Is Your Energy Aligned with Your Priorities?

Energy, as in the stuff I'm made of, has been on my mind a lot lately.

Sometimes it's low.

Sometimes it's on fire.

Sometimes it's scattered.

Sometimes it's blocked.

Sometimes I focus it in the wrong direction or fling it around irresponsibly.

Sometimes it's so magnetic that I can scarcely believe the wonderful things getting pulled into my orbit.

Lucas is my daily reminder that we are energetic beings. He picks up on my energy du jour and mirrors it back, amplified. This is especially bad news during the PMS week, but that's not what this post is about. On the flip side, this crystal kid manifests stuff out of the blue wherever he goes. Balloons, stickers, suckers, toys, clothes … you name it. He even has his own Trader Joe's nametag and t-shirt, thanks to Mr. Keith, manager extraordinaire of our local Trader Joe's. Lucas has a natural ability to pull people and things into his experience with ease.

I can do it with cupcakes. It's a start.

As an energetic being, I'm becoming more aware of what's going on with my energy, and I'm learning that I really do have much more control over it than I thought I did.

Lisa of Mommy Mystic just posted a very helpful and (for me) perception-shifting piece in which she discussed the difference between dispersion and stress. The piece was actually about boosting your immunity through particular chakra meditations, but first, she suggested that we determine which kind of energy depletion we were experiencing. The two most common are dispersion and stress, and often, we think we're experiencing stress when it's really dispersion. In a nutshell, stress is a contraction of energy, and dispersion is a scattering of energy. To find out how to deal with each one, pop over there and read her post when you're finished here.

I recognize that my energy has been more dispersed than stressed. My body has been in one place, but my mind has been bouncing around between, oh … roughly 37 different tasks, topics and worries. (I made a list!) As you can imagine, this isn't going over so well with Lucas. While I'm itching to knock this list down to a reasonable size, there's Lucas suddenly wanting my undivided attention for everything! "What? You want me to come watch you pee?" Jeez! Give me a break!

I set aside mornings to do our newly instituted "circle time" together. We set up a little circle centerpiece, I guess, for want of a better word: a candle on a holder sitting on a swath of fabric, surrounded by collected items from his nature table, like pinecones, leaves, rocks and twigs. Then we sing a morning song and I tell a story, acting it out with the rocks and twigs and pinecones. Then he blows out the candle. This little routine delights the heck out of him!

We move from this into some sort of project together; usually art, sometimes play dough.

And then … THEN! I'm hoping for a bit of a break while he has some independent playtime. After an entire morning of my undivided attention, you'd think he'd be okay with me pulling out the laptop and doing some writing while he played by himself for a while. You'd think! But you'd be wrong.

You see, my attention is only sort of undivided throughout the morning. There are those other 37 things on my mind, after all. And he knows it. He feels it when I'm not altogether there with him, and with his clingy and annoying behavior, he's telling me, "That doesn't count. I want a do-over! Keep trying until you get it right."

Sigh.

This is when I feel the beginning of martyrdom creep into my bones. Resentment, snappishness, impatience … all those feelings I never had any intention of throwing at my son rise to the surface, and I regress to my son's age, yelling, "I need a break! I need a break!"

So this morning, I woke up an hour earlier, meditated, wrote in my journal, and regained some much-needed perspective. I remembered that I actually have some control over what I do with my energy. I can choose to sink into all those dark and prickly thoughts, allowing them to feed off of one another until my energy is a giant, whirling dervish of negativity. (As uncomfortable as this is, I seem to choose it often.)

Or…

I can choose to tell those thoughts, "Stop! I need to regroup. This isn't what I want for myself or my family." That's what I did this morning. Instead of looking at my list of 37 things and freaking out over how I didn't have time to get them all done, I thought of what I valued most. What's most important to me is to be present and loving with myself and my family. With this as a starting point, everything else flows more easily. Living each day doesn't have to be a forcing, a pushing, a resisting. It can just flow. There is nothing keeping me from that flow but me and how I choose to direct my energy.

To that end, I wrote down the top three priorities for my time. Wanna know what they are?

1. Take care of myself. Yes, indeedy, this has to be number one. Why? Because when I don't, I get sick, impatient, pissed off and completely ineffective. For me, taking care of myself, at its most basic level, means meditating, journaling, getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, and giving myself time to relax. When I make these a priority, I have plenty of energy for everyone and everything else.
   
2. Take care of Lucas.
   This means respecting his need for routine, planning engaging activities and outings, and being calm, present and loving (not as easy as it sounds).
   
3. Take care of my family. For me, this means creating a loving and welcoming home environment, cooking healthy meals, spending quality time with my husband and son, and working out a reasonable routine for household duties that I can do without gritting my teeth.
   

Where do my 37 other things fit into these priorities? Some of them fall within these top three, but most of them don't. If I were to add a fourth priority to the list, it would be writing. Even though writing is very important to me, respecting my top three priorities means not writing at the expense of the top three. So, staying up too late to write, writing instead of meditating, trying to write while Lucas is playing, or writing instead of spending time with Toby when he's only home one evening a week – these are the kinds of habits I need to rethink. Instead, I can write early in the morning before everyone gets up, (because I'll be getting to bed at a reasonable time – taking care of myself!) during Lucas' naps, or while he's at preschool two mornings a week.

Most of the 37 other things aren't really all that urgent or important - not when compared with what I really value. They'll either get done in the cracks between what's more important, or they'll fall off my list.

Getting back to Lisa's idea of dispersion, pulling my energy back from 37 random things and focusing it all into my top 3-4 priorities certainly helps me feel focused, clear, and balanced.

I can breathe deeply now.

What are the top three priorities? How well do they line up with how you actually spend your time? Let me know in the comments.