As a part of my morning ritual  I have a process. I check in.

As I was checking in with how I want to feel…

cosmic
wildhearted
fierce
ease

I realized a funny thing,

I was getting myself horribly stuck. Worse, I was agitated by a practice I designed to bring me joy. This ritual had taken a funny turn. I was looking at a to-do list and then asking how I could fit how I want to feel into that list.

Wha?

I was asking too much of myself. I was expecting my desires to align with what I thought I needed to do that day, rather than creating the list with my desires in mind. The difference may seem subtle, but it’s MASSIVE.

The way I was doing it is like cramming a square peg into a round hole.

Now, there is something useful about saying “I need to run errands today. How do I want to feel while I do this? How can I help create that feeling?”

But all day every day? No wonder I was feeling defeated.

And it gets better.

When I got to the part where I was trying to decide how to bring each feeling into my life, how to create my day around these feelings, I was asking which one felt like it was the most needed. Ease kept popping up. And then nasty response.

I don’t have time for ease. I have stuff to do.

Never mind that I changed my whole business around because I wasn’t feeling good. I was burning out. Burnout feels HORRIBLE.

So, it’s not surprising that ease was (and is) asking for some love. But I kept telling myself

No, no nooooooo I need to be FIERCE TODAY.

It’s the best of em. It’s how I get shit DONE.

FIERCE ALL DAY EVERY DAY.

Because that’s HOW IT HAS TO BE.

Never mind that a part of my heart sunk. A part of me deflated because I was (once again) powering through and doing things that my heart wasn’t asking for.

This realization hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Holly, this isn’t you. If one of your peeps was doing this, you’d point out that they weren’t aligning with their hearts desires.

So, that day, instead of getting shit done by acting like a bull (mind) in a china shop (body). I let myself rest. It was what my body was craving, and I surrendered to her.

And wouldn’t you know it? The next day, my to-do list got done.

We all fall off the wagon. We all fall short of grace. The question is:

Are you going to go back to how you want to feel as your compass, rather than pushing through because it’s THE RIGHT THING TO DO™?

For me, fierce would (and did) come up again. But that day, letting go of it was fiercely protective of what I needed most.