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Today’s Miracle Moment Is About The Surprising Power of Doing Less…
Sometimes, the real breakthrough doesn’t come from doing more — it comes from doing less… and listening. Forcing your way to happiness and miracles doesn’t work. It depletes you, it disconnects you, and it drowns out the quiet wisdom trying to reach you.
Here’s an example of what I mean: You know those aha moments that seem to drop in from out of the blue? Or that great idea that comes to you when you’re taking a shower? That’s the power of the pause!
Epiphanies don’t usually arrive when you’re pushing or striving. They arrive when you stop and take a break.
Think about it: when do your best insights come? Not mid-scroll, mid-meeting, or mid-meltdown. They come when you’re walking quietly. Or sitting in stillness. Or just breathing. Or when you’re focusing on anything other than the problem you’re trying to solve. Here’s how this showed up in my life…
When I was 13, I went to see Zig Ziglar, an inspirational speaker, and I had a very clear vision that that was what I was supposed to do with my life. I had a clear vision, saw myself traveling around the world speaking to large audiences inspiring people. But when I started my career, I struggled with so much self doubt and low self-esteem.
In 1989, I got trained by Jack Canfield – this was before he’d even thought of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books yet. He was teaching about self-esteem. I wanted to start teaching programs like that because as they say, we teach what we most want to learn.
So I started teaching workshops on self-esteem. I worked really, really hard to build my career. For years, I was a road warrior – going from city to city every day and giving talks to anywhere between 20 and maybe 100 people a day. It certainly wasn’t the big audiences I’d seen in my vision.
I was struggling and exhausted. I knew I was doing the right kind of work, but I felt like I was hitting my head against the wall to make it happen. Well in January 1995, a dear friend of mine came to me and said, “Marci, you’re burned out. You need a break. Come with me on a seven day silent meditation retreat.”
I said, “You’re crazy. I don’t do silence. I haven’t been silent for more than two hours in my life!” But she was very, very persuasive, so off I went.
I’ll tell you, the first couple days of silence were absolute torture. But finally I settled in and really started letting go of that pushing, driving energy that I’d lived in. I really surrendered to the pause. And on the fourth day, in the middle of a meditation, out of nowhere, a light bulb went off in my head.
I saw the words Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul. And now, at the time, there were no other books out there other than the original Chicken Soup for the Soul book. And I knew that that was exactly what I was supposed to do, and it was what was going to lead me to bigger and bigger audiences.
There was one problem – I had just had this huge epiphany and I still had 3 more days of silence. When the retreat was over, I ran to the closest payphone – we didn’t have cell phones then and called up Jack and told him my idea. He said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe nobody’s thought of it!” He called up the publisher, and the publisher said, “I can’t believe nobody’s thought of it!”
I started working on the book and year and a half later, Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul came out and went to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list that first week. And it was the thing that propelled me to that vision that I had of speaking to large audiences around the world.
Since then I’ve written 9 books that have been on the New York Times bestseller list for 121 weeks and have sold more than 16 million copies. I could never have planned that.
So that’s how powerful that pause was for me. The idea that brought me to greater purpose and success, came in the pause, not in the push.
Here are 3 key shifts to lean into the power of the pause:
#1: Rest Is Not Laziness
Somewhere along the way, we were taught that if you’re rest, you’re lazy. Especially as women, we often feel guilty for pausing. There’s always someone or something that we need to take care of – whether it’s a partner, children, parents, community, or a business. And taking care of ourselves usually ends up last on the list.
But rest isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity for living a miraculous life. All of nature has cycles of rest and action. Our bodies, minds and souls need the rejuvenation that comes from rest.
I used to feel so guilty taking breaks. At one point, I was overworking so much that an Ayurvedic doctor said to me: “you’re burned out and you have to stop right now.” I said – “I don’t have time to stop. I’ll rest in a couple of years once I get through all of this work” and he said – “no, it will be too late by then. You’ll lose too much of your body’s prana – your vital energy and life force. You must take care of yourself now.” Well, that really freaked me out and so I stopped and started to do what he was telling me to do in terms of rest. I made the quality AND quantity of my sleep a priority, and every night I get to sleep by 10pm – I call it catching the angel train. And I found that I not only started to feel more energized during the day, but I was happier, and I even started getting more done.
I finally learned that rest is not selfish – it’s sacred. And it’s where our best self can return.
#2: Sacred Space Creates Clarity
Have you ever had a big decision to make, and the more you went over it in your mind, the more you got stuck in your head trying to figure out what to do?
Often, the answer won’t come from “trying to figure it out.” But when you allow quiet space in your day, you’re opening a doorway for something higher to reach you. That’s when the idea comes. The answer arrives. The clarity lands.
Not because you forced it, but because you made room for it.
And there’s some science to this – When our focus softens, the brain shifts into the default mode network—and that’s where creativity, memory, and insight converge. In the quiet beyond effort, the mind connects what pushing and forcing can’t, and that’s when clarity and inspired ideas can arise.
This was what happened for me at the silent meditation retreat. As the constant stream of thoughts and mental clutter cleared out, it created sacred space for clarity.
But you don’t have to go away for 7 days to create sacred space for yourself. Even 5 minutes a day spent in silence can help you access greater clarity.
#3: When You Do Less, You Feel More
When you pause the doing, you reconnect with the being. You feel more. You notice more. You become present again. And that presence is where peace lives.
And when you stop racing through your life, you can finally experience it.
My partner Sergio, who’s originally from Italy, taught me this beautiful Italian phrase, “dolce far niente.” It literally means, “sweet do nothing,” and it’s a celebration of relaxing. Being stuck in busy-ness doesn’t leave us time to connect with our innate essence or to appreciate who we are deeply inside, beyond what we do. We can miss some of the sweetest parts of life and of ourselves.
By doing less, you leave time to feel more of the yumminess of life – and more of what you’re truly here for.
So this week, give yourself permission to stop forcing and start allowing.
You don’t need to earn your rest. You don’t need to justify your pause. Because the happiness you’re chasing? It’s already within you. It’s just been waiting for the noise to quiet down.
I’ll end with this great quote from Anne Lamott:
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
Let me know in the comments: What would it look like for you to rest without guilt this week?
Your next epiphany isn’t in the push. It’s in the pause.
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