Are you committed to your personal growth and evolution? Do you choose to become a better person? A person with more compassion and capacity?
If yes, what are your triggers for slowing down and challenging yourself?
Do you have a mindfulness practice? A prayer practice? A breathwork or movement ritual?
Do you allow for moments of silence? Do you journal? Do you create? Do you notice curiosities around you and allow them to take you deeper into mystery?
Do you set reminders on your phone? Or use the Insight Meditation Timer app to set “interval alarms”?
Do you take regular nature walks? Tune into the cycles of the moon? Do you let the first snowfall, the first crocus, or the first firefly remind you that life moves in seasons, and allow those to draw you into reflection? Do you notice planetary alignments? The stars?
Do you notice recurring themes in your life, and pause to reflect where you’ve come with them and what you have yet to learn?
Do you notice when your shoulders creep toward your ears? Do you pause long enough to notice what your body has been trying to tell you all day? Do you choose to recognize the subtle differences between being tired and being disconnected?
Do you celebrate tiny moments of joy, or only the major milestones? Do you notice when you feel most alive? Do you know what deeply nourishes you versus what merely distracts you?
Do you notice in-the-moment when you feel challenged or off, and do you have a practice of returning to the feeling to harvest the wisdom from the experience? Do you choose people and relationships as points that support? Do you have enough people and relationships that provide the kind of challenge that makes you stretch to become a better and more compassionate person?
Do animals come to you in significant ways? Or do repeating numbers cause you to reflect on what you are envisioning for yourself? Do you choose to believe there is no coincidence and note the moments that feel “important”? Do you allow the person who rubs you the wrong way to trigger reflection on the part of you that’s similar?
Do you note synchronicity, flow, déjà vu, attunement & moments of awe? Do you notice expansiveness? Shrinking?
Do you have people who lovingly challenge you and invite you into being everything you can be? Do you become curious when you are met with another viewpoint?
I don’t really care how you do it.
I don’t care whether your practice is prayer or meditation, yoga or hiking, tarot or therapy, journaling or gardening, birdwatching or breathwork, moon cycles or neuroscience.
What I care about is that you have something.
- Something that interrupts the momentum of ordinary life that lulls us into mundanity. Complacency.
- Something that gently taps you on the shoulder and says, “Pause. Pay attention.”
- Something that plants a staff in the ground and says, “Not so fast.”
- Something that returns you to this moment. To your body. To your values. To the person you’re becoming.
- Something that interrupts autopilot long enough for you to ask, Is this really how I want to live, or do I want to lean in for MORE?
Growth rarely happens by accident. Instead, it happens in the hundreds of tiny moments we become aware enough to notice what’s happening within us, curious enough to ask why, and courageous enough to choose our next scary (read: growth) step with intention.
Whatever your anchors are, cherish them. Build them into your days. Appreciate their ability to disrupt the unchallenged course of life and stir things up in all the right ways.
They are not distractions from your life.
Quite the opposite: they are how you fully inhabit it.
You know that phone typo where “I LOVE IT!” accidentally becomes “I LIVE IT!”?
Maybe that’s not a typo after all. Perhaps the invitation isn’t simply to love your life. It’s to LIVE it—and living happens in . . .
The Interruptions.
Love, Renee