If you’re like me, you put pressure on yourself whether it’s to get all your errands done or to achieve success in a specific area. Then, when it doesn’t pan out as you expected or as quickly as you wanted, you blame and get upset with yourself.
This mindset is unproductive at best. The rougher you are on yourself, the less likely you’ll complete what you want to get done. It’s at that point when you’re most likely to give up. You’ll try (perhaps self-consciously) to convince yourself you’re not good enough.
But you are.
Let me share with you my most recent struggle—not to evoke pity, but to illustrate how not honoring one’s self only worsens a situation.
It’s a privilege for me to write these posts. Sharing my journey has been an amazing experience and I’m grateful for the support you, my readers, have given me. I’m convinced this is an integral part of my spiritual path.
My intention has always been to allow the Divine to work through me. And I thought I was doing that.
But I wasn’t. I worked in a manner that I decided I needed to. I obsessed about writing these posts no matter what else was going on in my life. I needed to publish something new every Wednesday. I wouldn’t accept any reason for skipping a week: not illness, not work and certainly not a vacation.
By Andy Steel, freeimages.com
As my health deteriorated, it became more difficult to create anything substantial. My backlog of posts that were ready a month in advance was gone.
Each week, I’d heap a boatload of stress on myself. And the more pressure I applied, the fewer ideas came to mind. I scolded myself that if I wanted to serve the Great I Am adequately, I had to be more productive.
Writing, a passion of mine, became a dreaded chore. One that I could never get ahead of.
Then my four-month-old computer bogged down to where it was unusable. I shipped it off for a warranty repair. Then I had to face the inevitable: I would miss posting on a Wednesday for the first time in more than four years.
I felt like I had failed God.
Friends had been advising me not to be so rigid. One told me, “If God wanted you to write something for this week, you would’ve written it. Maybe you need to let God decide when and if he wants you to post something.”
Without my laptop, I finally realized I’d been trying to serve the Universe my way. I kept thinking, I’d let go and let God. But I hadn’t. I kept working in the way I thought I had to and set unrealistic expectations to judge myself good enough.
Now, I see that God wants joyful servants, not beleaguered ones. And, that by truly releasing my “shoulds” and respecting myself, I’ll be writing what I’m inspired to write.
After two weeks without a computer, I’m brimming with ideas for posts. Not because I obsessed about them, but because I stopped worrying, turned off my inner critic and opened my heart.
So from now on, my posts will publish when I have something meaningful to convey.
Join me in releasing all the “shoulds” in our lives. Of course, we must go to work and tend to family, but when it comes to berating ourselves for self-imposed tasks we don’t get done, we need to look to the Higher Power, honor ourselves and let go.