My Learnings From My First Ever Media Pause//Part Three

Part 3 

Thursday morning I went on a bike ride up to the top of Mt Tabor. 

I waited for the light to turn green so I could cross Powell, a busy street, I felt startled when I noticed my thought that because I was a woman on a bicycle, I didn’t deserve to have the light change green for me. Hmmm... interesting. 

As I rode up into the park, I thought more about how as a sober woman, I sometimes feel like I don’t want to “bother anyone” with my sobriety. I don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable, or feel threatened. I realized though, that as the leader of a sober community, I of all people needed to work through those feelings! As I came around a corner on my bike, I spontaneously yelled out, “I deserve to take up space! I can speak my truth!!”

That afternoon, I was ready to dive into brainstorming the solution to a problem. For me this has  typically meant researching what other people think and recommend doing.  

According to my media pause plan, I was “allowed” to research during work hours, but this was an experiment to see what came in when I gave myself space. I didn’t need to do MORE research, but instead just trust that I could come up with the best solution. 

So I moved away from my desk and sat down on a couch with only a notebook and pencil. I went into Flow. And I felt more free in the idea I came up with because of the limiting beliefs I’d thought through on my bike ride. 

The simple idea I came up with was one that couldn’t have come from books, and I have now put into motion. I’m excited to share the idea with you in the next few days! 

Friday evening, though, was when the loudest, most unexpected message of all came through. 

What I’m about to describe to you might sound strange, but I’m just going to tell you what happened. 

 Friday morning, my husband and I had a little debrief conversation about how the week had gone, and what we wanted to carry forward. We still weren’t sure what we wanted to keep doing, or not doing from our week. 

I put out a request  that I wanted to hear from my creative muses, since the week was really to give them space to come in. 

After dinner, I sat down on the couch while my husband took a hot bath. This was Friday night, and was supposed to be the end of our media pause experiment.

I decided to do a short visualization to check in with my higher self.

After my visualization, I wrote in my journal what happened. And suddenly, something happened that had never happened before. With the pen in hand, words started coming into my head so fast I could barely write fast enough to keep up. It was my creative muses, and they had something to tell me. 

The message was clear. It was several pages of very messy writing, but the core message was: We want to help you, but it’s hard when there is so much noise. Keep it quiet, and it will be easier to hear us. 

I didn’t realize that while I had words flooding my mind, my husband was having a similarly profound experience in his bath with images. He came running into the living room, and sat down with his notebook, drawing. 

After the words subsided and I stopped writing, and he stopped his frantic sketching in his notebook, we looked at each other in amazement. 

I wasn't sure what this all meant, but I received the message. 

----

It’s been almost three weeks since the beginning of our experiment, and the house continues to be much quieter than we’ve ever had it. I still have urges to “check things” on my phone, but not as many. I’m doing much less “mindless scrolling”.  I can’t say that I feel peaceful all the time, because of course I’m human. In fact, I’ve had some emotional outbursts that didn’t feel very good, but instead of distracting myself, I worked through them. 

I like the change. It feels better on my brain. 

We’ve sat and listened to an entire album before bed-- doing nothing but LISTEN to Abbey Road. 

We listened to one podcast episode, and were able to really think and process it (and applied what we learned) instead of moving on to stuff the next one into our brains. 

I’ve read two books, but instead of just reading them and moving on, I’m going back and re-reading sections so I can integrate them into my life. 

My life had turned into information and stimulation overload. My nervous system was being worked too hard. The word I’d chosen for the year is “spaciousness” and I definitely wasn’t feeling it. I’d overstuffed all my mental and emotional spaces and hadn't given myself time to digest or process it all. 

One of the many things I love about sobriety is that I can continue to get curious and experiment with what makes my life better. When I feel better, it has a ripple effect into my community.

When I drank and smoked pot all the time, my life was one giant volume knob. I only knew how to turn it up or down all at once. Now I can see that life is full of a series of dials that I can delicately tune. But it doesn't work to blast everything all at once. 

If it feels good to you, maybe you'll be inspired to take a day of information rest in your home. See what happens if the house is quiet. What do you think about? What are you inspired to do, or to create? If you do decide to try your own version of this experiment, I'd love to hear about it.