Procrastinating
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Okay, so I have the charts and I have found the drawings I made, and there is nothing stopping me from preparing my talk on Sunday – except me, and this habit of not doing things until forced by lapse of time.
So, guys, why? A lifetime habit of procrastinating by preference, plus sometimes procrastination almost by compulsion. Why? I get the link to homework, but would you please expand on it?
We’ve said – and you have heard us saying – that a lifetime’s undesirable results have followed from this habit. We now tell you it is akin to what you have seen in Nancy.
I was with you, then lost it, trying to remember. Again?
It isn’t just your being unwilling to be kicked. You need to opt. You have the right to choose and the responsibility to do so. Much of what seems to be procrastination is really – or anyway could profitably be seen as – refusal to choose to do something.
Expecting to be carried downstream?
Sort of. That can be a good thing, of course, but better if done willfully. Now, here’s a nuance of your situation in the body that you may never have thought of. Like everything else, it is, or express is as, part of a duality. On the one hand, willfulness. Determination to shape your life, have your way about things, make your mark. On the other hand, receptivity. Determination to shape your life by letting it be shaped, to have your way be Life’s (or the Higher Self’s, or God’s) way.
But life isn’t lived at either extreme of any polarity. As Yeats said, there is no life at the full moon or the dark of the moon.
So that sometimes consistency is not desirable.
More like, so that where consistency is impossible, attempting it is counter-productive.
There is a time for will and a time for acceptance, just as the Bible says.
Well, this does put a different spin on things. You are saying my will is under-used?
Under-used and therefore sometimes inappropriately expressed when used, which makes you so much the less inclined to use it thereafter. Your parenting experience was largely this.
Is there a trick to using will appropriately?
Rebalance your chakras every so often; that will help.
As part of the recalibration, get into that space fully, then visualize your chakras from the bottom up, and expand and contract them – you may find it easiest to first contract them fully, then expand them and over-stretch them, and finally let them spring back to their appropriate position for the moment.
Or you could focus on your third chakra by itself, but that’s hardly necessary – the full process shouldn’t take two minutes.
Now about the involuntary part of non-choosing.
It’s your robot; reprogram it.
It is helping me to do what?
It thinks – as it was created to think, long ago – “why should he have to do this rather than what he would really want to do?” There’s the resistance. Further: “A few minutes of doing this, instead, will sweeten the pill of having to do what he has to do.”
So instead I could reprogram it to say, let’s see —
“Everything I’m doing now is what I want to do or what I have to do in order to do what I want to do.”
Not bad, but not complete. Try again?
“By doing things as they come up, or as it is appropriate to do them, I live freely and creatively.”
Not bad. Once more for a wrap-up.
“The time is now. I still have time to have fun or to goof off, but I have no need to escape from unwanted responsibilities, and my time is needed to do what I wish to do.”
Yes, that covers it nicely.
1) not being forced
2) living creatively
3) no time now to procrastinate.
I seem to feel my robot hearing it. Do I mean it? Yes, I do. This is a good TMA column, perhaps.
Good to hear. Sometimes I can convince myself that something else is ‘way more important to do first (like clean the oven with a q-tip or change the cat box), thereby self-righteously procrastinating on the real thing that needs doing.