Fear and overwhelm muddy our minds and hearts. When pond water gets muddied, eventually the silt settles and the water becomes clear. Similarly, when fear and overwhelm hit, here’s a way for the thoughts to settle, and the heart and mind to become clearer…
“I think of the children in Gaza, and it’s almost more than I can bear.” I heard this from a client recently. I hear clients and students regularly name overwhelming realities in our world today that trigger deep fear and sadness.
How can we truly be with these moments when we are hijacked by fear or overwhelm? Like the pond, we need to let the thought settle.
It starts with noticing a crucial distinction here, between the content of the fear and the way we carry it.
The content of the fear (the suffering children in Gaza) gets spinning in our minds, it sticks there, and we get stuck in a kind of anxious paralysis. Our hearts and minds get muddy.
But there’s another level going on here beneath the thought content. There’s also a subtle experience unfolding in our bodies. We may experience it in our gut, in our chest, in our hands. The key here is that how we carry the problem is far more important than how we think about it.
I ask the client, “When you check in to your body, where do you experience your sadness about the children?”
She’s quiet. “My stomach... I get butterflies.” This shift from the muddied mind into her stomach grounds her. The silt starts to settle. She naturally takes a deep breath and settles a bit more.
As she settles into the body (called the “moving center”), something like loosening occurs. Unlike the mind, the body is built for carrying things, like fears and overwhelm. As the silt settles, there’s a larger, wiser self that is now being with the problem.
This shift to a felt sense doesn’t solve the problem per se. The children are still suffering. But my client is now carrying the problem differently. “They’re being watched over,” she says. In a subtle way, she feels she and the children are also being carried - carried by a higher Love:
As our session ends, she’s a little lighter. She can now carry this heaviness with more grace. From this calmer and clearer space, she has what she needs to move to the next small, wise thing that is hers to do.