Life Design Attitude: Where your focus goes, your energy flows

Requires: Eyes, brain and will

Does not require: Thinking about landslips or giving birth on a shower curtain

Whatever you choose to focus on is what you will start to see and what you see creates your personal reality. If you focus on the negative, on the blips, on the things you don’t like about a person or yourself – that is what you will experience. Choose to focus on the path forward, what you love about yourself and your life and others and everything else will simply fall away.

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Yesterday I turned 36 weeks pregnant. According to the midwife this makes my baby “imminent”. When she said this I almost insisted that she take the word back.

“How can this baby be imminent?” I asked, totally shocked. “That sounds like he could come ANY DAY!”

She explained that as of next Thursday he COULD come any day.

Over the last few months I’ve been working really hard on lots of fabulous stuff, but this last month was due to be a much more Yogic existence. It was supposed to be stress free, chilled and restful.

Life, however, seems to have other plans. In fact, the last week or so has become a Yogic/Jedi battle to try and shift my focus off the stresses that I am being presented with and onto being YOGIC. For example:

 The village I live in is slipping. Southward. Into the sea.

Following the extreme rainfall we’ve had over the last two months, people half a mile away have been evacuated from their homes. To the right there is mystery flooding that turned our main road into a pop-up duck pond.

There’s movement and transition everywhere.

It would be very easy to lie awake at night and wonder what would happen if the cliff behind the house decided to fall down as well (just to join in the party).

It would be very easy to lie awake and think about the random conversation I had with a foundation surveyor at the ferry two weeks ago, who told me the whole of the village was fucked at risk of land slips, whether you believed your house was on rock or not.

It would be very easy to think about the chimney on your house (that you’ve been glancing up at for years, wondering whether it is actually a bit tilted and could fall off and collapse through the roof and straight into your bed … Or if it is really just just angle of your head …. which if you tilt it a bit to the left … looks much straighter) and wonder if it is safe.

It would all be sososo easy.

But focus on stuff like that and my God, sleep would be impossible. So instead I am nocturnally dragging my mind off getting squelched by chimneys and cliffs and instead

1. wondering where the insurance documents are

2. giving the cliff a mental thumbs up for being so goddamn stable

3. praying to the chimney elf not to lean too much on one side.

And sleeping fairly soundly as a result.

Other things have also been sent to test my focus. For example:

I am mildly emotionally attached to having a home birth. To begin with I was very cool and all “yeah, well, I’d like one, but if I can’t that’s fine  too.”  My mantra was “flexibility”.

Then the midwives came around. They sat at the kitchen table and we went through great swathes of paper that contained every risk, every possibility, every outcomes that could go wrong. All of or focus was poured onto the negatives. And then came the ultimate blow. I needed to buy a shower curtain to give birth on.

A Shower Curtain.

Not in my birth plan.

“Just buy a cheap one,” continued the midwife, who had clearly said this 100 times before and was oblivious to my face.

By the time the midwife left my mind was so entrenched in blood, haemorrhaging, the possible caesareans, the stitches the rips and the shower curtains, there was NO WAY IN HELL I was having a home birth. I was absolutely emotionally attached to having this baby in hospital. Fixed.

I then went and sat in my room in the Sanctuary and refocused my mind on all the reasons I do want to have this baby at home. With every moment that passed the beauty, the serenity, the peace, the warmth and the healing of this house seeped back into me.

Gently, gently my focuse was massaged back towards a homebirth. I knew I couldn’t set the outcome and there was a chance of going to hospital, but I could create all the conditions needed for a home birth.

Yogic stances.

Journaling.

Meditation.

A flexible vagina.

A plastic shower curtain.

With buttercups on.

Then yesterday I got a call to say I need to go back into hospital for more growth scans because the consultant isn’t happy with the bump size again. Clearly the Graph From The Midlands has not finished with me yet.

I guess that the thing with Life is that whilst we can’t 100% determine the outcome of anything, we can always choose where we put our focus. And where we put our focus, determines our thoughts, our feelings, our attitudes and (if we sprinkle in some luck and good karma) … the outcomes we are looking for.  

Choose your focus wisely Gorgeous Pie!