A Day of Not Doing Nothing: The Peace Of Being Instead Of Doing

A quiet, unscripted day off turns into a full reset—phone off, book open, dancing in the living room, and a new respect for “undoing” as real self-care. We explore ego noise, boundaries around stillness, and why a rested self serves everyone better.

• choosing a day with no plans and no alarm
• window-watching, slow breakfast, and simple joys
• reading A Course in Miracles and noticing ego patterns
• dancing, journaling, and reframing “doing nothing”
• moving from guilt to boundaries around rest
• Post-it capture for intrusive tasks and phone-off habits
• how stillness refills your cup for parenting and work
• artist date practice and weekly two-hour solo time
• stepping into a busy week with clarity and ease

“You are allowed days where you are still, that nothing is required of you.”

Chapters

• 0:00 A Day With No Plans
• 1:20 Turning Off the Phone
• 2:03 Window Views and Simple Joys
• 2:49 A Course in Miracles Reflections
• 4:05 Dancing, Being, and Reframing “Nothing”
• 5:29 Guilt, Boundaries, and the Ego’s Noise
• 7:03 Rested, Ready, and Proud
• 8:32 Practical Steps for Still Days
• 10:42 Fill Your Cup, Then Others

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Solar Podcast with me, your host, someone who's very relaxed and feeling really rested and recalibrated, Emma Jones. And this episode is very unscripted, unprepared. I just want to come on here after the most incredible day to share my day and also share how this day has made me feel. And so when I woke up this morning, I knew I had nothing in my diary. I had no plans whatsoever. My daughters are at their dad's, so this is my weekend without them. And I normally put things in my diary. I see friends, I have chores to do, things to get done, but I had nothing to do today. And so when I set my alarm last night, I decided to unset it because I thought, no, no, no, I'm just gonna have a lion. I'm just gonna see when my clock wakes up, wake up with my own rhythm. And so I woke up this morning and I was so excited, but like internally excited. Like it felt like Christmas. Just to know that I have nothing to do and nowhere to be and nothing expected of me, no one needing anything from me. I spoke to my partner in the morning and I said to him, I'm gonna be switching my phone off at 10. So we had about a 40-minute conversation, which was lovely, and he's all in favour of these days. Um, we both really enjoy our still days and our time to ourselves. He really likes golf and he finds that doing that is quite a still practice and really is mindful for him and restores his energy basically. And so I just got up, I made myself some breakfast, I let my cat in, I fed my cat, and then I just potted around for a little bit, I had a shower. Again, like nothing had a time limit, nothing had a time frame, and it just felt so good. Like all day I just felt so at ease and so peaceful. And then I sat in front of my dining table, which I love. I love my dining table, it's nice and big, and I've always dreamed of a dining table like this. And I looked out of my really big windows, and I had I have the most amazing view that I can see between these two houses for miles, and it's just so beautiful. And it was sunny, and then it was really windy and rainy, but the whole mixture of everything just made me feel like being at home was the best place to be. I could see that it was really wet at times, really sunny, but it was changing quite rapidly, and I was like, there's nowhere else better for me to be today than here. And then I opened up my book, A Course in Miracles, which I have recently started, and I'm on lesson eight. So this is just a personal read. I do a book club, and um, we are reading a separate book on the book club, which is more financial and about wealth. But this book has been really great for me because it is reminding me of the things that I think I've learned throughout some of the books that we've read on the book club, one being The Greatest Secret, where a lot of the time our ego is constantly in play to either get us to do something or not do something. Like it's it's always there in the in the background, it's always telling a story of some sort. And as I was reading this today, I probably read about three chapters of it. And if anyone's read this book, I mean it's humongous. I think it's got about 500 pages in, but all of the pages are like tissue paper, it's just it's like the Bible. The writing is absolutely tiny, but for some reason, since picking this up, I feel so ready for the information. Have you ever had a book where you're just like, this, I'm I need this right now. This is it's it could not have come at a better time. I am so ready for the depth of this information, and so I just sat and ate some fruit and just cut a little thing, a few things up, had them on the table, looking out the window, reading my book, taking notes, journaling, and I did that for the whole day. For the whole day. And in the middle of that whole thing, I just started dancing. I had some like classical music in the background. I just started dancing in my living room where I was just like, this feels so so nourishing to my soul. And I could actually be rather than do. I didn't have to read if I didn't want to, but it was a chosen task to do. I wasn't doing it for a purpose of proving or achieving or getting somewhere or getting a job done. And I thought to myself, so what have I done today? I've done nothing. And then I wanted to reframe that that actually I've done the best thing that I could have done. And I think that we all need to remind ourselves that we need of a day of undoing. We do so much every single day where we are mums or parents and we're doing the school run, and then we've got all of the school, all of the school activities that you have you have to remember that truly I'm consistently forgetting. There's so much to remember. Then running a business if you've got a business or going to work every day, and everything is put on your performance and what you should be doing and how much of it you should be doing. And it has taken me time to be able to take days like this off. Historically, I would have felt extremely guilty for this. I would have only maybe given myself an hour of that, or then maybe it grew to two and then three and then four, but I wouldn't have been able to take a whole day off without feeling that I had itchy feet, things that I need to be doing. And I find having my phone switched off really helps me. I just switch it off. I use an old phone to put some music on through the Bluetooth speaker. And my mind, the ego, as I'm reading this Course of Miracles, will often try and distract me back to the thing that is not going to bring me peace. And so it will remind me of these tasks I need to do, or it's someone's birthday tomorrow that I've forgotten I haven't got a present for, or it's this, or it's that. So I just wrote all of these things on post-it notes and I just put them on the side. It's like these can be tackled after today or later today, once we've ended our undoing time for ourselves. And it's something that I want to make sure that I am putting into my day and my week more and more, because actually, this is our natural state. This stillness, we've almost forgotten this is a part of our process. This is so important, the undoing, almost like sleep, but resting in the day. Almost so much so that I didn't even really have a word for it. And the word that I would only use is nothing. If someone were to ask me what I did today, I'd do, oh, nothing. Literally nothing, just stayed home all day and just did nothing, just potted around. And I thought that's not really what it is. And so in A Course of Miracles, it says it's a day of undoing. And I thought that was so beautiful because it is a day of stepping outside of that normal ego rhythm, you know, that one where it's like, you've got to produce something, you've got to achieve something. I'm consistently problem solving. You know, life is all about problem solving and how we maneuver through the things that we're being taught or given, you know, the lessons. And it was just a day of stillness for my mind and my body just to soften and just what it felt like was recalibration. And I feel so rested now, and also in some ways quite proud of myself because just to be able to exist, excuse me, without any justification is such a big step for me. Um, I definitely am a recovering, busy person. I've been recovering for probably the last two years, and it's taken me time to get to this point, but now I'm at this point, I can really just sit in all of the nothingness or the undoingness and all of the beingness, and it feels so life-giving and so refreshing. And so I'm gonna go into my Sunday tomorrow. I have a fitting all day tomorrow, so it's gonna be quite a full day. Um, but it's gonna be a day where I feel really rested, and I feel when I get my kids back, I'm just gonna be the best mum that I can possibly be. And so it was just a reminder I wanted to come on here just to say that you are allowed days where you are still, that nothing is required of you. You don't have to make your days filled with things so you feel that that day was worth your time spent, or that you did enough within those days, or that time frame that you've given. My brain or my ego, let's say, will always say, You've not done enough. You need to be doing more, you could be doing this. And as Abraham Hicks says, you can never get it done, and you can never get it wrong, but you definitely cannot get it done. There will always be things on your to-do list. There will always be things on that to-do list, it never ends. But I will be stepping into this week now, having refilled my bucket up, and I haven't actually done anything, you know. I haven't really gone out to seek something. I mean, nature could have provided me that, but just being in my own home and in my space, not being disturbed, choosing what I want to do, has really made me feel so much more myself. I almost feel like my brain is caught up with my body because sometimes in the weeks, especially with so many plates spinning, I can feel that I'm running around with my thoughts and my actions. Like I'm just I'm just going and running around with it all. And then to just stop and center everything so that everything can kind of catch up just feels so, so good. So I want to end it there, but I hope if you're listening to this, that this message has landed really well. And if you haven't ever really been able to take a day to yourself, just maybe start with like an hour that you turn your phone off. Like that for me is such an important thing, if you can, or at least put it on do not disturb, um, or error play mode. But it's just so important because as soon as I do that, I feel like a lot of the noise and distraction is gone for me. And then when you start with an hour, try and creep it up to two hours. Something we learn in a book that we read in the book club, The Artist's Way, was to take two hours per week of an artist date. We don't do that. We don't date ourselves, we don't take our time and say, I'm gonna put everything in the calendar, my kids' disco, my kids' photos, this, that. I'm meeting this person, I've got this, I've got this dental appointment. But do we ever put in time or block a timeout to say this time is for me? And I'm gonna hold a boundary that this is going to be for me, and nothing will come in its way. It's two hours. I'm gonna take myself to my favorite coffee shop, I'm gonna plug into some music, and I'm just gonna colour in an adult colouring book to de-stress. When do we do that? And yet, those are the things that we actually really need. These are like the real dopamine hits that we actually need that make us feel more alive, more connected, more clarity, more direction to where we need to go without it being disturbed and distracted by the noise of the ego of shoulds and we could have done that, and we need to do this and hurry up and urgency and control. So just taking that time and knowing that you're worth that time, and not only you're worth that time, everybody around you benefits from that. You are, if you think, the cup, the chalice cup at the top, and your family is everyone underneath that. And so you can only fill their cups if your cup is full and overfilling. You cannot be pouring your half cup into everybody's cup because you'll never refill. So I hope that's landed really well. And yeah, I'm sending you so much love. Thank you for tuning in. See you next time. Bye.