Easy

I declared my theme for 2013 to be EASY. As someone with a type-A personality (moving in the direction of becoming less type-A) and a tendency to be "tight" when it comes to having fun, I find this idea of making things easy appealing. I think what happens is that I allow all that "mind chatter" to build and then all of the sudden things on my to-do-list or events coming up or even regular kids stuff that happens on a daily basis becomes BIG and HARD and even a bit overwhelming. It's not good. Sometimes I even shut down because of the picture I have now drawn for myself. Hardness is scary. Big seems like it can't be done. Whenever this happens, it's tempting to take the "easy" road and just avoid or not do things at all.

I proved this point beautifully just the other day. I started posting to our McNair blog on a weekly basis in addition to creating a weekly newsletter - I'm calling it "Bulls Eye" - for the scholars. I've got the system down now (and it's pretty cool actually), but the reality is that it takes some time to make this happen every week. I usually do it on the weekend and "stealing" tidbits of time to do so alongside what I call the *chaos* of having three kiddos running around the house can often be daunting. When I do it this way, I find that I'm on the computer pretty much all day - amid a multitude of interruptions. With frustration mounting, I began to make this process into an even bigger and more daunting process. In my head, that is. So instead of letting myself start circling into a downward spiral leading toward more frustration I said no. I'm making these tasks larger and more complicated than they need to be. I'm assigning more importance to them than they deserve - which then makes them even bigger and more complicated in my mind.

Yes, my work is important and my goal is to continually improve and "freshen up" my writing, but by attaching too much significance to this goal, I find myself frequently tripping myself up. Certainly not my intention but certainly makes things more difficult in the end. So I started writing and attaching less to my judgment of the writing. I just started doing and attaching less to my judgment of the doing. I started riding my own momentum, which led to an easier, lighter and more "in tune" way of being. It made things easy. Which is where I'm intending to be in the first place. Full circle.

I named my blog Go With It because I believe I can achieve a sweeter state of sailing along in life by doing just that - going with it. The mind tends to chop things up with our internal commentary. Through yoga, I'm training my mind to attach less to this chatter and instead connect with my inner truth and inner workings that, if I allow them to, make me unique. It's about self-expression and finding myself in the process of letting myself shine. It's also about expressing more by untangling the strings of complexity, attaching less to the outcome and my own judgment of the outcome, and making things easy. The beauty is that I have the choice to make things easy if I want to. When I do, I feel more in the flow and more me.