If You Do Nothing...
Nothing changes.
I’m here today with a little messy middle truth bomb that is not as obvious on the surface as it may seem: if you do nothing…nothing changes.
Are you sitting on the other side of the screen contemplating why you want to keep reading this post from Captain obvious, here. Duh, Lindsay- obvi…
I hear you, but hear me out.
So many of us engage in this dance trying to figure out the right relationship between doing and being.
And after a season of life…ok well more like my whole life being a Striver (see my worthiness archetypes here) I was forcing - just making things happen all while over-functioning in the process and creating, what turned out to be, an incredibly inauthentic life. Setting my sights on a goal and bringing it to life wasn’t the problem then, being connected to my heart’s around why I wanted those goals was the actual root of the issue.
Fast-forward to my Worthiness Rebellion™ era; a time in which I was creating my thought leadership framework like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, I was compulsive, driven, undeterred in focus, would not could not stop.
And at the end of it you know what Spirit said? Lindsay, doing too much, too soon prevents a beautiful flight later on.
Wah wah. Such a buzz-kill, I thought. The completion of this framework didn’t arrive with the confetti cannons that lived with it in my mind. I arrived with it, completely burned out.
I loved what I had created and truthfully, my Spirit Team did too so I’m not negating that, but their point was well-taken: I needed to find balance in the creation process. I needed to find ways to be able to create without over-riding my nervous system. To create sustainably.
So can you guess what I decided to do next?
What Spirit told me of course…”Do nothing.”
I accepted their words like a teenager’s dare during a sleepover party. That alone should have been my alarm bell, but here’s the thing- I was exhausted from all that creation. I was deeply proud of what I had built and achieved and I was equally disappointed that it didn’t yield the clients that I immediately and magically wanted to appear.
And why would they?
I spent so much time creating the framework I completely overlook simultaneously building the audience. Ooopsie.
“I’m just one person,” I thought. I can only do so much and I was giving myself some grace in that.
So what happened next? I did nothing of course…but for months.
The first month was absolutely bliss. I needed that rest and to bring myself and my body back into a solid rhythm. To feed my body nourishing foods and read a few good books and allow myself to restore my energy again.
However, after that, I became restless. I would find myself in morning meditations asking Spirit to show me where I needed to focus only to continue to hear: “do nothing.” Some days there were some steps to take, but mostly I was met with this resounding - do nothing - you need more rest.
When I tell you (please don’t judge me, I’ve already done that) - this went on for 7 months. I know. It’s the thing I’m afraid to tell anyone because I can see how batshit crazy that sounds when you see it written right here. The words are screaming on the page at me and yet, in the thick of the messy middle of all of it, I truly felt like I was following my guidance.
But after a few months of this, I sat down with Spirit and dialogued about what the heck was going on. I needed to change my external reality, but “do nothing” wasn’t moving the needle. Equally, I couldn’t feel any clear direction within me about where I was meant to head. And in that, I felt paralyzed and continued to in fact, do nothing.
I was taking care of my inner world. I was using my time constructively with Spirit. Learning. Deep diving. Looking at patterns and seeing what was coming up to heal. In many regards, I wasn’t doing nothing because I was focused on healing my inner world to the exclusion on shifting anything in my external world. Eventually, my body reached a point where it was screaming, “I need change rapido” because NOTHING was happening.
But what was happening while nothing was happening is Spirit kept showing me how something magical was on it’s way to me. Kept telling me how magnetic I was for the life I desired, no less the life I deserved.
So for months I kept working on my inner and staying connected to Spirit’s messages about how everything was coming in and working it’s way towards me, which was enough to leave me in fantasy land believing my Spirit team was days away from delivering my new life on a silver platter as if it was from Mrs. Potts herself!
I waited for Spirit to sing and dance in my own personal rendition of “Be Our Guest.” I imagined Spirit flying around me opening different doors and weaving cosmic rays and sacred geometry around me as they showed me my matrix of what would inevitably behind all the doors as if I were a contestant on the Price is Right. Here’s the dream life you’ve won, Lindsay….cue Bob Barker from the other side.
But here was my actual reality: sitting in my bedroom at my sister’s house (not even a home of my own), compulsively writing in my journal (because what else was there to do), pulling cards trying to do more work on myself (because let’s face it, that Striver wound runs deep and at least I was doing something) while simultaneously not feeling inspired to do my podcast, write on Substack or really work on my business at all (things that might actually change my reality) for that matter because I was burnt out, exhausted and had no evidence that doing any of these things ever paid off in ways that could support the life I was trying to build. While I loved the comments from my listeners and my readers and how deeply my work was impacting them, unfortunately, impact does not always translate into a paycheck.
So now…in doing nothing to support my external reality…nothing was changing for sure.
And yet, every time I found myself beyond frustrated, I’d find my way to Spirit for support and guidance about where I needed to focus and was consistently met with some version of:
Trust.
Allow.
Put your plans on hold for now.
You cannot force divine timing.
Rest.
Spirit has awesome plans for you.
Make some room.
I could only hear those messages so much before I felt like Spirit was gaslighting me (don’t worry they were…because I was gaslighting myself, but I digress).
And one day I blew my lid - I was DONE resting. No more rest. I was restless from resting so much. I was absolutely stir crazy and couldn’t fathom resting another second. My life was boring AF and I was craving something, anything that felt like fulfillment.
Most importantly, my external world needed to change and I needed to deeply understand what was going on. So I did what I normally do when I’m chasing my tail and feeling like I’m running in circles with Spirit…I call a Time Out and dove into the deeper why and what lesson Spirit was actually trying to show me.
So…let’s unpack that shall we?!
Now - here’s what’s true. I do actually believe I was following my guidance. Spirit does that sometimes - they lead us down paths because we need to experience the truths that the lessons reveal.
So - here’s where I arrived at:
Doing too much too soon prevents a beautiful flight later on
AND
Doing nothing…changes absolutely nothing.
Two sides of the same coin. Often times, Spirit teaches us through contrast so we can more deeply embody the wisdom of it’s teachings. They need to “show us” the lessons - not just “tell us” what we need to know or learn.
So I know when you read this it feels like you want to respond with some version of: yeah, yeah, find balance…blah blah.
I said the same thing to Spirit, but honestly, have you ever tried to practice this dance between doing and being from a place of being deeply aligned with your intuition?
Meaning…not taking actions that your mind wants you to take, but rather, taking action from a place, for example, that you felt a small nudge, or spark of inspiration in a meditation, but tried to stay deeply congruent in taking action from that place?
Let me tell you - it takes GREAT discipline to stay connected, in getting your mind out of the way, and then following through on those nudges without second-guessing yourself 800 times.
I can’t even tell you how often I have been met with the idea that resting, allowing, receiving, surrendering translates into “do nothing” or “trust harder.”
And I often see spiritual teachings out there leading people to this conclusion, but it’s because these concepts are greatly misunderstood. And like I do most things, I learned the hard way.
When we do nothing, nothing changes. And while that may seem really obvious to many people, I literally thought I was doing the right thing by following Spirit’s guidance to lean back, relax, rest, allow, thinking that some magical unicorn was just going to fall out of the sky, pooping a trail of marshmallows and skittles along the way while making all my dreams come true.
I literally believed that my vibration alone could make that happen - that it could attract a magical life to me without doing anything. That would be some mind control, wouldn’t it? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist - what do I know?!
But, what I do know, is that we are asked to be in right relationship with doing and being.
And what understanding I now have and will share is this: surrender, allowing, receiving, and resting are not passive states. They are states where the heart is open, where the mind is relaxed, where we are allowing our bodies to be receiving signals of the wisdom and the nudges from our Higher Self and from Spirit.
And when we allow our minds to be in a state of rest, when we allow ourselves to be in that place of stillness and presence, we are receptive to the wisdom that allows us to receive the guided action step. But I assure you, we are being guided to take action; actions that come from a place of alignment, not from a place of our mind’s egoic control.
That’s not to say there won’t be times that we are guided to take a nap and to actually rest. But if you are finding yourself sitting on a mat waiting for some magical moment to just fall into your lap, you would be wise to pause and ask yourself why you’re so comfortable with doing nothing.
The deeper truth is not “do nothing and life magically appears.” It feels more like:
Stillness clears distortion so you can recognize aligned movement when it arrives.
And that’s a very different thing.
For me, I misunderstood this spiritual teaching because I was confusing surrender with passivity, non-attachment with disengagement, trust with avoidance, and receptivity with inertia.
We might be sitting on a mat in meditation and taking “invisible action” in that moment, but when life presents us with something, we need to move with it.
That’s action. Perhaps even conscious action.
For me, I got stuck in that place waiting for something to come while simultaneously holding a belief I didn’t actually need to move. It’s crazy to me when I place those words in front of myself on the paper here, but as is true of most things in life, when we’re in the messy middle thick of it, it doesn’t always feel that obvious.
There’s a difference between refusing life and not artificially manufacturing movement out of fear.
Spiritually, the issue is not usually whether we’re moving fast enough. The issue is whether our movement is distorted by grasping, fear, proving, control, ego urgency, or avoidance.
So the “doing nothing” phase can become helping in that it:
quiets the noise,
dissolves compulsive striving,
reconnects someone to intuition,
restores nervous system regulation,
and allows movement to arise from congruence instead of panic.
BUT…life still requires participation.
The universe is relational. And it responds to the steps we take and how we decide to dance with it’s cosmic tune.
We cannot force aligned destiny through fear-driven striving, but we also cannot fully participate in life while refusing to move when life opens the door.
There’s a rhythm between receptivity and participation.
And honestly, if you’re spiritually sensitive like me, perhaps you have even found yourself swinging between the extremes of over-forcing and over-waiting.
When we are in a place of striving and over-forcing it sounds a lot like: “
I’m gonna make it happen!”
Passive waiting (aka giving your agency away) sounds something like:
“If it’s meant for me, it will just arrive.”
But reality is usually more co-creative than either extreme. Becoming still helps you hear. Your intuition helps you recognize. Your courage helps you move and take action.
And then life responds.
So it’s less about: Sit still and the universe delivers.
And more: Become internally quiet enough to recognize what is actually yours when it appears.
So that’s my messy middle share with you. The fallout, I spent waaaaaaaay too many months doing nothing and now I’m trying not to over-correct by over-doing to compensate for all the nothingness.
Just another day in spiritual Lindsay-Land!
So, I leave you with this reflection:
Where in your life are you desiring different circumstances? Perhaps it’s a relationship, a thing, a circumstance. It doesn’t matter what it is that you want, the question becomes:
Why do you want it?
What responsibility are you taking to changes those circumstances?
Responsibility can look like a lot of things:
Taking responsibility for our alignment and where our ego is interfering.
Taking responsibility for taking action and showing up for what we want
Taking responsibility for the emotions that arise as we move towards the very things we want so we can find our courage to do the thing.
I hope you find your way to yours.