Don’t want to get up and do a thing? Me either. Lots. And mostly, I don’t. You know what? It all works out.
Why?
Hint: the word “procrastinating” implies failing or at least kind of weakly putting off something on your it’s-so-super-important agenda.
Key word: YOUR.
Ah.
What if there was a bigger plan than yours. What if following the body’s cues (or actually just being the body, as the separation is only a perceived one) and acting when acting happens, observing but not taking orders from the thoughts, is actually the Truer thing?
Because, well, it is.
Allow me to unravel this; it goes further than you might think.
Plans can be inspired and fun and in flow and in the now. Or they can be premeditated little prisons. We don’t like prison. We tend to rebel against the have-tos and the shoulds.
Because…
Our agenda is often not what’s called for NOW. Following a plan can often mean we’re working off of outdated, invalid blueprints. If we’re wearing our blinders and forcing a plan, we might just be blocking out what’s right here, right now and ignoring our very Life.
While we’re overriding Life and enforcing our small plans, we’re not only missing out on what’s actually here—perhaps what our body may need (a rest or a snack, for instance)—but perhaps we’re also missing out on taking that next inspired action that would be zipping us down our truer, inspired, Real path, not just this little rut we’ve envisioned from what we already know. We can only plan from what’s already in our data base—inspiration comes from somewhere else. Imagine the back-up that can happen here. The blocked energy. Although it might feel counter-intuitive to the small self, we’re always holding ourselves back by overriding Here.
And the feeling of procrastinating might be our cue we’re doing this.
While there is a place for flexible inspired structure (it prevents us from having to constantly remake every little decision about going to the gym, passing a test, getting dinner on the table or ourselves or our kids to bed on time), the difference between this and a control-agenda aimed at I’m-getting-this-done-because-I-have-to-Goddammit is massive.
We can feel which is which. The first, our bodies naturally just move to do, and the other? Those same bodies drag every should-have-trimmed-those-already toenail along the way and often we end up shaming, blaming and/or procrastinating. Knots in the shoulders. Headache. Eye strain. Fatigue. The energy leaves us when we’re forcing an action. As it should. The body’s trying to tell us something. That dead/dread feeling let’s us know when we’ve stepped out of here and now and are overlaying our own little plans over what IS.
What if we just stopped doing that??
In a certain season in my life there were lots of have-tos and shoulds, and I didn’t know about inspired flexible structure or flow or Here; all I knew were to-do lists. Most of the time I played carrots and sticks. But sometimes I procrastinated.
For awhile there was shame in procrastination, but it ended up being a gift— an unexpected window into a different way of being: just being. And then it all just, as Alice would say, got curiouser and curiouser.
I noticed that when I procrastinated (or rather when I removed expectation, forcing and guilt—because aren’t these, at its core, what procrastination actually is?), that I often felt inspired to do the thing on the to-do list later, in what turned out to be perfect timing, without forcing myself to do it. Or it got done in a completely unexpected manner. Or it was removed from the to-do list altogether due to factors outside of what I could foresee. Synchronicities abounded. In every case, the effort went out of it and it just…happened. I observed, as I experimented with this new world, that I could go any length of time with no plan at all, just the intentions for the bigger picture (e.g., health, graduate, enjoy etc.) and the things got accomplished. And then I realized that I didn’t need the intentions, either.
That’s when things got crazy.
Or, rather, not crazy at all. Actually, effortless. While the mind claws and screeches against the idea of “no plan” (how will anything ever get done??) the mirage of a plan at all is really just a mind-thing in the first place. There’s a bigger agenda at work here.
If the brain shows activity of a decision six to ten seconds before the “self” takes credit for it, who is really pushing an agenda here anyway? It’s nothing but this false self who thinks it’s in charge but is just taking credit for the real boss.
(Oh hey, Oz. Again.)
So what or who IS it who has the agenda then? Life Energy? God? Whatever you want to call it, it’s not the boss you think it is. It’s not this small you you think you are. It’s much bigger. To observe what happens when we (appear to) release (more accurately, it releases us) the illusory control we think we wield is to awaken to a whole new world. One which is potentially much (or completely) less stressful.
Because things get done. Flow happens. All without effort from this “self”. And when this little illusory self isn’t trying to control everything (which is only ever an illusion anyway), we can observe. We can surf.
But we’re not trained in this.
We’re conditioned to think that “we” make decisions and carry out actions because we decided to do so. So what do we do? We don’t do anything. The conditioning unravels when we stop overriding what’s here. I encourage you to fall down the rabbit hole of the link above. While we can weigh decisions and make pros and cons lists—did we decide to do this? Or was it already decided to weigh this or that and “we” just took the credit?
Slippery little slope, isn’t it?
Free will? Maybe not. Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe there is no “me” to have free will at all.
From my experience, which is backed up by the science mentioned, there’s no self here deciding any of this. But there’s the illusion of self. This story of who we are. But when the illusory self wakes up to its own illusory nature—voilà—we’re free.
I’m not saying I am always in awareness of all this. I’m just saying when I am, I’m free.
In which case, paradoxically, there’s no illusory “me” to seek illusory “freedom” anymore.
Conditioning is a bitch, right? Decondition. Procrastinate away. Be. See what happens. Voilà.