The Power of Doing Nothing
For so many years, I lived with a level of anxiety beneath my skin. A voice that said keep going, keep fixing, keep holding it all together.
If you’ve ever lived with anxiety you’ll know exactly what I mean.
It’s the quiet panic about tasks, new situations etc.
The sense that if you stop, even for a moment, everything might fall apart.
I wore that energy like a second skin as a TV producer. Seventeen years of deadlines, pressure, and perfectionism. I became brilliant at control, at managing, anticipating, producing results, holding everyone else up.
And yet underneath it all, I had these very well hidden constraints that silently were saying, It’s all up to me. I’m not safe. I’m not going to be okay.
When I left television and stepped into the world of energy, healing and mindset work, that belief didn’t just disappear. It shape-shifted.
I started “doing” my healing the same way I used to “do” success.
Meditation, affirmations, breathwork, 10 step morning routine, all in the hope of finally reaching peace.
But there was still a effort, a force to everything. The inner constraints were in charge, still trying to ‘earn’ stillness.
Recently, I revisited a teaching by Krishnamurti that landed with me.
“The desire to become silent is the noise.”
And I realised, I had been trying to ‘achieve’ peace.
By ‘doing’ things in the old way.
What he pointed to is this: the moment we chase peace, we lose it. Becuase we are chasing something outside of us through action when infact the very essence of us is peace.
True peace doesn’t arrive because we earned it.
It’s always here and it reveals itself hen we acknowledge it and allow it to flood out mind and body.
These days, my morning practice isn’t really a practice at all. It’s a ritual and an honouring of my body and my peace. I take my time and really honour the time for breathwork, honour the time for drinking warm water.
When I feel that familiar contraction, being on the edge of tiredness or pushing theough my to do list, the old it’s all on me energy, I don’t fight it.
I just notice it.
I watch the mind as if I’m watching clouds move across the sky.
I don’t try to push the thoughts away or fix them.
I simply see them, and in the seeing, they begin to dissolve.
Because the moment I stop trying to hold life together, I realise life has been holding me all along.
So if you’re tired, truly tired, from all the striving, let this be your permission slip.
Stop trying to be okay.
Stop trying to fix yourself.
Stop turning healing into another thing to achieve.
Just sit. Not as a method. Not as a ritual.
But as you would watch a sunset or listen to the laughter of a child.
Let life move. Let thought move.
And as you do nothing, something miraculous happens.
The peace you were chasing arrives quietly, like a breeze through an open window.
That, my love, is the power of doing nothing.
With love,
Emma x
For so many years, I lived with a level of anxiety beneath my skin. A voice that said keep going, keep fixing, keep holding it all together.
If you’ve ever lived with anxiety you’ll know exactly what I mean.
It’s the quiet panic about tasks, new situations etc.
The sense that if you stop, even for a moment, everything might fall apart.
I wore that energy like a second skin as a TV producer. Seventeen years of deadlines, pressure, and perfectionism. I became brilliant at control, at managing, anticipating, producing results, holding everyone else up.
And yet underneath it all, I had these very well hidden constraints that silently were saying, It’s all up to me. I’m not safe. I’m not going to be okay.
When I left television and stepped into the world of energy, healing and mindset work, that belief didn’t just disappear. It shape-shifted.
I started “doing” my healing the same way I used to “do” success.
Meditation, affirmations, breathwork, 10 step morning routine, all in the hope of finally reaching peace.
But there was still a effort, a force to everything. The inner constraints were in charge, still trying to ‘earn’ stillness.
Recently, I revisited a teaching by Krishnamurti that landed with me.
“The desire to become silent is the noise.”
And I realised, I had been trying to ‘achieve’ peace.
By ‘doing’ things in the old way.
What he pointed to is this: the moment we chase peace, we lose it. Becuase we are chasing something outside of us through action when infact the very essence of us is peace.
True peace doesn’t arrive because we earned it.
It’s always here and it reveals itself hen we acknowledge it and allow it to flood out mind and body.
These days, my morning practice isn’t really a practice at all. It’s a ritual and an honouring of my body and my peace. I take my time and really honour the time for breathwork, honour the time for drinking warm water.
When I feel that familiar contraction, being on the edge of tiredness or pushing theough my to do list, the old it’s all on me energy, I don’t fight it.
I just notice it.
I watch the mind as if I’m watching clouds move across the sky.
I don’t try to push the thoughts away or fix them.
I simply see them, and in the seeing, they begin to dissolve.
Because the moment I stop trying to hold life together, I realise life has been holding me all along.
So if you’re tired, truly tired, from all the striving, let this be your permission slip.
Stop trying to be okay.
Stop trying to fix yourself.
Stop turning healing into another thing to achieve.
Just sit. Not as a method. Not as a ritual.
But as you would watch a sunset or listen to the laughter of a child.
Let life move. Let thought move.
And as you do nothing, something miraculous happens.
The peace you were chasing arrives quietly, like a breeze through an open window.
That, my love, is the power of doing nothing.
With love,
Emma x
