The power of crappy and chaotic
Happy Sunday, Soothers. In an issue of the Soother a few weeks ago, I wrote about how I'm letting my meditation practice be "shitty and chaotic": I have meditated almost every day in 2023 for 20 minutes, and often twice a day for 20 minutes! How?! I took this course with Emily Kessler, and I also, as I told one of my clients, simply let my meditations be "shitty and chaotic" over and over again. I stopped expecting my meditations to feel good. They are the literal definition of shitty and chaotic, my mind runs literally all over the place with insane thoughts. And when I notice that, I return to the mantra, and begin all over again. All that matters is I show up and do it.
For a throway paragraph I wrote, I got a whole lot of feedback to the "shitty and chaotic" approach.
“This was the permission slip I needed to loosen perfectionism,” somebody wrote me.
A Soothe masterminder, Katie, told me and her small group that she is now letting her exercise routine be “shitty and chaotic.” “What does it matter if I just run outside for 5 minutes instead of trying to make a full-blown hour long workout?” she pointed out. “The shitty and chaotic vibe lets me just do the messier version of whatever my brain is telling me needs to be perfect and complicated.”
“100% more shitty and chaotic energy in 2023,” somebody else wrote back to the newsletter. Maybe shitty and chaotic should be the presidential nominee for the 2024 election?? (As if it's not already...)
The thing about having a perfectionist brain, as many of us here do: It does an excellent job of convincing us that things need to be elegant, executed just so, often take a lot of time, and look a certain acceptable way.
This is the roadblock of perfectionism. Since something has to be perfect, take a ton of effort and energy, and look really great and amazing, we often never do it.
So this spring, how about introducing more shitty and chaotic energy into your life? Not shitty and chaotic like you're going around with dumpster fire energy and doing nothing towards your goals and dreams, but just letting that effort look a little more... imperfect.
For example, my shitty and chaotic meditation. I groan, roll out of bed, pee, come back to bed, sit up against my pillows, set a timer for 20 minutes and meditate, never once getting a quietness in my brain. It's totally shitty and chaotic!
My shitty and chaotic workouts these days: I'm running more, but it's also looking pretty messy. I will often run half a mile to the coffee shop, and get a decaf iced americano. I'll then walk a mile and drink it, find a spot to throw it away, then run maybe 1-2 more miles, on and off.
My shitty and chaotic diet? It's not really that shitty and chaotic. It's actually pretty nourishing (to my specific desires and needs). But what is it? It's buying like 5 pre-packaged Trader Joe's salads and meals and doing almost no homemade cooking throughout the week. Or the other night, I did pan fry up a frozen Trader Joes turkey burger and ate it with microwaved broccoli and some beans rinsed out of a can. Wasn't a masterpiece, but its shitty and chaotic energy worked well for me!
Even the Soother sometimes gets the shitty and chaotic treatment. It's the only way to reliably produce a newsletter that goes out almost every week! And I'm really leaning into shitty and chaotic over at The Secret Soother, which I'm treating like a Tumblr from 2005. I'm not even using capital letters over there!
Where could you introduce more chaos into your life, in a good way, this spring, with the intention of just letting it be fun, fast, messy, whatever?
So instead of hot girl summer or whatever 17 year olds on TikTok are telling us we need to channel this season, try shitty and chaotic energy this spring.
What will you let become shitty and chaotic for you this week?