3 Steps to Wellbeing and Peace in Turbulent Times
Birdsong flitted through manzanita and cottonwoods as I set off on a sunrise hike last weekend. Coral light lifted the curtain of night onto a green escarpment. I decided to hike a steep trail that led to wild lands I’d imagined visiting for years. Both excitement and fear filled my limbs with tingly energy, like a hive of bees making honey.
During my healing journey, I retreated to this chaparral expanse many times. I felt too exhausted to hike, so I’d sit on a boulder where the Kumeyaay ground acorns by a valley stream. Swishing water and shimmering leaves beckoned me back to the living world. Even with crushing symptoms, I awoke to a sense of aliveness in and around me.
Isn’t this what we need now more than ever—a felt connection with our self and the world?
As meaning makers, the human species is generating a lot of scary stories right now. Our rights could be taken away. My voice doesn’t matter. If X, Y and Z don’t get us, climate change will. Maybe your worries center around your body. I used to have thoughts like: I really can't take this anymore, there must be something faulty with my genes or my life is wasting away. These doozies could send even the healthiest person to the dumps!
Let’s zoom out for a moment. There’s a situation. We have thoughts about it. Our thoughts create our feelings. Our feelings drive our behaviors. The situation doesn’t create our feelings. Our thoughts do.
What beliefs are creating fear, anger or sadness in you? Pause right now to take your own inventory. How do you feel in your body when you think those thoughts? Feel into your physical sensations in this very moment. You might notice a gnarl in your belly, pressure in your head or shooting in your neck. If you care about how you feel (and I hope you do!), choose a thought that makes you feel better, such as I’m doing my very best.
Our worries, like our physical symptoms, are trying to protect us from feeling an underlying emotion. When you notice your mind catastrophizing, pause and acknowledge it. Now ask, what emotion am I feeling? Gently open your awareness to your whole body. It can take practice to reconnect with our felt experience. But there’s a universe of sensation awaiting our attention. When we feel them, we heal them.
01. Notice how your thoughts make you feel.
02. Choose thoughts that make you feel better.
03. Attend to feelings in your body.
These simple steps shift blood from your limbic system to your frontal lobe. They can even regulate your nervous system. Why would we care about that? When the brain is in flight or fight mode—because of a predator on the trail or a whirl of worries about life on earth — it restricts blood flow to parts of the body. That can cause back, neck or body pain, bladder or bowel spasms, headaches, fatigue, anxiety, insomnia and any other stress-related symptoms imaginable.
Remember, the cause is psychological, not physical. There’s nothing wrong with your body. Your mind and heart space need tending.
The same part of the brain activated by a physical threat also lights up with a psychological stressor. We don’t run from saber-tooth cats these days, but we’ve got work deadlines, scary soundbites, pandemic pressures and self criticisms. We can’t control all of them but we can make compassionate choices. For this reason, I’m limiting my exposure to TV and instead reading headlines and select articles in the New York Times. When I watch cable news, I feel like the insides of a champagne bottle that’s shaken but still corked. It doesn't make me a better citizen to expose myself to all the dysfunction an hour can hold.
As I hiked towards the peak last weekend, I came across high voltage power lines snarling in this otherwise pristine habitat. so much electricity moving through a narrow conduit—Just like us! When we run too much stress through our mind-body system, It hisses with anxiety or crackles with pain. It tells us to turn down the intensity.
It doesn’t mean we’re sick or broken. Our physiology has evolved over billions of years to give us information we need to survive. But it hasn’t developed for 24/7 cable news (and I hope it never does). We’re wired to outrun occasional predators interspersed with vast stretches of collecting tubers and berries. We’re meant to move our bodies, breath fresh air and find common purpose with others.
How can you turn down the pressure in your life? What behaviors or thoughts are causing unneeded stress? How can you comfort and nurture yourself? Reestablish a sense of safety, as you would for a child. I don’t mean an occasional trip to the spa. I mean nourishing thoughts, feelings and habits on a daily basis.
Instead of thinking the worst possible scenario that may happen in the future, give thanks for the simple bounty you enjoy today: At this moment, I have all the air, water, food and shelter I need (and so much more!). There’s nothing wrong with my body. I’m just getting signals that a part of my brain is scared. My voice matters to me and I enjoy expressing myself authentically. Epigenetics shows our inner and outer environment turns on or off certain genes, after all.