Who do you know is relaxed?

How to live a life that honors the miracle that it is to be a human animal.

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Today’s inspiration:

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
though the lace of fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists in everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

Mark Nepo

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

Occasionally, I come into just the right amount of stillness and the weight of everything pierces my heart. This—stillness—is a rare occurrence, given that I am more beholden to the urgency spiral than not. Try as I might, say, in meditation, stillness is still not a place I can get to consciously. It’s more of something I catch myself experiencing in lucky moments. Sometimes I do get the briefest sense of it in meditation, where presence is fleeting at best and the stillness of my physical form masks the incessant grasping happening inside. Sometimes I feel it on the other side of the to-do list. Sometimes it comes when I’m out of the city, trading the sounds of traffic and people for birdsong, the rush of water, the wind in the trees. Other times, something happens—a global event, a catastrophe, a loss—and the bigness of the situation slices through the drama and chaos of daily life and I remember how fleeting this is—and I’m gesturing wildly now—how this moment, and this moment, and this one too, is already gone, goodbye, lost, over, never to return. In these heart-piercing moments, I remember the preciousness of everything. I come into the presence of my deepest longing: to live a life that honors the miracle that it is to be a human animal.

Last Sunday, I found out that a family member is facing a cancer recurrence. I called my mother to get an update, and after she looped me in she shared that she’d also just found out that a young woman she’s known for years had taken her own life.

Her voice cracked around the knot I knew had formed in her throat. “I found out yesterday and I just lost it. I just lost it in the car. It’s been a long time since I’ve let that much emotion loose.”

The weight of everything pierces my heart because these days there is too much everything all the time.

The thing with these heart piercing moments is that they reveal how tenuous everything is, and how loosely so many of us—and so many environments—are holding on. I catch myself in stillness, in a moment that is at once a blessed relief from the busyness, but also an unignorable call to wake-up. There I am, no longer able to continue puttering along with the to-do’s, because all I can see is the effects of our current collective reality, which is that despite attempts to simply do our quiet little bests, we are living through deeply uncertain times. In stillness, what I can no longer ignore is the toll this exacts on our bodies, on our hearts and our minds.

I remember early pandemic, speculating about how we would all eventually remember the experience. I imagined it would probably be at least a few years before we’d actually understand the depth and breadth of the impact. I had visions of myself as an eighty year-old woman, recounting the crisis to some young person staring at me wide-eyed and disbelieving.

What I didn’t imagine is that things would continue to feel just as, if not more, uncertain and unstable as ever, even as the pandemic fades further and further into the rearview, even as a specter of election hopefulness shimmers on the horizon. I know I don’t only speak for myself when I say I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted for all the reasons you’re exhausted, and it’s all I can do to not let the crisis du jour dump me down the rabbit hole (which is bottomless, if I let it).

I’ve mentioned, vaguely, that this has been a tough summer for me.

What happened was this: after quitting drinking almost seven years ago, the anxiety I’d experienced regularly since I was nine or ten reduced by 90%. So you can imagine my surprise when, around mid-May, it came roaring back tenfold, much to my dismay and bewilderment. Blessedly, I have more tools at my disposal than I’ve ever had before, and I’ve developed a decent enough understanding of how my mind works that I was able to observe myself back in the heart-pounding, flop-sweat inducing angst, even as it swept me away. I observed myself doing that very human thing: not only was I experiencing the anxiety, which was shitty enough, but then I smeared over it all my thoughts, opinions, evaluations, and judgements about what it meant about me that I was dealing with this…again.

It took a solid sixty (stressful) days, but around mid-July, I got underneath it, awakening to some blindspots I hadn’t realized were still crowding up my peripheral vision. Since then there’s been grief, relief, curiosity, elation, and more, a gamut of emotion that luckily included a decent enough dose of self-compassion. I do expect I’ll share about this more, but for now I’m floating on my back for a while, letting myself rest on the wake of illumination, and not immediately doing the thing I usually do, which is go straight into “figure-out” mode. I’ve efforted enough for a minute. What I’m practicing is letting the lessons reveal themselves to me, rather than force my way into something I might transform into a tight little bulleted list I can add to a cute design in Canva and share it with the world on social 🙃

An uncanny outcome of this experience was that I tapped into a different relationship to time itself. For as much as I understand that healing isn’t linear, it’s one thing to cognitively understand that, quite another to have a felt-sense, embodied experience of it. I felt, briefly, plugged into the cosmic circuitboard, connected to the reality of my insignificance, and also, the very mystery of life. A sense of spaciousness expanded inside me and as I mentioned, I’m not rushing to fill it. However, in the wake of experiencing time differently, even for the briefest moment, one thing did step forward as priority #1:

I want to be a relaxed woman.

A feature of anxiety is that in effort to relieve myself of it, I seek control. I think if I can micromanage every aspect of my daily life, as well as the behavior of the people closest to me, I will be free from discomfort. It doesn’t matter that this has never worked before: there I am, bearing down harder on the routines and rituals; obsessing over the most insignificant slights; wasting my moments on trying to predict the future. This is not only exhausting, but it offers zero relief, because it perpetuates the very thing I seek to free myself from.

And this is the bell that can’t be un-rung, isn’t it? This is the lesson I must learn over and over: that if I don’t shift my inner experience of life, it won’t matter how successful I am or what I accomplish or what beauty I’m surrounded by—I will continue to spend the rest of my days experiencing my one precious life as something to be fixed, managed, gotten through, instead of what I believe it to actually be, which is a trustworthy force inside of which I can surrender.

In order to be a relaxed woman, I must heal my inner sense of urgency and urge to control. I must learn to catch myself when I’m activated, and practice soothing myself instead of grinding away at thought and behavioral patterns that have never, not once, helped. This—offering myself comfort, instead of seeking comfort from another, or from a substance—is something I never learned nor was taught to do. So here I am, 40 years old, discovering that despite a lifetime of movement—dance, yoga, various forms of fitness—I am far less embodied than I realized.

So I’m remodeling the house. Bringing everything down to the studs. Fortifying the foundation by committing to new action. Specifically, I’m committing to healing my pobrecita nervous system, and I’m deeply humbled to admit that regardless of how often I move my body, when it comes to this more subtle awareness, I have barely scratched the surface.

I am still ambitious. There is so much I want to do and experience, so many goals I am moving toward. But this summer has taught me that as I move forward, everything I do, every decision I make, must be made with the ultimate goal of relaxed woman at the forefront.

So I’m living into some questions:

🌀 What are the conditions required for me to slow down?
🌀 What adjustments might I make in the domains of spirit, body, relationships, and environment, that might move me closer to stillness and slowness?
🌀 How do I let my body and heart guide me, rather than my mind?

I know I’m not the only one experiencing the wake-up call to reduce inner urgency. I see the articles, the endless memes. This isn’t an easy undertaking, because it requires living differently. It requires reallocating resources, and getting honest and specific about priorities—and then putting structures and experiments in place to explore and honor those priorities. Another thing that makes it difficult is that there aren’t many models for this. Who do you know is relaxed? Seriously—can you think of anyone? We are all aware of how hijacked we are by the constant demands of our lives, by our fractured our attention spans, by how ineffective we feel when we faced with global event/catastrophes/losses. But few of us are able to engage with what needs to change and stay grounded and relaxed along the way.

I’m always nervous when I explore things like this because I worry that people will think that my longing to reduce urgency and experience my life as a relaxed woman means that I’m checked out of reality and disengaging from the challenges we’re facing. This is not the aim, not at all. Becoming a relaxed woman does not mean I remove myself from being active in the world. Becoming a relaxed woman is the next step in deepening my engagement with the world, for I can be infinitely more effective and available if I’m operating from a place of wellbeing than I can if I continue to jam through life like the proverbial chicken with no head.

So I’m going slow. I’m being gentle. I’m releasing the timelines. I’m daring to imagine living in ways that up to now were heretofore unimaginable. I’m humbling down, I’m surrendering into my novice-ness. I’m learning to stay true to what matters most to me, I’m trusting that I’m ready.

Are you living into your own questions? Do you suspect your nervous system could use some care and tending? Are you ready to expand into a more grounded, engaged way of being in your life? This is deep work and if you’re curious/ready, I’d love to chat.

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SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA. 

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