More Peace When the World Around You Feels In Chaos
With so much going on in the world, it’s natural to feel at times anxious, afraid, helpless, despair, frustration, anger and a sense of hopelessness or powerlessness. These are not easy emotions to feel and it’s an understandable reaction to try to avoid your feelings. This can be particularly the case when they are connected to uncertainty and events that feel beyond your control. In this blog, I will be sharing some tips on how you can find more peace, feel less overwhelmed, strengthen your self-compassion and provide healthier strategies to manage your emotions.
Find an Outlet for Your Emotions
When life feels overwhelming and you’re experiencing lots of emotion, the temptation is to try to distract yourself or even numb yourself from your feelings. Instead of making the feelings go away, it can make the emotion more intense as it’s like adding it to a cup with extra layers of resistance or judgement. The cup cannot hold the emotion indefinitely leaving you to feel overwhelmed, numb or anxious - like a full cup or you find you can’t hold any more and there is a spilling over of tears or anger.
A healthier approach is to firstly acknowledge what you’re feeling and then find a healthy outlet through exercise, writing, talking, music, art. Whatever helps you to feel that you are releasing the cup healthily can help it to feel less intense and overwhelming. Doing this in a compassionate way acknowledging that you’re human in feeling emotion in response to life events. Emotions are more likely to pass when you respond to, rather than resist them.
Notice What is Being Triggered
Whatever is going on in the world, it will be triggering something of your stuff in addition to what you feel about the global situation. Acknowledging and working with your personal situation can help lighten what you’re feeling and help you understand more about yourself. Try to notice what is coming up for you. What feelings do you have and in which aspects of your life do they resonate? I.e. do you feel powerless in any aspect of your life? Do you feel angry at the misuse of power in your life? Do you feel disrespected? Do you feel a lack of connection to yourself? What could you do to improve this? What support you need do you need to heal this in your own life?
Take Positive Action
Emotions sometimes pass in their own time and sometimes they provide valuable information - taking positive steps in response can help the feelings to dissipate. Whilst you might feel overwhelmed by the bigger problem, identifying a positive action that you can take which will help the situation will help you to feel empowered. Try to do something on both a personal and global level. For example, could you stand more in your own power, could you improve your own connection or respect for yourself? Can you help out as a volunteer? Donate or get involved in the cause? Focus on what you can do rather than what you can’t! If your action helps several other people, it’s making a difference. If your action helps you, it’s making a difference. If you are affected by many different causes and situations in the world, identify one action for now.
Focus on What You Want
If you’re worrying about something, it can grow in size from the ruminating thoughts and constant worry. It’s like everything around is fed by the worry and things you wouldn’t normally be concerned about, becomes bigger. So to help yourself feel differently, it’s more effective to focus on what you want rather than what you don’t. I.e. send peaceful thoughts rather than worry. Here is a simple process to help you do this.
Take a moment to focus on your breath and gradually slow your breathing down.
Ground yourself by imagining you are a tree with a strong trunk representing your spine. Imagine from your feet there are roots going into the ground. From the top of your head imagine branches stretching up to the sun. Visualise a golden bubble surrounding you keeping you safe.
Imagine the sun shining down a Ray of peace throughout your whole body. See, sense and feel the golden warmth and imagine this moving from your head to every cell in your body. Do this for several minutes feeling your body relaxing. At any time you get distracted, just bring your awareness back to the warmth and peace of the golden sun.
Now imagine the sun shining on whatever global situation you choose. Visualise the sun spreading around the people, the land and whatever else makes sense to the situation you are thinking about. See sense and feel the golden light, the quality of peace, the warmth of the sun helping the whole situation.
The guided meditation above featured in this newsletter is a slightly different version of this process if you prefer to have something to listen to.
Increase Your Self-Care Don’t Reduce It
When we are overwhelmed or affected by something, it takes up time and so the tendency is to squeeze your self-care regime. And yet ironically, when we are coping with something, we need our self-care routine more than ever as it helps provide valuable support. If your self-care needs a boost, you can look at my questionnaire to help you identify what could support you further.
Create More Peace in Your Life
Surround yourself with people and objects that make you feel more relaxed and at peace. Breathe, spend more time in nature, with people who you can be yourself with, reduce clutter, limit exposure to bad news, media sources that create fear or unhealthy competition, avoid gossip et cetera. Write down all of the activities and tasks you do in a week and identify from your list what brings you stress and what brings you peace. Try to bring this more into balance and add additional things that help promote relaxation and well-being. I.e. learning to be more present, exercise, meditation, notice the natural beauty in the world, read some of the positive newspapers to hear a balance of what’s going on in the world, identify all of the things that are going well in your life and what you’re grateful for.
Increase Your Self-Compassion
Whenever things go “wrong”, you’re feeling low or having an off day, remind yourself that you’re a human being doing your best and that sometimes life is challenging. Whatever you would normally say to yourself or how you would interpret the situation, try to do so from a self-compassionate view. What would you say to a friend or a loved one in a similar situation? Remember that everybody goes through difficult times and that life has ups and downs. Experiencing challenges is part of this rather than something to chastise yourself about. How can you be kind to yourself and others or the situation?
Also, when you’re feeling upset for others, try to feel compassion without actually taking on the situation. You can feel compassion for somebody or something without needing to feel the entire situation in your body. It doesn’t actually help anybody if you feel it literally. You are more helpful if you can stay compassionate and resourceful rather than overcome by the situation.