I had some lovely plans for 2023. I started the year with great optimism.
I wanted to grow my newsletter and I wanted to start offering writing coaching. I’ve done some free sessions with you, my lovely paid subscribers. They’ve proved useful to you and enjoyable for me.
Unfortunately, my body has other ideas.
Before I get into that, let me tell you about a course I did at the beginning of the month. There is a point to all of this, I promise.
The course was about healing the body with self-love with Jerome Braggs. The course was online, split over two three hour sessions on a Saturday afternoon.
Jerome’s premise is that we are made up of our soul and our energetic frequency. Our body is merely a transportation and communication device to carry our soul around. When we get sick, it is a message from our soul saying that something is wrong.
Through our symptoms the soul is trying to tell us what is wrong and what it needs to recover. He calls this our true diagnosis and that it can be gradually healed with deep self-love. In the past he had suffered from kidney failure and AIDS and had managed to heal himself using these principles.
He describes the seven qualities of love as bliss, empowerment, peace, trust, belonging, freedom and worthiness.
However, when we are ill, especially chronically, we usually don’t feel that benevolent about our body. We curse it for letting us down and often feel fear, shame, unworthiness, anger, misunderstood, judgmental and all kinds of other nasties. And if we dig a little deeper we will probably see that we have attached some of these negative qualities to ourselves long before the illness appeared.
On the course he gave us several journalling prompts about this as well as a daily practice where we start visualising ourselves as well, seeking wisdom from that future self and also building a habit of appreciation and moving from those negative words to the more positive loving version.
I found it deeply profound and absolutely right for me at this time. Every morning I have done the daily practice and I feel that it is shifting the perception of myself from one of shame, fear and restriction to a more loving viewpoint. I frequently find myself patting myself and saying that I love me.
However, I haven’t been as well physically. My energy has dipped and my step count for the month is less than it was back in August.
One of the reasons is that I have changed a deeply ingrained, bad eating habit and I think the effort has taken all my resources. Hence the dip in energy.
Why am I telling you all of this?
Because I have struggled to write.
Using my brain has made me tired this month. A couple of hours at the computer is all I’ve been able to manage and it has become apparent that I can’t offer coaching at the moment and even doing the newsletter has been a struggle.
Going back to my course, if illness is a message from the soul, I’ve had some very tearful journalling sessions with mine. I’m basically saying:
“Soul – wtf?? What the f*ck am I supposed to do? I thought you wanted to do Gentle Creative. I thought this was my mission. People love my writing and I’ve had some brilliant coaching sessions.”
And Soul has replied by saying that I don’t need to worry about building another income stream at the moment. It says that I have enough money from my rental property and I need to rest more.
It says that it just wants to work on my Countess novel, and get a second draft done of book 3, and then it wants to have fun.
My soul wants me to do practical things like buy new underwear, treat myself to nice skincare now that I can afford it again and get my car cleaned because Soul was fed-up of driving around in a shit-pit.
My soul wants me to go for nice walks, to experiment with different types of wholesome cooking and spend time with friends. It doesn’t want me to be under any pressure with writing deadlines but it does want me to make real progress with my latest novel.
So I have decided to put Gentle Creative on hiatus for a few weeks. I’m away on vacation in early March so I’m going to park everything until my return and then decide what to do. This means that from today, I will pause the billings on your subscriptions so you won’t be charged anything.
I’m torn about this. Writing Gentle Creative, consistently for a year, through challenging illness has been such a fantastic and enjoyable achievement. I get such lovely comments on the articles each week and I know I am creating value for myself and my readers.
But my brain and my body just haven’t wanted to do it. It is the Gentle Creative thing to do, to just prioritise and focus on the most important thing at the moment.
Even though I’m sad about this, there is a little piece of me that is really excited that I get to write my novel for a while and not have to worry about anything else. After months of going through a plotting process I have finally wrangled my ideas into a scene list and I’m ready to begin a second draft.
When I have worked on it recently, I do feel energised. It feels the right thing to do.
Please bear with me during this time. I’m going to send out an announcement to everybody on Friday that I’m taking a brief hiatus. I’m going to miss popping into your inbox but I’m going to go with it and see what happens.
Keep plodding gently
With enormous love and appreciation
Cali xx
So much love - and that course sounds intriguing.
I love this piece. Thank you and it’s such an honest and open account of where you are at. It gives us all a reminder to nurture ourselves and to listen to our soul and what it is crying out for. I too am exhausted. Physically and emotionally and basically I think at a soul level. I feel it. I’ve been ignoring it and pushing on. Putting myself under pressure to earn and support everyone else. Thank you for giving me this food for thought and that I’m not going mad when I feel a calling from within to rest and practice self love and trust that the rest will take care of itself. Big hugs lovely. And safe travels. And once again…thank you. Tx