Day 107- Getting Out of the Work

I am using the tool of

self-forgiveness to work through the following experience:

“I’ve gotten to the point where I am able to move myself to go and actually set time for something and sit down to start it, but then, as I’m doing it, I “just start going crazy” within myself. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. But I get super uncomfortable and distractible and preoccupied which I accept and allow to pull me away from the task at hand and prolong the time it takes to do it, instead of sitting down, focusing and working through it comfortably.”

In my previous blog I identified the tendency I have to make this an all-consuming experience, affecting many different dimensions of my beingness/awareness/ability to move myself. Thus it is a character I become, as ‘all of me’ is engaged in the experience. The character I identified in my previous blog was what I called the ‘underestimating character’, but upon further looking into it, I see that it’s more of a ‘getting out of work’ character, wherein, I will leave the assignment to last minute because I don’t ‘want’ to do the work.

Then, instead of having left myself enough time to do it, I will have to rush at the last minute and do it all at once. Eventually I ‘get into it’, but it takes a lot, and then I have to really skim and make it look like I had spent a lot of time doing it.

This was a ‘skill’ that got me through elementary and high school, but when I got into college, I could not get away with it, and I dropped out for this reason, among many others. Now, in university, it is impossible to pull this trick. This had made my university experience quite a reality check. Even when I got to the point of sitting down to do it, ,I would try to get out of it, manipulating myself and falling in the face of many resistances. It’s like, if I didn’t have that ‘last minute’ stress pushing me, I simply could not move myself to do the work. If I had two weeks to do it, I would complete it at the very end of that two weeks, if I had one day, I would get it done at the end of that day, and if I had six months, I wouldn’t look at it for five months.

Now I am doing my classes online, so I have to rely on myself completely to manage my time. I have done pretty well with writing about this and pushing myself, but I have still not gotten to the point of simply sitting down and moving myself, breath by breath, through the work. Trying to ‘get out’ of the work had become so ingrained in me as a survival technique throughout my entire academic career, that when it came to a time where I actually wanted to learn and do the work well, I simply did not have the tools such as discipline, focus, time-management and self-movement to do so. So here I am taking on the ‘getting out of the work’ character, because enough is enough, I can no longer accept nor allow this behavior to continue.

So, herein, I will be looking at all the dimensions of a ‘character’, which are the thought, fear, imagination, reaction and physical dimensions, beginning with thought:

Getting Out of Work; Thought Dimension:

1) A picture of me sitting at my desk in front of an assignment drawing a complete blank.

2) The thought that there’s a whole big action packed world ‘out there’ that I’m missing out on, and that the work I have to do is so slow and boring and pointless.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create and manifest this thought of sitting in front of an assignment and drawing a blank, as a form of self-sabotage, based on past memories of being a student in elementary, high school and college, wherein I would daydream and doodle all day long in class, ‘enduring’ class, so that when I got homework and assignments to do at home, I literally had no idea what I was supposed to do, and would sit in front of it and feel as though it were an impossible task, and give up, or just do some bare minimum work and hope for the best, in which case I would get a bad grade. Within this:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see, realize and understand that I now DO pay attention in class, and I do know what’s going on, and instead of applying what I learned in class and have read in the material, I go into the ‘getting out of work’ character as a survival mechanism, within the assumption that I am incapable of doing the work, and going into the ‘getting out of the work’ character as a survival mode technique, creating and manifesting stress and anxiety within me, wherein I can’t focus and end up easily distracted and unable to absorb and synthesize all the information, thus creating the exact thing I’m trying to avoid, which is: sitting in front of my work, drawing a blank.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to validate and perpetuate the ‘getting out of the work’ character, by conjuring up thoughts that CONvince me that I’m only going to draw blanks, which I then believe and follow by participating in them through giving them my attention and energy, thus actually making it real in fact.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing the thought of ‘me sitting down at my desk in front of an assignment drawing a blank’ to exist within and as me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to further sabotage my application of myself by thinking that there’s a whole big action packed world out there that I’m missing out on, and that the work I’m directing myself to do is so slow and boring and pointless, which triggers the ‘getting out of work’ character in which I will put it off and then try to do quickly all at once right before the deadline.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try to read through material really quickly, looking for key words, and then only reading the parts that I think are relevant to the questions I have to answer or the part I need to research. I understand that there is a certain amount of skimming I have to do, but self-directed skimming where I am grasping concepts and strategically focusing more on some parts and not others is different from frantically trying to get through it as fast as possible and ‘find the answer’ immediately in an attempt to ‘get it over with’, which is NOT acceptable.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to read frantically through my texts in an attempt to get through it as fast as possible and ‘find the answer’ in an attempt to get it over with, instead of slowing myself down and reading with patience and focus, allowing myself to absorb the concepts the author is trying to convey, in order to integrate the information into my understanding in such a way that I can convey it in my own words.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to participating in the thought of there being ‘a whole action packed world out there’ filling me with an energetic pull or desire to go ‘out there’ and see it, while at the same time, participating in the thought that my work is so boring and slow and pointless, instead of stopping the thought as it comes by instead taking a breath and continuing to read.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place judgments on the work at hand, such as work being ‘bad and boring’ and not working being ‘good and fun’, wherein I create all sorts of energies within me, instead of stopping my judgments and moving myself to do that which I decide I am going to do in a given moment, and simply moving myself to do it as the directive decision of what I am going to occupy my time with in that given moment. No judgment is necessary to do this, in fact, the judgments placed upon the work create unnecessary relationships that cause me to become frustrated and easily distracted within myself.

Self-commitment and self-corrective application statements to follow…

Day 2- I’ll never get it all done!

Today the pattern that I found most noticeable was the feeling that I needed to get everything done all at once, and I went into an energetic possession when I realized I wasn’t going to have time to do it all. I have been doing end-of-term papers for the past two weeks and have put other stuff off, telling myself I’d get it all done when I’m finished with school. School took longer than I expected and now I don’t have as much time as I would have liked. However, now that I look back on it all, I see that if I had done a little bit each day, I could have done more than I believed, which relates to yesterday’s pattern.

So, I woke up this morning and I did a lot, and I didn’t realize that I was working myself up in to a bit of a crazy woman. Actually, I was pleased that I was getting so much done, but within this pattern I tend to do too much and then burn out instead of realizing that I need to just be consistent and do a little bit every day. By the time I left the house I knew I was in an energetic possession, because my mind was all over the place and I forgot a bunch of stuff so I had to go back home, then I was unclear as to where I should go first. It took me the whole bus ride downtown, plus some more time before I was able to get myself together again.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to participate within and as the energetic experience of ‘getting it done’ and ‘doing it all’, instead of realizing that I can only do so much in one day, and that I can only move one breath at a time.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to think, believe or perceive that if I rush rush rush and do it all right now, then it will make up for lost time and I will ‘catch up’ to myself (my mind) and experience a feeling of ‘being done,’ when in fact, there is always more to do and more that can and should be done. So within this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to chase the mind-created idea of the experience of ‘finally being all done’ as if it is a point ‘out there’ somewhere instead of realizing that I can accomplish much while remaining Here, in the present moment.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to procrastinate while I was busy with school, because I accepted and allowed the belief that I could ‘only handle school’ and only do one thing at a time, instead of pushing myself to be and become more disciplined, precise and effective within my daily application of myself in my life and my world within the context of all the things I have to do from day to day. Within this, I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to participate in the polarity opposite of trying to do too much, because I knew that I had been procrastinating and so I created a situation in which I sabotaged myself by allowing things to pile up.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe I can ‘only handle school’ and ‘only handle one thing at a time’ and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to limit myself within how effective I allow myself to be by existing within and as this belief. This beLIEf be a LIE I tell myself in order for me to not have to push myelf through resisting doing more that I believe I am capable of.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to gently push me and test my limits in order that I may expand those limits.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to justify laziness with the excuse that I work really hard at school, instead of pushing through my resistances to keep up on my daily tasks when I am also doing schoolwork.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to draw out my school work when I have extra time because I don’t have a deadline to motivate me to push through my resistances towards learning the coursework. In this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to indulge in the mind of idleness instead of facing reality and the fact that I can move me instead of depending on the energetic ‘push’ of stress that I call motivation.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to deny the fact that I know all too well that I am able to push me and move me, and that it is a choice when I do not do so. When I make the choice to not push me or move me I am choosing the limitations of the mind over realizing myself as life- doing nothing instead of doing everything, -wasting time instead of living (wasting life instead of living life).

I accept and allow and commit myself to, in moments of resistance when I see I have the choice, to choose life each and every single time until it is who I am.

I allow and accept myself to fearlessly face the fact that I am capable of self-movement and self-change, and that I will chose Life.

I commit to proving to myself that I am more than what I believe myself to be by walking through resistances in breathe as Life here, an when I see that I am holding a self-limiting belief I remind myself that it is not real, but only based on past experiences which are past. Who I am is Here, in the present moment where I have the power to choose Life in each breath.

I commit myself to directing myself through my entire day, and to do work consistently each day, without forgetting to also enjoy moments in my Life  within a gratefulness that I am able to do so.