Let’s talk about the benefits of giving up, surrendering, and giving ourselves grace in a culture that constantly makes us feel as if we are not doing enough.

TW: Post mentions PTSD & diet culture

The journey and timeline of giving up as a yogi entrepreneur

I have a never-ending To Do List.

And I give up on it.

I mean, think about it…I’m an entrepreneur, a world traveler, a yoga teacher whose schedule changes every week, and wife to a neurodivergent genius husband/business partner who can’t keep track of his own schedule from one day to the next.

Yes, I totally brought all of this on myself. Asked for it, even! I got sober and worked with the universe and manifested and followed the signs and went through the trainings and became lucky/blessed/in the right place at the right time enough to be the owner of two small businesses by 2019, Bigger Life Adventures & Grand Canyon Eco Retreat.

While we built our retreat property and grew the popularity of Bigger Life Adventures from 2019-2021 I was also finishing Ayurveda school online, teaching and managing at a local yoga studio through Covid times, taking over the yoga program at the Flagstaff Juvenile Detention Center, and learning how to share an apartment with my brother and his wife after not living together since childhood. I don’t share this for pity or accolades, rather just to illustrate my nature. I thrive on busy-ness. I’ve always taken on a lot, ever since high school. Activities and endeavors and being of service gives my busy brain constant activity which it likes, and it turns out entrepreneurship was a challenge I relished despite having to literally figure it out as we went along.

When Zach destroyed his ankle rock climbing in 2022, after we had moved out of our apartment and moved fully into the van/off-grid property, I added “full time caregiver” to my list of roles and that was the straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back which I wasn’t aware was so vulnerable and close to breaking.

Suddenly I was taking on Zach’s roles in addition to my own, managing our first employee, driving back and forth to Phoenix for repeated surgeries and appointments, dealing with health insurance bureaucracy, all while crying every single day plus losing my appetite and my ability to sleep. So what do you do when you’re losing it with PTSD? You take yourself to therapy, of course! Except that finding a therapist with availability, within budget, in a small town is hard. Adding therapy appointments to an already overwhelming schedule is hard.

Life is hard, and unexpected catastrophes make it harder. Once again, I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m sharing because I know SO MANY out there can relate. I know so many people who have been forced to navigate similarly intense life phases…

We made it through 2022! Zach healed! Hooray! So, I dubbed 2023 the “Year of Yes.” I got myself back to a better place mentally and did all the fun and healing and exciting things that came my way, like Ayahuasca in Guatemala and going to Iceland with an old friend. Both businesses continued to thrive and we invested in a website, videography, and more upgrades to Grand Canyon Eco Retreat, and kept building our own house out there. And then got shut down by the county….a saga I’ve already written about so I won’t go into it again here.

This year, so far, has been a very mixed bag. There have been such high highs like our incredible Costa Rica retreat, wild Mexican Pacific retreat and watching the eclipse, assisting with our first Yoga Teacher Training, Colorado River trip, Burning Man, diving deeper into Tantric mysticism and honing in on my personal meditation practice. In contrast, there have also been super low lows like having our permit application completely denied twice, some personal health struggles, facing the uncertain future without the majority of our income, and marriage struggles like wanting different things and losing patience with each other over and over again.

Through it all, I couldn’t help but feel the simultaneous pressure of both external/internal expectations plus the crumbling of my attention span. My own inner dialogue often went something like this during the hard parts of 2024:

“I’m a yoga teacher; I should practice more.”

“I’m an ultrarunner; I shouldn’t drop out of this race.”

“I’m supposed to be a role model; why do I lose my temper so easily?”

“You haven’t studied Spanish in months!!”

“Why can’t you get more done in a day?”

“Why can’t you focus?”

“Ugh, you got so fat again.” – THIS IS A DIET CULTURE-CONDITIONED THOUGHT THAT STILL COMES UP FOR ME EVEN THOUGH I HATE DIET CULTURE; I DON’T BELIEVE THAT THIN IS ALWAYS BETTER AND I KNOW I AM HEALTHY. I’m just being raw and honest here and letting you know that even though I’ve done so much de-programming around work around this it still comes up. I’m a human.

“Why can’t I force myself to stay up late working like I used to?”

Since 2018, I’ve been using the website and app Asana (not just for yogis, although the name is perfect, haha) to organize my tasks, to do lists, and due dates. Since the due dates are mostly self-imposed and since I’m an overambitious boss-lady, I end up letting “overdue” tasks pile up for months until I get overwhelmed and change the due dates or just delete them. So I end up in a perpetual cycle of checking Asana, getting a hit of guilt because all the overdue things on there, and then only doing the easy things while ignoring the bigger things because my overwhelmed, overly-distracted brain can’t go deep.

I have fallen into the trap of working ON my business but not working IN my business. The amount of time I have spent this year marketing is far greater than the amount of time I have spent planning yoga classes, crafting the teacher training I’ve been promising to students forever, or writing things like this which actually matter. I’m sick of it!!!

Grand Canyon Eco Retreat getting shut down might seem like an easy “off the hook” situation, until I think about all the tasks that situation adds to my list: selling glamping gear, selling our retreat van, following up with the Board of Supervisors about the discrepancies in our hearing, thanking all our supporters (“THANK YOU” if I haven’t said it in person!), plus you know, figuring out how to replace that income and still be able to travel the world to run Bigger Life Adventures, omg…

I am wired as a person to want answers fast, and when the answers don’t come, to go TAKE ACTION to create them. However, finally, at long last, this time, I am not letting myself jump into a frenzy to figure it out. I am forcing myself to pause, as I teach my students to do. To wait. To trust. To be kinder to myself and my loved ones who also work under the umbrella of Bigger Life Adventures. In Buddhism the concept “Metta” describes a state of “loving kindness” which the Buddha taught us to offer to everyone suffering in the world and also to ourselves. I’ve found that I am usually the hardest person to offer my own compassion to. But I’m trying.

I realize that the most compassionate thing I can do for myself right now is to let myself off the hook wherever possible, to stop being a failing slave to the To Do list on Asana.com, to actually put into practice my beliefs that I am valuable outside of what I produce. I have given up on ever getting it all done. It will always be too much. So I surrender thinking it’s ever possible. By giving myself permission to NOT check all of the boxes every single day I have actually found the space and inspiration to begin healing in other areas, bringing in more Ayurvedic self care like I always preach to others, trying out better sleep hygiene, more journaling, etc…. I’ve had to remind myself that most of the time growth and recovery isn’t about the big adventure, the tall mountain, the peak experience, but rather about interrupting an inner spiral when you notice your brain going there, giving yourself the internal stability to take a deep breath when the Pitta rage fire starts to burn, slowly allowing yourself to let go of your stubborn expectations when life has other plans.

Surrendering control and putting things in perspective helps as well. Before sobriety, I thought I was content to be a bartender in a trendy gastropub in San Diego. After sobriety, I got so much more than that, only because I first surrendered that image of my perfect life, surrendered any hope of ever being happy again, and cried out, as a beaten-down, shaky, hopeless mess of a human, for whatever god or force or universe I thought was out there at the time to just please not let me ruin my own life any more.

Like all of us, I am a work in progress and on some days the surrendering and self-compassion feels easier than on others. I have yet to find a better organization system than Asana, so I’m still looking at it, but trying to be more aware of my breathing and stress response when I see all the red, overdue due dates on tasks which no one besides myself will ever know if I complete or not!

I’m allowing myself to move or rest based on the tide of inspiration and inner body cues rather than external calendars and pressures. For example, today’s long run stopped after 10 miles because it was hot and I felt satisfied with that. So I let myself off the hook! I have Ayurveda clients to email and texts to respond to and all those red overdue tasks to attend to, but I felt like writing after my run so I wrote this. It came out easily, in flow, with less distractability than I normally experience when I am forcing myself to finish something. This is the super good flow state I wish to feel with more tasks, more often. Guess what? Even when allowing myself to work this way, I’ve never seriously neglected a client, missed planning something, or let someone down. It seems to all work out with less stress when I am taking care of myself and following the natural-feeling sequence of tasks.

The big problems are not solved by a long shot, but at least I am inviting a new experience by opening to unknown solutions and taking my time rather than forcing quick, fear-based “solutions” as a past version of Carrie would have done. So here’s to the pause, the surrender, the giving up which is required in order to show up more completely for ourselves and others.

What are you giving up on? What are you surrendering? Drop us a line to let us know.

A few other things that have been helping me lately:

The simple advice, “Don’t should on yourself” helps me catch and rephrase when I hear myself saying, “I should….xxxxx” too often.

The Opal app – recommended by an awesome friend on our New Hampshire retreat and now I think many of us are using it. It blocks the distracting apps you choose to be blocked for set hours every day and rewards you for staying away from them. I just have the free version but it’s worked way better for me than the iPhone’s own time limit system which is too easy to get around. Now I don’t have access to social media until 11:30am every day, and my mornings have already been way more peaceful and productive.

The Cycles We’re Breaking on the We Can Do Hard Things Podcast

These songs: Altar of Love by Ananda Das and The Mountain is You by Chance Peña