Feel the Support

What helps you carry your load?

The Practice:
Feel the support.

Why?

We’re all carrying a load, including tasks, challenges, worries, inner criticism, mistreatment from others, physical and emotional pain, loss and illness now or later, and everyday stresses and frustrations.

Take a moment to get a sense of your own load. It’s very real, isn’t it? Recognizing it is just honesty and self-compassion, not exaggeration or self-pity.

There’s a fundamental model in the health sciences that how you feel and function is based on just three factors: your load, the personal vulnerabilities it wears upon – such as health problems, a sensitive temperament, or a history of trauma – and the resources you have. As a law of nature, if your load or vulnerabilities increase – over a day, a year, or a lifetime – so must your resources. Otherwise, inevitably, you will get strained, depleted, and ground down. I’ve had times like this myself, and I’ve seen it in loved ones.

Staying In Alignment When The World Seems Crazy

This morning, I felt it. 

All of it… the tears, the grief, the sense of how REAL this all is. If you are the same — feeling the darkness and the fear, I want to send you a huge virtual hug right now. You are not alone! 

And while the hug may help, the REAL path out of the pit is to stay focused on the solutions. We want (and need) solutions-based ways and protocols that keep us close to our higher power, and help us hold onto a positive vision. 

We need to hold space for a true vision, one that isn’t set on “This will be all over on XYZ date, and THEN I’ll feel better.” Instead, we have to make room for the unknown. We don’t know WHEN everything will be over, or when (if ever) things will go back to “normal.” When we do that, we set ourselves up for failure because there’s no way to know when things will be over, or what the new “normal” will look like. That can cause even more stress. 

10 Tips for Surviving Our Stay-At-Home Time

I recently hosted a Facebook Live session filled with tips on how to cope with the anxiety you’re going through right now with the coronavirus and having to stay at home.

I wanted to check in this week and see how you were all doing. Plus, I thought I’d put my 10 Tips in this blog so you can have them handy. I hope they help to make your time at home a little easier and a little less stressful.

Here they are—10 Tips to Survive Staying at Home:

Surrender or Giving Up?

I was asking Spirit what topic I should write about and I heard: “Talk about the one you’re in” and I smiled. So … I am writing about SURRENDER!  I recently spent the entire morning working on surrender as I rescheduled our trip to Peru. It is such a bummer, and at the same time totally necessary right now.

The day before, around 6:30pm, I got a call from my travel guru who said, “We must decide on Peru – in like 36 hours. Everybody who has signed up for the trip has to make a decision, not just us.” My heart sunk as I realized we would have to contact over 35 people and get an answer within the next 36 hours.  We had been asking for information for three weeks as to what we could do and what the options were … and they were not great. And of course, we all want to go.

The trip to Peru was scheduled for late June, which of course seems so far away; but the reality of it is, as far as international flights go, we could not wait any longer.  So, we had to make the decision very, very quickly to reschedule what dates we could reschedule during a time when the travel industry in general is closed. Hotels are closed, employees are on furlough … so the connections were sparse.

It has been really challenging. And I know this travel situation is not something that is new. It is happening for everyone. So, I am not complaining about it. To try to reschedule things and work on all this stuff without being able to get contacts, emails, responses, and communication within a foreign country was not an easy thing. So, that morning, I surrendered.

In my heart I knew everyone was going to be disappointed, but at the same time I held onto the thought that we still get to go. We just bump it out a year. That was the first surrender. It was certainly a challenge for me and my sense of responsibility because it is my group. I am taking 31 people to Peru. It is my responsibility, my risk, my people. They are MY responsibility. And at the same time, my hands were tied in a lot of ways and I did not have control. I’m not able to just snap my fingers and change it or figure it out or force it. Like there is nothing in my ability to do besides surrender. And so that is why I thought this would be a great topic to write about … because that’s how I started.

I had to sit in the energy of surrender … versus what is the other option?

Just give up?

Just quit?

Cancel everything and just shut down and go hide away and hide under the blankets and be depressed?

That is an option as well.

BUT it is not an option for me.

So, I surrender.

Fasten Your Seatbelt, It’s Going To Be A Bumpy Ride

Bette Davis spoke this classic line in the film All About Eve, and it’s certainly apropos for the world we are currently in.

Unless you are in deep denial, the fact is that the rug has been pulled out from under all of us and it’s going to be bumpy for quite some time.

As we adjust to being in a collective dark night of the soul, we are individually figuring out how wrap our heads around the fact that right now there are no real answers: no one can say when/if the virus will end; when/ if certainty and stability will return; or if life as we once knew it will return.

Whether you are suffering through this process or are doing great with it (or bouncing between happiness and misery), most of us are now learning to adapt to “being with not knowing.”