Protect Your Heart This Week 💙

Hey guys,

This is for all my artists friends, who have sensitive hearts, and feel things deeply.

More than any other week this year, I believe we need to really protect our hearts and your minds.

I think you know this,

With the election chaos, it might get kinda  crazy. There might be some rioting and maybe some violence here in the US. And it's hard to know how to prepare to it emotionally.

I want to talk to all the artists out there like myself, music artists, but artists of any medium that might be kind of sensitive and feeling a sense of dread and fear right now. I want to speak to that and I want to ask you, and petition you, to really protect yourself.

I'm going to give you a couple tips.

First of all, I want to talk about the concept of fear. There is a really great book called "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway" by Susan Jeffers. She talks about how the underlying fear of all fears is this concept of not being able to handle the situation. Whether you're approaching your car breaking down, or losing a job, or a relationship issue, or you're afraid of a health issue, the fear of not being able to handle it is usually the fundamental fear that's actually underneath everything.

I haven't explored this enough to really know how true that is. But I do think that resonates right now, with this concept that you're afraid of what might happen with the government, whether it's local, or national, the federal government, and you're afraid of the election results. You're afraid of rioting that hasn't happened yet. You're actually maybe afraid of not being able to handle it, not being able to handle the results of whatever happens in this election.

I'm asking you to do a couple of things to help you.

Number one, I want you to look into doing something in the morning. The first thing you do when you wake up, Whether that's 5:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 5:00 PM, whenever you wake up, I think you should do two things. My two things are to go for a walk. I do it right off the bat. And then I also meditate. I go through a meditation, and I use an app called "Oak" that you can buy for a couple bucks for your phone, and it walks you through meditation. It helps you recenter. And that is so good for me. Now that may not be your thing. Maybe you would rather play with your animals and, call your mom, go for a run or play an instrument, or do some music production, whatever you're going to do. That's totally fine too.

But I want to ask you, I want to challenge you, to get into a habit this week of doing two things before you look at any kind of news. Before you look at the world and have to do your other things, just do two things that are helping you recenter. Okay.

Number two is I want you to limit your time with the news and social media this week. If you've already voted, if you've already argued your stance on things, it's probably not going to do much this week to keep arguing and fighting, right? So I urge you to stay away from those kinds of conversations. Stay away from arguments with your in-laws and fights about who you support. Just take the time to limit your social media contact, your posts, your comments, to less than an hour a day. Okay?

Even if you can do less than that, I encourage that as well. Social media right now is going to blow up in so many ways. And it's going to be very tempting to tune in like it's a reality show. You don't really need to.

Guess what? The world's going to keep going. Whether you're looking at it or not, you might as well take care of yourself so that you're in a better position for the next couple of months. And you're in a better position for the holidays and how to take care of your family through a pandemic and how to go forward.

Lastly, I want to urge you to do something you love doing. So right now, I'm really loving making lo-fi hip hop music producing and mixing, and we've got a channel I'm working on and I'm really loving that process. So I'm going to just do a lot of that this week, because I really enjoy it, but I'm not going to put a lot of pressure on myself. I just got to do it because I love it!

Now, let's talk about three 'do not do's'.

Number one, don't hide right now. There's a temptation for a lot of very sensitive people and artists to stick their head in the sand and just hide and wait for this whole thing to kind of blow over. I wouldn't suggest hiding because you're going to miss out on certain amount of engagement, but again, limiting yourself to the engagement, protecting yourself, but not hiding.

There's a big difference between, totally engaging in something and just moderating yourself. So again, an hour a day of news and media, but not hiding. It's good to be with friends right now. It's good to talk with people you love. It's good to laugh. It's good to enjoy things. Watch a movie, play a game. Those types of things.

Number two is, do not try to make something profound this week. You don't need to. What you're going to do is you're going to end up putting on yourself a lot of pressure right now. There's this temptation to say 'Hey, we're going through a crisis. I want to try to capture lightning in a bottle with all the emotions people are feeling and my thoughts and feelings'. You can do that next week. You can do that the week after - you can do that the month after. You don't need to do it this week. This week might be really, really difficult. I urge you to just take care of yourself and your emotions.

And lastly, I would say, do not do anything drastic. Don't move. Don't make any big decisions this week because we're going to all be a little emotional and it's going to be a little bit crazy.

Just relax.

If you feel like this video resonated with you, please consider sending it to some of your friends. Let's get through together!

Zion