Last week I shared how I want to create a safe space so I can feel my emotions and then put them into my fiction. I use certain grounding tools to help me do that: list of 10 Things and a 20-minute free write before I work on my current work-in-progress. And weekly (and sometimes more often) capoeira class.

This week I want to share another tool I use to handle overwhelm that sometimes arises when we're tapped deeply into our emotions. For many sensitive types, we experience a flood of emotions that are hard to decipher. I feel them as a flood, a mishmash of feelings I cannot parse apart. I'm left with an overall experience of Feeling. Like a wave tumbling me, I don't know which end is up.

I'm also a child of this Internet age, coming of age just as the first visual browsers were arriving. One thing we did when computers stalled is we unplugged them and plugged them back in. We restarted the machine and often that fixed things.

In life, we can't get a complete do over each time, but we can emotionally hit the restart button.

What this looks like for me is different depending on the situation, but for my fiction it means allowing myself to come to the beginning.

Instead of thinking that I should be at a certain place in the project, and pressuring myself about that, I allow myself the grace of hitting the internal restart button.

I want to come to the page with a fresh, open attitude, a sort of beginner's mind. 

To do that, I need to wipe the slate clean inside and give myself the freedom to begin again, without "shoulds" or past regrets.

What this means to my sensitive heart is that I allow myself room to feel without judgment and sit in that beginner space where it's all okay.

This article is part two in a three-part series, so that I can share with you my journey, tools, strategies, and habits I'm using and the results of my actions and my learnings on the power of connecting to your heart and putting that into your fiction.

As always, I'm happy to hear from you.

Best,

Beth

♥