"If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more"
About this Quote
Productivity culture wants you to treat distraction like a moral failure that can be punished into obedience. Clarissa Pinkola Estes offers a quieter heresy: if youve lost focus, the fix isnt force, its stillness. The line "just sit down and be still" reads like a small act of refusal, a poet-therapist undoing the modern assumption that attention is best managed through acceleration and self-surveillance.
The most revealing move is the domestic, almost lullaby metaphor: "rock it to and fro". An idea becomes something alive enough to soothe, not a task to be wrestled into submission. Rocking implies patience, repetition, and a body-based kind of knowing; it suggests creativity is less a lightning strike than a relationship. The subtext is permission: you are allowed to be temporarily unfocused because unfocus can be part of the process, not evidence that you are broken.
"Keep some of it and throw some away" cuts against perfectionism. Estes normalizes pruning as a form of care, not capitulation. Creation here is editing, composting, letting what doesnt belong fall off so what remains can "renew itself". That renewal is framed as self-generating; your job is to provide conditions, not control outcomes.
Context matters: Estes, known for fusing folklore, psychology, and poetic counsel, writes in a register that sounds like elder wisdom, not optimization. "You need do no more" lands as both comfort and critique: the culture that demands constant output is the very thing scattering your focus in the first place.
The most revealing move is the domestic, almost lullaby metaphor: "rock it to and fro". An idea becomes something alive enough to soothe, not a task to be wrestled into submission. Rocking implies patience, repetition, and a body-based kind of knowing; it suggests creativity is less a lightning strike than a relationship. The subtext is permission: you are allowed to be temporarily unfocused because unfocus can be part of the process, not evidence that you are broken.
"Keep some of it and throw some away" cuts against perfectionism. Estes normalizes pruning as a form of care, not capitulation. Creation here is editing, composting, letting what doesnt belong fall off so what remains can "renew itself". That renewal is framed as self-generating; your job is to provide conditions, not control outcomes.
Context matters: Estes, known for fusing folklore, psychology, and poetic counsel, writes in a register that sounds like elder wisdom, not optimization. "You need do no more" lands as both comfort and critique: the culture that demands constant output is the very thing scattering your focus in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meditation |
|---|
More Quotes by Clarissa
Add to List
