What are you blocking or avoiding?

All this chaos is distracting me!

Your Journal Prompts This Week:

What or who in my life is currently frustrating me, annoying me, or "driving me crazy"? 

How is this frustration or annoyance distracting me or blocking me from creating, from bringing my visions to life?

Knowing that I might not be able to remove all frustrations from my life, what could I do to manage them better, to bring myself back into balance?

I've spent some time thinking this week about those little things that get to us: a wrong word said, a message delivered with a strange tone, an interruption right when you're in the flow, a faux urgent request when you already have too much on your plate.

Logically, I know too much of my time is wasted complaining about the above things, and there are better ways to use my time. But as it is with a lot of logical advice or input, sometimes it just takes the right person saying it in the right way at the right time for it to really set in. And that happened to me recently while making my way through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

In Week 2, she talks about what she calls "crazymakers." It's a fairly lengthy description of individuals that in today's terminology you might hear referred to as "toxic people" or "energy vampires" or even "narcissists." After describing all of their traits, she ended with this inquiry:

"The next time you catch yourself saying or thinking, "He/She[/They] is[/are] driving me crazy!" ask yourself what creative work you are trying to block by your involvement."
-- Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, pg. 49

And there was my Aha! moment. Suddenly, I saw all the past "crazymakers" I encountered in the forms of old friends, boyfriends, teachers, bosses, coworkers, and clients. Then I realized just how much of my life I've spent obsessing over the thoughts, opinions, and actions of these individuals. And yes, they were the reason I pointed to whenever I said I couldn't do something I wanted to do, when I said I couldn't create something I wanted to create. It was because they kept me too busy, they frustrated me too much, they exhausted or depleted me.

But finding similar individuals or situations repeating in our lives is usually a signal of something that needs to be healed or addressed. And in my case, I realized my problem has been (surprise, surprise) ME! I had previously leaned on the idea that encountering these types of people is inevitable, but really, I have been a willing party in blocking my creative work. The conversation changes from "Why are these people this way?" and becomes "What am I avoiding doing when I choose to engage with this, and why am I avoiding it?" (The "why" being fear, of course.)

So when you find yourself getting frustrated with a person or a situation that is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor (meaning your life and no one else's life is in danger in this situation), consider what you might be blocking from coming through. We are all human, so we can't avoid feeling these feelings, but we can learn to recognize them, and I think journaling it out helps! So give the above journal prompts a try. See what comes up.

With much love & gratitude,
Marcy

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