Announcement / if you want a copy of Emergency Calm Down Techniques

I have been reeling hard lately in some cursed combination of heartache, numbness, political anxiety, winter stuff and some wild panic episodes.

Have been holding on (for dear life) to my Emergency Calm The Hell Down Techniques from a long time ago, and that’s been helping me.

I am giving away a copy of these (ebook + audio recordings) to anyone who gives any sum of money at all to the appreciation funds / discretionary fund in the hopes that we can all keep practicing together, for each other and for the collective, and also for ourselves in these scary times. ❤️

On Hope, and Seasonal Protocols

Dark, dark, dark, dark

It is dark, dark, dark here right now, and by here I mean everything from generally, in the northern hemisphere, careening as we are towards winter solstice, to specifically in the place where I live where it is physically very dark.

There are no lights out in the countryside on the edge of national forest. I can’t see my neighbors. I can see stars through my kitchen window if the sky is clear of clouds.

I jog slow figure eights in my kitchen twice each day, in the dark of morning and the dark of evening.

A ritual that is equal parts staying warm and maintaining some sense of sanity; to give a rhythm to my days. Each day bookended by these slow perambulations.

Reorienting towards light sparks

A month ago my morning jog was a way to enjoy sunrise, the light returning as promised, here it comes. Come on, blue sky, hello fields, hello light on the treetops.

And a month ago my evening jog was for slow sweet sunset time.

And now while I am jogging, because evening and darkness arrive so very early now and the light stays away until later in the morning, there is no light at all — unless there is moonlight, other than the tea light lit in my bedroom, or the light of the space heater glowing beneath the desk.

An occasional flash of lights car on the winding country road, sometimes I can see a bright planet from my window.

And yet, still, etc

I always forget that December is like this, so very dark, so impossibly dark, as if this great darkness of sky is a force I need to re-learn to interact with. It’s so intense, it’s so big. It asks more trust of me than I am willing to offer.

And yet, the candle gets lit. I jog alone with my thoughts around the kitchen until it’s either bed time or day time. Bookends.

But also, if we go even more granular, if we gaze into the depths, there is a sensation of overwhelming darkness in my heart space where I am trying to re-locate my courage heart and my loving heart and my hopeful heart. That is to say, everything feels like it’s gone dark.

Gone dark, not necessarily bad

If everything has gone dark, or my impression is that it has…

Is that a bad thing? It doesn’t have to be.

What if navigating this terrain is in its own way seasonal or transient too. Here we are, in the time that calls for more candles, more ritual, more hope practices…

Now is not then

Last year I said I was in and out of the pits of despair, clawing my way out and then toppling back in, then trying again. Bravely, courageously.

Good job to last year me, who went through some hard things, including nine weeks without seeing a single person or having even one conversation, which was exquisitely miserable, and let’s not do that again.

This feels both similar but very different.

The act of describing something that can’t be described

Heartbreak and grief remain the same: brutal to experience, and also extremely boring if I attempt to describe them in words.

If we are going by physical sensation, hmmmmmmm maybe about half the time I feel like I’m about to vomit, and the other half of the time I’m on the verge of tears but simultaneously convinced that if I let myself cry as much as I need to, I will simply never stop, and also it will be the kind of hyperventilating-sobbing where it feels like you can’t access your breath, so I don’t want it, but also it is definitely waiting for me…

If I try to convey the emotional weight of it, there is also a 50-50 element to it, a teeter-totter effect. Not hovering between two places, but wobbling.

Teetering, not as thrilling as it sounds

Teetering, tottering, in the in-between.

I walk this very narrow path and everything is too dark, impossibly dark, and on one side of me is the Abyss of Anxiety, and on the other side is the Chasm of Depression & Despair, and also I am super fucking bored of both of them? But also of the sensation of being lost in between them.

And something about this sense that balancing is too much work but falling is so tiresome, even if has become less scary as it is more familiar. Like, sure, we fell, it happens. We know how this works. At least there’s that.

Let’s find a path. Let’s conjure a bridge to somewhere else. There has to be more to this internal territory of heart healing than these two pits I’ve been visiting.

Partially true (what’s also true?)

Took a clue walk the other day in the form of a sunny weekend drive to run errands, and felt overwhelmingly sad the entire time.

I thought about this Big Sadness and said: Maybe this will pass. Maybe I just have to get through it. Maybe there isn’t anything else to do right now other than be this sad.

That felt partially true and partially not (what’s also true???), but I didn’t get much time to think about it because of what happened next…

Miracles, miracles

On the drive back, I suddenly began crying so hard I couldn’t see the road and there was nowhere to pull over, so I kept asking for miracles and guidance.

Miracles, miracles. Guidance, guidance.

And what I received, almost immediately was this:

BREATHE INTO YOUR COURAGE HEART, BREATHE LOVE INTO YOUR COURAGE HEART.

Repetition

I made it through the winding country drive home by repeating this:

Miracles miracles / breathe into my courage heart / I am breathing love into my courage heart

And that helped somewhat.

Somewhat is nonzero, more than nothing, I will take it.

Also it helps that I can picture my courage heart because during morning movement practice, I finger-write the word courage on my heart and practice breathing into it.

Maybe

So maybe if I can breathe love into my courage heart, I can also breathe courage into my love heart.

Still heartbroken though. Multiple things can be true at once. Still hurting, still moving, still breathing, still striding, still here.

Still here. Still breathing into my courage heart.

On Hope

A friend who has also been going through some hard life challenges said:

“I want to believe it’s possible to find some hope.
And also it kind of seems like hope is something you do? Like it’s a practice, putting on socks, standing up, putting one foot in front of the other. Or even just sitting up, right? Continuing to live. Maybe thinking through what would need to happen [with all the challenges] is a form of practicing hope? To think it’s even possible that things could change?”

Hope as a practice

I do agree with my wise friend that hope is sometimes like putting on socks — but harder, though some days socks are also a journey of perceived obstacles to be sure.

And also yes, hope is just something that needs a lot of repetition.

And I do wish to acknowledge that hope in and of itself can sometimes feel so hard and so scary; it can feel utterly fragile, or hard to access.

It is such a loving thing to do too, a brave and loving thing, to hope for other people and for yourself.

A candle in the window. A statement in the form of an action. It is morning and so I will jog in my little circles until the light returns.

A critical component

The part of Hope Practices that’s about releasing attachment to outcome is also so hard, and yet to me that seems like a critical component to hope.

I hope for better, I want things to improve, for me and for people I love and for people in the world and for everyone reading here. And also I have no way of knowing what the best possible outcome is; I don’t even necessarily know what a good outcome is.

And so I have to trust that solutions are being seeded, that mysteries are solving themselves, that help is on the way, that guidance is there is for me.

Part of hope as a practice includes the hope that practicing the practice and doing the things that helps holds its own value and meaning, even on the days when I cannot feel into the truth of that.

(If that makes sense)

I hope to be loved again in the way that I thought [person] loved me, but I also have to hope for the kind of contentment that will let me be okay with not finding a love like that even though I want it. If that makes sense.

I will or I won’t, but either way I don’t have to stay here between the two chasms. I can wander my way, or powerfully stride my way, into new territories. If that makes sense too.

Inside of my own tiny universe of chaos, I continue to hope my way towards remembering my strength, towards a re-invigorated sense of resilience.

I hope my way towards myself. I am hoping my way towards myself.

Actively, purposefully, sometimes terrified, sometimes teetering a little.

On Resilience

A lovely person who reads what I write here wrote:

You’ve inspired a lot of resilience in me, and I could never properly thank you for that. Still. Thank you. The future looks bleak, but I light a candle and I hope.

That’s very beautiful to me.

Resilience is a hope-based practice, and Hope is a resilience-based practice. Neither feels intuitive to me, and yet, what else is there.

Lighting a candle matters. Naming the painful things and naming the beautiful things. Breathing love into my courage heart. Breathing courage into my loving hurting heart.

Breathing hope into my resilience heart, resilience into a hopeful heart. We can do this. Or at least: we can try and keep trying, and trust in the trying. The trying matters.

On Ballast

Another lovely reader of what I post here wrote:

Thank you for all the ballast your writing has given over these now fairly many years. Your latest – on reeling and No Fucksgiving – were so welcome. In this time of feeling often disconnected, they melted into me and I’m moving through the days with them.

I love the image of ballast, something that balances and stabilizes. A word from the world of ships and sailing, which are movement-based and not chasms at all.

Even better, they take place at sea, and while it’s true that the sea can also seem dark and vast like the big winter sky here, the sea can also take you somewhere new on the trade winds.

Stabilizing practices for destabilizing times

We are in destabilizing times but we have stabilizing practices available to us: breath, movement, ritual, hope, candles, dancing, balancing, singing, humming, talking to the stars.

We can re-stabilize. We can do anchoring things.

Grounding practices

The thing I notice the most about my various movement practices is that they help even when they don’t. They help more than I think they will even when they help less than I want to.

Sometimes it’s enough to do them on the basis of believing that it’s good for me even when I’m fighting it.

The practice of hope is practicing hope.

Whatever reminds me to breathe more deeply, to drop my shoulders, to remember that my courage heart is there waiting for me to breathe into it…all of that is good and useful, whether I feel like it or not, whether I do a little or more than a little.

Tending to myself is valuable in and of itself. Remembering is valuable.

More guidance

I went to the pool to ask for wisdom, and it said to keep focusing on contentment (in my courage heart, in general) and naming the good and doing what helps, and assume it’s all for the best as a starting point.

As a starting point.

I like that.

Any starting point is good.

Cold spell

It’s been going down to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 degrees Celsius!) which is very cold, and I do not have central heating in my little trailer.

In the late afternoon, I fill jugs and vessels with water, then turn off the water at the pump before it gets dark and send up a little prayer for the pipes not bursting.

In the morning I cook soup to help warm the kitchen while I do my workout, and around noon, I turn the water back on for washing dishes. It’s an inconvenient system, going into camping mode, but it works, or so far it has.

I’m just doing this for a spell, I say. Just for right now. Hoping my way into something easier and better, but also getting better at this, the right here right now of this experience.

Seasonal Protocols

Okay, I actually have a lot to say on this topic, and probably need to save it for next time, so I will just say that right now RITUAL and HOPE are my seasonal protocols, or my general categories. Not just for heartache, but for long COVID, for TBI, for seasonal gloom, for all of it.

Within that, there’s a lot of detail. But I think it’s an interesting question. What are the protocols and support mechanisms for a very cold day, a very dark day, a very high grief levels day, a bad brain day, a day when nothing is working?

Or if you are in the southern hemisphere, maybe you are figuring out protocols for heat and low energy and siesta o’clock!

Where do these protocols live, and what helps us remember what works? This is what I am thinking about these days. Some elements come back easily from past winters; others I rediscover the hard way all over again.

Seasons gleamings, longer days

In a week and a half, we slowly begin to orient towards more sun here; the days will gradually get longer where I am, and, if the gods are willing, I will get to observe this on my morning and evening jog.

Maybe in six weeks time is when I will notice more light, but noticing, like hope, is a practice of perseverence. You show up for the noticing.

I am thinking, as I always do this time of year, how utterly ridiculous it is that this is the time our culture wants us to start thinking about resolutions and new habits, and making big changes, when this is so clearly a time for hibernating, percolating, letting things shift in their own right timing.

And yet, if there is one thing I know a lot about, it’s rewriting patterns and habits, and so I am wondering if that is a thread to follow and write more about. Like maybe part of the practice of hope is returning to the places that make sense to me.

A practice of practicing

One step and then another step.

Doing the thing that helped last time, or doing the opposite of the thing that helped last time.

Guidance guidance. Miracles miracles.

May the next steps reveal themselves, even when the path feels shrouded in darkness. Maybe this is the time for moving slowly and even more slowly than that. Maybe this is the time for striding exuberantly. Maybe this is the time for trying both and feeling into which one is right for the moment.

Maybe it’s the time for imagining our way into a movement, a next step. Letting my breath move me. Trusting the fractal magic. Breathing into my courage heart.

Come play in the comments, I appreciate the company

You are welcome to share anything that sparked for you while reading, anything that helped or clues received, or anything on your mind, wish some wishes, process what’s percolating…

I am lighting a candle for us and our beautiful heart-wishes. What a brave thing it is to allow ourselves to want something better for us and for the world.

Or if there’s anything you’d like to explore further or toss into the wishing pot, the healing power of the collective is no small thing, companionship helps.

Whatever comes to mind or heart. Let’s support each other’s hope-sparks…

Housekeeping note: You can subscribe to posts by email again!

If you aren’t seeing these updates in your in your email and want to, you can can solve that here.

This will pop up a new page on Follow.It that lets you subscribe via email, newsletter, or RSS reader. They say “expect 50 stories a week”, and that’s a very imaginary number, once a week is the dream.

I am emailing copies of the Emergency Calming Techniques package!

Anyone who gives to the Discretionary this week (more info below) will get my Emergency Calming Techniques package by email as a pdf. I am only checking email twice a week because I no longer have wifi at my place, long story, so be patient with me but if it doesn’t show up within the week then let me know!

I have some ideas for the next ebook too but if you do too, shoot me an email or share in the comments.

A request!

If you received clues or perspective or want to send appreciation for the writing and work/play we do here, I appreciate it tremendously.

I am accepting support (with joy & gratitude) in the form of Appreciation Money to the Discretionary Fund. Asking is not where my strength resides but Brave & Stalwart is the theme these days, and pattern-rewriting is the work, it all helps with fixing the many broken things.

And if those aren’t options, I get it, you can light a candle for support (or light one in your mind!), share this with someone who loves words, tell people about these techniques, approaches and themes, send them here, it all helps, it’s all welcome, and I appreciate it and you so much. ❤️