LifeSoup by Cherie Dawn Haas

People often ask how I get so much done in my life, and there are two things that come to my mind:

1. I don’t watch a lot of television, and when it is on, I’m often exercising while watching or just have it as background noise while I’m writing or reading.
2. I always try to set up my day for success the night before with a bedtime routine.

When possible, I go to bed at 10:00pm (by 10:30 – no later than 11:00 – my mind is quieted and I’m ready for sleep.) If my husband and sons are home, I put my phone on airplane mode and then use it to listen to meditative music while I write, meditate, or read.

What to write? I don’t use this time to actively work my brain. This writing time is for my journal. I might reflect on the day, jot down favorite moments with my family, vent about frustrations, or put words to my fears and release them out of my head and onto paper.

What to meditate about? After a long day of “all the life things,” my mind is still ready to race. It sees me settling down to meditate and instead of hitting the brakes, it revs the engine. That’s okay. It’s meant to think. So I give it something to think about. I might count to four while inhaling and then to five while exhaling. I set a timer so my mind isn’t worrying about if I’ve been meditating long enough. 

What to read? I intentionally choose to read non-fiction books that are about spirituality, religion, meditation, yoga … you get the point. Reading fiction right before bed can plant images that I don’t want to take into the unconscious realm with me, causing nightmares or even just general unrest, depending on the novel. I save fiction for daytime reading. 🙂 

Sometimes my husband, Dwayne, comes to bed during my writing / meditating / reading window. When I’m reading, he’ll make me laugh by scooching close and staring at my face, and sometimes reading the words out loud, intentionally mispronouncing or misinterpreting them. 

One night, he did this as I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, “Peace is Every Step,” and it was a paragraph on suffering:

“From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, ‘Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don’t want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy.’”

I pointed to the words and said, “you’re making me suffer,” and he laughed with me and said, “I’m sorry. I’ll try to be more understanding.”

We joked about it and continued to reference this concept of suffering and understanding. Still, the reality is that even talking about it in a silly way helps us think about how to better communicate.

For example, Dwayne gets up before dawn to go hunting with our son, Aaron. (This provides our family with venison for the year). When they were finished hunting for the season, they chose to sleep in, but Dwayne forgot to turn off his 4:00am alarm. When I woke to it, I could hear part of my mind wanting to get mad, to go ahead and get up and make coffee and read (fiction, haha), to huff and puff and further wake him up and say irrational things about him not wanting me to have a good night’s sleep. 

Instead, I paused and knew that he didn’t set the alarm to make me suffer and by doing any of the above, I would then be causing him to suffer more than just from waking up in the middle of the night.

This is just one glimpse of an example of how we can practice understanding at home with the ones closest to us. Imagine if we can extend that practice of pausing, thinking, and then finding compassion to others, even strangers we come into contact with. Often, others aren’t trying to offend or inconvenience us. We can consider that when our ego speaks out and flares up with impatience or anger.

Is there a time you can try to choose understanding, patience, or compassion?

In the Writing World…

This past Spring I finished writing (which includes years of re-writing and editing) my second novel, “Ashes for William.” Because I believe in this book, I spent months sending query letters to about 70 literary agents in hopes of finding my “soulmate” of a representative. Alas, it never happened and although I received many rejections, it wasn’t enough to make me give up on this book. In early 2023 I’m launching a Kickstarter to fund the self-publishing costs, so stay tuned ~ I plan to include some very cool perks, like getting your name published in the book itself.

And, this November I was a “winner” in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which means that I finished the 50,000-word first draft of what will become my third novel. I’ve been working on various incomplete versions of this one for several years. How did I finish this recent draft so quickly? I started with a strong outline that I spent months crafting. Having this map helped me soar through the word count. There’s still much work to be done (probably a few more years, accomplished in an hour at a time here and there), but the skeleton is in place. If you’re considering writing a book, NaNoWriMo is a great resource.

Until next time,

Cherie Dawn