STOP Being BUSY

Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome back. Of course, with yours truly, Elizabeth April. I am here today to give you a very important message from the universe and from me. And the message is to stop being busy. That’s a tough one. It is extremely difficult to really put into practice. 

Some of you may literally just be these busybodies that are go, go, go, all the time like me, very busy all the time. Some of you may really be enjoying life, maybe you’re retired, maybe you travel a lot, maybe you love to just sit in your backyard, and read a book or take a nap, which is fantastic, good for you! Regardless of what state you’re in, I guarantee you that you keep yourself busy. No matter if you are retired, or you’re working five jobs, I guarantee you that you keep yourself busy. Likewise, no matter if you’re 2 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, or 60 years old, I almost guarantee you that you keep yourself busy, most of the time.

In society, we are literally taught from a very early age that we need to work hard, that we need to make it, that we need to go, go, go! Life is busy enough. There’s already so much energetic movement within life. Do we really need to keep pushing ourselves into movement? 

Do we really need to keep busy all the time?

Say, for example, you are the smaller percentage and are retired. Good for you, once again, that’s awesome. But I almost promise that you’ll be out in your backyard, sitting in a lawn chair, looking at your beautiful garden, wherever you are. I’m sure that your mind will be thinking about that dinner party that you’re hosting on the weekend, about the Christmas holidays that you’re going to, about the food that you’re cooking that night. I’m sure that you’re thinking about maybe the dream that you had last night or the friend that’s in need, or your grandchild that’s growing up. 

Regardless, if you are retired or you’re working five jobs, your mind is going all the time. Can you truly say that you’re relaxing? Or, do you have to admit the fact that you are nonstop? I’ll give you a good example. I’m a pretty aware, pretty conscious individual, and honestly, I make fairly conscious choices throughout my day. I’m really trying to put my teachings into my own life and obviously into action. When I go to make coffee in the morning, I stop, in the moment, I question myself, and I ask, “Does coffee really excite me right now or does tea excite me?” It depends, every day is different. I’ll say, “Oh, you know what? I really was looking forward to coffee. I’d really love a hot cup of coffee. Fantastic, great.” Then I make the coffee and I drink it because that’s what excited me then. 

Throughout my day, I’ll make a variety of a handful of conscious choices, which is really good because we make probably hundreds of choices a day and we’re not even aware of it, but I make a handful of conscious choices a day. Just the other day, I turned off the TV, and I was just laying in bed, and I was just kind of thinking, and I tuned in to my own body, and I said, “Hey, Elizabeth, I just wanted to say that I really love you.” This whole tingling came across my body. I had this thought, I had this realization, this moment of, “Oh, wow, was that my first conscious thought throughout the day?” It was such a stark difference between my mind just rambling literally, as you guys know, just literally rambling on throughout the day, and clearing your mind, having nothing else to think about, but just having a very clear, conscious thought. 

Then, I was really thinking about it when I had that moment of that conscious thought, and then I’m like, “Oh, wow. Is this really my first conscious thought throughout the day?” I thought about the conscious choices that I made. Okay, well, I choose coffee over tea, and I did this over that, and I chose to call my family member, and I chose to do this, and that was all conscious. I chose those things because they excited me the most in the moment. But I didn’t necessarily have any other conscious thoughts around it. I didn’t even stop to– say, for example, I chose an exciting choice, which was doing art, sketching in my sketchbook. Great, that excited me in the moment. But even as I was sketching away, my mind was drifting and on autopilot. I wasn’t really in the present moment saying, “Wow. I really love this. This is really incredible. Can’t believe I’m here.” If I really think about it, I probably have a handful, which is very few, conscious thoughts throughout the week. 

I believe science has proven that we have around 50,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day. Per day! So, how many of those are conscious? Like I said, I’m a pretty aware individual and I had one conscious thought the entire day. That’s besides making conscious choices. I’m just talking about a really clear, conscious thought. Okay, a conscious choice, I would say is a little bit different, similar, but different. How ridiculous is that? I think the main reason is that we just continue to keep ourselves busy.

Now, unfortunately, with the age of social media, what are we doing in between the time that we’re doing bigger things? What are you doing in between the time of going to the nail salon and getting your nails done, and then going back home? All of those little moments in between or even during the nail salon, even during an activity, we choose to extra distract ourselves and go into our phones, just scroll around on social media. Maybe you want to call a friend, which is cool because that’s a little bit more conscious than just mindlessly scrolling. But in every moment, we are distracting ourselves. We are extra distracting ourselves! We’re triple distracting ourselves in every moment. We’re multitasking. 

Make a Conscious Choice &  Be in the Present Moment

I know, for me, I own my own business, so I’ll be answering emails and I’ll be getting an update on the Schumann resonance, and then I’ll be chatting with a friend, texting, and I’ll be posting social media posts, and I’ll be doing a variety of things all at once. The biggest thing is to really end the distraction. I don’t know if you hear the– what is it, leaf blower in the background, that just turned on. I think that’s a pretty divine time for that to turn on, pretty divine time for that distraction to happen. 

Actually, I do a lot of videos, I don’t know if you guys watch. I do a lot of videos when I’m rollerblading, and I will stop literally– not in the middle of a busy street. I’ll stop on the sidewalk of a busy street and I’ll just literally download this incredible, amount of truth. All these cars are in the background, honking at each other, I mean it’s LA. Even though I don’t say it every time, I think that it’s a beautiful moment to have those cars in the background because it forces people to really pay attention. Here we are talking about distraction, all of these noises are going on, and it’s incredible. It’s really important.

I’m not telling you all to sit down and meditate for five hours a day, it’s not about that. It’s about making a conscious choice to just put the phone down, and to be in the present moment. Making the conscious choice to smile at the little ants on the ground, or the snow piling up on your front porch, to smile at your dog barking his head off because someone walks by. To really just pay attention to the world around you. Be cognizant, be aware of what’s happening, and how the universe being you is talking to you. 

A really good example of this is just the other day I was going for a really big bike ride. Basically, I made the choice in the moment, a conscious choice, to go for a motorcycle ride, because that’s what excited me the most in that moment, very conscious choice, very intuitive choice. I could have done a lot of things, but that’s what I decided to do. My choice of where to go was a little bit more autopilot, because I really wanted to go to this really big park for quite a while. I’m like, “Okay, great, I’ve got some extra time. This is what I’m going to do today. I’m going to go to this park.” I stopped to get lunch to-go before I went to the park. As I stop and pull my bike over, this guy comes over to me and he talks about how he broke his leg on the freeway, the summer before that on his motorcycle, and he got hit by a drunk driver. I’m like, “Oh, okay, that’s kind of weird,” that he just came over to me and told me all this, that’s cool. But it’s a good conversation, we talked about bikes. 

Then, at the same time, I got a text from my friend who’s also a psychic, and he tells me, “Hey, I just want to let you know that it’s important not to preplan things and to really listen to your intuition.” I’m like, “Hmm, okay, weird time for a text like that. But okay, cool. Yeah.” Then, my girlfriend also texts me, right when I’m getting lunch after those two things, and she’s like, “Hey, I just want to make sure that you’re not going on the freeway today. It’s just not a good day to do that, so much traffic or whatever, just stick to the side roads.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.” When I get my lunch and I go back on my bike, and once again, getting prepared to go to this big park, which is quite a distance away, about an hour, this woman walks by me, and she’s like, “Oh, you’re a female rider.” I’m like, “Yep.” She’s like, “Oh, just be careful. People are crazy out there. Make sure you stay off the freeway.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” That’s when it clicked in, in the matter of a half an hour, I had five messages, five divine synchronistic moments, that to anyone else would feel just cool, random moments of your life. But I had five messages from the universe all saying, “Hey, be aware of the road, be aware of the freeway, be aware of riding your bike, and listen to your intuition.”

At that moment, I just wanted to go back home. I’m like, “Okay, cool. It’s not safe to be on a bike today, I’m not going to be on my bike.” And I love my bike. I would say, that’s definitely– I wouldn’t even call it an attachment because I practice nonattachment, but if I were to have an attachment, it would be to this bike, just to riding in general. For me to stop my autopilot and my attachment to say, “You know what, it’s probably not a good idea for me to ride at all today.” But at the same token, once again, I can’t say all or nothing. It’s like, “No, I mean, I made the intuitive choice to be here.” So, basically, I had a compromise with the universe. 

Clearly, the universe, being me, was giving me this reflected message, saying, “Hey, it’s probably not super safe to go on the freeway and to do a big bike ride today, so maybe you should do something different.” What I did was I went to my little meditation spot, which was literally right down the road in Beverly Hills, and it’s really beautiful. I went there instead, it was five minutes away. I didn’t run away from the situation. I didn’t get freaked out, but I listened, and the only reason why I listened was because I was outside of my autopilot, and I was really open to the messages of the universe. I was open to changing and to shifting my plans because I wasn’t attached to them. 

The more flexible you are about your path, your plans, your direction, the easier it is to listen to the universe. The more stubborn and attached you are to where you think you’re going and how you think you’re going to get there, the more limited you make your own life and the more confined you really truly become. The only way we can ever listen to the signs and the messages and the realizations of the universe, is if we stopped distracting ourselves. 

There was someone super famous, and I don’t know who it was. I don’t know if it was like Nietzsche or Freud. It was some sort of great psychologist. Maybe not an older psychologist, maybe a more recent psychologist, but there was a book that my friend was talking about, and she has kids, young kids. This book went into how– How children need to be bored. As a parent, you’re like, “What?” The last thing you want is your child to be bored, and to be nagging you and to be looking for something to do and getting into trouble, and whatever that may be. The last thing you want is your child to be bored. What do we do? We stick an iPad in front of them at the age of two, we buy them all the toys that they want, and then they want more toys, because those toys aren’t good enough. They continue to want more, because all you do is give them more to deal with their boredom. They never actually deal with that boredom. But you know what? Boredom in children or adults, you know what boredom really creates? It creates creativity. Boredom creates a space in your life to express, to change, to make conscious choices, to manifest, to imagine. 

Imagine if you were put into a windowless, doorless room. And you had nothing, you had absolutely nothing. But maybe let’s say you had a sharpie marker, and you just have blank walls, and you knew that you were going to be in there for 10 years. What are you going to do? You’re going to imagine stories. You’re going to imagine characters and images, and a fairy tale. You’re going to create something from nothing, you are going to do that. You’re not going to buy something that is already created for you, because you don’t have the means. You are going to manifest, you are going to intend, you are going to imagine, because you have that power. 

It’s like the same analogy of eating all the time. These days, especially in, well, the first-world countries, which is a lot of countries these days. We have access to unlimited amounts of food. If all you wanted to do was eat potato chips, day and night, you could literally do that, especially as an adult, no one’s stopping you. You have full control over your diet. With all of the options and varieties, you can eat anything that you want. 

It’s funny, just as a side note, I went to Colorado, but really in the middle of nowhere Colorado, for a conference that I was speaking at, not too long ago. I went on to Uber Eats because I didn’t have a car. There was really nothing that was walkable, so I went on to Uber Eats to just order some food in. There was not one restaurant, not one restaurant on UberEats. The only thing that I was able to order was Domino’s Pizza. That’s the only place that delivered. When I come into Los Angeles, I go onto Uber Eats and it’s like, “What do you want? Do you want Thai? Do you want Chinese? Do you want Indian?” Literally down to the niche of like, “Do you want vegan Indian food? Oh, we have that.” It’s incredible. It’s incredible the amount of choices. Then, you get overwhelmed with all the choices and nothing’s ever good enough.

Extremely similar to having Netflix. Before, I don’t know about you guys, but when I was a kid, it was like, whatever kind of VHS we had was what we were watching. And that was it. I mean, that’s the only– they didn’t even have movies on TV. It was just whatever’s on VHS, so you would watch the same movie over and over again. These days, we have an unlimited amount of choice in every single moment. Which, on one hand, can be so overstimulating that we don’t make a choice at all. On the other hand, it can be so overstimulating, that we make a choice and then we’re not happy with the choice, because we know that there are other choices to make.

We are literally being forced to make a choice with confidence. Just to stick with it, because the more we’re like, oh, I could use a pink pen, or a green pen, or a purple pen or an orange pen. I’m going to use the orange, but that’s not good enough. I’m going to use the purple, but I’m still not happy, I’m going to go back to blue. Still not happy. The problem is that we are not in the present moment enough, and we are distracting ourselves with all of the overstimulation and all of the options in our reality, which is incredible, and what a feat in society that we are here. It really creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of unrest, and a lot of depression, because we’re unable to be happy with just where we are and what we have. That’s a bit of a problem!

Having so much choice, having so many options, creates a disconnect from self, because all of the choices of food, all of the choices of TV, all of the choices of social media scrolling, all of the choices of shopping, all of the choices of driving and directions, or whatever it may be, all of the choices of all of the things, is all external to us. None of that shit matters. You’re not going to be taking any of it with you into the afterlife. None of those things, none of those choices, make any profound difference in your life whatsoever. That’s why no matter what movie you decide to watch that night, it’s going to be unsatisfying, it’s going to be deeply unsatisfying. The reason why is because it doesn’t make an impact on our soul.

We continue to feed the material world. We continue to feel like we need to feed the physical reality, our physical bodies, in all of the ways. We continue to grow deeply restless, deeply depressed, because we’re ultimately not feeding the primary aspect of self, which is the soul. Ultimately, that is the thing that we need to be loving and feeding and concentrating on, and nourishing. That’s a huge word, nourishing. We need to nourish the soul. Right now, at this time, that’s the last thing that we’re doing. We are not nourishing the soul at all. We are distracting ourselves from the thing that we really truly need. Which is, energy, vibration, compassion, emotion, love. We distract ourselves from feeling the lack of fulfillment within our soul, which is ironic. We distract ourselves with the physical world, so that we don’t have to feel the feelings of not having enough in the nonphysical. All we need to do is take that same time and energy that we’re putting into the physical distraction and just put it into our nonphysical connection, your soul. 

I promise you, if you spent five hours a day in distraction, so it’s like five hours of your mind being on to something else, five hours of you scrolling through social media or sitting at your desk and just staring off into space– technically, we probably spend 23.5 hours distracting ourselves in our day. But if you were to just spend five hours a day distracting yourself, and then I promise you, if you were to spend five minutes giving back to your soul, sitting in a bathtub, connecting with who you really are, allowing yourself to step outside of your body, outside of your reality and looking at the bigger picture and loving every aspect of the bigger picture. If you took five minutes a day to feel the shitty emotions of feeling not good enough, of feeling lack, of feeling depressed. If you actually just stopped distracting yourself, one minute of anti-distraction equates to one hour, if not more– that’s not really a proven math there. But it’s like quadrupling 10 times the amount of satisfaction and fulfillment that you’re going to get in just one moment of conscious awareness and conscious connection to the soul.

That conscious connection doesn’t all have to be all bliss and rainbows and butterflies. Absolutely not! It’s just a real moment, a real fucking moment of connection. We don’t have that enough. Therefore, we are constantly looking for validation, connection, excitement, fulfillment in all of the other ways. No matter how much shit you have, no matter what you eat, no matter how much love you get from others, you’re always going to feel a lack if you don’t start connecting to your soul. Because that ultimately is who you are. The transitions that you make, and the challenges that you go through at a vibrational quantum soul level, that’s what’s going to stick with you. A big part of that is your emotions. Your emotions aren’t physical. They can’t be solved by physical things. Your emotions aren’t tangible. They’re vibrational, and the more you work on your emotions, work with your emotions, all of the emotions, the easier it becomes to be satisfied and fulfilled with nothing at all, except for yourself. 

With that being said, I really hope that this message comes across to you. I really hope this message resonates with you. I want you all to take that moment, that one moment, just start with that, one conscious moment throughout your day, to just be with yourself, to just love yourself, to just feel what you’re feeling. 

Have a beautiful rest of your day! Have a beautiful rest of your week!