I’ve got to tell you about Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast called Magic Lessons!
The first episode is called “Do What Ignites Your Soul.” It touched on something I feel often. As a stay-at-home mom, sometimes I feel guilty that I have other focuses besides my daughter. She says women in general, and mothers especially, need to give themselves permission to do the things that ignite their soul. Not only is it for ourselves, but it’s an excellent example for our children. She herself (and her sister) are writers because her mother was dedicated to her own projects.
“There’s a deep, deep sense that once you are a mother, you lives belong exclusively, entirely, and only to your children, even if they’re in school… even if there’s 8 hours a day where they’re not in your presence. Anything that you’re doing in those hours that is for you and not for them, there’s this deep fundamental sense that you are taking something away from those children… that anything you do that ignites you harms them.”
Of course we must be kind to ourselves, and fill up our own needs and give ourselves a life… we can better take care of a family if we are cared for. But beyond that… Anything we do that blocks us from the work that wants to come through us is fear. It can show up as perfectionism, guilt, procrastination, insecurity… because we are too scared to do it.
I have definitely been too scared at times but I am overcoming it. I know what Liz is talking about for sure.
She reads a quotation from the British novelist and woman of letters Dame A.S. Byatt, author of my absolute favorite book of all time, Possession
“I think of my writing simply in terms of pleasure. It’s the most important thing in my life… making things. As much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes things. I am who I am as the person who has the project of making a thing. And because that person does that, all the time, that person is able to love all these other people.”
In other words, if we don’t allow ourself the creative outlets, the intellectual interests, the soulful exploration, then we am not wholly ourselves, and that will lead to resentment that we’ve lost our life to them.
Tell us how you could better embrace a creative outlet and what it might open for you.
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