How to create more space in your life for alignment
Happy Sunday, Soothers, and welcome back to my series on living an intuitive, aligned and surrendered life. If you're new here — welcome, very much! I'm Catherine, a writer, life coach, and online teacher living in Western Virginia, talking about how to create meaning in our lives in practical ways, and how to build up self-compassion and authenticity. You may want to go back and read these parts in chronological order below to get a sense of what I'm talking about today. Or you may say YOLO and dive on in, because that's also fine and you'll always get what you need at the moment you need it, anyways.
Part I: How to live a surrendered, intuitive life
Part II: How you can begin to claim your desires
Part III: Listening to and seeing signs all around us
Today we dive into Part IV: the importance of cultivating space and attention as part of living the intuitive, surrendered and aligned life. As always there, will be a little invitation/prompt/assignment at the end of the essay for you to participate in should you like.
So, let's go!
You've likely heard poet Mary Oliver's words on attention: "Attention is the beginning of devotion."
Or, “To pay attention / this is our endless and proper work.”
Or, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields / which is what I have been doing all day."
This poet, she might have been on to something about attention, turns out.
Attention, our highest form of currency and power, and the one we most easily give away.
The reason I focus today on attention — and cultivating the space to be able to pay attention in the first place — as part of living a surrendered, aligned and intuitive life is this:
Remember how in Part I I talked about us in a canoe on a river as a metaphor for living this kind of life?
If we don't cultivate space to learn how to pay attention, we are living the equivalent of being in the canoe and furiously looking at our phone, or really, anywhere else other than the river and the surrounding banks while also trying to paddle upstream.
Then, we're surprised when we hit a rough patch of water, even though the rocks were starting to build up and we could have seen it coming. We're shocked by a turn in weather, when, if we'd been looking, we could have seen the shifts in the horizon and the clouds and adjusted. We're dismayed we missed the turn we should have been taking, even though there were literally, like, 57 signs telling us we should have taken that turn.
In order to see the signs and invitations, as I talked about in Part III, we must learn to cultivate space, cultivate attention, and wrest it back from those who would have us give it away or tell us that it isn't important.
But you cannot see where the surrendered life is inviting you to go, you can not notice signs and synchronicities, you can not learn to tune into and listen to your intuition, if you do not consciously cultivate space, time, focus, attention, and choose to wrest it back from the many ways in which it is taken from us.
Trust me, this is one of my most personally difficult challenges. I am enraptured, ENRAPTURED, by technology and my phone. I absolutely have a total phone and email and computer and social media addiction. I have ADHD and my little sparrow brain is constantly demanding to be entertained, distracted, fed. And I truly do love the abilities and community and help and connection that technology can give us.
At the same time, I have also made significant strides in practices that help me cultivate space and attention, and I'm going to share my favorites with you today.
The very first and most important, to me, practice I can recommend you is Morning Pages as created and taught by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way. It's so stupid simple but will create massive change in your life if you stick with it. All you do is wake up, grab a notebook, and start journaling stream-of-consciousness about anything — anything, literally — for three pages, by hand. This is a space clearing practice because it excavates the layers of crud that are mostly occupying our attention, conscious and subconscious. Underneath lies our truth, our intuition, our guidance, our knowing. You absolutely will start out writing about the most mundane shit (and I often still do, many days!) but then the gems, the realizations, the breakthroughs will start pouring forth. If people ask me for how to start a morning routine but they don't have a lot of time, I say, all you need to do is devote 15-20 minutes to Morning Pages and you'll be well on your way.
My second favorite practice is walking in nature without my phone (or I have it on me for location/safety, but I don't use it). I try to do this almost every morning. Sometimes I am listening to podcasts, but more often lately I'm walking in silence. I often set the intention to simply see the sign I need to see. Sometimes, it's nothing. The other day? I saw two turkeys, three deer, five rabbits and a pileated woodpecker. Did they mean anything? Not really, other than it was awesome to see so much wildlife and I felt connected to the larger world around me. You don't have to have access to much nature to do this, either; I used to do this amongst the streets of Washington, D.C. I would challenge myself to see how far I could walk without looking at my phone and what I could notice. Many times, I wouldn't notice much, but other times I would see truly weird and unique things I never would have seen if I had been looking at my phone (beautiful murals or graffiti, an interesting-looking plant, a beautiful object in a storefront). It also doesn't have to be a very long thing. I challenge you to try a 10 minute walk without looking at your phone. Bonus, you can weave intuition into by listening to your gut instinct about which directions you should turn or which way your feet should walk you.
Meditation. Ah, the best for me practice but the one I resist and dislike the most. I remember distinctly back when I was about 30 (so 13 years ago) when I started to meditate. I was doing all this researching and reading on how to meditate; I thought surely there was One Right Way. But I could never find a stripped down and simplified manner of practicing, so I came up with one on my own. I would sit in silence, and count to 10, then start over, and do it for as long as I could stand. That's it. And that's still my practice today. Most days I count to 3, and my thoughts take over, and I forget I was supposed to be counting, and then with a gasp I remember, and I go back to counting. Meditation gives me greatness when I can do it regularly and frustration at the same time, because my little perfection brain thinks I should be a "better meditator" by now. L o l. That said, if I can devote 20-30 minutes about 2-3x a week to this style of meditation, it does really help my focus, my mental health, my attention. I am not by any means a prolific, talented, or "good" meditator. I go through YEARS where I have not meditated, even though I have the conscious awareness of how much it can serve me. Anyways, just including this in case you have wanted to try meditation but also struggle with it or resist it. Keep going. Right now, I'm simply telling myself I'm going to meditate 2x a week before bedtime for 20 minutes, and that's it. I'm letting it be as easy as possible. (And I often wake up and meditate for 10-20 minutes in bed before getting up, and that's lovely too.)
Decluttering. It's one of the tougher ones, but personally, I think one of the most radically effective. Is there a space in your home that weighs on you because it is cluttered, or are there unfinished projects sitting on your dining room table, etc? Committing even just 20 minutes, or if you have it, a few hours to decluttering your space doesn't free up just the literal physical space; it releases space in your psyche, as well, and lightens your subconscious load, which will help you tune more into your intuition and truths.
Finally, I'm trying a new practice that you may have seen me talk about on Instagram (the irony!): taking a phone sabbath from Friday afternoon at 3pm until Sunday around 10am. My plan is to delete any apps that wrest my attention away each Friday afternoon, put the phone in airplane mode, not use it for podcasts or anything (except driving directions, should I need it), and just... be. This will likely involve some staring at walls, and I'm accepting that. I've also done something I tend to do 1-2x a year, which is unfollow everybody on Instagram (well almost everybody; I stay following private accounts of family members). I find this to be a trust and anti-scarcity practice; the accounts I'm meant to re-follow because I find them so valuable, I won't forget. And information that needs to find me, will.
So there you have it, some simple space clearing, attention cultivating practices!
And your invitation this week?
To commit to one of these practices for the week ahead (or a space cultivating, attention focusing practice of your own making and choosing!).
If you pick journaling, the walk, the meditation, decluttering — just try it once this week, and just for 10-20 minutes. You don't have to overhaul your entire lifestyle in one fell swoop. This is a process of doing little by little and trusting the unfolding. And if you pick the tech/phone sabbath, join me and share your thoughts on Instagram (again, I realize the irony, but here we are) with #SootherSabbath.
Which will you be doing and when will you commit to doing it? Drop it in the comments below. Remember, anybody who comments throughout this series will be entered into a raffle to win a free coaching call with me.
Happy space clearing, friends. As you clear your minds, hearts, spaces and paths, may the signs and synchronicities and intuitions flow fast and plenty to you, pointing you in the next right direction.