The Amazing Power of Solitude: 7 Good Reasons to Take a Break

Why do so many of us flock to retreat centers?

Why do we daydream about taking off for a weekend to a humble little cabin near the water… just Self and a good book?

Why do we yearn for just a little space of time to write or to paint or to create? Is it because we instinctively know that having some alone-time is the only way to re-glue our scattered fragments of Self? Could it be that sitting in solitude is the only way we can re-connect with our all-wise Inner Woman… to find out what she has to say?

If you’ve been looking for a way to harness your personal power, tap into your potential, unearth your deepest passions, and create a straighter path to your goals, it may be as simple as setting aside short segments of time to spend with your Self and your thoughts. Your time – with no one else in your soul-space. Time away from the heavy traffic of your daily realities. Self-gathering time. Time to view what’s going on inside you, and time to set it all straight. Thinking. Daydreaming. Imagining. Creating. Planning. Assigning new perspectives to your life-experiences. Organizing your mind. Focusing your thoughts, like a powerful laser, to alter and re-create your circumstances.

Nearly every woman I know is on a major mission – raising children or helping with grandchildren, partnering in a major relationship, creating and maintaining homes, careers, businesses… working in the church, the community… possibly all of the above. We are constantly moving and doing, yet, many of us carry around a little mental cache of important things to do that we never seem to get to.  Usually it’s our things.

The big dilemma: we are all very busy, yet, we all need more personal time. No matter what our daily occupation, whether it’s work outside the home or work inside the home, the prescribed nature of our womanhood is giving, nurturing and creating. Giving birth to the new, and then sustaining what we’ve given birth to… from the heart …from within our inner spaces. Regular periods of solitude, even very short ones,  can help us to keep our inner spaces clear, whole and healthy, giving us the opportunity to become aware of what’s truly most important for us, and enabling us to be more productive.

Gaining control of our lives starts on the inside. Even short periods of time alone create a zone where we can stop and think about the direction our present actions are moving us in, and to pull ourselves back on track, when we need to. Solitude puts us in touch with our inner drives and truths and convictions, and increases our personal power by leaving us with a more-organized, calmer mind-life, (as opposed to the dark and dangerous undercurrents that sometimes keep us rocking in our inner spaces and in our outer actions). Achieving a more aware state of mind makes all the difference in how we take what’s inside us and create our reality.

After just a few sessions of sitting alone with no one else in your soul-space, here’s what you’ll discover-

Solitude is the best way to clear a weary mind …
A weary mind can’t think clearly, solve problems, make plans or communicate well with others. A weary mind needs nothing as much as it needs an absence of input – from outside Self. Alone with our thoughts, we actually get to think through our situations. When we are alone we can come up with some outlandishly creative solutions to some of the situations in our lives.

Solitude is a worthy Rx for self-healing…
When we choose to carve out a segment of time to purposefully deal with our feelings, we allow our thoughts to progress naturally toward healing. Away from the demands of response and reaction we are free to experience our emotions, and to distance ourselves from the fear of being hurt that can make us feel like victims, and from seeing others as having more power over our lives than we ourselves do. In our private zone, we can allow a new compassion for the other players in our life dramas. And, forgiveness can take place. Emotional healing requires that we form new perspectives about the things that have happened to us. Changing the quality of our thoughts can only happen when we take the time and space to become aware of our thoughts… aware of their origins… aware of the effect they are having on our lives and aware of how our thoughts are making us feel… minute to minute… day to day….and from action to action.Your spirit’s wisdom can emerge and expand unhindered when you sit alone, with no one else in your soul-space… In the absence of other voices, our personal wisdom can emerge and we can come to a place of arriving at our own best perspectives of our life experiences.

Solitude is essential for planning your next important steps in your life journey.
The strength and courage that precede positive action are born only when we have given ourselves the opportunity to fully feel out and project ourselves into a given situation. Claiming the time to examine our lives enables us to see exactly what actions are required of us in order to be who we truly are, from the inside out.

New passions are often born in solitude. When we give our Inner Woman the opportunity to reveal our most compelling reasons for being, we are suddenly revitalized, and made ready to use our gifts to strike out in new directions of being. In your solitude you can begin to assume a new mind-set and to pre-create whatever it is you love to create. As you tune into yourself and hear what your Inner Woman is thinking about, and get a glimpse of what she is trying to accomplish in your life and where she is taking you, your Spirit-Given Agenda becomes clear, and you will find yourself walking a better path and planning better projects, with greater clarity.Focusing our thoughts on a particular situation or project can lead us directly to the solutions that have kept escaping us. Nothing ever gets accomplished unless we have focused our thoughts, our energies and our intentions… integrating them and causing them to work together to carry out our desires.

New clarity will come when we clear a space for it in our fields of time and awareness. Our solitude is mind-clearing and can open us to a new awareness of all aspects of our life, and allow us to discover what, in our life, matters most to us.

True gratitude is more easily experienced in our solitude. We can only fully see the miraculous strains in our lives and experience our blessings with true, unforced gratitude when we can sit quietly to ponder the things that are taking place in our lives.

Each woman’s power comes to her in ways as elusive as the wind… comes effectively only through calmed and cleared channels of consciousness, riding on spiritual waves that won’t respond to our crude erratic thrusts into our minds looking for solutions to our problems. When we create a habit of sitting in quiet and clarity, pushing all of our fears and unbelief, distractions to the side for just a little while, we can look ahead through a corridor of affirmation and get a glimpse of who we really are and what we can really do. We begin to believe that we really will find our way to the place we need to be.

Solitude offers us serenity. A time of stepping away from confusion and chaos, into order and peace. Imagine this: You are sitting in a warm tub of lavender scented bubbles. Your eyes are closed as you rest your head and shoulders against a soft pillow. Your children are in bed for the night, and everything and everyone else in your life has been put on hold while you take the time to do absolutely nothing but spend some time listening to your own thoughts and communing with your Creator.

…white tapers blink star-like from the corners of your tub, and the whole room is blanketed in their soft glow and the scent of lavender water.

…you can feel the tension in your back melting

…you can feel your breathing become slower, deeper and more even

…the muscles in your face are beginning to relax

…and, as you close your eyes, you can feel yourself becoming more centered… more at peace… and more whole…

You can do solitude any way that suits you. You can do it any way and anywhere you want. But, as our lives and our relationships become more and more complex, and the world keeps producing more and more gadgets, gizmos and reasons for us to stay busy… a wise woman will make it a point to recharge herself.

Who Do You Think You Are?

You are who you think you are. 

You are as worthy of receiving good love as you think you are. 

You are as capable of creating, developing and actualizing your visions as you think you are.

So, who have you been thinking you are? Ms. Hopeful? Ms. Capable? Ms. Pitiful? Ms. Sad? Ms. Fearful? Ms. Doubtful? Ms. Faithful? Ms. Courage?

And, what is it that you want?

New health?

New strength?

New love?

New peace?

New faith?

A new home?

A new job?

A new life?

You’ve probably been thinking that the Trouble in your life was caused by the choices you’ve made or the family you have. Or maybe you think you’re in Trouble because of a certain relationship, or your weight, your looks, your money situation, your responsibilities, your job, or some past experience. But the truth is, what keeps you bound to your address in Trouble is whatever thoughts you’ve been having about these issues.

Whenever you find yourself residing in Trouble, you can believe that your low beliefs about yourself are what’s to blame. Changing those beliefs will unlock the doors you’ve been pounding on.

When we believe High we seek differently. When we believe High we ask differently, and we find ourselves listening more to the mysteries of Spirit than to the din of daily life—we are divinely enabled to see obscure and improbable possibilities. When we believe High, our minds go off seeking hidden things and, astonishingly, discover treasures lurking in the oddest of places . . . and in the most unlikely people.

From Trouble to High Places: Meditations For women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges That Lead to Joy! Copyright 2010 Esther Davis-Thompson

What Have You Been Believing About Yourself and Your Life?

As you go about trying to straighten out your life, you might be surprised to find that the culprit responsible for blocking your goals, upsetting your apple-carts and, generally, sabotaging all your efforts is . . . You. Wielding a plethora of low-belief thoughts, swinging them around recklessly like double-edged swords, we effectively slash through all of our best hopes and rip our dreams to shreds. High Places lives aren’t born of low-belief thinking. And the best thing that could happen is for us to actually catch ourselves in the act . . .
Today, examine your self-talk. What do you say to yourself all day? What kinds of thoughts run through your mind like a river of living waters, feeding your perceptions and determining your actions? Have you formulated a laundry-list of reasons why you’re stuck in Trouble? And another corresponding list of reasons why you need to stay in Trouble? Reasons like—“I’m too old to make changes in my life . . . I’m in too much debt to go back to school . . . I’ve invested too much in this bad situation to jump ship now . . . I’m needed here, so I can’t move forward . . . or . . . God won’t do this for me”—will continue to hold us hostage until we start making conscious decisions to believe higher for ourselves.

Today, see how many times you can catch yourself thinking negative thoughts about yourself. CHOOSE to believe higher about yourself and your possibilities. DECIDE that you will leave your Trouble . . . for your High Places . . . and you will miraculously be shown a way to go.

There is this thing that happens. This thing that happens in the psyche and moves all through the psycho-emotional centers of a woman. It is the transient movement of all that we believe coursing through us, throughout all of our physical, spiritual and emotional paths of Self. Throughout the very blood and cells of us. Coloring us and defining us and telling us who we are and what we will do in any given situation.

Journeying toward your High Places requires you to begin to inhabit your Highest Self. Once you have identified yourself as living in Trouble, you will have to choose to meet God on the path toward your High Places. 

You will have to begin choosing to adopt the mindsets you will need to live more as your Higher Self than as your lower, troubled, Self.

You will have to choose to defy the gravity of Troubled-life, as you have known it. 

You will have to choose to allow faith, not fear, to rule your steps. 

You will have to choose to allow your forgiving spirit to rule your mind and your relationships. 

You will have to choose to believe that your Creator-God is mindful of you, will be your strength, and will empower you to walk upon your High Places.

From Trouble to High Places: Meditations For Women Who Are So ready to Cross the Bridges That Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009, Esther Davis-Thompson

Walking into the Future…

We are the generation of women who must re-start the living of what we instinctively know.

We are the generation of women who must pay attention so that we can come to know ourselves, and know who we are to God: the Peace-loving, Nurturing hands of God; the Creative, Working hands of God.

We are the generation of mothers who must pay willing attention so the next generation of mothers can know who they are . . . and the next generation and the next generation and the next.

We have to be walking and talking and praying in the Spirit . . . without ceasing . . . or we will not survive. We can all feel this. We are knowing this right now. There is an urgency in the air! There seems to be a silent danger siren sounding that so many of us hear, and we look in each other’s faces for confirmation, and we look to each other to be sure that someone else is going through this . . . and that we are not crazy.  

But we aren’t crazy. In the Spirit there is so much work to do. So much demand for prayer warriors. So much feeding of the spiritually starved to be done. So much teaching and preaching, comforting and pushing along a path. We don’t have time to wonder, anymore, whether we are capable. We have to walk, gaining capability. And there is no more time to wonder if our daughters will make it to the highest end of themselves. We have to grab them by the hand and pull them along, no matter how old they are.

The time for planning has passed, and now we are to join the procession of women walking in their knowing to their High Places of Faith. Holy Spirit is shining like the sun and is our Wisdom.

Faith is no longer an option but a necessity. The future that has been waiting outside of our world is now in our faces, and the time of allowance for our uncertainty has passed.

We are the generation of women who have to pay attention and listen to what the Spirit of God is saying so that we will know in which direction to begin walking.

From Raising Up Queens: Loving Our Daughters Loud and Strong