Pausing for Pleasure

 My friend Jo Anna Rothman has undertaken a delightful project – 42 days of pleasure. Jo Anna is a brilliant creative dynamo and if you don’t know her you’ll want to change that. Her The Receiving Project is wonderful – check it out and I bet you’ll want to do it.

But back to pleasure. This past week, as Mercury has gone retrograde, I’ve been committed to spending a bit of time every day doing what Mercury loves to ask of us during retrogrades – to review, to reconsider, to re-evaluate. This has been an interesting summer for me. And while there have been all kinds of wonderfulness, I’m also finding myself challenged by feeling a lack of spaciousness. Particularly with regard to time.

Things I want to accomplish seem to take way more time than I expect. And when that happens I can easily slip into worried-anxious-brain that insists frenzied panic is so much better than inspired action. And we all know how helpful that mindset is.

So I’ve been playing around with deliberately cultivating spaciousness. Shifting around my schedule, changing things up. Another round of purging and releasing stuff to make energetic room. Taking mini (and not so mini) breaks. Playing with ways to give myself a little elbow room in everything.  I’m giving myself a Mercury retrograde of spaciousness and pleasure.  How fun is that?

And because the Universe loves to conspire and bring on happy surprises, today I received a wonderful tea-party-in-a box gift from a friend. So I’m about to take a break and sit out on my front porch with a lovely cup of tea and watch the bees visit my flowerboxes.  And I’m betting this little joy recess will be exactly what I need to fuel my next round of work.

So it seems I’m happily playing along with Jo Anna’s pleasure project. I invite you to as well. What pleasure can you gift yourself with today?