The Cost of Being Busy

When we live a life that’s stressed to the max, when it’s a status symbol to be so busy that you need every technological nuisance known to man to keep up with ourselves, we are purposefully losing ourselves in the constant doing. A busy person doesn’t know how they feel. I’ve often distanced myself from my feelings because they would interfere with my busyness. It’s a status symbol these days…being so busy that you can’t take care of yourself is a sign of success.

We expect ourselves to work, raise a family, maintain relationships with friends and family, and we expect all this to happen in an environment that drains our batteries faster than we can recharge them. Add on top of this play time for sports or hobbies, maybe volunteer work saving the world, and we’ve only touched on the pace we expect ourselves to set and the standards we’re keeping.

It is time to stop doing and let ourselves be. It is time to stop doing, and let ourselves feel. It is time to love yourself, to gift yourself the most valuable blessing available, enjoy your own company. It is time to relate to yourself as the best company you’ll ever keep. It is time to penetrate the illusion of separation by going within ourselves and keeping our own Divine company. It is time to face fears; in facing them, in truly stepping outside of whatever supposed comfort zone we’ve circumscribed our lives with, to deliver ourselves from our fears. It is time to realize that our biggest fear is in being all that we can be. It is time to listen to ourselves, and to speak our truth.

If we can recognize how busyness is keeping us distracted, how it feeds self importance, it’s not a far reach to recognize the same in the people in our lives as well. Self importance interferes with the ability to see or hear anything that doesn’t serve self. Self importance perpetuates the myth of separation. Self importance blames rather than taking responsibility. Self importance is a sure way to hurt other people through our self centered focus.

For those of us convinced that a rich and full spiritual life is within reach, busyness and its’ companion self importance, is a sure way to prevent that life from bearing fruit. Busyness is a way of acting out a belief in “not enough”. Not enough time, not enough people, not enough resources, busyness is the focus of not enough. Once the truth of enough rules in our lives, once the realization of abundance makes its’ way from our heads into our hearts, busyness is over.

Mouthing the words that everything is perfect, and living that perfection is the difference between talking a talk and walking a talk. How we treat the illusion of time is a good example of how well we understand perfection. In busyness there isn’t enough time, which betrays a conflicting belief that all is not perfect in our Oz.

When the illusion of not enough dominates your world, you are in violation of your own Divine nature. As you violate yourself, you violate the world in which you live. We wonder why the world is what it is? We look for answers outside ourselves, to our governments, religions, schools, and worse, violating the truth we carry within ourselves that we know the answer because we are the answer. That feeling seems a direct contradiction to what’s happening in our world and we decide we’re out of our minds. In a real way, we are out of our minds when we feel like we’re the answer. It isn’t a grandiose egotistical impulse to feel you can save the world.


Our world is what it is because we support and create it, every perfect moment of it. Whether we recognize or accept this truth makes no difference, denying our power as creators of our world doesn’t take the power we have away. We can fiddle all we want while Rome is burning, it won’t change that we’re fueling the fire too. I like to paraphrase Jesus on this one…We can do as He did and then some.

We can believe that there isn’t abundance in our own lives and reinforce the mass consciousness that creates a world of not enough...or, we can believe in a world that has enough, whether we know how to make what we have go around more equitably or not. Through such choices our souls’ evolution is navigated. Having the ability to choose is part of our Divine nature, again whether we recognize and accept responsibility for it or not.

The good news is “as you think today, so you will be tomorrow, therefore let us avoid all thought that causes distress to another. That statement works this way as well…as you think today about yourself, so you will be tomorrow, therefore let us avoid all thoughts that cause yourself distress. We begin creating the violent, dog eat dog world the moment we start thinking negatively about ourself.

Many of our family environments role modeled conditional love. Life skills that we learned in those environments carry on through life, skill sets that believe as a result of those childhood experiences that there isn’t enough. Our Divine nature can come into play to accelerate the healing and processing work that will need to be done to rework the limiting beliefs. The fear based beliefs will not, can not, do not go away unless and until we so choose.

We can resent the world we've inherited (living in the past), we can worry about the state of the world (living in the future), or we can stay in the moment of power. When we stay in the now, we have the energy we need to work to resolve past issues, or the solutions we'll need to step into a changed world.

We were born into a world that uses the element of time as a construct within which a soul frames an existence in physical reality, but it doesn’t confine spirit to those same constructs. Spirit is timeless and when the spirit is beckoned to act outside of time, it is so.

We were born perfect, and despite beliefs to the contrary, we are perfect now. This is an experiential truth, a personal take on reality that can defy another persons beliefs. Blind persons who can see without eyes live a personal truth that is outside the norm and its’ explanation of reality. We can often allow such an individual an experiential truth that we won’t even consider as possible for ourselves.

We will believe that a psychic can do a “reading” for us. We aren’t willing though to believe we can do a reading for ourselves. We are willing to believe in angels, but we’re not willing to be the angels. We are some of us even willing to believe in a devil within us making us do “bad” things, but we’re aghast when it’s suggested that God is within. We can believe that we’re flawed in the extreme and will not even consider ourselves perfect.

Marilyn Hayes, healer/author uses the phrase “I love and approve of myself” as the antidote to every kind of illness in her book How to Heal Your Life. She describes clients who, when asked to repeat the phrase in front of a mirror, left the room never to return. In my case it took almost of year of intermittently looking myself in the mirror to tell myself that I loved and approve of myself before the feeling was truly mine one fine afternoon.

We’ve all heard stories of heroic acts performed by ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances. Feats of strength, healing acts and the like will arise from within those people that would be out of the question in an everyday reality. Our goal then is to step out of our ordinary minds into our hearts where the wonders are made manifest.

June 2006