Blog 38: Love & Anxiety-Inner Restlessness

Do you ever have one of THOSE days? You know, the ones where you feel antsy and so restless? You feel like you are missing out on some goodness, like you should be somewhere else but you don’t know where. You just feel off and full of angst. I had one of those days this past month. I have noticed, these kind of days are more likely to follow a season of big events or experiences, such as after a successful Attachment training weekend, or an important presentation. Right after I have felt “up” and excited about life and my place in it, if a restless day is going to roll in like a storm front, it tends to follow on the backside of the wake caused by  big “high” feeling. And, just like the wake from a big speedboat, those days tend to throw me off balance.

This sensation of restlessness I am convinced is a part of being human, especially now, in our way too stimulating, technologically advanced culture. For me, the restlessness manifests as a gripping tension in my belly and that unsettled feeling that keeps me from resting and settling, even if I sit and try to meditate. The “message” this sensation gives my body is that I am running out of time and that life is passing me by, that others are experiencing the good I am missing. Getting on FaceBook does not help. Since people post experiences of joy and triumph and not losses or failures, it can seem that everyone else is having the time of their lives. Can anyone else relate to this restlessness?

I will out myself and share an example of how restless sensations can distort beauty and reality. I was cycling alone up the bike path on the Strand a few weeks ago. I had been feeling restless all morning but during the ride I settled and became more awake and aware. I began to really be present to the experience. Suddenly, I had such a strong sense that we are all connected, humans, nature, even the caterpillars crawling across the path I was carefully avoiding to so as not to run over them. The sensation was so sweet. I decided to stop, look at the bay, and be open to anymore insights or epiphanies. Less then two minutes later, another cyclist, stopped at the same place and came up behind me and began to engage me in conversation. Instead of connecting, my old nemesis, restlessness, kicked in and I lost presence. I quickly felt antsy and frustrated that this person was “ruining” my experience of sitting with the Oneness and the sense of Divinity in that wonderful sensation I had just lost. I felt like the interruption “cost” me the good of this experience. I know, it’s very funny if you pay attention to life’s invitations, but I was not!  I was paying attention to the restlessness and the sense that I was losing this great experience. I know, crazy town! Here I was presented with an opportunity to deepen the sense of oneness with an actual person, but I totally missed it because I was in my own little world in my head letting the restlessness dictate how I thought things should go. (In case you were wondering, it took about 10 minutes for me to wake back up and notice my ridiculousness.)

This experience highlights one reason I try to not live in the restlessness for a minute longer after I become aware of it. The “inner voice” of the restlessness is so narrowing and self-focused. It tells me I am missing out and that if things would just go differently I would feel better. This will cause me to miss the gift or joy available right in the present moment. Luckily, I have lived long enough to have lots of practice catching the sensation and I know that sometimes you just have to ride out uncomfortable feelings and false beliefs. Sometimes, you have to hold onto your true knowing and just sit until they pass, which they do. This can be especially difficult because restlessness almost always brings along its Significant Other, a big dose of Anxiety!

One of my “cures” for the restlessness is to drop into silence and Being. To slow everything down internally and ask myself some questions. “What is really going on? Is there really any tangible thing I am lacking in this moment”? Usually the answer is no. I realize that silence may be easier for us Introverts. Extraverts can find silence frightening or annoying. So if you are more extraverted maybe your silence is a concentrated short time where you focus on connecting with your own being and the goodness therein. The gift of riding out the restlessness by sitting until it leaves, is a deepening sense of peace and calmness.

Another “antidote” for restlessness is love & connection with my beloved friends. Those wonderful beings who see me clearly and adore me anyway! Thank you to all of you, you know who you are. When the restless sensation hits your body, you could use it as an impetus to reach out and connect personally with someone you love and that loves you. In-person, or at least voice-to-voice, is more physiologically helpful than an email or text. Although any kind of connection is helpful to our body and nervous systems. The process of reaching out and experiencing the synchrony between you and your beloved, opens the door internally for positivity resonance to permeate and “wash” out the unpleasantness of the restless, anxious sensations. Barbara Fredrickson in her stunning book, “Love 2.0” speaks of Love and its “positivity resonance” and how it improves our mood, outlook, physical health and our ANS/physiology.  She speaks of Love as not just what you experience with lovers, friends, and family members, but also as little tiny moments of connection and mirror neuron resonance that can occur all day long. We are not “screwed” in the love lottery if we live alone and have no family living nearby. According to her research, you can experience all the physiologically and health benefits of love all day long in your short encounters with other kind and helpful humans. This can include a stranger on the street, an uber driver, your local barista, etc. I encourage you to check out her book, it’s a revelation and based upon research and neuroscience.

So, please reply and let me know that I am not the only one who experiences restlessness. Please let me know how yours manifests and what you do about it. Have a great week.

GOING DEEPER:

1.) How many of you laughed at my ridiculousness on the bike path? But do you ever have the experience of totally missing what is in the moment in front of you? How do you come back from numbness or lack of presence, or living in dialogue with the to-do-list in you head?

2.) Do you ever experience these restless sensations? If so, how do they manifest in your body? What are the messages they whisper to your mind? How do you ride them out, or what tools do you use that help you recover your equilibrium?

#37 Love & Anxiety: The loss of love & other things.

Friendships are like sunshine, not much grows without them

This past week I’ve been aware of feeling some sadness. A dear friend of mine had come to stay here in Coronado for the whole summer instead of traveling back and forth each weekend from AZ. It was such a treasure to have so much juicy time with someone I loved dearly. Healthy friendships are incredibly nurturing, especially if you are a single adult. But summer ends as it does each year and she returned home. I adjusted to the change, or so I thought. But I kept feeling sadness creep in.

I know from personal and professional experience when a feeling/sensation does not go away it means there is a message that would benefit me to heed. So when I sat down and welcomed the sadness for a while I realized that I still have an old somatic imprint, (in lay terms, a deeply ingrained message), that friends who truly love me, will abandon me. Memories began to surface from way back in childhood about friends I lost to mental illness, to death, to cruel manipulations by teachers or other authority figures. The friends I lost to motherhood, moves, job changes, and to cancer. I am sure most of you can relate. We all lose friends, lovers, family members. It hurts to lose love and loved ones. It hurts to lose anything really! Though I had not lost any deeply beloved friends in a long time, that old message from the early years was still deeply engrained in my body and physiology. (Tip from a therapist, they never go away really, unless we work on processing them in order to heal them. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s research teaches us that our body never forgets anything that happens. Our mind forgets but the body does not.)

After the meditation of sitting in awareness with my sadness, I biked to the ocean to surf and understanding began to click in place. This experience and sadness were a gift for me. They triggered my forgotten/buried somatic imprint strongly enough for it to come into my awareness, so I could make a new association with the old sensation (imprint). I have not “lost” my friend, she had not abandoned me and she had not left me permanently, she just moved home. But our connection is still strong and she will be back. Instead of surfing, I sat and watched the ocean and allowed the deep relief of the truth of the situation to really permeate and “brainwash” over the old youthful imprint that intimated I would always be left without those I love. From past blogs you may remember, you must sit/pay attention to a positive event for at least 30 seconds for your brain and ANS to register it as a positive experience and to change your brain wiring.
As is often the case, as I was fully present to my environment and to the truth in my body, my understanding deepened even more. I realized that old imprint, and its false message caused me to wish Life was changeless. To believe that if I wanted something/someone’s love and attention, I should never have to relinquish it. That smaller, wounded part of me wanted Life to be like cement. BUT LIFE IS LIKE WATER NOT CEMENT. Life by its very essence is fluidity, changeable, it ebbs and flows, has seasons and a myriad of permutations.

Cement is set, immobile, changeless, so it is very stable. If life was more like cement all would stay the same, friends would not leave us and lovers would not bail out of relationships. Before I sat with my sadness a part of me would still have said “cement is stable lets go with that”. But in my soul’s heart, where I know what’s really true for me, I know that sameness and lack of change would deaden my senses, my desires, and my vibrancy. For vibrancy, joy and growth, humans need change, fluidity, new challenges, new relationships, learning how to grieve our losses and move on. Novelty and change strengthens our emotional and physiological muscles, allows us to deepen our self-awareness and broadens the personal power we weald in our own spheres of influence.

So currently, I am siting with the fact that Life is water not cement, and letting the goodness of that truth wash my mind and soul. I love surfing but at times the waves are really big and closing out (for non-surfers read a huge wall of roaring water weighing 1000’s of pounds, crashing down on your body, driving you to the ocean floor.) I get scared and won’t risk engagement with the surf, but all I lose is a chance for fun and exercise. Life is like water and when we refuse to go out into new and challenging experiences, into change and risking not knowing, we lose much more. We can lose out on great opportunities, new relationships, and broadening our skills and horizons. We build our courage by surfing bigger and bigger waves as we are able. When we accept that life’s very nature is fluidity and change, we are better equipped for it’s vicissitudes and at times erratic permutations. We can be grateful for all we have and gracefully surrender what is leaving or changing, as I had to with the loss of my summer friend’s company. We can let go of our death grips and controlling behaviors and as life’s waves come and go we can float on “surfboards” of love and connection and the embrace of the Divine Oneness that holds us and the love and support we have been blessed with thus far.

This week notice how you respond to life’s changing nature and lack of sameness. See if accepting and expecting that to be the case, helps a tiny bit with the pain of loss and change.
Let me know how it goes. I am eager to hear.

Life is like water! Changing and morphing, so enjoy the ride.

Going Deeper:

1.) What have you lost that has been the hardest to accept? How have you handled the pain of this loss? Have you moved past it, or does the grief of it still impact your thoughts and behaviors? Are there any old imprints or false beliefs stuck in your mind and body? If so, are you ready to let them go?
2.) Life is like water not cement! How does this phrase touch you? What phrase might you use that works for you? Do you wish like I did that in certain areas that life would never change, that you would always have certain things? Are you comfortable with water, with Life’s fluidity? How do you navigate the waves of change?