Dijan

You get back from the holiday and within four days you're exactly where you started. 

It isn't because you rested badly.

Take two women with the same job, the same kids, the same week. One of them carries constant low-grade pressure and the other doesn't. What separates them is almost never what's on the to-do list.

It's the tracking. The anticipating. The adjusting before anything has actually happened. When you've been the capable one long enough, responsibility stops being something you pick up and put down — it just runs, underneath everything, and nobody ever asked you to do it. You knew how, so off you went. For years that was an asset.

Then it turns into a default with no off switch. Which is why the tiredness never matches the workload, and why doing less only helps at the edges. The holiday took away the triggers. The operating system came home in your suitcase.

Full piece is on my website. Link in bio.

She came to me after her father died.

She had a lovely life. Home, dog, friends, family. That was the confusing part. "Although I had a lovely life, I was, I'd say, deeply unhappy — and angry too."

The grief didn't stay in her head. It went into her body. Her health went, and her walking went with it. There were days she could barely get across a room. She used a stick.

We didn't start with the grief. We started with breath, with moving gently, with feeling into the body rather than thinking about it from a distance. And with lists. Actual lists, on paper — good things, things to look forward to, things she wanted to do. Not very mystical, I know.

A year or so on:

"I'm moving a thousand times better than I was. The stick's long gone. I don't keep tripping over, because my feet can actually carry me now."

She'd done years of therapy. It helped, and it went as far as talking goes. The surprise for her was that she already owned the tools — she'd done box breathing, she knew breathing calms you down — and that they went somewhere else entirely once the body was actually in it.

Grief goes into the body. I knew that. I'd never watched it walk back out before.

Her full story on dijan.co/stories/deborah

"I used to be more decisive."

No, you weren't. You just had less noise.

A decision is a direction. You know it or you don't. And when you don't, more thinking almost never gets you there.

Because look at what's in the room with you. What your partner will say when you tell him. Whether you could justify this to anyone if it went wrong. The last time you made a call like this one and it cost you. And the three-in-the-morning version where the whole thing falls apart, which your mind assembled once and has been rerunning ever since.

None of that arrived with the decision. It attached itself afterwards. And because it's louder than the answer, it gets counted as evidence.

Being clever makes it worse, not better. A good mind generates more scenarios, and every scenario adds to the racket it's straining to hear over.

Two things I ask in private work.

If you know exactly what you'd tell a friend in your position — you're not confused. You're just loud in there.

And if something that needed a week has been sitting open for months, that isn't a hard decision. It costs you more than the time, too. Every month it sits there, you believe yourself a little less.

Full piece is on my website. Link in bio.

My first warning sign was an eye twitch.

I want you to notice what I did next, because I know I'm not the only one. My honest reaction to my own body waving a flag was: but all the coming weeks are already scheduled?!

So I kept going.

For years I would have told you I was simply making an effort. And I was — I loved the work. The doing was never the issue.

The distinction I couldn't see then is the one I watch women miss every week now. Effort is energy applied with your system's consent; it spends and recovers. Force is the same energy applied over your own signals.

And force works. That's the inconvenient part. It delivers, it hits the deadlines, on paper there's no problem to solve.

Paper is one thing. The body keeps different books. Mine paid out first as the twitch, then as those long blank moments of opening an app and staring at it with no idea why I did. Dulled senses. Checked-out evenings. Zero desire to hear from people I love.

Back then I called it being busy.

(My inner judge had a field day with that one later: you literally teach this.)

So — where did a part of you already say no this week, and you went anyway?

Read on burnout, nervous system and more on my Insights on dijan.co! Link in bio

On the eclipse I shared a practice and did it with you. My line is taped inside my planner, where I meet it every morning whether I feel radiant or not.

Here's my report: I lived some days of it beautifully. Other days I ran my old programming from morning to bedtime and remembered the line only while brushing my teeth. Sixteen days is enough to learn which one you're feeding.

That's what full moons are for in my practice — a reading, taken without drama. You look at what you planted, and the garden tells you the truth about your watering.

September carries a new moon too, and I'm preparing something for it in my work. But that's for another letter. Tonight, just the reading: take out your line. One question, answered honestly — did you live one day of it?

I have a complicated relationship with manifestation talk. I trained too long in serious traditions to enjoy watching the moon get treated like a vending machine.

And still — some days carry more weight than others. Today is one of them: a total solar eclipse on the new moon in Leo. New moons open cycles. Leo governs desire and radiance. An eclipse compresses the whole thing into a portal you can feel.

So today I'm doing a strong practice, and I'm inviting you to do it with me — the full steps are in the slides. It asks for one hour and one honest sentence. The sentence is the hard part. Most of us can produce goals on demand; a true desire, spoken in our own voice, is rarer than we'd like to admit.

I'll be doing mine this morning, Bali time. Wherever you are, the sky is the same.

What are you asking for today? Tell me in one word if the whole sentence is too much.

Today is Guru Purnima — the full moon dedicated to teachers.

Every year on this day I do the same accounting. I sit down and trace everything I teach back to where it came from. The practices I give my students arrived through my teachers, who received them from theirs — back further than any of us can see. I'm one link in that chain. On a good day, a useful one.

I've been a student of what I am sharing since 2009 and I still am — I return to my teacher every year, and every year I'm surprised by how much beginner is left in me. Honestly, I've stopped expecting that to run out.

People sometimes thank me for what shifted in their lives. I receive it, and then today exists so I can pass it backward, to the ones who shifted mine.

To my teachers — the ones who knew they were teaching me, and the ones who had no idea.

Who taught you the thing you'd never want to unlearn?