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Tag Archives: overwhelm

A Guide to Keeping your Head up

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by Asia in Inspirations

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

activism, everything is going to be okay, heart nourishment, overwhelm, the state of the world

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Photo of Milla Prince (The Women who Married a Bear)

Living on earth is an exquisite experience. Rich, beautiful, exhilarating! … and also, let’s be serious for a moment, hard as hell.

Don’t get me wrong, being here is wondrous, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are small things that hurt. Spilled tea, papercuts, a word thrown carelessly. And big things too, bigger things than our bodies were even meant to manage. Oil in the ocean, clear cuts, weapons sold carelessly. This past week in our country we experienced one of the biggest mass shooting in recent history. It is a horror and an ache (and a clear call for policy shift). And yet another swath added to the larger tapestry of disaster and heartache that has been these past few months.

It is a lot, to say the least. It’s a lot to continue to believe in the wonder, the beauty. To still find the etching of light that exists around closing doors. To court magic, and believe in the good things coming.

Sometimes it’s all you can do to take care of the small things. Like throwing away the flowers that have grown stale or taking out the compost. In moments like these it’s perfectly fine to sit all day by the soup stock, and focus on what feels nourishing. Because when we learn how to take care of our human bodies, we can continue to find our humanity. And because tea and snuggles and laughter and pie is good medicine. It’s the medicine we need to teach our bodies how to breathe in a world where global tragedy pops up daily on your screen.

So what do you do when the world teams with the beauty of sunflowers and mums in every color… and yet it also seems like it’s going to hades in a handbasket?

In light of the ongoing heart-depletion of this time I’ve created a Guide for Keeping Your Head up. The five things I do every day to keep healthy, heart-strong and connected to the good. Because it’s there, it will never fade. And every day we have the opportunity to learn new pathways for finding the good that remains.

three pinks

1. Nourish your Heart

Media these days moves at the speed of light. An event that happens in one corner of the world is beamed onto every screen within the hour. Our bodies, however, are on a much slower evolutionary trajectory. In many ways our hearts, minds and nervous systems are the same as they’ve been for thousands of years… and life used to be a whole heck of a lot different. Our bodies developed in small more-than-human societies, where stress came and went and the locus of your world was your individual community. Today, we are plugged into the whole globe and often bearing the brunt of an entire planet’s stress. Overwhelm has become a near constant state of being for most folks. Our nervous systems simply weren’t built for this kind of overload of information! And so we need to learn how to take a breath and become better caretakers for our own bodies.

Good parents are conscientious not to push their children beyond the brink of their physical capacity (and if they do, God help them, for it shall be known in the form of tears and endless tantrums). We’d do equally as well to take such good care of our bodies. Because the truth is that every time we push our bodies beyond their capacity for integration, we face a similar reaction. There is only so much a single person can take, and our bodies have their very own special kind of “tantrums” to let us know when enough is enough: anxiety, depression, colds, muscle aches, skin breakouts, digestive querulousness… (aren’t they precious?!). Skip the tantrums by listening and taking care.

Stay strong enough to weather the times by tending to the “soft animal of your body” first and foremost. Be gentle on your heart, your nervous system. Give yourself time to decompress. Take baths, massage the bottoms of your feet, turn off the computer after dinner. Make yourself an herb blend to take as a daily tea or tincture. I keep a tincture called “Everything is Going to be Okay” in my purse at all times. And it always helps. Try making your own or check out my sample formula below.

Everything is Going to be Okay

4 oz tincture formula

Milky Oats (Avena sativa) 30 mL
Hawthorn Berries (Crataegus spp.) 30 mL
Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) 30 mL
Tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum) 30 mL

+ Flower essences of: Hawthorn, Cherry Blossom & Star of Bethlehem
(7 drops of each)

asia wonder

2.Begin Every Day with Gratitude

Gratitude shifts our perception. It is the fastest way to alter your consciousness and elevate the goodness. Gratitude gives your heart the strength to move into dark times. It is a lantern that will help you to the other side.

I begin every morning by giving gratitude for everything I can in my life. The food I eat, the water I drink, the air I breathe. The beautiful things, the hard things, the things that teach me how to be me. I give gratitude for it all, big and small, and then it is the blessings that stand out to me.

After my gratitudes, I take some time to “send light.” Sending wishes for care, nourishment, help or aid to those in need. I ask for the intervention of higher powers, I request miracles. Sometimes I ask for those in peril to know, simply, that they are cared for, thought of. I send my light, from the infinite source of all light, and by doing so I come into heart-felt relationship with all the love I have to give (and the attendant power it then gives me to act).

 

random flowers

3. Limit Screen Time + Gather with Friends

It is natural, when things fall apart to want to connect to others, and be in the know. But often we end up reading the same, similarly worded article over and over again and feeling our own power drain from us as we get lost in hopelessness or fear. Keep yourself sane by limiting media and forging real connections. Find reliable news outlets, update yourself once a day, then step away from your computer and reach out to an actual friend.

Studies show that social media creates more feelings of loneliness than it does community or connection. A good scroll on Instagram might seem just the thing to assuage one’s grief, but it can often overwhelm our senses, leaving us feeling even more inadequate or alone. When times get hard, gather your good friends close and talk about it. If you are sad, shocked or grieving, reach out. Call a friend to chat. Make a tea date. Go into the woods for a “forest bath” (plants are the most healing community I know and are always there to help you ground back in hope). Real community and relationship is important for healing and the best medicine is what happens “irl” (as they say).

asia calendula

Photo by Juliet Blankespoor

4. Find Ways to Laugh

 

Laughter is medicine. It is the first medicine we ever learn to give ourselves, and it is a medicine that can be freely generated at any moment. In The Book of Joy, a conversation with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu (and a wonderful read for any hard moment), Douglas Abrams refers to a Mexican shaman he met once who said, “laughing and crying are the same thing— laughing just feels better.” And it’s true.
Laughter helps clear the body in the same way tears do, and it is good medicine indeed. So, find the things that make you giggle. Go see stand-up comedy, call a friend who makes you chuckle, check out your favorite meme account, or better yet start a “funny file” on your phone to go to anytime you need a pick-me-up.

I was just clearing out my phone tabs the other day when I stumbled across this SNL skit I saved over a year ago. It seriously NEVER FAILS to make me giggle.

What is making you laugh these days?

Daisy Gift

5. Give what you can (when you can)

 

Offer concrete actions to help assuage the ache. Social sharing, monetary contributions, giving blood, writing blog pieces, donating clothes, making a phone call to your representative, offering your services for low cost or sliding scale. Generosity is one of the eight pillars of finding true joy, as outlined by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. When we give from wells that are full, we experience a deep and replenishing joy. Whether it’s a listening ear, a small love note, or an anonymous donation, we all have something to give to help the greater whole.

When you feel deeply awash, try to undertake that one action and then give yourself permission to be done for the day.

Transition all the way back to #1 on this list (nourishing yourself) and know that you will have even more strength tomorrow.

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Something Small & Bright

02 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by Asia in Inspirations

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

florida, Ocala National forest, overwhelm, The Calusa, wilderness

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Last week I took a legitimate vacation. An honest to goodness, leave-the-computer-at-home and pack a sun hat, vacation. Those just don’t happen all that often for me, I can probably count on one hand the amount of real vacations I’ve taken in the past decade. But something inside was tugging like a sailboat in wind to be cut free so I loaded up my pack basket with my camping gear, weighed my car down with snacks, and headed to the wilds of Florida for a week.

I’ve been in a love affair with Florida for years. An entanglement that never fails to set my heart aching whenever I think upon that pastel stretch of earth whose very name, the land of flowers, is a droplet of poetry. Florida, wild Florida, is a dreamscape in hues of tropic— hibiscus, emerald and aquamarine. There are roadside thickets full of tangerines and crystal clear springs so deep, blue and clean that they’ve been likened to the eye of an angel. Upwellings of water straight from the heart of the earth that form entire rivers, clear as glass and warmed to a perpetual 72 degrees.

Florida itself is something small, and infinitesimally bright. A disappearing peninsula gifted from the sea, submerged, revealed, shaped and changed countless times over the eons by the touch of ocean waves. What we know of as Florida is just a tiny flicker in the monument of time. A coastline that will always return, sooner or later, to the sea. It is a place of microhabitats, hammocks filled with dwarf-sized trees, middens made from shell fragments, and springs that glitter in the shards of a thousand crystals.

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I went to Florida to remember, in blessed relief, what I truly am – something small and infinitesimally bright. And it was a kind of bliss. To strip down my thoughts to simple, light-filled things. Like how far I wanted to paddle for the day or when to feed the fire with palmetto fronds. Noticing how much closer to the horizon the north star is this far south, the tiny diamonds of the Pleiades. Small things, like the whole constellation of seeds in a single wild tangerine. Or the tiny bits of Spanish moss the cormorants carry, beak by beak, back to their collective rookeries.

I gathered seashells, one at a time, and at night I gazed up at the sky, remembering that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of this earth. Before sleep I found myself repeating, I am cozy inside this world. And every morning I woke up, clear as quartz.

When we become small, when we acknowledge that we always have been, a truly incredible thing begins to happen. We can allow ourselves to be cared for. We remember that to be on this earth is to live in a cradle of nourishment. And Florida, land of flowering abundance, is a place that shows you how very deeply we can be cared for when we cherish our minuteness.

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The Calusa, the native people who built a complex and enduring civilization across Southwestern Florida, lived inside this knowing. The Calusa are unique among the large civilizations of native North and South America in that their vast society was never sustained by agriculture, but by the sheer bounty of the ocean. With nets and boats and vast estuaries, they lived solely off the shoals of the sea. The water teemed with such life there was no need to spend much time cultivating fields of sunflower, corn or squash. They ate heartily, with their hands, from what was offered. Which was, in short, everything.

It is a luxury that is hard to imagine these days, but it is also not a luxury at all. It is what it means to relish the seed of one’s being, to embrace one’s smallness in the wider orchard of this world.

Our perceived bigness in this time of human history is a burden that ripples out devastation in its wake. A cultural ethos of primacy and grandiosity that is a heavy weight indeed. So what a relief it was, for a week, to put aside being anything but tiny, being anything but me. To let go of the feeling like I must always be wide enough to hold all the responsibilities of the world. As if it were up to me to change the unchangeable, to shift the tides.

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Like many indigenous peoples, the Calusa believed in reincarnation, but their hue of rebirth looks very different than what has become our common vision. For the Calusa, reincarnation began with being human. And instead of getting larger, wider, and more expansive with each go around, our selves, instead, got smaller. Once you shed the skein of being human you could become a jaguar, an alligator, a deer. From there you might pick through the marsh as a heron, run under the waves as a pinfish and finally, alight upon the world as a mosquito, the ever-present wetland companion that is known to those who live here as swamp angels. Until, one day, you became so small and so bright you simply disappeared into the vast light.

There is something so liberating about this to me. Instead of the pressure to become larger, what if we are actually here to get smaller?

marsh-flower-1

This one idea has helped me so much upon my return. To let go of multitasking, the impetus to be always expanding my attention out to what will be, what might be, what I should make happen. Instead, since I’ve come back, I’ve let my attention be small and bright. Alighting only on the task at hand, moving like an egret, one foot at a time, through the pond of my day.

I let go of big ambitions, the need to be grandiose or successful or even seen. The endless scrolling and complexity. I let it be simple. I let it be… just me.

So if you are feeling overwhelmed, join me in this place of the small and bright. Give yourself permission to take on tiny tasks, one at a time. Go outside to feel the sun on your face and remember how deeply you are cared for.

It is a blessing to be a grain of sand with you here in this wide and wondrous world.

 

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Defined

[wool-gath-er-ing] v.
daydreaming, the gathering of thoughts and dreams as one might collect fallen tufts of wool

[wild-craft-ing] v.
the harvesting of herb, root, flower or inspiration from the wilds

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