It would be great to be a really calm person, wouldn’t it? To trust that whatever disturbance is going on in your mind and body, that this is temporary, and give yourself a few minutes you will return to calm – like the proverbial snow shaker. We give it a shake, place it down, and wait. Within a few seconds or minutes, the pieces have fallen together on the ground. Everything has come to rest.
Falling apart?
Or falling together?
If we’ve been really busy, or energised, or just pushed ourselves a little bit more than usual, this will affect our system. It might take longer to bring the body back into homeostasis – a process which we are biologically developed to do. ‘But my body isn’t doing that’, I hear you say. ‘I can’t slow down. I don’t understand why I’m feeling so overwhelmed and anxious’. With this kind of thinking, before we know it we’ve intensified further the sense of being out of control – fragmenting even, at its furthest point.
We might even find ourselves shaking the snow shaker again, and again – maybe this time it will work. ‘I will work sufficiently hard or please such and such a person that I will receive the endorsement I need and then I will be able to calm down’.
The trouble is that shaking your system up again and and again, isn’t going to help anything.
Self-regulation is really hard!
Really, after each cycle of energetic activity we should allow our systems to wind down and pause a little until we’re ready to start with the next round. But life rarely works like that.
So I was thinking about what could be one piece of helpful thinking I could offer in this short blog (enough of all the self-help over-sharing!)
And I think that one thing is: Don’t keep shaking the snow shaker. Don’t keep over-riding your system. Life isn’t for that. There is a part of us that experiences the shaking up and snowflakes falling with child-eyed pleasure; and there is another part that watches with calm recognition. We have the capacity to contact ourselves and hold the over-excitement. To enjoy the over-excitement even but then to watch over ourselves as we come down to rest.