Life Design Action: Intuitive Rule Breaking

Requires: Your intuition, a sense of personal leadership, acute risk-awareness and rules.

Does not require: A computer that says no.

(Where I live the roads are windy and one frequently faces blind bends. As the summer season creeps in, touristic traffic creeps in and the risk of getting splattered whilst walking or on a run is doubled. This is why, when I go walking or cycling or running, I tend to become versatile with which side of the road I decide to move along. If I’m about to run/cycle around a dead blind bend and face an oncoming car in a very tight situation, I would rather go to the other side where everyone can see each other. This often means that I am schmoozling about on the incorrect side of the road.

Which is essentially

Breaking

The

Rules. 

Being an intuitive rule breaker whilst running makes running with others awkward. I don’t really want to be reminded I’m on the wrong side of the road. I like to follow my own intuitive thread of what is safe rather than the imposed regulations of what is safe. 

When I was a kid growing up, there was another rule that stated, “If you don’t go to University you will not be educated, have no qualifications and be on benefits for the rest of your life.”

 That rule also seemed as though it could be flexible, so intuitively I followed my own breadcrumb path and found myself running my own businesses from 21 years old. I’ve never been in debt, never had to pay back student loans and never been on benefits.

In my view, culturally accepted rules are not exactly there to be broken.

But our own intuitive initiative is definitely there to be followed and sometimes this goes against the rules.

Man made rules remind me of the wooden rulers that children’s knuckles were rapped with in turn of the century classrooms. Intuitive initiative is less like a wooden ruler and more like stuffed velvet snake (purple velvet). Velvet stuffed snakes are very versatile and can be used at draft excluders, warm scarfs and for all sorts of other things. They can also be bent to support and guide and do this is a soft, succulent way.)

***

The Purple Snake Approach

    The House of Bethan Groove-athon is about to begin …

And it turns out that Naughty N’s silence on the matter is because she secretly booked a spontaneous week in Cyprus.

“There’s no way I am only eating raw food whilst on holiday,” she told me, whilst flouncing about and then lifting her top to reveal her stomach. “Am I looking brown?”

“No you are looking red.”

“Oh dear. It is incredible how burnt you can get after six minutes in a tanning booth.”

I suggested to Naughty N that rather than shrivelling her skin under ultra-violet lights, she should go for a fake-and-bake like we had before.

“But I don’t want to look orange,” frowned N, hands on hips and cocking her head to one side. We both paused and stared thoughtfully, considering umpa-lumpas and fake tans and real tans and at which point the rules changed about whether it was okay or not to look orange.

“Okay, well if you are going to Cyprus then you’ll have to join the Groove-athon when you get back. But that means you’ll have missed the first week and have therefore failed it.”

“Can’t I start the week I come home?” wheedled Naughty N.

“Nope. The Rules say we start on Tuesday 28th of June and that’s THAT.”

Ha. That will teach Naughty N to book lovely, extravagant holidays whilst the rest of us are creeping about in whatever meagre sunny patches we can find.

Unlike Naughty N, the other Groove-athon participants are far more engaged with The Rules which are basically as follows:

1. Choose your aim (mine is conscious chi-building).

2. Select three activities to complete for each week (me and the Isle of Wight girls have chosen to hook our activities around Mind/Body/Munch. So for example, starting on Tuesday we will be eating raw food, doing daily yoga and muttering a mantra whilst in meditation. Goddess Janin is due to have her baba in 6 weeks, so she is opting for Duty Delights (the breaking of Procrastination).

3. Complete the week and lavish yourself in points for each day of success.

4. Select the three activities for the next week.

5. The person who fails the most weeks has to do something horrible. Like jump out of an aeroplane.

They are the only rules that are rigid in the wooden ruler sense. How those rules are interpreted or experienced is down to the participant.

I am currently v v v excited about the whole thing. Originally I was going to follow my Raw Food Detox recipes for week one, but now I have decided to Purple Snake the whole thing and have no fixed rules for what I’m going to eat or when. I will follow what my body feels and if that means, 3 yellow peppers, 3 red peppers and 13 grapes on my way home from work in the Spar car park, then so be it.

The Purple Snake approach has made the whole thing feel very creative. So, for example, I have decided to specifically focus on liquids this week:

Juices!

The one on the left is beetroot, apple, lime and pineapple. The one of the right is the same, minus the beetroot.

Fennel tea from the garden.

Very chi building.

And camomile from a beautiful blue pot in the rockery.

Right, I’d better go as Ads wants to go and collect his car from Cowes and it is blue and golden outside and the sun is shining in the garden and the beach is calling and I can hear Pix loudly putting away dishes in the kitchen and it is 11am and I’m still in my PJs.

Will let you know how the Groove-athon commences!

***

(Key Point: Rules aren’t for fools, but I believe it is foolish to obey without question and to always do without awareness. Where are you unconsciously following rules in your life? What family rules did you grow up with? Many rules that we lived with as kids, we still follow as adults. Where could you be more flexible with rules in your life and is it time to replace the Wooden Ruler with the Purple Snake a little more often?)