Friday, April 8, 2011

I Did It My Way

I did a fun thing today.  I attended a psychic development class that I found on Meetup.  I've always been interested in psychic and intuitive development.  I was excited to go.  But my excitement turned into fear as soon as the teacher said, "Ok, now we're going to do readings in front of the group."  What? An oral presentation, on the first day of class?  I haven't read the book. I don't know what I'm doing.  Can I get out of this?  Maybe pretend to go to the bathroom and slip out the back?

I am afraid to be wrong.  Really, really afraid to put myself out there, to put my pride on the line, and fail.  It critically wounds my sensitive soul.  All the advice out there on moving past fear is basically, "Just do it."  I agree with that, but I'm not sure I always agree with what 'it' is.  For some people, jumping in and practicing sink-or-swim works.  It probably leads to fantastic breakthroughs.  For me, it leads to post-traumatic stress disorder.  Those of us who are intuitive and sensitive experience life very acutely, and sometimes we need to find a subtler, more graceful strategy to handle the challenges we face.  And that's ok.  I've spent enough time feeling anxious, self-critical and unhappy.  If the task in front of me is paralyzing, I will find another way that suits my temperament and balances the challenge with fulfillment.

So I decided in the psychic class that my intention was to relax my mind and learn to receive impressions. I didn't try to interpret them, I just shared whatever came to me.  It was fun, and without the pressure of trying to be right, I learned a lot about the way my intuition works.

From now on, I will just do it.  I will just do it my way.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The badly-written post

It's been over a week and a half since my last post.  I did write a draft of a post last week that I might still publish, but right now it needs some editing.  Editing is a very long, arduous and nasty process in my world.  I want to keep my commitment to myself to keep writing, but I also want to get some sleep tonight.  So I am just going to post whatever.  Just to keep me on schedule.  Nothing clever, nothing educational, nothing that involves editing.  I am just going to put it out there that I am publishing a badly-written post today.  Action wins over procrastination.

And I take another very small step forward.