Good morning from New York City. What I want to talk about today is a continuation of the last two episodes. I’d like to start with a little background in case someone is stumbling across this episode and hasn’t listened to Friday and Monday.
On Friday, I think the episode was called Airplane Mode and I talked about choosing to get quiet with myself. I call that airplane mode. Then on Monday I talked about reckoning, reckoning being when we feel like we’re at a crossroads and or we have our back against the wall a little bit. I talked about one of the first things I do, which is to start generating a list of questions because questions activate our subconscious and reinforce this idea of the conversational nature of the universe. It is a beautiful thing.
Anyway, today I thought I’d continue because it’s what I’m doing right now. This is not a formula. It is my personal process, and it may be useful to someone. So, I started with silent mode and the next thing I did was I went into questioning by generating a big list of questions. Again, my circumstances are related to this reckoning I’m having in my life around what’s next and wanting to be in the driver’s seat. Yet another part of my personal reckoning is this balance between making stuff happen- my old mode – and allowing. What I mean by allowing is being in the mindset and creating the circumstances where I can follow the flow of what wants to happen next in my life.
That is definitely a recurring theme in my life. I’ve talked in the past about unlearning my trying to will things forward and making stuff happen. Moving to a place in my life where I’m more the observer, cultivating curiosity, being mindful and tending to my own energy because fundamentally I believe that life is about flow. We’re here to cultivate flow. We’re not here to. arm wrestle with life. We’re not here to go upstream. Life is about identifying and doing more of those things that make you feel good, and that includes work.
Anyway, back to my personal reckoning process. The other thing that I’ve always loved to do is mind mapping. So often when people hear that word, they say what does that mean? For me, mind mapping started when I was running my business and I had so many things on my mind that I would either get highly agitated or completely overwhelm myself and shut down. Mind mapping was a way of dumping everything that was in my head onto the paper to look at it, and to make sense of it. It was almost like something I did to soothe myself. Mind mapping is also a very creative thing to do. So on Monday I shared a couple of the questions to give you some sense of what I mean by generating questions. For the mind mapping, what I did is I selected several of those questions, then I put the question in a circle and I started writing lines off of the circle and answering the question. It’s a way of actually seeing what I think.
To illustrate the mind mapping, I’m simply going to share the very first question that I wrote. This is something that comforts me and helps me come back to myself. On a piece of paper I wrote in a circle this question: what comforts me and helps me come back to myself ? Some of the things I wrote off of the circle were: questions, mind mapping, asking for support.\, turning down the volume on external noise, journaling, writing down how I want to feel, noticing and capturing recurring thoughts, reviewing my core values. You get the idea, right ?
I guess I’d end by saying that for me mind mapping is a way of calming myself, and of capturing and examining all the different things that are going through my head. I used to do it with a computer program, but now I do it by hand. Working with your hands almost immediately takes you out of left-brain mode and the analytical frontal cortex. I don’t know, there’s something about wrangling my thoughts and seeing it on paper that’s always been soothing and helpful and you can mind map basically anything. I hope that was helpful to someone out there. Until next time, from my heart to yours.
