Leaning into ease
Why I'm allowing myself to follow my inner calls over following the playbook of everyone else.
I’m writing to you all from a local coffee shop where I came to create this week’s edition of On Holiday. Next to me is a cappuccino in a mug, with a healthy dusting of cinnamon on top and a cranberry orange scone that I already ate all of the crunchy bits off of.
I don’t know about you, but to me the energy of September always feels like a clean slate. Perhaps it’s the fact that the Jewish new year falls around this time of year and energetically/ancestrally I’m plugged into that, or perhaps it’s the changing of the seasons—a feeling of gratitude for the summer and a closing of a chapter, beginning the transition into the cocooned months of winter. Either way, I always feel a sense of renewal around this time. The air feels lighter, crisper, and I feel clearer.
On this past new moon, I attended a women’s circle to meditate on the new Jewish month, and we listened to the shofar. I’ve sat in a lot of communal meditations, but this was the first time I experienced the fusion of my Jewish culture with my meditation practice. And it was powerful. As the sound from the shofar came through my laptop speakers, my eyes filled with tears. I felt a homecoming in my soul and a feeling of coming back into myself. I am here. I am alive, I am ready to show up.
Over the past few weeks, the inspiration has been pouring in. I am so immensely grateful for this momentum. There’s been a lot of talk around Pluto moving into Aquarius after many, many years in Capricorn, and its consequential effect, especially for the cardinal signs. And although I am not a Cancer, Aries, Libra or Capricorn sun, I am a Cancer rising and have six placements of Capricorn in my seventh house. So needless to say, I have been feeling it. And knowing that Pluto has been playing a heavy role in my life since 2008 feels incredibly validating. The cardinal signs have been going through it—submitting to others and forgetting our own power. But now, it is finally our time. We aren’t taking any b.s. from anyone and I feel this deeply in my chest. Something has shifted. And because I suddenly feel like my energy is at a gallop, I have felt pressured to gather my life into systems—and fast.
It was in session with my therapist this past week that I brought this urgency up. I laid out all of my strategies and the complex ideas that I was in the process of building. And I told her how overwhelmed I already was just thinking about it all. She asked me, “What would happen if you approached all of it with a bit more ease?” And it’s interesting. I think that more often than not I go against my free-flowing nature to build structures in an attempt to ground and validate what I’m working on to the outside world. It’s almost a form of people-pleasing. But most of the time, attempting to do this stresses me out more than it does me any productive good. And when I take a moment to reflect on my past wins, most of those times the work that I’m most proud of happened when I was moving in flow with the beat of my individual creative heart, not trying to fit into any box.
Deep down, what I have always craved is to move with more of this ease. I have been on a deep dive lately about women’s cycles and living with more divine feminine energy. I talked a lot about these things on this podcast episode with my dear friend Tetiana in case you want to dive in too. In applying this thinking to living my life in better alignment, I realize that in fact, allowing myself to flow with my energy as it is every day will actually help me reach my goals even more efficiently than those systems and lists will.
So I decided to practice this right here, live, with this edition of On Holiday. I have so many compiled lists and Notion pages and Google sheets filled with places I want to cover, people I want to talk to, and topics I want to write about. Maybe some of that will happen, but also, what would happen if I leaned into more flow? Today, I am writing from a place of what is coming up right now with curiosity and acceptance to what comes through.
I’m realizing that it is time for me to truly step into what I preach, and master it for myself. How will I show up daily with more ease? Can I trust this state?
I have been moving into what is truly making me feel excited lately and working on having non-judgement for how and when it comes in. Perhaps it doesn’t all need to be wrapped up in a neat bow and fall in line with a grand schedule of six months to a year of planned content. Perhaps what I share is meant to find someone then, or right now, and that brick leads to another brick until you turn back and see the road behind you and marvel at the sparkly, glorious path you just had the privilege of walking.