You can achieve anything you set your mind to – but what are you allowed to want for yourself?
Monday Musings
Here’s your mantra for the week! This week’s card is from my The Sovereign Success Oracle deck. You can get it here or here.
Last Monday, Lucinda and I recorded an episode for our Diving into Writing podcast on Future Thinking and what futures women especially are and aren’t allowed to dream of.
It was during this episode, which will be published on the 13th of May, that I referenced a quote by – as I know now – David Allen:
‘You can do anything but not everything.’
If you haven’t come across this quote before, you’re welcome. When I first heard it, it confirmed something I’d known for a long but never knew how to put in words. Not once in my life have I felt like I wanted to achieve everything, and the people around me never failed to look at me like I was absolutely mental when I made it clear I had no aspirations to excel at all the things that the society I grew up in expects of women.
That ‘whole package’ – a good partner, a successful career, a lovely home, and the right number of kids, all of whom were happy and well-adjusted – has never appealed to me, and only partly because I never bought the belief that women could excel in all of those things at the same time and not suffer tremendously.
You’d think that we’d have arrived at a point in time by now where women can choose whoever they want to be and what they want to focus this one, precious incarnation on, but alas. Too many of the creatives I work with are held back by other people’s expectations and belief systems, the stories they’ve internalised around those, and the guilt they feel because they’re realising they can’t quite be the perfect partner and mother and housekeeper if they add their own dreams and desires to the equation.
The card I drew for today – I can achieve anything I set my mind to – is a wonderful and powerful affirmation, a mantra that fires up the solar plexus chakra and raises one’s self-confidence. But what if what you think you can achieve, or what you think you’re allowed to achieve, is coloured by when you grew up, where you grew up, whom raised you and how, and which peers you’ve had throughout the years?
What if all of these have limited what ‘anything’ means for you, have conditioned you into thinking you’re not allowed what you’re secretly yearning for, making you – consciously or subconsciously – curb those dreams and desires until they fit a mould someone else has poured for you?
Today’s journaling exercise – Limiting Beliefs about Creativity: Uncover, Understand, Revise – will help you bring to light any conditioned beliefs you might be having about your creativity that are unknowingly holding you back from achieving your full potential. You can download it here.
I based this exercise on one I came across years ago in Creating on Purpose: The Spiritual Technology of Manifesting through the Chakras, written by Anodea Judith and Lion Goodman. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it.
The exercise goes rather deep, so make sure you take the time needed to centre yourself before you answer any of the questions.
Once you’re done with the third part, I’d love for you to share your revised beliefs by leaving a comment. If that feels too public but you do want to share, feel free to email me at marielle@mswordsmith.nl.
Happy creating – and digging into those old patterns – this week <3
Mariëlle
Does cartomancy intrigue you, but you aren’t sure where to start? Or do you own a deck but aren’t entirely sure what to do with it?
So You Want to Sling Cards, Too? is a three-week mini-course for those who are entirely new to cardslinging and those who’ve just started playing with cards.
During this live course, which consists of three 90-minute Zoom calls, we’ll move from getting to know your card deck to learning how to interpret your cards, to asking your cards the right questions.
For more information and to enrol, click here.
This echoes the cards I drew this morning and is a repeating theme in my life lately. Our culture encourages us to use ourselves up and burn ourselves out trying to be everything to everyone. It's so hard to let go of the need to do it all and be it all, because we're bombarded with messages that tell us that scaling back equals failure. What if, in fact, it equals sanity?
Two thoughts occurred to me while reading your article about doing everything well and how women should live. The first thought was I didn’t want human children to the shock of many people. I have fur children instead. My next thought was about business gurus who feel you should only have one niche and just focus on that. Ah, no, this doesn’t work for me. Both expectations make me unhappy. So I’m going to excel at what I’m good at and bring me joy!