Glimmering Butterfly Project – Day 10
Someone in the EOLcommunity suggested I write about the effects/feelings from doing a daily 1 Day Kylego.
But first a quick summary of 10 days of the Glimmering Butterfly Project at large.
The Glimmering Butterfly Project has been incredibly beneficial for me. Simply taking the time to actually listen to myself and what my heart and body wants has been so instrumental for sorting myself out. While my circumstances on the outside hasn’t changed very much, I feel so different on the inside than I did less than a month ago before watching the Limitation Game.
But it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. I’m going through what I define as a cycle of chaos. Kyle talks about this in one of his videos, that we’re never always going to experience one type of emotion (or intensity of emotion) forever, even though we feel like it.
One of the consequences I’m facing right now as a result of “listening to the heart/body,” is that I’m having a hard time keeping track of my days. I can’t tell where one day ends and another begins. My circadian rhythm has not been consistent for years. Now I think that it will work itself out through the extent of this project, whether it happens naturally, whether I decide to try and “coerce” it into a new rhythm to be more consistent, or whether my heart/body just decides it’ll do what it wants with it.
But the last few days I’ve definitely had to go back and cross-check the project’s daily “summary” to see when I posted content for what day, because sometimes I would wake up at 11pm one day and that would be the beginning of the following day. And since I would flip-flop between waking up in the morning and waking up at night, it became very muddy on what content belonged to what day.
Sometimes I just have to stop myself, disconnect, and hit the “reset” button. Because honestly, what I did yesterday doesn’t matter too much. What I “put down on paper” won’t matter too much. In a year, in a few months, or heck in a couple of days — it won’t matter that much whether my “records” show that I put a piece of content down on Thursday at 11pm or Friday at 1am and which day it counted for.
At the end of the day, what matters (for this 30 day project) is that I stay with the heart and continue embracing the flight of a butterfly.
And despite the madness that is my sleep cycle, that’s exactly what’s happening. When I get tired, I go to bed and don’t fight being awake/asleep at abnormal hours. If I’m not hungry, I don’t stress eat unnecessarily. When I feel dirty, I go get clean. When my room’s a mess, I go clean it. When I feel called to work on a project, I actually go and do it instead of wasting 90% of my time on YouTube.
It’s not perfect, of course. I don’t listen every time, but the gap between not doing it and doing it is shortening every single day.
Effects/Feelings of Doing 1 Day Kylegos Every Day
But first I should actually go do my meditation and 1 Day Kylego for the day.
… Okay.
Side tangent, now that that’s done. Looking back at the past 10 days, it’s definitely been up and down as far as “when” I do my meditation and Kylego. Sometimes it’s within the first hour, sometimes it’s in the middle of the day, and sometimes it happens in the evening just to check it off my checklist for the day.
But the best days of the project have been, almost without exception, the days when I do my meditation and Kylego as soon as possible. Sometimes I still scroll through Facebook when I first wake up, because my body hasn’t found its natural rhythm of being awake at that time – so a little jump start is necessary. Although it’s better when I do something else other than be on the phone or the computer, like go make tea and physically move around. But never the less, doing meditation and Kylego earlier is better.
Having just finished my meditation and Kylego for the day, I want to preface this with one thing: these strategies and tactics aren’t necessarily “magic solutions.” Even when I do them, even when I feel great about them, I don’t always follow through with some of the things that I do. But there is, without a doubt, more momentum in every day the past ~2 weeks since watching the Limitation Game. Imperfect, but progressing.
And that’s more to be said for me than what I was doing before I watched the series and started implementing these practices.
And this is only 10 days of this “project.” They say it takes 21 days to neurologically build a habit. Or 30 days. Or 60 days or … you get the idea. In other words, I’m only a small portion of the way forward and I’m seeing the benefits, so I’ll have to do an update again after the project is done.
But what I will say is that doing this Kylego exercise every day has been incredibly beneficial. A part of me actually tries to convince myself NOT to do it, because doing it raises my awareness of what I’m actually capable of. And if I don’t do it, then I don’t have to face the music.
I think it’s possible that I’m downplaying the grandeur of what I “should” be doing with my 1 Day Kylego, but they have become a way for me to strategize what I want to accomplish for the day. The “remember the future” method has an interesting way of downplaying how “hard” some of the things I want to do are. I’ve struggled to get myself to feel motivated to do the things I want to do (and I understand that we also need to be able to DO things even when we don’t “feel like it”), but immediately after my Kylego (which typically takes less than 10 minutes, whether I write or speak), I feel super amped up to get shit done. And then I actually do.
But there’s also another interesting little side effect of doing a verbal Kylego for me. I’m not someone who normally talks a lot, and conversation is often challenging for me one-on-one. But as I continue to do verbal Kylegos, the level of comfort I have with my own voice starts to increase. This is similar to how I would read books aloud to help me get acclimated to how my own voice works, except this time what I’m saying is organic and genuine, not read from a page. It’s actually an incredibly beneficial vocal training exercise for me.
I’m getting better at catching when I’m not being very articulate or that I’m speaking too softly. It’s helping me to find the ranges in my voice that feel more comfortable, more confident, and I can tell when I’m holding my voice back versus what my “real” normal volume is. In a weird way, just saying my Kylegos helps me to learn how to be more expressive, how to embrace my own voice, and eventually I hope that it will carry over into actual conversation with people as my “ideal volumes and articulation” become habit, not something I have to think about.
And on top of all of that, using my voice to “remember” my day, it puts me physiologically in a better state. Sometimes I have to stand up and walk around the room when I’m doing the Kylego. In fact, I think most of my Kylego exercises (particularly the month-long or year-long ones) that have the most ambition and grandeur to them are the ones where I’m loudest, where I’m pacing about the room — I’m just bridling with energy and I have to let it out.
That movement and the physical exertion of my own voice shakes my body up in a way that acclimates it and me to actions that involve doing things, rather than just sitting in my chair and scrolling about in an aimless fashion. I became far more aware of when I’m just defaulting to unproductive actions and can instead switch back to doing what I want to accomplish.
So while I don’t see these exercises and practices as “magical solutions,” I can’t argue against the impact they’ve had on me these past couple of weeks. And I don’t think I’ve seen the true extent to them, if I stick with them in the long run and develop consistency with it.
//
A few tiny Left Page ideas and inspired-idea projects that came up during meditation and Kylego:
- Updating my “wall.” In 2017 I printed out all of the major things I wanted to focus on for the year, my top questions, etc. So I want to update that for 2018. I’m very visual and I like to have “projects” for things, so this could help me stay a little more grounded in the progress I want to make. One of the “failures” of my 2017 was not staying on top of actions related to my goals, so I want to break my directions down with tangible actions/objectives, while also keeping it dynamic to adjust as I (and my heart) evolves.
- Combining different methodologies: I love the EOL stuff and I also love the “get shit done no matter what” stuff. And as one of my favorite people online says, “pull from both sides.” So I’ll be combining this “heart stuff” and Left Page ideas with some of the tangible “get shit done” things and different concepts and processes around breaking down goals into actionable steps I can take, schedule them out, etc.
- Creating a Left Page wall for all of my “big ideas,” similar to a vision board but for everything that comes to mind during a Left Page exercise. Of course I want my default to immediately take action on a Left Page idea, but having something I can look at and “revitalize” a crazy idea I had would be really useful for staying on track. And I can always remove something if it’s no longer exciting to the heart.
- Printing out not just my Top 10 Questions (for my wall), but having a jar full of my Top 100 Questions, so that if I ever needed something to contemplate, or to concentrate on during my meditation, I could pick one.
//
Photo by Ryan Oswick on Unsplash
