And it doesn’t just land. It touches down in your consciousness and ripples out. Circles echoing circles. Reverberating.

It sets off a chain of spiraling cycles that move outward and downward simultaneously.

What started as a stone is not just stone. Skipping out over the water, it has now become a new thing that is stone-meeting-water.

No longer an object but an encounter. Maybe even a relationship. Patterns and circles. Center and periphery.

It is not unusual to think you want something with all your heart and still have parts of you who resist it.

It is okay to want something and not want it at the same time.

We all self-sabotage like crazy. We all have residual doubt and experiences of pain that accompany desire. It is normal and human and nothing is wrong with me.

Anyway, yesterday on Facebook she put out the question:

When you feel discouraged about your art or your business, what helps you keep going?

And there I was scribbling down all sorts of things in response.

Not because I’m a weird genius, but because ohmygod I get discouraged all the time. This is a part of my experience that I am achingly familiar with.

The me who knows how to stop.

Exhausted me: “This sucks! I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to recover when I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know how to do this.”

Except…

When I was first training to be a yoga teacher and sprained my ankle in a non-yoga-related and completely ridiculous three-stooges-tripping-over-a-ladder incident?

Sprained ankle me knew how to stop and recover. She knew how to take time off. She knew about ice and elevation and not-doing.

Everything is connected. At least, theoretically.

And even if it isn’t, we can pretend (or assume) that within the world of you and your you-ness:

Connections are everywhere.

This comes in handy whenever things get overwhelming. Or when your to-do list is seventeen million miles long.

Look at the garden.

It’s a beautiful garden. It’s the place where all your projects, hopes, possibilities, things that might happen and gwishes are growing.

But there are way more things growing in this space than you could ever possibly tend to.

Sometimes it seems like there isn’t any point in taking care of any of these flowers, when taking care of one means abandoning all the others.

Luckily, these are fractal flowers.

Also possibly magical. I’m not really sure how it works.

I am phobic and weird about oh so many things, really you don’t want to know and I don’t want to make a list so let’s just drop this making certain types of phone calls.

It’s a fear. But it’s not an irrational fear because I don’t believe in irrational fears.

Anyway, it sometimes makes it hard to be me.

This is a very partial list. Some of these things I learned from my dear, sweet Hiro, my sister-in-silliness and calmer-of-worries.

Others are things I knew and taught before.

But the past two and a half years spent studying and playing with Hiro have given me a much deeper understanding of all of this.

These are in no particular order. You are welcome to add to the list!

What wheel-grinding looks and sounds like:

• Looping conversations in our head, where we repeatedly run through all the things they did or said, and the things we could or should have.
• Bringing this “he said, she said” cycle into other interactions and conversations and hashing it out even more.
• Perceiving other people’s experiences (or reactions to our experience) as shoes being thrown in our direction.
• Long, drawn-out assessments of the problem from different angles.
• Soap opera reporting (“and then he did X and she couldn’t believe that I didn’t Y”).

For the thing that is not a goal and not a wish.

And not a dream and not a mission. And not a project.

It’s a gwish.

Because it’s fun to say. Gwish gwish gwish gwish.

And because it isn’t as scary to talk about a gwish as it is to share a tiny, sweet thing that is vulnerable and in need of protection.

So today I’m going to do something a little ….

I don’t know. Something… risky? revolutionary? sneaky? complicated?

Instead of putting up what was going to be today’s post, I am going to just give you the concept for today’s post.

You’ll have the point. The thing I would normally be explaining and example-ing.

And then I will let you expand on it.