Between surviving and leading a fully humming creative life lies the middle ground of determining your minimum requirements for self-care, a duded-up way of saying what you absolutely must have to stay in touch with your center.

Basic needs, or minimum requirements, are different for each woman, although getting enough sleep, moving our bodies, eating fresh food, being touched, and connecting to something larger than ourselves show up pretty consistently on women’s lists — but again, not on everybody’s.

It can be easy to discount the importance of these basics, because getting enough alone time or napping when you are tired just doesn’t sound as sexy as realizing some fabulous dream. Yet without these basics, the dreams don’t come true, or you can’t sustain them when they do, or, most tragically, it turns out that you are following not your dreams but rather a script about what you should do. […]

On most of the Life Organizer pages, you’ll encounter questions like “What do I desire this week?” “What calls to me, even if it doesn’t make logical sense or I’m certain I don’t have the time or energy for it?” “If I were suddenly infused with twenty times more courage, what would I want this week?” “What depth of desire might reveal itself to me?”

Almost every “week” a question or two asks you to consider what you desire, how you want to explore and shape the life force coursing through you. Why such a focus on desire? Because it’s pure life force speaking to you, and we have neglected and misunderstood it for far too long. […]