Half of the adults in our country take medication for anxiety and depression. We are an anxious bunch – and we live in a society that is anxiety phobic. Meaning, we have little ability to work with or tolerate anxiety. Our approach is to fix it.
This is a huge subject. I want to touch on just one aspect of it here: resourcefulness. This is a winter topic, our resourcefulness. Winter is the time of year we must put slightly more emphasis on rest. Do less, recover more. Winter is the pause that allows ‘go’ and ‘do’ to happen. If we don’t comply, we live from a place of deficit, always exhausted. We get sick. Chronic exhaustion is a major contributing factor of chronic anxiety.
When exhausted and depleted, we experience life as an imposition. Our day is devoted to completing tasks that ask more of us than we have to give. From this state, we develop poverty of mind and spirit. We begin to focus on life’s demands and develop resentment, lose confidence, because we can’t catch up. We begin to look outside ourselves to fill an inner void. Further, life begins to feel hollow and thin.
When we give our self time to rest, genuinely rest, we build our reserves of energy. We recover our experience of resourcefulness. From resourcefulness – and the inherent richness of this experience – we engage life in a manner that naturally magnetizes goodness. We feel rich and attract richness to us. Our experience of life altogether rests on a ground of goodness, allowing us to step into relationship with a world that is full of creative possibility.
And chronic depletion.
I believe more people live in this state than we might imagine. Particularly parents of young, active children. Particularly adult women of all ages. Perhaps nearly all of us. We know this is happening when the measure of a ‘good day’ is when we’ve completed everything on our ‘to do’ list.
We haven’t taken the time to enjoy.
We are geared more to accomplishment than beauty.
We haven’t laughed, or had a sense of humor. Or sung, or danced.
Furthermore, we may have been living from our ‘to do’ list for years. Or decades.
When accomplishment is the measure of happy, we may have lost touch with our essence and purpose, our inspiration. When we live chronically exhausted and disconnected from our essence, we set the stage for debilitating illness to manifest in our body.
How do we change this? The answer is simple, few of us do it. So few, it feels radical. And wrong.
Slow down. Stop doing so much.
Go for a walk. Both move your body, then rest.
Drop the guilt. Sit with a cup of tea. Let yourself relax into the space of quietly
being.
Rest your mind, let it be still.
Let it be still long enough for you to know why you are tired.
And then be courageous enough to makes those changes in your life to stop being tired.
So many people disconnect when they are tired. They watch TV or movies. TV and movies divert our attention, they don’t help us recover. Furthermore, our bodies may relax as we watch, but they relax directly in line with the content of what we are watching; most often, not helpful. Better: read or listen to a great story, one that reconnects you with your core nature.
Our senses come alive when our mind is still. We tune into the smells and sounds around us. We see our physical environment instead of what our mind is thinking about.
We realign with here - and now.
In the space of quiet and here and now, our inspiration shows up. More accurately, we reconnect with our inspiration - it was never missing.