Secret #5 -- Committing to Self-Focus

This week’s discussion in the Next Chapter book club is Secret #5 of The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women, by Gail McMeekin, is “Committing to Self-Focus”. Jamie, our amazing hostess and facilitator, challenges us to not just read about self-focus this week, but to experience it.

Because my whole life is patterned in cycles, so is my self-focus and self-care. Sometimes I am all about self-focus and other times, I’m very outer-focused or other-oriented. Times of self-focus tend to coincide with times of high creativity, while times of other-focus tend to align more with the fallow times I wrote about in my last post.

Lately, though, I’ve tried to be more systematic with my self-focus. On 15 January, I joined the 100 Day Reality Challenge. The intentions that I set all had to do with being more present in my day, or being more focused on my self. To support my intentions, I’ve adopted the daily practices of taking a daily walk, writing my morning pages, and keeping a 100-item gratitude list each day (because today is Day 26 of the Challenge, I’ll be adding a 15 minute meditation to each day). Okay, so I haven’t done such a good job with the walk – and I haven’t done the other practices for the past few days – but mostly I’ve been doing okay. Since I’ve been participating in the 100 Day Reality Challenge, time seems to have slowed down for me, and I’m more focused on my day. Eckhart Tolle teaches us to periodically stop what we are doing, taking stock of the moment and realizing that this is it; this is my life. I’ve been doing that more often and able to feel appreciation for where I’m at, at any given moment. I consider that pretty good self-focus.

Because my husband and I don’t have children, I don’t have that element of other-focus in my life. While I was initially heartbroken at not being able to have children, I’ve come to love our child-free lifestyle. John does demand a certain amount of attention and focus as does our apartment, but he takes as much care of me as I take of him!