Yes, it's been a while.
These things come in spurts and I've been crazy-busy in my real life, so
my blog has suffered. Now I'm back with
some rather interesting developments....at least they're interesting to me and
I thought I'd share.
Last fall and then again this winter, I signed up for a
Process Journaling class through my local community ed program. i thought it would be an art journaling/mixed
media class, which it was, but it was (and is) SO much more than that.
We did a lot of non-dominant work. The instructor would have us write a question
or statement with our dominant hand and then respond with our non-dominant
hand. The idea is that our dominant hand
is the "rational" side, the side that tells us the rules and is a
constant critic. This side is important,
no doubt, but for many of us in Western society (myself included), this side
soon drowns out the quieter voice from our more spiritual side. By writing with our non-dominant hand, it
forces us to pay more attention to what's really going on with our psyche, our
emotions, our soul, our spirit.
I've done a lot of soul-searching, trying to understand
myself and the people closest to me, and I thought I had it all pretty well
figured out. On the one hand, that
meant that delving into that deeper side of myself wasn't scary or
surprising. On the other hand, I learned
much much more than I expected.
In a recent class, I kept coming back to how I have to
finish my chores before I can play. Of
course, there are ALWAYS more chores to do.
There's laundry and dishes and dusting and vacuuming and cleaning the
oven or scrubbing out the fridge or organizing that junk drawer and on and on
and on......I'm sure you can relate to that.
In my world, that means that I NEVER get to play. And if I do play, I have guilt.
I've long blamed that voice, and others relating to my
perfectionism, on my parents. To be
sure, those voices started with them. I
can still hear them admonishing me to "Do it again, and this time, do it
right!" or "If you can't do it right, why do it at all?" But I learned through my journaling that I've
taken those voices and made them my own.
*I'm* now the one saying those things to myself!
At first, it made me sad and angry. But then I realized how freeing that
was. If *I'm* the one behind all of
that, then *I* have the power to change it.
I can rewrite that script!
The second half of that class revolved around
"trust" and "let go."
Those were the messages I kept getting as I worked through it. That's hard for me, as you well know. I'm a road map and reservation kinda gal, so
trusting and letting go when I don't know what's ahead is hard for me. But I'm doing it more and more and the next
revelation was even better!
