At the end of 2016 I had some private salsa dance lessons, where I was learning how to be led. It’s about knowing the moves, without anticipating the moves and without assuming the lead when I sense uncertainty on the part of my partner. Recognising my role is to stay in my centre, without anxious thinking about ‘will I know how to respond’ to a lead. Trusting myself. All very much a metaphor for what I have been realising this past year or two. I hope you enjoy!
Strong feelings and persistent thoughts appear to demand a lot of our attention and we can feel compelled to act on them. Many of which are unconscious and habitual.
However thoughts and feelings in and of themselves CANNOT be a problem. We cannot solve a thought or a feeling no matter how hard we try….and most of us try pretty hard. This is because they are simply thoughts and feelings!
I’m going to use the example of finding our work stressful. In this situation we often expend many hours thinking and worrying about it, we can even make ourselves feel quite sick about it. We would likely say we’re feeling stressed by our work, or our work is making us sick. Yet in reality it’s our thinking about our work that is causing our distress.
We can experience mental and emotional discomfort from our fixated thinking about a situation. We can also experience physical discomfort from this same thinking. The acute physical symptoms can be many and varied, but commonly can include quickened heart rate, headaches, stomach aches, change in bowel habits, stiff neck, tight jaw, disrupted sleep and nausea to name a few.
These can all manifest from us getting caught up in our thinking about various life situations.
It’s a vicious circle, as we can then go on to worry about our physical symptoms…and so the worry train chugs along – or races along – to an unwanted destination.
Simply noticing that we are having a lot of thinking about something and recognising that we have just ‘made it up’, is very powerful. Without interference our system naturally chooses to go in a different direction.
When we realise that we are feeling sad/angry/depressed we only need to acknowledge the presence of this feeling. There’s no benefit to giving it any more attention, no justifying, defending, analysing, blaming, fixing, putting a positive spin on it, pretending it’s not happening…this alone, significantly reduces our workload!
It is an inherent part of our human design that eventually these feelings WILL pass. We all have examples of times when distressing thoughts have just disappeared, because there was nothing to fix – because nothing was broken. Understanding this is freeing.
It’s a similar process to having a cold, it’s a nuisance, but with recognition of what is happening our inbuilt immune system deals with it.
It’s the same with thoughts and feelings. The intelligence of the inbuilt design of our mental and emotional systems allow us to experience the full range of thoughts and feelings without compromising the healthy functioning of our whole being.
We are free to trust that in any moment we will always have an appropriate response to whatever is presented to us in life….and it’s perfectly ok when that response is I don’t know. Because when what we “know” is that we don’t know, then we’re simply speaking the truth, and it creates the space for the known to become clear to us.
No preparation required…phew!! As a life long anticipator this is where I am waking up. Anticipating is engaging in unhelpful thinking. With the best of intentions it’s actually taken me down some roads that truly looked like they were going places, but which have often been filled with potholes and dead ends.
Anticipatory thoughts and feelings are just that. They don’t need solutions, no matter how good I’ve gotten at dreaming them up!
Staying comfortable in the unknown.
Listening to our inner knowing.
Knowing when we know. Knowing when we don’t know.
We are being led.
Do we know how to follow?
As I’ve spent the last 24 years studying and working in the area of health and wellness it may be useful to explore how I see the similarity between our thinking and the functioning of our immune system.
Our immune system automatically knows how to respond to a bacteria/virus/ mutating cell but often we don’t pick up the signal, or we override it, as it doesn’t seem as important as something else that has our attention. Think of the advertisements for cold and flu medication – take this and soldier on!
Persistent inflammation can lead to dis-ease. For example the “‘itis” illnesses eg tonsillitis, gastritis, arthritis etc are a description of that body part experiencing inflammation. Talking and eating with tonsillitis is painful. Opening jars when you have arthritis in your hands and fingers really hurts and becomes very difficult. These are cues from our immune systems saying ‘don’t do this you’re causing yourself pain and more damage’.
Our immune systems are self-correcting but we have to play our part.
We are being led.
Do we remember how to follow?
It is wise to listen to our body when it’s in pain and distress. It’s one of the ways that the intelligence behind life communicates with us. When we stop and listen, it will occur to us how to respond.
Our often ‘unconscious over ride’ can result in our system having an inappropriate response to mutating cells. In a way our system is interpreting our over ride as ‘this is fine, nothing to worry about’ and it accommodates the dis-ease. Often our reaction to daily life is frenetic activity, which tends to shift the focus of our immune system to maintaining homeostasis within our endocrine (hormonal) system. Commonly this is accommodating the huge demand we place on our adrenals, which become exhausted from our ‘must do more and more and more’ reactions. Meanwhile the mutating cells quietly replicate and “out of nowhere” appears a diagnosis of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis or one of the many autoimmune diseases there are.
We are all aspects of a huge ecosystem. We are micro ecosystems within the macro. When we are tuned in we naturally connect with our innate wellbeing and are in harmony with the innate wellbeing of the macro system.
So when we’re getting more and more distressed by our anxious thinking it’s a big clue!
Stop and listen.
We are being led.
Our systems always know, in real time,
how to follow the lead of universal intelligence.
Our job is simply to listen to our inner knowing. This gets easier once we recognise that creating more noise in our heads about whatever the thought or feeling is, is inflammatory, and actually takes us further into distress.
Observing young children can help us remember this fearless way to be. They can be happy one minute and distraught the next when something is presented to them that is difficult for them to comprehend. However once they’ve hung out in that uncomfortable feeling for a while they move on to the next moment.
In my experience as a parent this all flows with much more ease when I get out of the way and stop seeing their feelings as a problem…and mine to try and fix! This is applicable to all of our relationships and to every aspect of life.
There is a calm air of acceptance that comes with allowing hanging out in the present moment, however it looks.
Over time this way of coming back home to our peaceful centre is our automatic response. The situations in our lives that used to look stressful, just look like what they are: Tired kids. A big workload. Moving house. A head cold.
We are being led.
I’m remembering how to follow.