I’m in big time lesson mode over here at Maison Carlson {seriously have to find a new name for our house when we move}.  The lesson is all about energy flow.  Specifically personal energy flow and honoring your ups and downs – charting your own tide calendar, if you will.  It’s not easy when you want to do something, or feel like you should be doing something but your mind and your body have other plans for you and you aren’t in the mood for a fight.

This isn’t anything new for me, in fact it’s something that I deal with a lot.  Every healer or coach I have ever worked with seems to discover that my life hiccups result from fighting against my own flow.  I push when I should pull, I run when I should rest.  I also have a tendency to be far too hard on myself, something that also keeps me from fully honoring my energy flow sometimes.

For months I was dealing with a sleep cycle that made me feel like the biggest lazy slob in the world.  I was going to bed at 6am and waking up around 4pm.  But there was really no reason to be hard on myself!  At that time I wrote like a crazy person, was making art, designing web stuff, and working away very contently through the wee hours.

The problem seemed to be that since it wasn’t “normal” to be doing these things at these hours my Ego felt like I should feel bad about it.  So I did.

That began a viscous circle that I often end up in here where I start taking sleeping pills at 9pm to go to bed by 10pm with the foolish notion in my head that I’ll wake up refreshed and ready to go like in the commercials on TV by 8am.  NOPE!  That’s never happened.  I’ll be in bed by 10pm and still wake up at noon the next day because now I have a sleeping pill hangover.  That also means that day I’ll likely be useless because I’ll be in a fog.

That’s me screwing with the ebb and flow and that’s not good.  Don’t fuck with Mother Nature, right?  Your energetic ebb and flow is part of Mother Nature at work in your personal ecosystem.  Sometimes you’re just meant to be up at 4am watching reruns of Dr. Phil or writing your next opus.  It’s OK.

Right now I’m learning to allow the flow and the shifts.  I have a lot coming up in my personal life and in my biz in the months to come and right now is a bit of a down time, a time to reset and prepare for the changes.  It’s hard for me to do that because I have this need to go go go 24/7.  It’s one reason that my meditation and yoga practice, love it as I do, it’s still a struggle.  It’s a necessity, but it’s a struggle because all the while I’m on the mat my mind is half wondering to other things and counting all the things that should be on the day’s to-do list.

So I had to sit down and come up with the 4 things that I have to do to honor the ebb and flow to keep my sanity and I think you’ll find them helpful for you as well when you feel the need to fight against your flow.

 

Drop The Should’s

As soon as you start to hear yourself pulling out “should’s” it’s time to take a pause.  If you’re sitting on your bed looking out the window admiring the birds in the trees and you start hearing yourself in your head {you know, that blasted Ego yammering away} saying “I really should go clean the bathroom, or answer emails, or balance my checkbook, or check my site stats” or whatever else your Ego tries to make you do when you’re having a quiet moment, stop.  Stay where you are, stand your ground against your Ego.  All those things will be there later.  Down time to just be is important.  Go go go 24/7 is a one way ticket to burnout not the sign of productivity.

 

Be OK With Being Flexible

You need to learn to pick your battles with your ebb and flow.  You may have made big plans and scheduled projects in your calendar months ago and now the time has come for them to get going but you’re in a major ebbing period.  This doesn’t mean you need to scrap the calendar but you need to be willing to shift things around.  I love planning for the year ahead when December and January come around but I also know that just because I put something on my calendar for June back in December doesn’t mean it will 100% happen in June.  And I’m OK with that!  The more OK you are with this the easier it will be for you to take advantage of your big energetic flow when it comes because you prepared during the ebb and embraced the downtime.

 

Maintain Some Sense Of Structure + Ritual

One thing that is always hard for me when my schedule decides to go all catawampus on me is keeping to some sort of structure to my days, even when they start at 4pm.  When I do keep a structure despite the actual times of day, things work much better for me.  So if you know that your best days start with 30 minutes of meditation and yoga followed by a yummy green smoothie and a little time in the sun, then always start your day that way no matter what else happens.  Even if the rest of your day is spent on the couch binge watching Mad Men, that’s OK.  The structure will keep a sense of normal during your shifts in energy.

 

Don’t Fool Yourself – Everyone Goes Through This

The difference between you and someone else with this is just how you handle it.  Some people just collapse and do nothing, others force themselves to do more than they should.  And then there will be you.  You’ll be doing just what needs your immediate attention when you’re in an ebb and when you’re in a flow you’ll be a creative rock star.  The only reason you will be a creative rock star is because you took your ebb as seriously as you took your flow – you went with it, made the most of it, and rocked it.  You didn’t give up and you didn’t fight it.  You simply worked with it.

 

Now determine where you are in your energetic cycle and see if you’re properly honoring it or if you’re fighting it.  Adjust your response and embrace where you are.  If you’re down you’ll be up again soon enough, and if you’re up and feeling burnout coming, be sure to give yourself the space to come down and enjoy that ebbing space.