“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly…”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Do you have days when you feel uninspired? I do, even though I usually have projects going that really inspire me. Still, there are days when none of my ongoing projects inspire me. I don’t feel the energy to take action on any of them. Those days I just feel tired, and a little cranky, even if I slept well the night before. The cranky comes from an inner assumption that I must be doing something wrong to feel like this, and I’d better fix it. Only I’ve discovered that I don’t need fixing, I need acceptance and a change in perspective.

The other day I wanted to create a post for the blog. I wasn’t feeling sparked about anything. I was feeling tired. So, with no inspiring thoughts to guide me I went back over past journal writings I keep for this purpose. I discovered a story I wrote and found it to be a good fit for the blog.

Before I knew it, I was immersed in rereading the story, adding a little description here and there, creating the post format on the website, finding the right quote and the right picture to go with it. I was in the flow.

It all came so gracefully and unexpectedly when I hadn’t been feeling the spark at all. I’d uncovered a little pocket of joy.

Later that day, though I knew I should be weeding and mulching out in the yard, I just didn’t feel like all that effort. Instead, I drifted into the kitchen and tried out a dessert recipe that I’d been hanging onto for a while. It turned out well. That buoyed me up and I decided to check on-line for other recipes to try. There, I stumbled upon a gluten-free bread baking book. Feeling a little spark, I downloaded it.

There’s a discovery here – little pockets of joy happen, even when we don’t otherwise feel inspired, if you follow your energy.

It’s easy to feel joyful when we’re feeling really inspired about something. That joy spills over into everything. The energy is flowing strongly and it feels great. Yet, even in times when the energy is not flowing strongly, the joy still happens. It’s just quieter, and we’re less apt to be conscious of it, though that is when we most need to be aware of joy happening.

I didn’t think I was inspired that day. I just thought I was tired. Instead, I found my inspiration in places I didn’t expect it, in old journal writings, in a recipe I had been holding onto and never tried, in a new cookbook. I found it and didn’t recognize it for what it was, because I thought I should be feeling inspired about working in the yard. 

Instead, I just did what I had the energy to do.

The discovery is that there is joy happening all the time. It may be quieter, less obvious on the down side, but it is there.

Instead of focusing attention on trying to fix ourselves during these times, we could focus attention on where the quiet enjoyment is.

Maybe it’s a new recipe, an inspiring movie, a book. Perhaps it’s sitting quietly and sipping a cup of tea. The thing is, it’s there. It may just look a little different than we expect.

It requires the self-acceptance not to beat ourselves up because we think we should be doing something else, even as our hearts are guiding us to the quieter inspirations. It requires a change in perspective to see the rainbow.

And the surprise is, it’s not about what we’re actually doing, not really.

It’s about following the changing flow of creative energy from within. It floods sometimes and it trickles other times, but it’s always there.

I thought it wasn’t there that day. I was wrong. I was looking for the flood. Instead I needed to listen for the trickle.

The inspiration is there, even on the days when it feels like it’s not. Your inner self will guide you if you give yourself permission to listen, and look for the rainbow.  

“Whoever loves much, performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.” – Vincent Van Gogh
 
It is essential, especially now, when so much negativity is flying around, to focus on what is positive in our lives. Let’s take a good look at that by asking, what inspires you today? What is sparking your energy?
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It feels wonderful to be in that place where inspiration is flowing, sparking your energy. As Spring is making her spectacular entrance, royally clothed in pink and white magnolia blossoms, roseate crabapple, palest apple and bright red bud, the ground is dotted with sunny, yellow daffodils and clusters of grape hyacinths, and bright green leaves are poking noses out from their winter beds, Mother Nature inspires us and sparks our energies to join in the dance of creation.

Feeling inspired the other day, I set up my front planters with fresh soil and planted them with ivy wintered over in my garage/green house. Then I tucked in some fresh-faced purple and yellow pansies. I did the same with the front window boxes. It feels so good to mix around in the dirt, (it’s rather like cooking) nurturing new plants into their homes. It connects me with my yard and with the flow of energy that is Mother Nature.  Now I find excuses to stand outside the front of the house so I can enjoy the new display.

Next, I’m on to the planters on our back patio. Today I’ll be picking up vegetable seedlings to plant in them from a local farm.

Paddling around in the dirt, mixing in nutrients, clearing out debris, gentling in new plants and tending established plants, eases me right into my heart. I feel focused and in the flow.

When I finish one project, I enjoy the results right away. Then I look around and the next project steps up and says, “Me next!” So, I’m inspired to keep going, doing the next thing.

It doesn’t have to be gardening. Any project that gets your juices flowing can be the same. It feels like channeling life energy, because that is exactly what it is.

I believe that as Creators, individual sparks of God, channeling life energy is what we came here to do, experiencing our creative life force in action. We do this whether we are conscious of it or not. It just happens, we can’t help but be the Creators we are. It can be a positive experience or a negative one. When we experience it positively, when we love as we create, it is blissful.

The positive experience looks like intuitive inspiration that sparks your energy and gets you moving on manifesting the inspired idea. It feels exciting. You feel enthusiastic about the idea. You love it. You want to do it. You find yourself daydreaming about it, what it looks like, how it would feel to manifest it, what life would be like if you created it.

That first intuitive inspiration, is like a newly planted seed. If it is given what it needs to grow, it will sprout, seek the sun and manifest into your life. But if it is uprooted by negative thoughts of, “I can’t do that. I’m not worthy of that. That’s too scary. I don’t have enough money for that.” It will be like the tiny seedling, uprooted and left to wither and die in the sun. It cannot thrive in that environment.

Intuitive inspiration needs gentle tending and nurturing like the new seedling it is. Then it can grow strong as it manifests in your life. 

 “When you free up the stuck energy in your home, you dramatically change the feeling of stuckness in your life, and new opportunities can come your way.”
 – Karen Kingston

For the past week, I’ve been in what my husband calls a cleaning frenzy. I call it Spring cleaning in January. The crazy thing is, I’ve been following my bliss. It all started in meditation last week.

In that meditation I saw myself clearing off a dirty dish-filled kitchen counter by sweeping my hand across and knocking everything off. I felt fine about doing it this way, seeing the dirty dishes as energy dissolving into the air. Along with this visual I felt the energetic benefit that I would experience from decluttering and cleaning my home.

Cleaning is sacred, spiritual practice. As we clear and clean away the ego debris of daily living, we raise the vibration in our homes and our inner being, freeing up energy, aligning ourselves and making space for God in our lives.

After that meditation, I walked around the house and realized how heavy it felt. I could feel the clutter and accumulation weighing me down energetically and emotionally.  It made me tired just thinking about all the cleaning and decluttering I had put off. That's when I realized that I had been feeling tired for days.

I thought back to how, in the evening, I want my kitchen cleared of dirty dishes before I go to bed. It is rare that I leave the dishes unwashed. When I get up the next morning, ready to start the day fresh, and walk out to see the kitchen filled with the debris of yesterday’s living, it feels like the plug is pulled on my energy. It drains right out of me as I look at the clutter and work to be done that should have been done the day before.

“Your home is the outer expression of your inner environment.”
- Shoshana Ortalia Aurora Rogers
 
The same is true of other areas in the house in need of clearing and cleaning. All these areas are the outer reflections of stuck energy in our lives. Places where the energy that should support our daily living is dammed up, stagnating and unable to flow. 

Several days ago, Peter and I received a wonderful gift from our daughter and son-in-law. In beautiful synchronicity, they had our car professionally deep cleaned and polished, inside and out. It really needed it because our much loved and fed grandchildren had been riding and snacking in it for many months. Driving the car home from the car wash I reveled in the clean look, the clean smell, the shine inside and out. Our car sparkled!

Arriving home that evening, I began dinner preparations and thought no more about the car. A short time later I realized that I felt really cheerful, upbeat and energized, noticeably more than usual. Driving in that sparkling, clean car had lifted my energy significantly.

I hadn’t realized how much driving around in our usual clutter and dirt was affecting my attitude and my energy.  

How much more does living in the accumulated clutter and dirt of daily living affect us in our homes?

“The stagnant energy that accumulates around clutter causes you to feel tired, but when you start clearing it, this frees up stuck energy in your home and also energizes you.”
 – Karen Kingston

Over the next few days, feeling inspired by that experience with our clean car, I went into cleaning mode. It felt great. I scheduled carpet cleaners to deep clean all our carpets.  I deep cleaned our bathroom, reorganizing and decluttering as I went, as well as our floors. In preparation for the arrival of the carpet cleaners, Peter and I moved everything off the carpets, shifting large amounts of stagnant energy as we did so.

The house feels different now, lighter. It feels like springtime, when the windows are thrown open and warm and fragrant breezes waft through the house, this despite the fact that it is January and the outside temp is in the single digits. The energy has lifted and most significantly for me, my energy right along with it. I experience this emotionally as happiness, physically as increased energy, and spiritually as renewed creative inspiration. I can feel my energy opening up and expanding outward.

Perhaps you too have been experiencing the winter doldrums, feeling tired and low on energy. If so, move stuff around in your home, rearrange, organize something, clean something out. You’ll be amazed at how starting small can lead to big results energetically and emotionally. Check out today’s Spiritual Toolbox for some ideas to get you started.

“Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.”
-Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap

Over the weekend, I went to a potluck dinner and channeled event at the home of friends. I had been looking forward to this event for several weeks, knowing that it would be both fun and educational.

There were a number of people attending, many of whom were friends who had been on the trip to Iceland with me. It was a wonderful evening, full of loving interactions, fascinating sharings and information during the group, humor and laughter, spiritual connection, delicious food, hugs and gifts.

Sounds perfect, right? It was. Only I didn’t acknowledge it, or allow myself to feel it until the next day.

Huh?

Upon waking that next morning, I realized that it is possible for me to be right in the middle of my bliss and not know it.

It's like how many of us will deflect a compliment. We receive a compliment from some well-meaning person and then  don't allow ourselves to receive and feel the good feelings that the compliment could engender.
 
A friend says, "You're looking great today!"
You answer, "But my hair is a mess!" 

Except in this case, I deflected the good feelings of an entire evening.

I had encountered what Gay Hendricks calls an Upper Limit Problem from his marvelous book, The Big Leap.

Dr.  Hendricks describes how the problem showed up in his own life,
“I have a limited tolerance for feeling good. When I hit my Upper Limit, I manufacture thoughts that make me feel bad...”

Now let’s back up a bit. I drove to the event with my daughter and grandchildren who were also attending. Inexplicably, I began to feel anxiety creep in as we drove. I recognized it as the old social anxiety that plagued me for years. I was not happy to feel it resurface.

“I’m so done with this,” was my predominant thought.  But in fact, I wasn’t.

I was hitting my Upper Limit Problem knowing unconsciously that the gathering we were about to attend would be an opportunity for social and spiritual happiness. Apparently, part of me wasn’t ready to allow that.

When we arrived at our friend’s home, I pushed the anxiety aside and joined the group. Yet, my thoughts kept harping on my annoyance with old anxieties cropping up again.

The group being the kind of supportive group it was, I was able to share about my feelings, and often just airing feelings like this in a supportive atmosphere is enough. But this time, my irritation with myself about my anxious feelings continued.

Finally, with some supportive guidance, I came to understand that fear happens. It is just part of the human condition. I don’t need to beat myself up about it. Nor do I need to be afraid of fear. I can allow it to blow through me like wind through a screen door, in and right out again. I don’t have to get stuck in it.

So, that’s all good, but what does that have to do with bliss?

What it has to do with bliss is the fact that fear and the negativity that goes along with it can effectively veil you from perceiving and acknowledging your bliss. You can be right in the middle of a blissful situation and not realize it.

If you are so caught up in feeling fear, getting annoyed with yourself for feeling it, and trying to fix it or get rid of it, how do you have any room left for experiencing your bliss? Even when your bliss is right in front of you.

And that’s just the point.

The real problem is that for some of us bliss itself can be too scary, and that’s where the Upper Limit Problem comes in.

Perhaps there is a part of us that is afraid that if we allow ourselves to experience bliss something bad will happen, or our bliss won’t last, or we are not worthy of bliss, or undeserving of bliss.

Think of a young child, full of excited happiness, racing around, laughing and yelling exuberantly, being told to be silent by a tired, over-worked parent. How many of us have experienced some version of that very human situation?

Many of us have had life experiences especially as children when we learned that it was not safe to be too happy. For whatever reason we learned to curb our happiness, keep a lid on it, tamp it down. We learned an Upper Limit for happiness.

Self-judgment is an especially effective way to put a lid on happiness, even to the extent that we are not aware of bliss when we are right in the middle of it.

In spite of myself, I had a wonderful time at the gathering.  I was able to focus in on loving conversations and interactions and just be where I was, with whom I was, at any given moment. I just didn’t fully feel that wonderfulness until the next morning. The self-judgment was too pervasive in my consciousness.

But what if I recognized my fears as simply the acting out of my Upper Limit?  What if that awareness allowed me to release self-judgment, let go of struggling against the fear? What if knowing of my Upper Limit allowed those fears to blow right through the screen door of my awareness and out the other side?

I might have allowed myself to experience that scary thing known as bliss.

Now, as I think back over the evening, I can savor those moments of connection and enjoyment and that sweet echo of bliss.
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But next time fear and self-judgment show up I’m going to open the door of awareness wide, walk through and focus upon the bliss that may be just on the other side.

“It’s the excitement in the simple things that tells you what simple things are actually connected to the bigger things that excite you. And will actually get you there in what may seem to be a round-about manner, but by following the excitement is actually the shortest, fastest, straightest path.”
-Bashar, channeled by Darryl Anka

You can choose to feel good even when you are doing something that might normally feel onerous. It’s a matter of what you are paying attention to and how you are focusing your attention.

Recently, inspired by an upcoming get together here at the house, I’ve been doing an hour of puttering each day which has resulted in the house getting cleaned.

Despite the fact that cleaning is one of my least favorite things to do, I have enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed the process and I’ve enjoyed the results. I’ve even woken up each morning and looked forward to my hour of puttering each day.

What? Looked forward to cleaning? How does that work?

I’ve found there is a big emotional difference between the idea of puttering and the idea of cleaning. It is a change of perception and therefore attitude.

When I’m “cleaning,” (cue air quotes and frowny face) I have a specific job in mind that I feel I have to get done. It might be vacuuming the downstairs. It might be washing the windows. Whatever it is, it is something that has been bothering me. I’ve resisted doing it and now I want to get through it and get it done so I can move on to whatever it is I really want to be doing that day.

My thought process is generally negative, “Look at that dirty floor! I’ve let it go too long. I’ve got to vacuum today.  I might as well just get it over with.” It feels punitive and I get it done as fast as possible.  

On the other hand, when I’m “puttering” (cue happy, smiley face), I give myself an hour to putter. I invest myself fully during that hour, mentally and emotionally. I don’t allow myself to think about what comes later in the day. I am fully present with whatever I am doing.

This week, the focus of my puttering has been cleaning the public areas of our home, because we’ll be entertaining this weekend. That’s the only focus I’ve had. I’ve drifted from vacuuming, to washing the counters, to hanging a picture, to washing windows, to cleaning cabinet doors, to touch up painting.

Surprisingly, I’ve done more than I would normally do for getting ready for a party, just because it was enjoyable.

The cleaning has happened organically, one activity flowing into the next, and my feelings about it are very different from my usual feelings about cleaning. I’ve enjoyed the process and I’m enjoying the results.  

During that week, when I had the time and energy, I added onto the hour and tackled another area. In this case the garage. I loaded up a car-full of cardboard boxes for recycling. Mind you, these boxes have been stacking up in the garage since winter.

I drove to the recycling dumpsters in town and spent a surprisingly satisfying quarter-hour unloading cardboard and breaking down boxes. The dumpsters were located at the back of the parking lot of our local community center, bordered by woods. The temperature was perfect. A lovely breeze cooled my face as I worked. Every so often I stopped to listen to bird song and appreciate the fact that I was there completing a job I’d been intending to do for months.

You might well ask, “What is the matter with this woman that she is blissing out at the dumpsters?”

Given a job to do, wouldn’t you rather enjoy the process rather than have to force yourself through it?

What’s the difference? The difference is in slowing down, focusing on the process more than the product.

My thought process goes like this, “I’m going to invest this hour doing whatever catches my attention and needs doing. When I’m done with that, I’ll do the next thing that catches my attention.” There is no rushing to get it all done. There’s time to take a deep breath, look out the window and listen to the birds sing as I work. I’ll often put on flowing music which adds to my sense of relaxation and flow. At the end of the hour I am done for that day if I choose.

I generally get a lot more done than when I assign myself specific jobs that I feel I have to get through.

So, what’s the take away here?

Bashar talks about bliss as a sense of excitement. I believe that bliss looks like any number of positive, life-affirming emotions. Bliss is a combination of happiness, contentment, attraction, excitement, satisfaction, well-being and more.

Bliss may be what you experience as you reach the summit of a mountain after an exhausting climb. Bliss may be what you feel as you hold your sleeping grandchild. Bliss may be what you feel as you pursue your avocation or vocation. Bliss may even be what you feel as you flatten cardboard boxes with the breeze on your face and bird song in your ear.
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Bliss comes in small packages as well as large, life-purpose size packages.
We can, through our choice of attitude, choose bliss, even in the small things.