What if on the other side of that breakdown you’re avoiding or fighting against, is a breakthrough?
I wrote to you last week, but you never received it. It was a long, long letter about some recent events that left me feeling completely bewildered, blindsided and, quite honestly, feeling really hopeless. I’m glad I didn’t send it. I wasn’t in a good place. Actually, scratch that. I was in a horrible place. I wrote because I felt like I had to, because I told you I would.
It’s the funny thing about coaches, consultants, people who do wellbeing and/or spiritual work. We go through all the same things you do. We deal with the same emotions, often the same circumstances, we run up against the same walls. We often feel bound, constrained, running into that same glass ceiling even when we’re sure we’ve found a different way this time.
We’re really no different than you.
I often wonder if how we actually are different though, is that we always seem to find ourselves in these states. If we’re always coming up against these circumstances, we must be even more diligent and resilient to find our way through the chaos to create sustainable stability while we’re weathering the storm – and then help you do the same, from our own lived experience.
It’s hard. We fall. We have breakdowns. We shut down. We go dark, dormant.
Through it all though, even though our faith might be taking a huge hit, we somehow learn the meaning of trust. Trusting ourselves. Trusting that there’s a larger plan at play that we can’t see. Trusting the redirects. Trusting that the people and things that cross our paths were somehow divinely placed there with a very real purpose.
It’s this essence of trust that most allows us to help you. If we can trust that the ebb of life will inevitably lead to some kind of flow, we can share that same love and trust with you.
The short-ish version of the “how much do I share” question I’ve been mulling over, and reason behind my letter…
If I’m just tossing it out there straight away, I have spent my entire life in survival mode. I can’t remember a time, especially as an adult, where I felt real stability in my external life. I had been wired for survival since before I entered the world. I can look back through all of my life’s decisions, pathways, forks in the road and see a very clear pattern where I’ve made choices based on what the current climate of my life called for. How I’ve come up against the same issues. How the same traumas get triggered by the same events. How I shut down, plummet, somehow heal through it all and go forward.
Until the next tidal wave takes me under. To me, this is exactly what survival mode feels like. It feels like you’re constantly drowning, and the minute you get to the surface and finally get to breathe, the next wave takes you right back under and you’re fighting for your life all over again.
I share this because I’m, of course, meeting so many people who are currently in these same states and I wanted to share with you what I’ve learned.
What I know so far…
Survival mode keeps us in a constant state of scarcity – there’s not enough of the thing and we can’t rest until we get more. Money, love, status, material items, enter in whatever this looks like for your life. That to say, survival mode keeps us in a constant state of fear. It’s a very easy trap to fall into, especially these days with the state of the world as it is.
This surfaced for me, yet again, in the last few weeks. I’d been living in my Chicago apartment for a couple years, and recently took a sublease from an existing tenant at a very, very low rent price. The unit was minimally more expensive than the apartment I was in, while boasting almost twice the space. It was like the gods were shining their favor on me. Everything lined up perfectly. All systems were set to “go.” This is usually where the author of such stories boasts on how they manifested their dreams into reality. And, to some degree, that isn’t far off.
While I moved into my favorite floorplan of the entire building, my nervous system never settled. In fact, from the day I moved, I never felt settled. I never felt like I could land here.
My nervous system always knows before my mind does (hint: this is actually a super power us humans have without knowing it!). It knew I wouldn’t be here for long. The sublease was 4 months long, and less than 2 months into that sublease I received my lease renewal…. for 50% more.
Even though you have a feeling something is coming down the pipeline, you’re not always ready to deal with it. It’s much easier to shove it back down, power through and get to the other side than it is to actually let it take you down. To process. To see what it’s showing you, and then make an intuitive decision on what to do next rather than one out of panic, fear and scarcity.
An old mentor taught this concept to me in terms of surfing. She said that when a surfer gets caught in an undertow, survival and adrenaline kick in to fight to get out of danger. The circumstances and environment around this situation support the “fight or flight” response. You may hear other people, their opinions, their panic, their own past experience with this very same situation. Everything amplifies the terror that’s already present in your body.
This is when there’s more danger though, because you may often run out of energy and drown out of sheer panic before you ever break free of the undertow.
The better solution?
Surrender to the undertow and allow it to carry you to the surface. That is, float.
I don’t know about you, but the thought of surrendering during a crisis (while it sounds peaceful and wonderful) sounds like suicide. Nevermind that this is conditioning, especially here in the west. There’s a threat? We fight! We must control the outcome and make it go our way and in our favor!
The thing about it though, is that surrendering isn’t suicide though. It isn’t synonymous with giving up. Surrendering is releasing control. It’s loosening the grip. It’s allowing that complete breakdown to wash over us so we can get to the other side of it. What we think will take us down forever and inevitably kill us, actually doesn’t. It’s often only when we’ve become so exhausted fighting the undertow that we surrender, pretty much because we have no other choice.
What my apartment debacle showed me, when I allowed myself to completely fall apart, was that I was being redirected. While the apartment I’m in, and the building I’m in, is wonderful and has made a great home for the last 2 years, I’ve done all I can do here. It served a purpose, and now it’s time to move on to what’s next. There are a lot of reasons this move is a GOOD thing, and after I got past the shock of feeling displaced and basically forced to move, I was able to see that.
I think that’s the point of this week’s letter. There might be something you got blindsided with, a breakdown you’ve recently had or are currently going through, something big that’s on deck for you.
If you find yourself in scarcity, survival, fear… can you allow yourself time to be still? To allow life to show you what it’s trying to show you? Circumstances in our lives are often lessons, and when we give ourselves the time and space to let the undertow take us down so we can learn to surrender, float and make it to shore, we often find ourselves on new land with a different vantage point.
We can see things with new eyes, in a new way, even if it’s old landscape. Things can come into better focus and we can often see beyond the illusions that fear has painted for us.
From there we can redesign our lives going forward. We can make different choices, so we can have different outcomes.
For me, from where I sit now, I can look back to see I stayed in this building and in this neighborhood out of necessity. I had friends here, who are mostly moving out as well. The building was great for my dog and I who were mostly homebound, and he passed away a year ago. A lot of my clients (the pandemic-pivot dog walking business) lived in this building, who have now all moved. The reasons it made sense to stay are no longer, and as for me, I’m moving into a very different space in my life – a new chapter for sure, but maybe even a completely different story.
What I realized is that getting priced out of my apartment unlocked the cage I didn’t know I was keeping myself in. I had my head down for so long just trying to make everything work (read: unknowingly forcefully making things work), that I never picked my head up to see if the life I was creating was the one I actually wanted.
It wasn’t.
No wonder everything always felt so hard.
So… what if your blindside is actually a redirect in much the same way? What if life is plucking you out of a situation that isn’t actually in alignment with the life you truly want, and is trying to place you where you actually belong – and you’re exhausting yourself trying to fight against the change?
Human-ing is hard work. We’re all struggling at or with something most of the time, and taking care of yourself first isn’t optional. It’s necessary. We often don’t know what we don’t know until we know it, and then everything changes with the new awareness and path forward.
Here’s some help…
The sustainable self-care practice you may need most is taking an integration day. What is an integration day? It’s a set timeframe (hours, a whole day, a couple days, whatever you need and can realistically make happen) where you allow yourself to just be so you can process life. There’s no “doing.” The idea is that you’re allowing yourself the time and space to process through whatever you need to process through. This may look like staying in bed. Crying. Staring out the window. Taking an Epsom salt bath. You’re at home, in your own energy, by yourself. You don’t need to be anyone, go anywhere or do anything. You just need to take care of yourself and what’s happening inside and around you.
When big things arise in life (even when great things happen!), we must take time to integrate all that’s happened and all that’s happening rather than just plowing through it all the time. The rush and chaos of life is real, and just like that undertow analogy you can get swept up in an instant.
Helpful hint: Creating boundaries around this time for yourself is where the real work comes in. You may very well need to schedule your integration day into your calendar and say no to everything that isn’t an emergency. Clear your schedule to allow time and space for your breakdown, knowing you may not actually break down. The nerve of something not happening when you’ve scheduled it! =) Things happen in their own timing, scheduled or not.
What I can tell you though, is that routinely giving yourself time to just be will help in more ways than you can count. Over time, this becomes a reliable practice to bring yourself inner stability to weather life’s storms.
Taking a proactive approach to our own self-care is where the bravery comes in, because it’s sometimes the hardest thing to do even when we know we need it the most.
I’m rooting for you!
