingness to only behold for a moment,  we can think about snowflakes and ponies, without rolling our eyes, and reinvest in the delight of life rather than all the  dramas.  And in doing so, we remember who we actually are - not the sum of our reactions but, at core, an expression of life not unlike the raindrop or that snowflake. 

That's why thinking things we love can work to cheer us - because when we think things we love, we stop seeing ourselves as a reaction we're having and remember ourselves as the inherent lover and appreciator we are. 

    When I was a kid I followed my Mom around the house, talking.  She would go up the stairs - so would I.  She would walk from room to room, putting away the laundry -  so would I - not helping, just talking.  She would go in to her bedroom - me too.  She would lie down on her bed; I would sit and continue talking to her.  She would go to the kitchen; there I was.

I had a lot to say.  It seemed.  And she would sort of listen.  But although it appeared as if  I was getting what I wanted - the microphone and a considerate audience - in truth, there were few times I felt worse than those times I was traipsing after her, words and  worries spilling out of me.

I felt like I had something I just had to get out, something I needed to say but was never able to articulate. Instead, I just got lost in the rapids of retelling what I had seen, thought, heard, and felt that day. 

I didn't actually want to be regurgitating my day's emotional swings; I wanted to feel grounded despite all of the mental fodder floating through my head.  All of the talking, as it turns out, was a reflection of trying to reach for, strangely enough, stillness - calm.  I wanted to feel safe and stable despite thoughts that were troubling me. But talking only calms when it is an expression of thought that's been given room to grow into insight in quiet, not in reactivity.

To this day, more often than I'd like, I find myself still talking when, in truth, I was done with the  subject several minutes before.  There is nothing more I am compelled to say, yet like a tap left on accidentally, there is still more coming out.

I find these moments disconcerting, but at the same time, an opportunity to remember that once I've spoken my truth on any topic, there is only one thing for which I might still be searching - to get re-rooted in the place from which that truth came: that stillness, that quiet.  And in this way, I can be saved the drain of speaking without connection.  And, happily, others are spared it too.

Traipsing after the world to get it to listen is an exhausting position.  It has hopelessness built in.  But when I no longer seek safety and grounding through talk, but through my  inner stillness, my talk is left unburdened of that impossible mission and it no longer drains.  When my own thinking empowers me, an interested audience naturally appears; and when I am done talking, I actually notice.

When I was starting to take art lessons in college, I was intensely frightened.  I saw the blank paper as a test I was bound to fail.  The test involved me having to look at something outside of me and then make my paper look like that thing - and I believed I could not do this.

In truth,  I have always been terrified of this test in more ways than just having to do with drawing. I have, for a very long time, been frightened by the idea that there is a right way out there, a realistic way, a way everyone agrees is good and right and that I am to either be it, draw it, or at the very least, work very hard to achieve it.

This thought is why, when I went to my first life drawing class, my hand shook and I sweated in ways new to me.  It is why I felt, with every move of my charcoal across the paper, I was failing, and why, in the end, I quit that class (though I did return to studying studio art later).

It was the idea I was to copy what was out there that was so problematic for me.  In a broader context, I think, for many of us, this idea is painful and throws a wrench in tuning in to our true selves and what we most wish to offer the world.   Even amongst the realistic artists of the world, each still translates the vase, the model, or the landscape differently.  One truly cannot copy anything; one always only expresses.  But we certainly can run interference between who we actually are and what we offer with erroneous ideas of what has value and what does not, what is right, true, and "real", and what is not.

If I could go back in time and talk to that panicked self, I would tell her first to breathe.  And after she had balked at the simplicity and uselessness of that advice, I would say she need not concern herself with copying anything,  that it is her connection to life that is of paramount importance.  It is her connection to life, not her copying of its various forms, that will guide her hand and give her a new form that truly contributes to the whole and fuels others' connection, appreciation, and love of life.  And that is no test she can pass or fail, that is as it already is and that is true for everyone.

In my journal writing I strive to step outside my usual way of thinking about my challenges and open to another perspective in order to get the bigger picture. So, often, I write from this perspective in order to coach myself when I need it.  This is a condensed bit of that guidance, from several years ago, I came across today and still resonates with me.

"Your World is So Waiting for You"

The world you want is waiting for you - the world you dream of and want to be a part of - not some cruel, scary dog-eat-dog world.  It is the world you wish to create for yourself. That is the world waiting.  That world loves you and when you acknowledge this, you are loving life. 

Today when you pass something you hate, send love rather than resistance, and you will place yourself in the middle of a great cloud parting at that moment .  You do not wait to bandage a bleeding wound.  This is how quickly we ask you to move to act internally.  We ask you to understand that when you feel pain or discomfort, anger, frustration etc. a cut has opened and you are losing blood = joy.  And you don't want to weaken yourself by waiting too long to stop the bleeding.  You get the bandage and work to help stop the  loss now.

This is what we want for you: to tend to the loss of Joy now - loss of connection to life now.  Don't stand around complaining about it - act- care for it.  Act with love, to care for the wound.  Right away.  When you do - the loss stops and you do not become weakened by the experience, nor exhausted by it.

This is the I love you.  Tend it.   And when you do?  The "loss" stops - the sense of  despair, of losing connection (=joy) with life and meaning - stops.  It has to because you're back in touch.   It is life giving.  

One of my favorite books is, "The Art of Monsters, Inc."  It's a collection of artwork, created by the artists at Pixar and famous illustrators, to inspire the creators while they were developing characters and settings for the film.

I love this book because it's devoted to the free flowing ideas of different people all given the same seed and asked to allow it to grow in his/her own way.  The drawings and paintings are referred to as "inspirational artwork" and they inspire me too.

They're inspirational for me because all of the art together becomes testimony to the joy of process which offers a different gift than the greatness of any particular piece.  This is a book of process, of different minds seeking and searching from the same starting point.  Its value for me goes  beyond individual images and into the dynamism of creativity and the energy of being a part of it.

There is an aliveness to the pages, a vitality to the energy of exploration that helps me shift from my concern about outcomes and back into excitement about allowing something new to happen in my work  (and my life).  I've always found this the happiest and most productive way to create: to be playful, to explore, to free myself, and to allow discovery.  In this light, the outcome is a just a natural byproduct of my joy of  being engaged in life and creating, rather than a stressful well-planned, well-executed journey to an end.

               "We don't live to arrive safely at our deaths."
                                                                ~  Robert Holden