I’d planned this retreat to A) have a lot of fun and restore my spirit and B) create new ideas for my business. I imagined a light-hearted week with my good friend/marketing strategist who had flown in to join me.

You know the feeling when you visualize and dream about the upcoming fun? Revel in the anticipation? I knew delight was waiting for me on that Colorado hillside.

And yet, at the same time, I found I had to sit and be with major emotions throughout the week. I had a little meltdown one day. Other days I felt turbulence rolling around in my chest and hit the hiking trail to help my body and spirit work through it. 

When you invest in the creative process, it’s messy. 

When you become a parent, it’s messy. When you open up to the mind-body connection and refuse to stuff your feelings down, it’s messy. 

By the end of the week, I felt lighter than I have in a whole entire year. Maybe two. My body was freer. My heart was full of friendship and connection. My creative spirit was satisfied and itching to take action on all the new ideas. 

I was also really tired. Allowing myself to drop into those feelings, daringly explore those new creative wilds, and to challenge myself to grow took a lot of energy. 

The mind often tries to tell us there will be some perfect destination. We’ll have the perfect retreat. We’ll have the most amazing vacation. We’ll arrive and mind-body nirvana and feel amazing nearly all the time. 

The real magic, though, is in the messiness and the mix. Everything is swirled together in a soup of feelings, inspirations, energy, exhaustion, action, rest, stagnation, and movement. 

The perfection is the messiness instead of the mythical “just right” that our minds often seek. 

This week, where can you allow yourself to feel the necessary feelings? Where can you let something be delightful even if it’s not perfect? 

As you’re exploring this, I’d love to connect with you about it in my Mind-Body Magic Facebook Group. You’re invited!

I used to think that I had to work really hard to get things done, but when I became a coach and healer many years ago, I learned and practiced that the art of getting things done in this world is by entering a flow of creativity. It’s not about pushing, but about being pulled and listening for that gentle pulling forward.

The other morning, I was writing my memoir outside because the weather was so beautiful. I only work on this project in the early morning before carpool. During the day, I’m involved in other projects and life with family, coaching and continued learning causes me to be masterful with prioritizing my time.

Anyway, that morning, I felt the desire to move inside to continue writing. My desk overlooks my garden, my bird feeders and the one tree that graces our Chicago backyard. I was blessed to see such colorful birds including two that I’ve never seen before—two Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks. Such beautiful birds with black, white, and red markings! I didn’t continue working on the memoir, but delighted in the scene out my window and rolled with the flow to other parts of my life.

I’ve been working on the memoir for about two years now. It’s a huge project with a very steep learning curve. I used to think that I would just work on it a few full days a week and get it done. But I couldn’t. Not because life happened, but because flow didn’t happen.

I believe that all our work, parenting, health, whatever we are involved in, is about creativity.

All parts of our lives are creative happenings, and therefore it’s necessary to tap into the flow of our creative selves, to be in tune with higher intuition, and take action from that higher energetic vibration.

For me, the creative energy flow that I need to write the memoir happens in early morning, before the distractions and involvement of other areas of my life begin to take place. And no matter how involved I get in the flow of the memoir writing, I need to contain it when the clock strikes 8 am and getting my child ready for carpool needs to happen. And then I flow into that part of my life.

The same goes throughout the day; each activity and space of time requires a different kind of flow of creativity. I have a lot to do on my to-do list and because of my introvertedness, I’m careful to flow with my reserved energy. The ebb and flow of activity and downtime, talking and silence, is all taken into consideration as my energy flows through the day.

I also monitor closely if there are activities that drain my energy or give me a physical symptom like a headache. If either of those result, I take it to heart what my body is telling me and then dive in for some somatic information as to what’s going on. Did I push myself a little too long with a project or was the inner critic dragging on me when I was taking some action forward? Did I talk a little too long with someone or did I share too much of myself and energy in an interaction? I have to flow into healing mode to discern what’s going on and then make little shifts accordingly.

And how about you? Are you pushing yourself forward blindly or can you bring awareness to your flow and what wants to happen? Are you careful with your energy? If you’re an extrovert, do you surround yourself with people who you can express to? Do you work in an environment that nurtures your outgoing nature?

Or, if you’re an introvert like me, are you careful with that ebb and flow I spoke of? Are you aware and honoring of your need for quiet time in between ‘outward’ energy time?

And what projects light you up and excite you and which ones drag you way down? Sometimes it’s the activity itself that feels bad, but sometimes it’s the thoughts or the way that you’re approaching the activity that feels bad. Before you dump the activity or project, it’s important to discern what’s happening ‘behind the scenes’ in your mind, emotions and soul.

Maybe sometimes you are like me when nothing is flowing well because a strong emotion like anger, fear, or sadness comes up. When this happens, I know I need to take the time to address those before I can step into a flow of creativity. Being present and allowing those emotional energies is one way to get unblocked so that forward movement can resume in relationships, work, projects, and joy activities.

What helps you move forward?

Is it a gratitude list, a 10 minute meditation, or just some deep, conscious inhale and exhale breaths?

Trust is an important concept to bring into our awareness of flow. Like going back to the memoir writing which I had put aside and bird watched instead. When I didn’t return to that activity that morning, I trusted that if it was meant to be, I’d be up early the next day, involved in continuing the momentum of the writing as I’d been doing for the past two years. Some things are slow and steady and some things move a bit faster, but either way, let yourself listen and be pulled gently into the Flow

Miriam Racquel (Meryl) Feldman is a Somatic Healer and Certified Mind-body and Martha Beck Coach. She is a published writer and speaker based in Chicago. Integrating her knowledge of Kabbalistic Judaism, Somatic Healing, and Coaching, Miriam Racquel empowers women with clarity and peace-of-mind in their relationships, career and health.For more information, visit MiriamRacquel.com or email her at miriam@miriamracquel.com.

Standing in front of the class, I began to tell my story.  My public speaking coach had reviewed how to use gestures and suggested that I reach my arms out to illustrate my opening line – a line that recalls the memory of my two year-old self reaching for a parent’s connection until I hit a wall of emotional energy that said “Do Not Enter.”

I did as my coach suggested and reached my arms out; however, it felt completely unnatural.

Why did this gesture of reaching out feel so unnatural and why did it still bother me days later?

Upon searching for a new perspective, one of my elders asked me, “What gesture would feel more natural?”

I replied, “Actually, I don’t feel like moving at all.”

The contrast between the “Do Not Enter” energy and my loving exuberance had created enough confusion and overwhelm for my two year-old self to freeze in place.

I began to wonder what other frozen energy still remained inside of my body.  My curiosity took me to another elder who helped me become aware of, and release, some of my frozen patterns.  She also shared a new perspective:  “No wonder your website has been under construction for the last two years – like the energy in your body, it’s been frozen!”

My inner and outer worlds had collided.  If I didn’t get some heat on this frozen energy, I feared I would not be able to create the life I wanted – I’d never get my website launched and connect and serve those who resonate with my gifts most (Oh more frozen thought patterns!).

During this session, I also became aware of the risks I’d taken to melt this frozen energy:  For decades, I’d placed myself inside a protective block of ice, but as I began engaging my elders for support in melting it away, I felt exposed and vulnerable within my existing relationships and environments.  It’s as though I’d prompted others to see me question the status quo, the known, the predictable, the comfortable, and this brought tension to the surface.  The thought I struggled with was, “It’s not safe to ‘come out’ as a mind-body coach/entrepreneur and healer” (which, by the way, I define as someone who heals themselves so they can create and hold space for others’ healing experiences).

So how can you make the process of transmuting frozen blocks into a more flowing liquid form, feel a bit “safer” – allowing you to connect into your creative flow and express your gifts?

When I try on the perspective that everything is energy, I can start to play with the possibilities.  I can imagine that the frozen energy in my body, or my life circumstances, is like a magical soccer ball.  It looks solid, and I can even play with it for a while, but I can also remember that I have the power to transform it into something else like a puddle of water, or into steam from a teapot.

For instance, I recently imagined myself as a contented baby in one of those jogger-strollers with the stroller representing all of the support that was available to me.  This then led me to the notion that if I ever find myself crawling around on the floor, I can always get into the stroller and be glided into an easier way of doing things.

My stroller of support has included reaching out to a group of elders – healers, coaches, and other practitioners that have experience playing with these layers of frozen energy and transmuting them into new forms of creative self-expression.  These are also individuals that not only have insightful perspectives and tools that I can apply, but there’s something about them that allows me to feel safe and supported as the ice in and around me melts into the flow.

These individuals also create and invite me to create my own safe spaces (Why not get in the stroller and head to the park vs. the parking lot?).  They help me to remember that:

• You get to pick and choose the relationships and environments where it feels safe to unfold and transform that frozen energy
• You can tune into and trust your own inner wisdom to guide you toward what you need in order to feel safe and supported within those relationships and environments
• You can always become aware of the choices that are available to you (e.g. you can say no, you can leave, you can ask someone to join you in another location, you can start a new thought…).  In fact, instead of taking flight, fighting, or freezing in response to stress, there is a forth option…

You can radiate – just by remembering that you are light is enough to melt and transform some of the frozen energy into your creative flow and experience connection.

From there, I believe you’ll have the space to create, all while feeling the joy of being in the flow of receiving guidance from your inner wisdom for what you need and want, and then reaching out to express your gifts and experience meaningful and supportive connections and relationships.

I can’t wait to see what we’ll all create from our frozen energy!

—–

Mind-Body Coach Kelly C. Mullen started Whole-Self Wisdom Coaching to help those who feel exhausted stop all the doing and start being who they really are, so they can live a life with more ease, and make an impact in the world without compromising their health and ability to engage in meaningful and supportive relationships.  Whether it’s through private coaching, or facilitating workshops, she creates and holds a space for her clients to strengthen the connection to the four parts of themselves – mind, body, spirit, emotions – so they can connect to and trust that their inner wisdom will guide them into more ease, energy and engagement. You’ll find her at www.kellycmullen.com

All right. Ready to go. Planning to start any minute now.

Or, maybe in a few minutes, after you check Facebook. Or read one more email. Or finish one more housekeeping task.

Oh my gosh! You just remembered that closet in your basement you were going to re-organize. Better get that done first.

You have just run smack into Resistance, a good friend of mine.

Resistance shows up frequently in my life. In the past, I used to berate myself anytime resistance stopped by. I’d say things to myself like this:

• But if you would just do this, it would be over.
• Why can’t you just hurry up and do it?
• You suck.
• You should not be resisting this! It’s good for you/fun/something you should do!

I used to battle resistance. It was a futile battle, I might add. I read self-help articles that talked about “overcoming resistance” and “getting rid of resistance.” Yet, whatever I did, resistance still showed up. I thought I was just procrastinating out of laziness, silly fear, or other such ridiculousness.

Then, as I developed my mind-body skills, I began to see resistance differently. Because, if you believe, as I do, that everything shows up to give you a message, then resistance must be here for the very same reason.

Instead of fighting with resistance, I started asking it how it was here to help me.

Here is what resistance said:

• You’re trying to do too much at once.
• This is overwhelming. Planning a whole afternoon of creating feels hard.
• Tone it down – how about just 10 minutes of mind-body practice?
• There’s no need to hurry or do so much at once.
• Please put less pressure on yourself about this goal/activity/idea.

Wow. Resistance is actually pretty smart. And friendly.

It turns out resistance was here to save me from myself – or at least the part of me that always pushes too hard, pressures herself, and sets impossible standards.

I started talking to my clients’ resistance, too. Often, it had very similar messages for them. The details were different, but the general message was pretty much the same. I’ve distilled it into two easy-to-remember sentences. Resistance shows up to tell us:

Slow it down. Gentle it up.

In other words, where can you take smaller steps, be in less of a hurry, and do less right now, while still gently moving forward? How can you take the self-pressure off and be kind to yourself while engaging in your goal or activity? (Note – sometimes, you actually have to stop moving at all toward the end goal and just be. That’s okay!)

If you’re trying to create something today such as trying to do something new and uncomfortable, like fully feel an emotion, put yourself out there in some fashion, or any such terrifying prospect, you might be feeling resistance.

I’d like to suggest that you don’t try to push through the resistance, get rid of it, or argue with it. Instead, you might try befriending it. Then, ask it how it’s here to help. See how you can slow it down and gentle it up with whatever you’re doing.

I’d love to hear how this works for you! Hop on over to the anamsong facebook page for a conversation!

If it was when you actually were five years old, then this is an emergency. Go get a box of crayons, stat!

I have the luxury of enjoying the company of a five-year-old regularly. My niece, Emmy, is currently teaching me about living joyfully. She’s reminding me of all the things I forgot from my five-year-old days, and I have to say, I think these are really the essentials a person needs in life.

Here’s a summary:

1)     Play hard, then sleep hard. Preferably with your dog snuggled next to you.

2)     Eat what you love, even if it is mostly cheese with a side of cheese.

3)     Be amazed at yourself and proud of your accomplishments, even seemingly small ones.

4)     Cry when you need to cry.

5)     Be enthusiastically interested in whatever you’re doing now, until it’s time to switch gears.

6)     When it’s time to switch gears, switch.

Things I’ve done recently with my niece include dancing the hokey pokey, eating spaghetti, seeing the movie Tangled (sooooo awesome!), playing at the park, coloring, and shopping. Each of these adventures has been at least as useful as an hour of therapy. Kid fun is infectious, and it reminds me that play for play’s sake, whether I’m playing with writing chapters in my book or coloring in a princess coloring book, is possibly the most important thing I can do with my time.

Want to create more energy in your life? Want to feel better? Want to have a better relationship with your body?

Play.

I asked Emmy today how she has so much energy. She mulled it over for a minute. “I think,” she said, “kids just like to do stuff, and so they just keep doing it.”

That about sums it up. Do what you love. Play at it, don’t work at it. Love what you do. Love you. Life – all you really need to live it to its fullest potential is everything you knew when you were five.

Admittedly, I might be a massage ‘ho. Recently I had two massages in one week. Maybe I need to consider starting a Massage Addicts Anonymous group for myself. (Anyone want to join me?) I’ll borrow a page from Scarlett O’Hara’s book and think about that tomorrow.  Or next month. In the meantime, I’m going to keep indulging my massage mania, because I find massages delightfully relaxing and incredibly useful.

The basic benefit of any mind-body connection strengthener is the resulting connection to your own inner wisdom. The more your mind and body are in sync, working together, the easier it is to translate those intuitive hits, gut feelings, and moments of deep knowing into understandable, actionable directives for your life. Your inner wisdom is always on your side, helping you to create the life you want.

When you first start using mind-body connection tools, you will likely face stored emotions, unheard intuitive truths, and other uncomfortable information your body would like to share with you. We usually disconnect ourselves from our bodies to avoid this kind of discomfort, so it makes sense that reconnecting means facing that discomfort.

Think of the different elements of your mind-body system as having different jobs. Your body and emotions are the conduit for your inner wisdom/intuition, while your mind is the translator. It translates physical awareness of inner wisdom into language so you can understand it and use it in your daily life. Once you have moved through the initial phase or reconnection, your mind-body pipes, so to speak, are pretty much cleaned out. Your inner wisdom can then flow cleanly and easily through your body and into your conscious awareness. This means that nearly every time you purposefully connect to your body, you’ll probably get pure gold: creative ideas, solutions to problems, directives for the next steps to take, and insights.

This is where the mind-body way of living gets really fun and massage becomes your creative workshop. As you lie on the massage table, enjoying the heavenly bliss, you’ll find the idea stream opening up to maximum flow. This can be a little disconcerting if you’re trying to relax, but don’t stress. You don’t have to do a single thing about the flood of ideas coming through. Think of it as mining for gold – there’s a huge stream of water, silt, and other stuff flowing, but you’ll be sifting through it for the true gold. To do this, you don’t even have to work. Your inner wisdom itself will sift for you, and you’ll remember only the truly inspirational, useful pieces.

I take a notebook with me to my massages and leave it in the car. After the massage, I take a few minutes to sit and write down everything I remember from that rush of creative, intuitive information. I trust that whatever I remember is what I need most, and whatever I forget is something unnecessary or something that will surface again when needed. I end up with blog post ideas, workshop ideas, things I want to tell friends and family, questions I want to explore, and ideas for everything from business to health to hairstyles.

All of the mind-body tools have this effect after you’ve used them for a little while, because they are all designed to connect you to this source of creativity and insight – your own inner genius. However, I love the absolute decadence of treating myself to ninety minutes of bliss and getting amazing creative flow as a result. In fact, I’m off to get another massage right now.

They don’t always change their jobs, but they often begin incorporating this creative self into their life.  Sometimes, they are already doing something creative, but struggling with feeling blocked.  As we go through the mind-body process, they blossom and open back up to their creativity.  They begin to enjoy their creative processes again.

All of this makes a lot of sense to me.  The pelvic region houses the sacral chakra, or energy center, and the element of that chakra is creativity.  Westerners used to make a lot of fun of chakras (many people still do), but science has started to confirm that we do indeed have nerve bundles in these centers in our bodies.  Hmmmm.  Unnerving.  Thousands of years ago, yogis knew something about the human body that we’re just starting to understand.

I’ve always loved a good mystery, and this has all the spine-tingling elements of a classic.  Can it really be coincidence that all these women have pain in the creative center of their body and also feel blocked or are unaware of their creative dreams?  Could it be that the pain is just a big signal that we have shoved away this part of ourselves?

When I was struggling with pain, I was absolutely not living my authentic life.  Now, I absolutely am.  I infuse my entire coaching practice with creativity, and I feel ALIVE.  What got me here?  The pain, of course.

What if we are all creative healers?  I say healers because I think creative arts heal.  Music heals.  Art heals.  My hairdresser is a hair artist – and her creativity is immensely healing.  Creativity is life force.  When we’re with people who are harnessing life force, healing happens.  I use the word healing in a broad sense.

So in our many different ways, we are waking up to our true purpose in life – to be creative healers.  All you writers, coaches, photographers, painters, sculptors, and more whom I’ve coached: doesn’t it feel good, to be living life as you were meant to live it?  Funny, how pain brings us home to who we really are.

What do you think?

I wrote all about this last week (New Stuff), and now, HERE IT IS!

You are all cordially invited to come visit my creative side-project, www.essentialyouart.com!

I’m always getting random creative ideas, and this one was so fun I simply had to run with it.  My Essential Self told me to!  I love talking about creativity and its power to help your personal growth, healing, and emotional life.  So, now I have a whole website devoted to just that!  I’ve named the concept YouArt, because this isn’t ART, like you normally think of it.  This is all about the process of creativity for discovering more about YOU.  If you want a quick healing art exercise, there’s one available on the Start Your Own YouArt page.

Anyway, come on over and visit the new site for a little something different!