(You can listen to the audio version of this blog post on YouTube.)

In mid-July, after my family returned home from vacation, my sleep was all out of whack. This was partly from trying to settle back into our own time zone after spending two weeks in a time zone that was several hours off from our own, and partly from the effects of vacation on our brains and energy patterns. These go hand in hand, though we don’t often realize it. Let’s look at my experience as an example.

Leading up to vacation, I was exhausted from attending my daughter’s twice-weekly baseball games and from working full time to support my family while also trying to build another business—not to mention the extra time spent to complete projects that would be due while I was away, and preparing my clients for my absence. My husband and I both felt like all of the effort we had been putting in would finally start paying off after we got back from vacation, as if we were riding bikes to the crest of a hill and would be able to enjoy the view during vacation before simply coasting down the other side with ease.

I couldn’t wait for more than two weeks of sightseeing and simply living in the moment, enjoying the company of friends and family. On vacation, I was able to do exactly that, and to safely try a mind-altering chemical that is illegal where I live but legal in the place we were visiting. I arrived home tired but essentially recharged, thanks to the insight and relaxation that travel nearly always brings me, along with the additional insight brought about by the drug I tried.

On almost every night of our vacation, I fell asleep easily, rested deeply, and woke rested in the morning around the same time I do at home. For the first couple of weeks after we were back from vacation, however, my sleep fell into a not-so-pleasant pattern. On our first night back, we all slept the sleep of exhaustion brought on by about 15 hours of driving and flying. Then I experienced several nights of not being able to fall asleep for hours after going to bed. On our first Friday night home, I had nearly drifted off when one of my kids startled me into full wakefuleness. After they had settled back down, I lay down but had a moment of insight about some aspect of my business, so I got up and wrote down the insight. Then I went back to bed. When I was once again nearly asleep, a kid once again brought me to full alertness. As I was climbing into bed after sorting out the child this time, another amazing thought hit me. I got up and wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it. Finally, I lay back down again but found myself wide awake. Angry that I couldn’t sleep, and recognizing that at this point, I was going to have to push myself to utter exhaustion before I could fall asleep, I started cleaning my office. I attacked two overcrowded shelves full of papers from graduate school and college—and even some from high school! After an hour or two of clearing, I was finally able to sleep like a baby.

When I woke the next morning, I reviewed the notes and progress I’d made the night before, and I started trying to implement the plans I had written down in my moments of insight. To add frosting to the proverbial cake, my husband had awakened early, full of ideas, so while I had been sleeping in after a late night, he had spent several hours creating his own plans and researching ways to implement them. We spent a couple of hours discussing and melding our individual ideas into a cohesive plan for improving our life and reorganizing our home. And then we began implementing those plans.

I slept well on Saturday and Sunday nights, but as the work week progressed and I was unable to continue to clear away clutter, I had more and more problems falling asleep. The closer I got to Friday, the later I fell asleep. Incidentally, I didn’t have time to clean the office because I was working.

Finally, on Friday night, I again lay awake, unable to sleep. So I got up and worked on another shelf in my office. With that task finished, I was finally able to fall asleep, and I slept blissfully. Again on Saturday morning, when we awoke, my husband and I discussed our plans for life and business, and then went to work on implementing those plans.

The progress of both implementing our plans and of cleaning is painfully slow to me, as we’re still doing it more than two months later (no longer with the sleep disruptions, thankfully), but I know this is required. We’re clearing away many things from our home, but what feels most freeing is the purging of those papers and documents that we’ve held on to for various reasons for a very long time—at least 13 years, and sometimes more than 20 years. We’re shredding the papers and adding those shreds to our compost bins, to eventually be used as fertilizer in our garden. This is making more room on our office shelves. In doing this, we’re freeing up space for us, for our work and creativity. We’re not clearing the space to make room for more things but to have more breathing room, more walking room, more BEING room.

To rearrange objects is also to rearrange (move) energy, just like to clear away objects is to clear away the energy those objects have amassed. In this case, we aren’t simply throwing out these old papers and their energy—we are transforming the paper and transmuting their energy. We kept these papers for years, thinking they would one day be helpful to us in our professional lives, but our professional lives look very different now than we had once anticipated, and these papers are full of information that is no longer relevant to us. It helped us, and we learned from it, and thus it transformed us; we would not be who we are today without it. And so, rather than simply discard it to a landfill, we shred it and transform the paper  so it can nurture the land that nurtures our bodies and souls, the way the information on it once nurtured our minds.

Clearly, the mental break and change of scene—not to mention the restful sleep—offered by our vacation jumpstarted our thinking processes. In this case, it also triggered our need to purge those items and energies that no longer serve us.The more we clear, the more relieved my soul feels. When I encounter sleep difficulties in the time since our vacation, I try to clean. Just like after vacation, my sleep problems tend to arise near or at the end of the work week, when I have been unable to clean much, and when energies sometimes begin to stagnate. The clearing away improves my sleep and gives me a fresher start to the next day.

When I find myself frustrated by the slow rate at which things are progressing—whether clearing the clutter, completing projects, or the growth of newer business prospects—I remind myself that any forward movement is good, that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and we sometimes have to loop back or go backward to find a way around an obstacle.

The papers we are clearing have been on their shelves for more than a decade, and before that, they occupied various apartments for several years. They took years to accumulate. Years of energy from close to a dozen living spaces have accumulated in these papers, so a giant sudden purge would perhaps not be all that wise, anyway. Even if we take several more months to clear the papers, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that we are consciously releasing the old, recognizing that the knowledge has already served us and will continue to serve us in the future even when we no longer hold on to the papers. Essentially, we are thanking the paper for its service, blessing it, and sending it on its way. What also matters is that at the same time, we are consciously examining how we want to transform the energy in our lives and are taking steps to aid that transformation, including by making room for those new energies—by moving out the old. As we move out the old energies, our creativity continues to grow, and we gain more insights into how to implement our plans to improve ourselves, our lives, and our businesses.

In a never-ending feedback loop, we rest, we clear, we grow more creative.

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If you want to know more about how you, specifically, can expand your creativity, considering having an intuitive reading with me.

And if you’re having problems sleeping but can’t seem to get a handle on what’s causing those problems, Reiki might be a good option for you, as it can clear away stagnation in our energetic bodies and leave us feeling very relaxed. To learn more, or to purchase a distance Reiki session visit srsstringham.com/services/reiki-sessions.

 

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