You have limited energy

Assuming you’ve had a restful night’s sleep, you wake up in the morning with a reserve of energy. Not like electricity, but like a battery. A rechargeable one.

You probably do some things that joyfully drain your battery — doing your creative work, for example. It takes energy, but it also gives you some too. Life is also full of things that drain the spirit’s battery, emptying us slowly throughout the day. There’s traffic, noise, stressful circumstances and depleting people, too. We lose this vitality without filling back up.

Perhaps you’d prefer to spend your finite energy on your work, creating revenue, using your gifts, sharing them. You can turn this desire into a sacred practice.

You deserve a sacred space

Because we live in a “more is more” culture, so many things compete for our time and energy that it becomes difficult to sense where appropriate boundaries are. What is enough? What is too much?

Boundaries? It’s a free for all. We throw up our hands in overwhelmed resignation. From this place, it’s too much effort to discern where to begin.

You can create a sacred boundary around you

It is possible to preserve and cultivate this precious energy. Even though it seems impossible with all the act-now offers and text messages and appointments and calls to return and errands to run (and even my phone rings as I type this). It is possible. You may just need to start small. Smaller than you’re accustomed to.

Unsubscribe

Unsubscribing is a perfect place to begin to reclaim your vitality and spirit. Even as you do these actions, you may incidentally improve others’ lives too. Consider these suggestions:

Unsubscribe from emails: As you look through your inbox, notice what depletes you. Notice if there are certain emails you never read. Start unsubscribing — including to this newsletter. If you don’t have the heart to offend the sender, many email programs allow you to set up a “rule” so that certain messages get automatically trashed bypassing your inbox. Same outcome: less email, more peace.
Unsubscribe from phone calls: When you get a solicitation — even at an odd hour — pick up the phone and ask to removed from the list belonging to the company calling you. Be kind to the solicitor and remember they’re working to pay the bills too. I like to say thank you at the end and wish them a good evening with a smile. It may be the only kindness they receive today.
Unsubscribe from mail: In the US, you can write “RTS” (return to sender) if a letter was mistakenly sent to you and it will be returned. If it was intended for you, call the company that sent it and ask to be removed from their mailing list. It’s worth the time. My insurance agent sends me letters occasionally asking if I’d like additional insurance products. When I emailed him today, I learned that I can unsubscribe from all their mailings at once — so I did. No hard feelings. No more junk.
Unsubscribe from advertisements: I’ve debated canceling the Sunday paper for this reason: I look through all those ads and feel all angsty and full of want for things I don’t really need. Another kind of advertisement (and feeling) comes from catalogs. If you receive them and don’t like how you feel when you look at them, pick up the phone. You’d be surprised how helpful the sales agents are — and how accustomed they are to this request. Not only will you save the company the expense of sending future mailings, you’ll save yourself the time of processing them and leaky energy that could be put to better use.

As you can see, this process is more than just organizing time or paper. I invite you to create just enough structure — to cultivate an environment that replenishes your precious energy.

Starting with these steps will enliven you and give the gift of peace to your future self. When excess email, calls, and paper decrease, what could have room to grow?

In its place, invite in more of what you want

To deepen your sense of sacred boundaries, imagine drawing around you a circle of light or flowers or love or ocean sounds (or whatever touchstones nourish you) that provide a healing, expansive buffer for your spirit. Your creative space can be like this. In the place of distraction, you can invite focus. In place of overwhelm you can invite clarity. In place of depletion, you can experience a full heart.

Start small. Nurture your spirit. See what unfolds.

6 comments

Remember when you were a kid, and “getting mail” was really exciting?

Maybe it was a card from your grandmother, a letter from a pen-pal, or even the Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes envelope (am I the only one who used to play with the little magazine stamps as “stickers”?). Back in they day, getting mail was fun and kind of exciting. Of course, we got less of it, and we usually didn’t have to worry about things like “filing” or “paying” or “sorting.”

Nowadays, getting mail usually means bills (ugh), junk mail (double ugh), or magazines (fun, but potential clutter). While most of our everyday communication takes place on the phone or online, snail mail is still a presence in our lives… and on our countertops or desktops!

Here’s what I do for snail mail

What works well for me:

Most junk never crosses the threshold into my house. I keep my recycle bin near the door between my garage and house, the entrance I use when I’m coming in the house after retrieving my mail. Before I enter the house, I pause for a minute and pull out all of the flyers, pamphlets and junk mail envelopes that don’t contain private information, and I dump them directly into the recycle bin. They never come in the house.

The shreddable items (credit card offers, for example) come in the house, but go directly into the shredder. If I set them on my desk or counter (ostensibly to “shred later”) they sit there for weeks. Directly to the shredder they go!

The magazines go onto a small end table that sits near my loveseat. Once the shelf on that end table is full, I have to either recycle magazines currently on the shelf, or (if everything on the shelf is Need To Read material) the new magazines get tossed into the recycle bin with the junk mail before ever coming in the house–until some room is made on the end table shelf for new ones!

What I’m working on:

The “needs some attention” stuff is tough. The flyer for a conference I want to attend and need to register for. The bill I need write a check for and pay. The invitation I need to RSVP for (after checking my calendar and figuring out travel details).

The items that require some interim step between receiving it in the mail and disposing of it are the ones that befuddle me, and often end up being tossed in a pile on my desk where they promptly… sit. (Well, they sit *and* act as the foundation layer for additional pieces of “needs further action” snail mail that come later… so let’s not pretend that they’re completely useless.)

And then there’s the outgoing mail that I need to generate: birthday cards, thank you notes, the stuff that I want to send the “old fashioned” way rather than by email. I have the card, I have the stationery, I have the stamps… but all those separate pieces usually wind up sitting on my desk (near that nefarious pile of “needs further action” mail) rather than getting assembled and mailed.

What do YOU do with your snail mail?

What works really well for you? What are you working on?

7 comments