Finding your way back to you.
It’s part of the human experience to wonder what we’re missing, occasionally make poor choices, and wrestle with the feelings of failure and loss. But if we prioritise what’s important to our wellness, we’re never far from home and the bliss of living with ease and fulfilment.
When we ‘fail’ at something it can give us a jolt, for which a common response is to shut down a little until we’ve prioritised the significance of that ‘fail’.
Another tendency is to calculate the failure and link it to other failures, until we have a really large and seemingly insurmountable pile of collective failures to tackle.
You wonder if you need therapy, you might. But in the meantime, things can start happening fast, the feeling of being jolted becomes uncomfortable, and your state of mind might be starting to look like a Marie Kondo tidying project in reverse: with all the clarity cleared away into bags, ready for the dumpster.
And then, without you noticing, a lot of the small, easily solvable stuff that just needed talking about are now in charge. It may seem like only yesterday when you had a filter for most of this stuff, but it got buried under a mound of minor irritations, and things you meant to say at the time but didn’t, etc.
If we can mentally take the leap to stand outside ourselves and look back, we can retrace our feelings and memories to locate ourselves in a calmer happier time. What was different? Where were we? What were we thinking? It feels good to see ourselves again, untroubled, before the jolting started, and it reminds us that we always have the capacity to get back there.
There’s a scene in the film Contact, where Jodie Foster, being jolted around in a metal chair, takes the courageous action of unclipping herself from it. By doing so she enters a suspended state of stillness, from where she’s able to look back at the violently jolting chair with calm curiosity.
As soon as we leave the space in which we’re feeling jolted around, we get the perspective to see the jolting for what it is. Just turbulence.
And from this new vantage point, we can start tidying things up in our minds.
Prioritising elements of our current lives into order of their importance to our sense of ease and fulfilment, and casting out anything that isn’t serving us.
The things that matter most can be prioritised: home, family, income, security. And then the smaller stuff can be more easily tackled.
Look out - your priorities may have changed since you last checked in!
There’s a space between wanting to chat something through and seeking therapy.
The reason we started Wangie is that in a pre-therapy space, we can often find our way out of a mindset which isn’t serving us, simply by chatting.
Talking on Wangie where there are Mentors present, no judgement, no names and no picture profiles, is where having a quick chat becomes an opening form of self care. No appointment required, or candles.
Talking with strangers can be liberating, even if there isn’t a problem, it’s a quick way to explore how you're feeling and be heard, without being judged.
Come on in and say hi.
There’s always someone to talk to on Wangie.
@Ana_W | Wangie Mentor