Don’t Procrastinate — Meditate!
At 5.45am in my morning meditation, sometimes I will take a pen to a page in my manifestation journal and ask a question that I need answering, or simply to receive any message that I need to hear. The reply which comes back to me is always intensely meaningful, profound, and sometimes plain shocking!
My entry for 24th October 2018 was no different. It entailed a very brief exchange about fulfilling my purpose. After a few words of encouragement, I asked: “How do I beat procrastination…?”
Procrastination is the dream silencer which lives within all of us. It feeds on fear and thrives in your past and present, therefore it does everything in its power to stop you from moving forward towards a brighter future. Like most writers and entrepreneurs who work at home alone all day without a boss checking up on them, procrastination is a demon that I must face every single day.
The response was simple, loud, and clear: “Push through it and keep going. Don’t let your emotions get in the way.” Pretty straightforward, I thought, but it is this last sentence which sparked a revelation. Maybe I had let my emotions get in the way? I had always perceived procrastination as the absence of emotion — nothing more than a nagging feeling of insidious apathy. But I was wrong. Procrastination had never really been the issue at all, it was all of the other emotions that I was trying to avoid.
And I am not the only one. Professor Tim Pychyl says that people who have achieved their identity are less likely to procrastinate, which is bad news for the majority of us who are still walking the path of self-realisation. Before we achieve self-actualisation and enjoy some immunity to procrastination, we first have to acknowledge and stand firm in the face of our negative emotions in order to get the job done.
Self-doubt, self-consciousness, fear, and low self-worth are usually the main culprits here and they are all far more painful than just the nagging discomfort of procrastination. Maybe you’re procrastinating because you’re scared that you’re not going to achieve what you have set out to achieve. Maybe the fear of what other people will think is so overwhelming that you’d rather stay with their current perceptions of you for fear of damaging those relationships.
Without procrastination as a buffer, you can feel like a paper house in an emotional hurricane. Without knowledge of your life purpose as the foundation to keep you anchored into the ground, it can be easier to run and hide than to feel the potential of everything you have worked for being blown away.
But procrastination only really protects you from your greatness. Hiding from your purpose is like putting your thumb over the end of a running hosepipe — you can only stop the flow for so long before you have to surrender and let it out into the world.
Instead, look within and ask: “what am I really hiding from?” I have found that meditation is an amazing time to uncover your hidden truths, so next time you feel that all too familiar urge to avoid and procrastinate, take a moment to pause and find out what’s up. By unrooting the real cause of your procrastination you can buy yourself invaluable minutes, hours and days that would have otherwise been squandered. There aren’t many opportunities to buy time in this life, so grab this one with both hands, and next time you want to procrastinate — meditate!
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