Right now, there is more lonesomeness, loss, fear and anxiety than anyone ever could have foreseen. Many people describe themselves as feeling not exactly miserable, but numb, tired and disconnected.
You realize that the way things are is not the way you want them to be. And you don’t like it. At all.
You wish it were different, but you feel as if you just don’t have it in you to be a participant. You feel like a bystander. After all, you find yourself in the midst of a pandemic. So, what now?
Lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth over your eyes? Knuckle down and force things to happen? Follow some expert’s how-to recipe? The answer is none of the above. If you’re coming from a place of lack, nothing is going to work for you in any case. Yep, even during a pandemic.
You want to start from a place of abundance and possibility and, most of all, you want to do what feels natural to you. Unless you’re a serial killer, of course. But then again, if you were, you wouldn’t be reading this now, would you?
Nevertheless, the biggest change you are capable of making in the world, starts within you. So, whenever you are dead beat, take an honest look at what you’ve been thinking and how you’ve been feeling and acting. Madisyn Taylor says you’ll probably find a behaviour pattern, belief or relationship that is out of alignment with who you really are.
Still, it’s quite a challenge to stay authentically who-you-are when you feel as if your attempt to participate will be criticized or attacked. Madisyn says that most of the time, the attacks and criticisms of others have much more to do with them and how they’re feeling than with you.
If you get caught up in trying to adjust yourself to other people’s negative energy, you lose touch with your core. Of course this is especially true during these times and the best thing you can do for yourself is learn how to dodge other people’s negativity.
The more of an artful dodger you become, the more you’re able to tell the difference between emotions that belong to you and those that belong to other people. Madisyn says that eventually you’ll be able to hear others’ feedback, taking in anything that might actually be constructive and releasing that which has nothing to do with you.
Christy Whitman says that we can allow the dominant frequency of the world around us to regulate our energy or we can take responsibility for deliberately cultivating the energy we wish to live in. You know which choice leaves you at the mercy of world events and other people’s actions and reactions.
So, once you’ve turned off the myriad of voices in your head, you can start focusing on what you do want instead of what you do not want. Christy says that to get what you want, you have to focus on the presence of it; not the absence of it. Ask yourself: What do I want? Why do I want it? How do I believe I will feel once I have it? Then focus on that feeling.
Joan Borysenko says that we’re at the tipping point of a metaphoric seesaw with positive and negative outcomes perched on either end. For sure, there are a lot of negatives, and we all know what those are. Yet, there are also many positives. All of us want to know what we can do to tip the balance towards the good.
Joan says that many years ago she was telling her friend, Rachel Naomi Remen, how long her own personal healing was taking. “Would I ever get to 100%?” “You don’t have to get to 100% to heal,” Rachel assured Joan. “You only have to get a tad more than 50% and the seesaw automatically tips. The other 50% is a gift of grace.”
Joan says that she thinks of grace as a matching grant from the universe. You take one step towards goodness, and goodness takes a step towards you.
This is how you become a participant instead of a bystander, girlfriend. You take just one step. Tomorrow you’ll take another. Or the same one if you lost ground. And when you look back one day you won’t see footprints. You’ll see that you left heart-prints.
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