As a self-employed freelancer for 30 years, I have had to learn the skill of turning phases of famine into opportunities.  It means harvesting what I’ve sown, creatively finding resources, and planting new seeds.  Now is such a time. We are asked to remain in global pause as we enter the next season of this pandemic. What can we do with a pause?..

As much we may want to go back to what we know, accepting what is and learning how to respond in the here and now is the practice of any new creative act.

If you have the good fortune of having your life, your health, a home, a job, the Covid crisis could be reframed as your chance to embrace nature’s cry to STOP. Like letting land lie fallow, not doing allows something new to flourish.

STOP for a moment NOW...

The philosopher George Gurdjieff turned “STOP!” into a practice to awaken awareness. In his game, when Gurdjieff yelled stop, whatever you were doing, be it digging, cleaning, washing, riding a bike, you had to pause, in mid-action, freezing in your bodily gesture like a statue. In the pause, one noticed whether he had been aware of himself. And If you happened to be in a position that was out of balance, stopping made you fall down. 

STOP. FREEZE.

What do you feel you are doing,

right now? 

Covid is our real world STOP practice. By agreeing to put the pause on our usual habits, we can seize the opportunity to become more aware of what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is a radical movement inward. It’s a chance to reacquaint self with self and to clean up our messes. As we are painfully learning, our lives literally depend on it, individually and collectively. We are each a branch in a huge connected interdependent system. What we do matters. Knowing what I myself am doing is the first step to healing the whole. Each of us doing that together has dynamic quantum power.

If Covid is an expression of our being asleep to and out of balance with nature, the practice of connecting to one’s self is not a “self care” luxury. It’s an evolutionary necessity. To thrive, we must reshape ourselves to meet the new challenges we will face when we inevitably re-emerge from lockdown. Our response will be our destiny. We are being called upon in every dimension to develop into beings that take responsibility for what we do. It’s powerful to ask oneself: Will I be more awake or go back to sleep?  Will I try to go back to what was, or create a new way forward? Some of us, like Gurdjieff’s students, will simply fall down.

With these questions in mind, we at MOOVY have designed several series to turn winter’s darkness into a reflective season for activating your evolutionary journey inward. If you want to take charge, heal, improve, get radical and go deeper, awaken from the slumber of familiarity, and into the novelty of your essential nature, I invite you to join us over at the Moovy studio.

With Love,

Adrienne