The Pause Is Not the Problem

What I learned from a year of deliberately doing less.

Last year I stopped.

Not because something went wrong — but because something finally went right in my thinking. I could see that an internal pressure I'd been carrying for years, a low hum of feeling perpetually behind and measuring my worth by my output, was quietly draining the very creative energy I was trying to tend. And I made a deliberate choice to set it down for a while and just be.

The first part of that was genuinely uncomfortable. There's a particular kind of cultural programming most of us have absorbed — push harder, show up more, never stop — and stepping out of it can feel irresponsible even when you know intellectually that it's necessary. I had a fear of what would happen if I wasn't being productive by these standards.

What actually happened was nothing like what I feared.

What happened was that the noise got quieter. The chronic sense of inadequacy began to loosen its grip. And something I can only describe as a deeper knowing of my own value started to come online — something that years of doing this work had been pointing toward but hadn't fully landed until I created the space for it.

Slowing down isn't the opposite of growth. Sometimes it's the only way growth can actually happen.

A few months into this experiment I started practicing Yin yoga — the slow kind, where you hold poses for a long time and use props and let your body sink in rather than push through. The first class, the hardest thing wasn't the poses. It was holding still. My whole system wanted to keep moving. But then, every night when I got into bed, I could feel my body unwinding. Things I hadn't known were held were starting to let go. Within a few weeks, I couldn't believe how much better I felt — and how simple it had been.

Last year was a Yin yoga move for my whole life.

I share this because I think a lot of people who are drawn to this kind of work are also carrying some version of this pressure — the internal list of things not yet done, the quiet voice that says you're not doing enough, not finishing enough, not showing up enough. And I want to say clearly: that voice is not telling you the truth. The pause is not the problem. The pause might be exactly what's needed.

If you've been feeling called to slow down, to integrate, to give yourself more space than the world seems to think you deserve — I made something that might help. The Creativity Reset is a free 20 minute guided activation designed to clear some of the accumulated pressure and help you reconnect with your own creative energy. It's a small step, and it's a real one.

Get the free Creativity Reset Below