Felt Safety and Building a Website

Wow.  I have finished my website (sort of - I'm sure there will be many changes to come).  This task has been hovering around my shoulders for months.  As I have sat down to really work through this over the past week, I have noticed increased anxiety and stress, still around me shoulders and travelling up and down my spine.  I've been more irritable than I would like and notice a frantic feeling in my chest.  

All this, over a website?  This is curious to me.  How does sitting in front of a computer, playing with wording, boxes and graphics, make me feel so overwhelmed?  So I began to unpact it.  This is unfamiliar to me.  I have to learn, experiment and try new things.  Which could be fun, but I've been procrastinating and putting it off.  So it doesn't feel fun, it feels overwhelming.  Then there's the fear, what if it's not good enough?  What if it doesn't look like I imagine it could?  Then there's the little, niggling irritations,... this didn't work right,... that's not what I wanted..., why don't they have a font I like,... is there such a think as a font I like?

All these little stressors add up to a lot of static running up and down my back and making my body feel as though it's in danger.  But I'm not under threat.  I'm not being attacked.  I am just sitting in front of a computer, trying to link one part of my website to another. 

As I reflect on this I realize that stress does this a lot in my body.  It disguises itself as danger to help me get stuff done.  Otherwise I would continue to procrastinate and avoid the job. 

And so I've begun a simple practice, a variation of one which I teach a lot of my clients.  I pause.  I check in with my body.  I ask, what's the threat here, what's the danger?  I look around, feel my feet on the ground, listen, stretch, breathe.  And then I tell myself that it's ok.  Nothing is dangerous here.  It's just a website.  Just light and pixels.  It's ok. 

This is not a immediate fix.  It will take stress a while to learn to motivate me in a calmer, gentler way.  It will take my body a while to ease off and learn something different.  But I am confident that if I continue to be patient with myself and practice, I will enjoy things like building a website more and that would be so wonderful.