Find your passion by doing nothing

How can you find your passion by doing nothing?? I’ve interviewed Ina Catrinescu. She focuses on how to get more done with less effort and how to easily tap into your intuition. This is extremely important, cause as you know, as passion comes from your intuition. Check out her biggest insights…

1. Why are people so busy nowadays?
   Economy and technology helped us to become so much more productive than we have ever been, but we haven’t adapted our working times. We think that time = money. We have turned time into an economical currency. We made it vulnerable to scarcity. We equate being busy with productivity.
2. What are the consequences for everyone out there of working hard, being so busy?
   Technology and media right now showers us with information. It has clear consequences on mind, body and spirit. Specifically to our brains. Our brains have not become bigger. It actually has been shrinking rapidly. And since our brains are the biggest source of energy consumption in our body (It consumes a 5^th of our total body energy), it has a huge impact on our physical biology.
3. Why is doing nothing getting more important?
   About 10-15 years ago, science has discovered what happens in our brains when we’re doing nothing. We believe that when we focus on an activity, that’s when our brain functions the best and new pathways activate, but that’s actually not true. When we look at the MRI-scans of what happens to your brain when you simply close your eyes, laying back and just letting your mind wonder, not necessarily focusing on things, astonishing things happen.There is real evidence now that doing nothing activates more parts of your brain than when you focus on a certain activity.
4. What is doing nothing?
   We love to have control over our life. Control over our time and now we’re even trying to regulate what doing nothing is. Mindfulness, yoga, meditation. The forms that try to compensate the current disengagement and the crises we are facing, for example burnouts. These forms are still about control. Yoga focus on ahshana, meditation focus you on our breath or reducing thinking, mindfulness focus on any certain activities and observing things. That doesn’t allow for the neural pathway to activate. There is a system in our brain that activates when we do nothing. And that happens when we just close our eyes. Not focusing on anything, not thinking about anything, not trying to stop your thoughts, but just allowing your mind to wander. It’s okay to have thoughts.Sitting on the couch, standing on your head, laying on the floor, wherever you like. There are no specific rules to the ‘game’. Just sit still, close your eyes, and let it happen.
5. What can happen when you do nothing?
   It brings up those breakthroughs, because this is the modality to create new connections in your brain. The default mode network activates and this is the mode where learning happens and new creations are activated. Connecting one thing to another. It´s the moment after the fact, not during the fact, that your brain is creating new connections with the information it received before.This is where we develop meaning, this is where we develop passion. This is where the purpose and passion are contained. It’s not in the external information we’re looking for. It´s all within us already and the only thing we have to active to get more insight into this is to allow ourselves to do nothing.
6. What has doing nothing to do with passion?
   This is where we get our breakthroughs. Our ‘aha-moments’. You tap into your intuition, with meaning and this is where passion comes from. You can’t look for your passion in the outside world, it’s already inside. When you close your eyes, you can access to your insight.

We are curious: What is your experience with doing nothing? Put it in the comments!