This week’s Shedding Light post is dedicated to you and to everyone who is navigating their lives in extraordinarily turbulent and stressful times.
You’re not alone in your quest to stay aligned, centered and balanced — to be OK — when you’re not OK.
We see you, we understand, and we’re here. To bring you resources for presence. To help you find your way to OK.
Cultivating presence when the going gets tough
No matter where you look, things are turbulent and disconcerting. Collective stress is high. You may be wondering how bad things have to get before things start to get better.
And of course, the answer is: Who the hell knows?
Regardless of your position or point of view about what’s occurring in your community, country or the world, you can wind up feeling out of control, vulnerable, and overwhelmed. You may even want to bury your head in the sand.
The desire to disconnect in some way, to ‘stop the madness’ is normal. Hitting the pause button to take a breather can help you recenter and reconnect.
However, as a strategy for managing high levels of stress and discomfort, disconnecting from yourself leaves you rudderless and without your inner guidance system.
Energy healing lends powerful support for maintaining your connection to yourself. With so much volatility surrounding us all, it’s especially important to anchor in to practices that support presence and inner authority.
When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We’re not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.
Source: Joseph Campbell
A Consciously Curious Conversation*
Recently, EHI joined with members of our Consciously Curious Community to talk about How to be OK when You’re NOT OK.
The group shared their understanding of what ‘OK’ and ‘Not OK’ looks and feels like. It became powerfully evident that based on our belief systems and the way we frame our experience, we develop unique coping strategies, which influence how we respond to, and why we disconnect from, our inner and outer world.
Because one person’s disconnection may look different from another’s, there’s no point in categorizing, ranking or judging anyone else’s experience – yours or your neighbors! It is what it is, and that’s OK!
Rather, the point is to know and recognize your go-to patterns as they arise, and to make a conscious choice to be present to yourself, to give yourself space to regroup and find the path back to ‘terra firma’.
What does presence mean?
Presence is a state of being, a grounded awareness that anchors you in space and time.
When you’re present, you’re connected to yourself — your body, your emotions, your needs, your sense of OK-ness in real time. This awareness informs your choices, actions, behaviors and responses, in every situation.
Being present to yourself is not mutually exclusive. You can hold awareness of yourself, while also being present to someone or something else. It’s this ability that enables you to know you’re OK even when things are not OK.
For example, recently there were extreme wildfires in Los Angeles. A lot of people were deeply impacted; they lost their homes, their possessions, and of course, their sense of security. You may have been very aware of how difficult and tragic the situation was for those good people, while sitting contentedly in your home, watching a fire burn in your fireplace.
Beyond that, there were those people in LA quoted on the news who were devastated by their loss, and concurrently OK because their family members and pets were safely sheltered.
As a witness to the devastation happening in LA, you were OK and not OK. Those who lost home and hearth, yet aware of their gratitude for being alive and together, were also OK and not OK.
Your energy is foundational for presence
At EHI, we’re big on cultivating presence! We share foundational energy regulation skills — Grounding, Embodiment and Containment — in The Present of Presence to generate and cultivate presence.
Learning to work with your energy — your chakras and aura — leads you to presence.
When you are present, you can be OK…even when you’re not OK.
When you do get hijacked, and we all do now and then, you can return to yourself through the practice of presence.
* If You’d Like…
You can join the community and have access to the replay of this fabulous conversation, and all of the other tools and resources we make available to our free and paid members.
