The Rules of Magic: Stay Soft

"Be gentle. Rest often. Soften, soften, soften." -- Chani Nicholas

I have a tendency to overstretch myself -- to push past my own clearly expressed and stated limits and try harder when I fail to meet my own standards. When it comes to setting and achieving goals, I shape the whole of my life to meet my ambitions. I track and plan every half hour of my waking day, and if I'm not careful, I end up in a constant competition with myself to get better, do better, be better. 

If you read that and felt exhausted, I'm with you. If one's goal is a healthy, rewarding, pleasurable life centred on one's purpose, this is not how to go about it. The path I describe above is a one-way ticket to burnout.

Sick? Better do as much as you can anyway. (I'd get sicker).

Unemployed? Work yourself to death in a search for a new job. (I never considered taking the time to figure out what I would really like to do).

Creating art? Get better right now and then make as much as you can immediately! (I forgot why love being creative in the first place and acted like I needed to be a one-woman severely disciplined production machine).

I've run into the "try harder" wall thousands of times, and every time I think I've learned to hit the brakes before I crash, I inevitably smash myself into the wall again. When I first fell ill in 2012, that wall became my constant (unwanted) companion as I learned the extent of my new and evolving physical limitations.

Since then, with a whole host of incurable chronic illnesses that continue to limit and undermine me on a daily basis, you'd think the wall and I would have parted ways, but the truth is, we're still unwilling besties.

But these days, I tend to see the wall coming.

These days, I've started to internalize the solution, and it's the exact opposite of my type A tendencies.

Envision being determined, focused, proactive, ambitious. How does your body respond? What does that feel like to you?

Now consider anger, jealousy, self-criticism, anxiety. How do those feel inside you? What does your body do when you hold those emotions?

These are all sharp emotions for me. Positive, negative, neutral -- these types of emotions register inside me as hard. I sharpen alongside these feelings. I lose my flexibility and open, soft curves.

I don't want to feel hard, not even when I'm in immediate pursuit of my goals. I want to feel joy when I create. I want to take my time and linger where it feels right to do so.

When burnout starts to take root inside me, it's almost always because I've disconnected from my purpose and my desires in order to meet an external standard I internalized somewhere along the way. I've grown hard, and with that comes the sense of being unforgiving. When I start to feel this way, it takes a lot to take my foot off the gas, but these days, I do.

The cure to burnout is not complicated. At a glance, it's a the simplest spell in all the world. All you have to do is centre softness.

These past few months have been hard on all of us. We're in the midst of a pandemic, a burgeoning mainstream awareness of systemic racism, and a need to take immediate anti-racist action. In addition to this, each one of us has more personal struggles, whether as a direct result of shared world issues or separate from them. Staying soft in the face of upheaval feels like the exact wrong appropriate to take. Don't we need to be alert, aware, on guard, ready to act?

In the light of all this upset, being soft can feel like a threat to our personal well being. Doesn't soft mean weak? Doesn't it mean being a pushover? None of us can afford that sort of weakness right now!

But softness is actually the foundation of our survival and gives us the tools we need to thrive. Without it we lose ourselves, our voice, our anchor. Being soft means we’re present. It means we move with intention and kindness. We respect our boundaries because we take the time to feel them. 

Softening starts inside us. If we cannot be gentle and sweet with ourselves, we cannot extend this to others. Learning how to be soft with myself was one of the biggest challenges I've ever faced. Centring softness does not come naturally to me, and after a lifetime of pushing, holding a soft space for myself went against every one of my beliefs.

This holding space is key. When you hold space, you create a boundary, and boundaries are essential to our wellbeing, especially when we face burnout.

Softening starts, like all healing, with listening. This can start with a question as easy as "Do I feel hard or soft right now?" Work through how you can move towards softness.

If it's hard for you to hold yourself in softness, think of a person, animal, or delicate object in need of care. For them you bring love, compassion, understanding, patience, and space. Consider all that you would do for them, then do those things for yourself.

This isn't an overnight shift. It's a constant practice, which means it helps to have a quick reminder of your intention to be soft, like the quotation from Chani Nicholas above.

My reminder is this: slowly, softly, sweetly. They're words I wrote on my arm when I picked up running after I fell ill and couldn't run the way I once did. It's now a reminder I let lead me through my days, through each one of my activities. And when I found myself careening towards the wall last week, I had those words to call me back to myself, back to the softness I now call home.