We all experience this – a period of time when we go underground in a sense, pull comfort around us like a blanket, and just try to get through whatever it is. In my case, what triggered it was moving from our family home and downsizing in preparation for our youngest daughter heading to college next year. We released about 1/3 of our belongings, said goodbye to a house full of beautiful memories, and moved.

During this time I didn’t have my usual passion for creating new business programs or socializing or even dancing as much as usual. Instead, it was almost like slowing down my heartbeat and entering a cocoon.

That didn’t mean I didn’t keep busy. I did. In fact, at times I was a whir of movement – pack the trunk with boxes for Goodwill, paint this wall, sort kitchen drawers. Anything so I didn’t have to think too much.

Finally, I felt the call to come back. To spend more time with my writing, with connecting to and embracing exactly where I was. And so I sit on my deck overlooking paradise, shedding the winter layer that has protected me, and feeling the air on my legs. Aliveness and possibility are calling again, and I am listening…

If you find yourself in the midst of hibernation, with your creativity and writing frozen, perhaps it’s time for the thaw? If you are hearing that voice calling for something more, consider joining me on an 8 week adventure beginning February 19. See details above in Reconnecting with your Creative Heartbeat… and Writing from There..

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

To subscribe to Backyard Pearls Newsletter, visit the site here.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to  her website. You can get a free audio on overcoming writers block by clicking HERE.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

That last one is what I’ve been dealing with. We are moving. We’ll still be living in Austin, yet we’ll be closer in to the funky downtown area and are downsizing slightly with the empty nest era just under a year away. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m excited, as if it’s beholden on me to spread the enthusiastic move energy around like a wand full of glitter. Come into my orbit, they want me to say, and you too can live vicariously through this move.

I get it. Only problem is, I’m having a hard time actually locating said feelings. First there are a host of other feelings waiting to be felt. They are hiding behind my fears about if this was the right move, the right time, the right house? Will there be lots of West Nile Virus mosquitoes there just waiting to pounce? Would this move have made more sense after our youngest daughter left for college, rather than before?

I felt this way when my mother died, too. People kept looking at me with sorrow on the day of her death, yet all I could feel was inexplicable joy. Waves of it. In time the grief would come, over and over again, but it wasn’t there in the moment people expected it to be. Instead, it appeared out of nowhere as I drank my coffee and poured in half a cup of milk just like she did. Or when I heard a song that reminded me of her. But on the morning of her death, it was transcendent joy.

As writers and creatives, we become more human when we feel what is really there, at any given moment, rather than falling into a role of what we should be feeling. It may not always feel good, but it does feel more alive. And when we do this, we touch into the core of who we are, regardless of circumstance.

Already I can feel the shift as numbness melts like ice floes and everything from elation to boredom float up to be felt.

Recently, a friend asked me if the new house would make me happy. I said that no, it wouldn’t – that I planned to be happy anyway. Ultimately, the house, the death – none is going to deprive me of happiness or the right to embrace whatever I happen to feel. I may look weird dancing at a wake or being cranky at my birthday party, but it’s all good. It’s the pulse of life. And if I’m moving, that’s the direction I want to go.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

To subscribe to Backyard Pearls Newsletter, visit the site here.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to  her website. You can get a free audio on overcoming writers block by clicking HERE.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

And then I got sidetracked.

I left my pleasure article holding a knapsack on the side of the road as I went off in other directions. Each day,  I’d see “write newsletter” on my to-do list, and each day I’d find other things to do. This went on for two weeks as I kept avoiding completing the article.

Then one morning I showed up at Nia dance, feeling a bit frazzled and out of it. I started moving and found my brain was going into overdrive as my body followed the moves of the instructor by rote. I was just doing well enough to, say, not knock anyone over with a mindless sweep of my arms by going the opposite direction of the class. My body was keeping time with the music, but no one was home.

When I noticed this, I shifted back into presence. My head and body moved back in sync and after a few minutes, the download began. Rather than the annoying, repetitive cycling of my earlier thoughts, now my thoughts felt more like fresh packages delivered to my door, sent  to shift me in a better direction.  Delightfully, this is what happens when we take the time to move back into the present moment.

One of those packages was the sudden realization about why I couldn’t write about pleasure. I had been trying and trying to recreate the mood of the moment I had been in when I was happily writing about pleasure, but then life had shifted and a new direction was calling to me. The longer I kept my eyes closed about what I really wanted to write and forced myself to continue the first article, the more I suffered.

What really wanted to be written was how we fragment in life when we start getting too other-focused.

I had been in the midst of full summer riot gear. I was helping guide one teenage daughter as she pondered jobs, colleges and boys; was annoyed with the giant Elizabethan collar our dog was wearing since his hot spot flared up,  and was busy supporting my husband in the midst of employee changes.

So I didn’t want to talk about pleasure. I wanted to talk about how do we hold onto this cord of “I” and honor it and connect to it in the midst of pulls from every direction. I wanted to see why we release the cord of what we need, with the result being a slow backyard drip that we don’t even notice, other than to feel a little more spacey and fatigued. And how, even in the midst of that, we can ultimately reconnect to what’s most essential in ourselves.

It seems, now that I’m coming to the end of this article, I haven’t written about either pleasure or distraction. I’ve written about how we need to honor ourselves by writing what’s true for us in the moment, because that’s where the juice and the healing and the aliveness are. I suppose I could also add how sometimes we don’t really know what we’re writing about until we’ve finished writing it. Like I just have. Ahhhh… that feels better. Almost like pleasure.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

To subscribe to Backyard Pearls Newsletter, visit the site here.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to  her website. You can get a free audio on overcoming writers block by clicking HERE.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

And I always smile, knowing that when they arrive… and they will… these doubts will dissolve.

There is something sacred about retreats. Women arrive fatigued, frazzled from their daily lives, not connecting to their muse or themselves. We start in a circle and they look at me expectantly, not sure whether or not they should have taken a day off to do this crazy thing of taking time for themselves. They worry about what they might find once they start looking within. They wonder if there’s a creative muse to be found or if she’s checked out long ago, packing her bags of haikus and magic dust to head for more fertile grounds.

Yet each time the same thing happens. We create a safe space, begin to let go and something shifts. When we are given an opportunity to explore with abandon, pleasing no one but ourselves, we stumble upon treasures. A poetry line here, a memory fragment there, a piece of ourselves discovered in the moment.

Soon the mind is settling down. The negative voices are stepping aside to see what else is there. There’s ALWAYS something there for us (despite what we fear), and from this place expression is born.

Writer Natalie Goldberg aptly describes this process when it comes to writing. “The goal is to allow the written word to connect with your original mind, to write down the first thought you flash on, before the second and third thoughts come in,” she says. “That’s where the energy is. That’s where the alive, fresh vision is, before society, which we’ve internalized, takes over and teaches us to be polite and censor ourselves.”

So often when we are writing, we are thinking it all out, trying to get just the perfect word, structuring as we go. This writing is fraught with all those same recycled thoughts our culture has taught us, the ones that we rinse and repeat day in and day out. Our story about how busy we are, how we can or can’t do this, where the parameters of our life supposedly limit us.

But when we take time to pause – in retreat or our own backyards — and actually listen to the hum of life around us, something different appears. We open to everything — to the mockingbird’s call, to the leaf falling, to the creativity of the whole world moving through us. When we’re in this space, we don’t have to search around for ideas or to find inspiration. We simply stop and listen, and it rushes in to greet us.

One of the best parts is that we realize, on a very deep level, that creativity isn’t for some people and not others. It’s available to all of us… we just need to stop long enough to embrace it.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …