Can-Do Mindset and the God Vase

What do you do to put yourself in a Can-Do Mindset?

Here are some of the things I usually do:

• Surround myself with positive people.
• Ignore the news on the television and radio as much as I can.
• Watch movies and listen to music that inspires and shifts my mood into a more joyful place.
• Center myself with still, quiet moments (which I usually do by pausing from my work and looking at the view outside my window… at the beautiful tree in my neighbor’s backyard or at the birds that come to the birdfeeder.)
• Go for a walk with the dog around the block.
• Say and write affirmative statements about the things I desire and know that will align to my highest good… habitually.

But sometimes it takes more than that for me to shift.

Like this morning.

There’s a technique that I learned about in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. She calls it the God Jar. Except instead of a God Jar, I use a God Vase.

It’s a simple exercise. Whenever something is bugging you and you want to let it go, you write it down on a slip of paper and put in the jar. When you’re truly ready to release something emotionally and mentally, it can work wonders on helping get back your Can-Do Mindset.

So, maybe you’re wondering what was so hard for me to shift that I had to use the God Vase and “give it to God.” Well, while doing yoga and stilling my mind early this morning, I realized that for several days… no, wait… if I’m honest, I’d say it’s been with me for the last month… there’s been a feeling of sadness in the background of my mind. It’s not depression or even a sense of melancholy, but more like a lingering sadness, sort of like grief about a loss from long ago. It’s been like when a loved one has died and time has passed. You now feel okay about the loss, meaning you’ve adjusted to how things will be in the world without that person, but you still feel sad about their not being with you anymore.

When I got still and this sadness bubbled up again, instead of stuffing it down, I asked my spirit what it was. The answer came immediately: When one is awakening, one sees what might have been if one hadn’t been asleep.

Ah, so it was a feeling of “what if.” Not exactly regret, but a sadness over the time “wasted” while not aware of my own power. What might I have been able to do with my life so far if I hadn’t been “asleep”?

At that moment I realized that this had been seriously messing with my Can-Do Mindset, and I needed to re-frame things so I could move on.

With that intention, here’s what came to me next:  The time during my life when I was unaware of my full potential and power was a mere nanosecond in comparison to the eternity of my existence. It has been a teeny, tiny blip on the radar screen of the Universal Mind that I am – we all are – part of, so it’s really not a big deal to God that I wasn’t using my potential back then. There was no use giving it another thought. Besides, I’m awake now and, as they say, “better late than never”!

Grabbing on to that feeling of what I can do next with my life now that I know I can do it, I wrote on a slip of paper, “Sadness about the unreached potential of the past… I release this” and popped it into the God Vase.

Are those choirs of angels singing… do you hear them too? :)