Ground Yourself in Something Bigger than your Troubles

I’ve just come off a zoom call with a lovely group of folks.

It’s my 3rd Sunday, out of a 4-block workshop, delivering ideas and exercises based upon the Polyvagal Theory - otherwise known as the theory of connection.

Healing, whichever way we may dress it up, is very confrontational.

To that end, I like to start the chat by saying “You know what…everything’s OK. Even if things are not OK, they’re OK”.

What I actually say is this 600yr old quote from Julian of Norwich…

When you’ve lived through the bubonic plague (aka the Black Death) as Julian has, you’re entitled to have an opinion on life’s struggles.

A quote like this has healing in it. Just by reading those words and letting them land in your heart you’ll notice a shift and a softening.

Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging our place as part of the universe and reminding ourselves we’re not commander-in-chief.

Like I said to my wife

Claire Venus

earlier today, “The universe has much bigger levers than we do”.

So, whilst we frantically pull and push as many tiny levers as we may be able to get access to…just one big shunt by the universe and off we go down a completely different track….wether we like it or not.

Never underestimate your own importance and magnificence in the world, but try to relax into a sense of there being a higher order of thinking or processing going on.

Chaos or Order

When the world really seems chaotic and, I’ve fully checked out, I’ll watch the rain drops falling on the velux roof window in my little yoga room.

If I watch the patterns made by the rain long enough, it reminds me that there is actually order in the universe even when every rational thought in my body tells me there’s none.

Every rain drop takes its own unique path down my window and I’ll never see the same pattern twice in my lifetime but ultimately I do recognise it. And if I recognise something then that must indicate a pattern and patterns require some sort of order.

Something is holding the centre.

Whether as a kid looking out of my bedroom window, or as a father of two lying on his back in a home yoga studio, or maybe even an old man with nothing left to do but stare out of a nursing home window…rain on a widow will always be rain on a window.

The universe is ordered.

Isn’t it time you allowed yourself to soften into that.

Photo by C. G. on Unsplash

The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?