Coming Home to Ourselves Amidst Chaos
Sometimes we think the external world pulls us away from ourselves, but really, we are allowing ourselves to drift, be distracted and drained from our center. Often, it’s our own default programming that takes control of the wheel, unconsciously falling back into old operating patterns that create a false sense of safety, yet only bring us further away from self-connection.
We can often go into overdrive, push too hard, feel too much. What’s happening in the world, if we are sensitive to it, is incredibly draining. Keeping up with all the information is too, and then tack on trying to outsmart reality by thinking five steps ahead in our lives, the stock market, finances, our relationships.
Personally, I drained myself by absorbing a spout of negative, upsetting information and tried to protect myself in a mad rush to nowhere. My sleep was thrown off, my body felt tense and I was swept up in fear, and I didn’t even realize it. Tack on processing emotions from everything that has happened up until now in my own personal life—well that’s a lot, on all of us! It’s heavy homework, and sometimes the best thing to do is to blow it off, take a nap, tackle it tomorrow, or don’t try to tackle it at all. Perhaps too much effort just has us spinning our wheels while remaining stationary (fun 😄).
So, we know when we are fried, when we feel like we have stuck our hand in a circuit and we resemble Albert Einstein's hair (on the inside), we may feel frazzled, broken, eccentric. We may feel that we need to be wearing a warning label: Malfunction occurring.
When we recognize we are in this space, that's exactly when we need to be a loving parent to ourselves and ask, Why am I pushing so hard? Why am I so tense? What can I do to remedy this? Maybe I just need to relax, have some tea, cry out my tension, stop consuming information, stop doing, stop over-functioning—it’s going to be okay. YOU are going to be okay. The world is going to be okay.
In fact, we are beautiful, just as we are, even if we feel like we are a mess in the moment. We are sacred, we are God, we are a living being, and despite everything going on in the world and going on in our life, we are allowed to just BE.
A friend gave me a tarot deck a year or two ago called The Rooted Woman. While it’s geared toward women, it can apply to men, too, in that we all have an equal amount of feminine and masculine energy to us. The way tarot works is that it’s simply a mirror to our energy. Before I became depleted over the last few weeks, feeling like a car running on fumes, I pulled two cards. (I only pull from this deck when I need deeper guidance as the messages are always profound and accurate.)
Over the past year I pulled cards that were about seeing in the dark, free-falling, transmuting trespasses and transgressions, letting go, and for the first time ever, I pulled two beautiful cards—one was the card on the cover of the deck, The Rooted Woman herself, and the other card was a “Meadow.” (My name Shelley actually means "a meadow's edge"). It was a confirmation to me that I’m in a new cycle, a positive one, and yet sometimes, as we move into a new cycle, the old emotions come up for purging like a geyser. It’s often darkest before the dawn, like in a healing crisis where everything is forced to come up and out before we can renew.
As I rebalance myself by ignoring the upsetting news for a while for my mental and physical well-being, I restore my energy through a cup of tea, sitting in the sun, sitting in my uncomfortable emotions, attempting better sleep hygiene, better self-care. I do so to return to my center, to the calm within, to the good. It’s a counterbalance measure. We need to go inward, into our yin energy, and what better way to do that then to spend time in mother nature. She calms us physiologically by turning on our parasympathetic nervous system because attuning to nature is reconnection. Studies show even just looking at pictures of nature can relax us since we are reminded we are always connected to her (and therefore our nature).
On one of the warmer days this week I sat in my favorite spot and for the first time I noticed a tree in the distance that looked exactly like the card I pulled—a tree with her roots exposed, her branches wild and weathered. When we feel out of control, we must root again, or really, just realize we are always rooted, even if we look crazy to the outside world (or to ourselves).
Sometimes it feels vulnerable to be exposed, but that's the journey. Some animals have protective mechanism, but trees, they just are. Coming back to ourselves is what's needed to restore ourselves, restore connection to our bodies, to the truth of our emotions and feelings, by simply honoring them and sitting with them. In doing so, we come back to our own "mother nature." And in that grace, in synch with nature's rhythms, our branches grow green again, bear leaves and give coverage to others...while merely being one's beautiful, rooted self.
Soul-Prompt: How can I root in myself when I feel exhausted? How can I offer myself care as if I were a child? Can I do something to feel better?
