Saying yes to the snow and the storm
Taking responsibility for our inner world
As regular readers know, I draft my Substack in the week, then upload and edit it over the weekend. The snow has all but gone, the news continues to pound the ears and eyes of unwary folk. In today’s post I offer some food for thought.
Tuesday: I spy snow out the window this morning and clap my hands like a small child. Just a sprinkling yesterday but it soon melted. Today, it lingers and thin cloud has gently evaporated leaving blue blue skies. In fact I’m itching to get outside. The mountains that circle our little settlement have been snow capped for some time.
Friends tell tales of early morning journeys to the ski slopes of Mount Baker, a two and a half hour drive away. But this is the first time this winter snow has found us down at sea level. The cedars look magical, their drooping branches perfectly designed to hold one inch of pearlescent, airy snow. It turns our little cul-de-sac into a fairyland. Light breezes send little flurries of snowflakes falling gently down. With this bright sun it will all melt away soon enough.
The snow offers an interrupt. A welcome pause. I’ve heard people liken the current cascade of news to a firehose. In truth, that firehose is always on in one part of the world or another, aiming its jets haphazardly, affecting lives and livelihoods near or far. Sometimes ripples from actions far away touch our lives, often it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else. Easy to look away.
Finding calm in the eye of the storm
The firehose analogy fits. Actions and reactions are happening in rapid succession. So fast, so outside business as usual that it is hard to comprehend. The mind whirls then scatters trying to put pieces together to make some kind of sense that doesn’t terrify, numb or engulf the nervous system in instant overwhelm.
Casting around for anchor points or humour to stave off a sense of powerlessness, panic or disbelief. For some this is a time of jubilation, excitement, even glee. In times of disruption there is a collective heightened energy whether you relish the chaos or fear it. It’s easy to be swept away in this urgent cascade of dark (or bright) imaginings. The tornado takes you out of the present moment, out of your body.
When I worked overseas in community development, I met aid workers who thrived in war zones. Looking back I can see they fall into two camps: those who achieve great things running on adrenaline and those who can stay calm in the eye of the storm. The adrenaline junkies usually burn out or have very unbalanced lives. Those who find the peace at our core, can use their training to operate in extraordinarily challenging situations again and again without wrecking their health.
Leaning into stillness or chaos
Humans have been creating chaos since we crawled out of the oceans. We are also capable of sublime heights of awe, reverence and creativity, blessed with the power of imagination. With it we can imagine heaven or hell and then create it. How to reconcile these things?
Are we simply mirrors of consciousness, contracting and expanding?
I’ve been pondering on this for some time. Last night we took a stroll along the La Conner boardwalk in the early evening dark. The lights of the town twinkled, the ground sparkled with frost as temperatures dropped below freezing. The waters of the Swinomish channel were still and dark. A few diners chatted animatedly in warmly lit restaurants but far more shops and units were dark, packed up for the day or closed on Mondays.
We stopped at a local eatery for a salmon and elk burger, respectively. Peeling off hat and gloves to sit in the cosy glow of the firelight, listening to the welcoming strains of Fleetwood Mac. I spied some quiz cards from a game called, I should have known that. We slowly unwound from a day of shadowy pressure that lurked at the edges of our awareness. There’s a lot of uncertainty here. So many things we don’t know. Walking back to the car, the streets deserted but for a lone dog walker, we both felt grateful for our lives and each other.
Later, for me, binge watching The Morning Show, an Apple TV programme following the fortunes of the characters working on a fictitious iconic morning news show at a major legacy TV network. It’s a soap opera with some fine acting and story lines that up the dramatic tension at every turn. My switch off show, or so I tell myself. Perhaps it was the fact the character dramas interweave real news events from 2019 to 2021 that had me in an agitated state. You’d think I’d know better than to load myself up with stress chemicals right before sleep. But hey ho, that’s what I did.
See how the power of the mind creates your experience
In case I needed a reminder, right here was evidence of the power of the mind to generate whatever experience we consciously or subconsciously order. I ordered, heightened tension and anxiety with my evening viewing and guess what, I found myself stressed out and reactive? It wasn’t pretty but I recovered.
I woke with some of that same tension and anxiety floating around and nearly reached for my preferred digested news from writer Heather Cox Richardson. But I caught myself. There would be only one possible outcome from reading news in my tense and anxious state. More stress. I turned instead to a 17 minute meditation from Scottish practitioner Andrew Johnson. His mellow tones soon had my nervous system standing down.
And then, a thought popped into my head (as they do!).
What if I said YES to all of my experience and took responsibility for it?
The thought came with an ah ha, a relaxing of my mind, body and spirit.
What do I mean by saying yes to my experience?
By experience, I mean my inner experience, my feeling state, the state of my mind, body and spirit. My words for this tend to reference pressure. So am I easy in my mind body and spirit or constricted and tense? Am I high energy, pleasant or unpleasant or low energy, pleasant or unpleasant?
You may use emotion words to describe your state: frustrated, bored, angry, scared, anxious, excited, lonely, angry, happy. Doesn’t everyone’s feeling state go up, down, in, out, all day long? If you have a fitness tracker, like an aura ring, you can see this in real time on the stress tab. It measures cool stuff like heart rate and blood pressure to show you whether you are stressed, engaged, relaxed or restored. Everyone’s line zig zags like a fell runner on warp speed.
The changing feeling states are not the problem. The stories we tell about how we feel are what get us in trouble. One of the biggest stories is that it is something out there in the world making us feel the way we feel or someone else, or something in our past, some imagined future, our wiring or our hormones.
If this is your belief then it’s logical to start casting around for what you can change to make you feel better. This means your head gets busy creating more internal pressure and stress chemicals. If you can’t change your past/your hormones/the weather/the news then you feel even worse.
If only it weren’t raining, I would feel okay.
You can’t stop the rain, so now you feel low and helpless.
I came to realise I was pretty intolerant, almost allergic to distressed states of mind (mine and other people’s). As I came to understand more and more how fluid my experience is and how every feeling state eventually changes, I become less and less inclined to try and manage them. When the collective energy gets very stressed, it’s easy to forget this simple truth.
Left alone, feeling states change by themselves
Back to the insight. What if I say YES to my experience?
Whatever experience I am having be it ‘nice’ and relaxed or ‘reactive’ and tense, it is my experience. Here’s what I observed about that:-
My experience is unique. No-one else can ever know it.
My experience is already happening, like a firework that’s been lit. You can’t ‘unexperience’ it.
Saying no to my experience is kinda pointless and uses up a lot of energy like standing under a waterfall and trying to push the water back over the top.
I don’t need anyone to validate my experience. I’m going to experience what I experience anyway. Imagine a dog asking for permission to feel what it feels?
Saying yes to my experience doesn’t mean I have to dig into it and make a big story of it. It is simply acknowledging that it is happening in this moment. Whatever it is: sadness, anger, shame, panic, overwhelm, frustration, boredom, happiness, daydreaming, whatever.
Saying yes to my experience helps stabilise my nervous system and bring me closer to the calm at the eye of the storm
Saying yes allows the experience to move and morph more easily as all our experiences do, sooner or later.
As we understand deeper and deeper where our experience comes from, it gets easier to take responsibility for it. My experience, my feeling state is coming from the thoughts (conscious or subconscious) I have about what crosses my awareness.
I see a dog. I think, ‘how cute’; I get a warm fuzzy feeling. I see a headline, I think, ‘how terrible’; I get a sick feeling.
The next feeling state will be along shortly anyway so why waste time thinking about the one you’re in? That would be like staring at the rain and complaining about it. At some point it’s going to stop raining, with or without you complaining about it. In the meantime, you could just relax and then your mind will likely give you another option like, ‘I could read a book or watch the Super Bowl!’
Trying to manage my experience, for instance by insisting that I should be calm or peaceful or understanding at all times, is, as Adyashanti says, ’trying to control your mind so you can control your mind’. It’s a fool’s game. And generates massive pressure.
Saying yes to discomfort opens the door for fresh thinking
When we say yes to uncomfortable feeling states, something beautiful happens in the mind and body. The whole system relaxes. That state can move through us. This allows fresh thought. Common sense kicks in. Next might come curiosity. Then we may see something new. Something to say or do. Something that brings us closer to the dissolution of boundaries between ourselves and others, ourselves and the land, ourselves and the hidden realms. That is our deepest human longing.
Always there, nascent in every experience is the opportunity to shed more layers of assumptions, judgements, fears and insecurity, to engage deeper and more fully with the aliveness of being in and around us. When we do that, we know instinctively what to do or not to do, when to speak, when to listen, when to wait, when to act. Which experiences to trust and which to let go. We get ideas for inspired action, quotidian or revolutionary: make a cup of tea or organise a peace summit.
Times of intense pressure offer the opportunity to go deeper towards inner stillness, not to avoid or bypass what is happening but to find deeper reserves of resilience, innovation and strength.
As we get more accomplished and confident in saying yes to our experience, we feel stronger in the face of changing states of mind and any firehose of information that comes into our experience can be navigated without completely derailing us. Knowing that anger, bafflement, fear, numbness, sadness, shame, terror, being galvanised, motivated, excited or restless are all just peaks and troughs in our experience. None is our final resting place.
Below all these changing states is a deeper sense of wellbeing, undisturbed, constant, reliable. There we can find all we need to navigate these times from a clear head and an open heart.
And now dear readers, the pull to get outside beneath these blue skies and the last of the melting snow is strong and cannot be denied. So I’m signing off.
Gratitude
Substack - I’m grateful for the spirit of generosity here on Substack and the community of writers encouraging and inviting me to write more from the heart, to unmask and share my deepest longings.
A great accompaniment to this article is ’s latest piece, Stay on Course: Why Focus is the Most Powerful Act of Resistance.
The power of gatherings: friends for dinner, online gatherings for meditation and poetry, playing ukulele with others, sharing critiques of creative writing, WhatsApp audio calls with loved ones in the UK. Chatting with my Mum about our daily lives. These things feel real, grounded and nourishing and I’m grateful.
A little like, restack or comment brightens my day and I love to hear from you by direct message if you want to share reflections or strike up conversation about what has sparked something for you in my writing.
Until next time
Juliet
This is beautiful. It gave me something to think about, thank you! Glad I found your Substack.
Once again, Juliet, this is beautiful. Your writing helps me lean into stillness, beauty, and reflection. I am grateful. And what a surprise to see you link to my last post. Thank you!