Is my energy higher than the thing I'm creating?

photo by Karim Manjra

I was listening to Elise Loehnen's podcast Pulling the Thread the other day and she said "Your vibration must be higher than the thing you create, otherwise you cannot manage it." 

I really liked this and it's giving me one more way of processing my work with Ruminate, the literary magazine I dreamed up and led from 2006-2019.  

I never could get Ruminate to a place where it was financially sustainable, which felt like a failure at a the time but I've been examining this story lately.

And when I heard Elise's words I wondered: what if we just became energetically mis-matched? Initially my energy was higher than the thing I was creating, but over the years, as Ruminate needed to grow and as I experienced a lot of self-doubt, I found myself feeling ten steps behind and unable to "manage it."

I like this framework—it feels true. And it feels like a kind way of telling the story.

I was talking to a colleague about this the other day and she asked if I ever actually thought an indie literary magazine could be financially viable long-term. I paused and told her: I did! Even though I knew the very nature of literary magazines is that they are ephemeral (I studied this for my Master's Thesis)! And then we both laughed.

What can I say, I'm an optimist and I guess I really like a challenge. Ha!   

Anyway, I think Elise's idea is a useful question for all creatives and entrepreneurs:

Is my energy/vibration/capacity higher than the thing I am creating? If so, green light! If not, it will be difficult to manage. 

And I think it turns out to also be a useful framework for making sense of why things aren't working or didn't work.

What about you? Are you also metabolizing any old "failure stories" in a new way? I'd love to think it through with you.

With care,
Brianna