I want you to picture a Monopoly set on your kitchen table.
You’ve got the board laid out, with all the little houses on the right squares around it. The cards are shuffled, and ready to be pulled. You’ve got your counters and your monopoly money sitting in the bank. You’ve read through the rules, and are clear on what happens after different moves.
Now all you need is one thing - for the game to begin.
The go and the flow
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between structure and flow.
As a feminine embodiment coach I’ve learned a lot about masculine and feminine energetics. The basic principle is that within all life (and all people) there is a masculine and feminine pole. The masculine is the external, ‘doing’ force, which creates structure and space. It’s tangible, logical and often visible. The feminine is the internal, receptive force, which allows life to flow through the masculine created structure and creates fullness within the space. It’s intangible, unseen and often appears chaotic to our minds.
The ‘structured’ pole is the board, the counters and the rules, while the ‘flow’ is the game itself. Both need each other to come to life. Without the game, the monopoly board is just a piece of cardboard; without the rules or the counters, the game itself can’t be played.
We operate at our fullest potential when we are skilled in both creating structure and order in our lives, and in allowing life to flow through that structure, while we receive the fullness of life.
I’ve played with these dynamics for quite some time, and right now there’s another layer that I’m learning.
For peak health, the masculine needs to operate in service to the feminine. Not the other way around.
(Detangle this from gender, if that’s where your mind has gone. It’s not about that.)
The structure, or containers that we create in our lives are there to enable the flow to move. The flow cannot be forced, it can only be nourished. And if the flow isn’t working, then the best thing to do is shift the structure.
All good board game makers know this to be true. The most successful games have clear rules, easy to use counters, enough twists and turns to keep it interesting but an unlying simplicity which makes it easy to follow. During their tests and trials they’ll try out different structures to work out the peak conditions that create a really great game.
You know that feeling when you start playing a game that’s far too complicated and just no fun? It usually feels like life is draining out of you. That's because it is!
The conditions for flow are wrong, and so it retreats. You cannot force the flow.
Structure creates the conditions for life to grow (and flow)
I absolutely love structure.
When I was 3 I used to go to a play group which was basically a big room full of toys and lots of children playing. I hated it. I found it noisy and overwhelming and used to cry if my dad tried to leave me. He ended up having to stay there with me the whole time, every week.
When I was 4 I went to the nursery next door. It had “reading time” and “art time” and different parts of the classroom were used for different things. I thrived, and loved going everyday!
My love of structure has served me extremely well in education and work settings. But growing up in a world that favours all things structure, often at the expense of all things flow, meant that over time I fell out of balance. I spent much of my twenties trying to create the “perfect” morning, evening, work day etc. routine, usually copied from a YouTube influencer. After a few successful days I’d feel exhausted and would gradually start to give up - this left me feeling ashamed and like I was a failure for not ‘making’ it work.
But I wasn’t a failure. I had just made one simple, critical error - I was trying to make my lifeflow serve my routine, rather allowing the routine to serve my life flow.
The structures we place around our lives - whether that’s our daily habits, our working hours or our boundaries - are there to enable our deepest selves to be expressed and flow through us into the world. If a ‘rule’ you’ve given yourself feels constricting then it’s highly likely that it’s the rule that needs to change, not you!
There is nuance to this of course. When you start playing a new board game it takes a while before the rules become habitual - so of course a new habit or structure may not feel 100% amazing right away. And even a structure that greatly adds to your life will sometimes feel challenging. But the clue as to whether that structure is one that supports your flow lies in the answer to this question: “Does this habit / structure / boundary enliven me?”
Example: From September 2022 - September 2023 I quit alcohol. Taking a year off felt like the perfect container to explore my relationship with alcohol and sobriety. I loved it. Although there were times when I craved a drink, or felt a little left out, overall I felt empowered, confident and stronger. On the whole it enlivened me.
Nowadays although I do drink from time to time, I feel much more confident making my own rules around alcohol which support the life I want to live.
How I’m adding structure to my life
I’m completing a course in embodied wealth by the House of WE and one of the recent activities has involved creating a temporary budget. While many of the budgets I’ve set before have all been about saving as much as possible, this one is about leaning into the feelings I want to cultivate in my relationship with money - which in my case means letting myself spend more than I usually do, all the while feeling confident that my bills are paid and I am safe.
This beautiful process of creating a really supportive budget (structure) has already started enlivening me, and bringing flow back to places where I had previously been feeling stuck.
So I’ve felt inspired to look at other places in my life that could benefit from supportive structure and share them with you.
Work and business
I’m working three shifts a week in a restaurant. This allows me to pay my bills and enjoy myself a little (I’m fortunate to have low outgoings!) while I get my business foundations in order. Anything I make from my business right now is going back into the business.
I’ve given myself permission to take a step back from my freelance writing for the next three months at least to free up time to write my core coaching programme.
I have a very simple business plan for the next three months which includes just three key goals.
I use a weekly tracker to plan my weekly and monthly activities. I update this as soon as I get my work shifts each week.
Wellbeing
I’m aiming for a midnight to 8am sleep schedule. This is slightly later than I’d like it to be but seeing as I sometimes don’t get home from the restaurant until 11:30pm it means I don’t feel like I’ve “missed bedtime anyway so I might as well just stay up!”
I do a daily yoga video and I’m aiming to run twice a week. Restaurant shifts are pretty physically demanding so I’m getting some extra exercise there!
I’m making a meal plan each weekend which is very, very light touch - I plan three recipes that I know will give me a couple of meals e.g. a curry, or a pasta bake, and plan my weekly food shop around it. Then I just cook each meal when I feel like it and use the leftovers for the next few days.
Fun
This could fit under wellbeing, but really it feels better here! I’m leaning more into my beauty and fashion choices as a source of fun and expression. I have a monthly clothes budget which I’m mainly using in charity shops, and I’m aiming to do a weekly hair mask and fake tan. All of this is much less about my appearance and more about how great it feels to dedicate regular time towards pampering myself in little ways.
I’m signing up to another course in improv comedy and taking steps to rearrange some of my work shifts so that I can go to more shows. Improv is such a fun activity and comes with a lovely community, that I want to create more space for it in my life.
I’ll be checking in with myself regularly to see how these structures are supporting me. If they leave me feeling tight, rushed or disempowered then they need to change. But the intention is that they will create space for even more life to flow.
This post was originally published in July 2023. Some parts have been updated for accuracy, but the "current habits" section has been left as it was.
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