3 Keys to not wasting this crisis

During her divorce, a woman woke in the night with one clear thought. 
This is an unprecedented opportunity for spiritual growth. 

Ten years later, this same thought is helping her stay grounded, productive, and stable during the myriad crises facing her (and the rest of the planet!) right now.
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The almost unbearable pain of watching her family torn apart transformed this woman in every way.  She no longer had the luxury of doing things the way that made her feel comforted.  She now had to do things in ways that worked.  Period.  Otherwise, she would lose her house, her job, her children.

She knew that this is exactly what she wanted, exactly what she had been searching and praying for--even if it hurt very much.

And it did hurt.  Very much.
I know because this woman is me, 10 years ago.

---

As the Pandemic hit, I ran across this business maxim:  
Never waste a crisis. 

Ah, I thought.
 
This is the business version of my personal maxim:
Feel everything you can.  This is an unprecedented opportunity for spiritual growth. 

 The terror and suffering we experience when our support systems collapse are an urgent invitation to evolve into a new reality that is already here as an uninvited guest.

​In crisis, we are compelled to create new ways of staying grounded and acting with consciousness, compassion, and intentionality.


Here are 3 Keys to Not Wasting This Crisis.

1. Match The ENergy, and then HArness it!

Seriously?  Match the energy of feeling freaked-out? 

Yes.  Seriously.

• Say "hello" to your freak-out.  Look in a mirror and literally allow your freak-out to be seen--and then greet it as if it were a small, scared child.
• With curiosity and compassion, ask "What do you need?"  Take any answer you get seriously.

The energy may not be freak-out.  It may be anger or grieving or heartbreak.  Whatever it is--match it first, and then harness it through emotional hygiene.

2. Harness the Energy Through emotional hygiene

What is emotional hygiene? 
It's actually a lot like physical hygiene. 
Emotional hygiene is a practice of clearing out trapped, stuck, or stagnant old emotions. 

Why do we need emotional hygiene?
Because emotions are a powerful energy that you can use to make your life better!

​Emotions get trapped inside us every day, and we need to clear them out, or they cause distress and disease.  And here's the thing:  it is a lot easier to feel our daily accumulation of uncomfortable feelings now than it is to feel them tomorrow or next month or next decade.

Unfelt feelings are like credit card debt.  It hurts to pay that money when it's due, but it hurts a lot more to pay it after it has accumulated interest!  

So what is a good emotional hygiene practice? 
There are so many! 

We live in an age where our knowledge about the biology of trauma and the energetic practices of emotional release are attracting an unprecedented combination of both cultural respect and scientific precision.

But breathing and moving the body are the foundation of all of them.  So begin here:

• Match:  Take 20-40 seconds 4-5 times a day to notice your breath, to stretch, yawn, and wiggle your toes, or to dance like nobody's watching!  You are likely to notice some emotion arise.  Your job is to greet and welcome it!
• Harness:  Say to your feelings the actual truth. "I am scared of feeling this, but I welcome you and thank you for things you are teaching me."

I would love to support you as you experiment with these practices.  Click to join my private facebook group, where I keep loading lots of emotional hygiene videos.

3. Make Inertia your ally

You have got to be kidding me. 
Inertia is my enemy!

It seems to most of us that this is true.  Inertia seems like it is keeping us from action. 
But inertia is really just a truth about physics. 

• Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. 
• Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.  

How does this truth about bodies affect us?

Let’s go back to March.   When I switched to online teaching after the pandemic hit, I set up many zoom chats to check in with my students. Over and over I heard them say almost exactly the same thing:

It’s hard to work from my bedroom.  I’m used to working at the library.  I’m used to running into friends between classes.

My students had been using inertia to their benefit. 
 
Most of us have taught our bodies to stay in motion once we leave the house, and to stay at rest once we are home.

But while we shelter in place, the flow of inertia for many of us has changed. 
We easily feel trapped by the “body at rest” part of inertia.

So how do we work with inertia, not against it, to balance and energize our lives?

1. In the evening, use the “body in motion” force to set up your morning flow.  Get your bed all comfy.  Set your alarm and prepare your bath for transition into “body at rest.”  Prioritize tasks for the next day.  Prepare the space coffee and breakfast and self-care and children routines to be finished at a certain time, as if you had to leave the house at a certain time.  Turn off your screens and turn on relaxing music.
   
2. Transition into “body at rest.”  Use the warm water, toothbrushing, exfoliating, and moisturizing time to clean your body and soften your emotional defenses.  It’s effective and efficient to do emotional hygiene as you do physical hygiene. 
3. In the morning, meet “body at rest” energy with kindness.  Massage your feet for a moment before getting out of bed. Stretch luxuriously.  Set a timer for 5 sweet more minutes of body-at-rest.  Do emotional hygiene again as you brush your teeth.  Move and wiggle and dance a bit without any directed objective--just put your body in motion!  (Bonus:  you can include the kids in all of this, if that is what is happening.  They will benefit from your healthy intentions to work with the flow of inertia rather than against it.) Then use the body-in-motion inertia to flow into your coffee and breakfast and priorities!

Click here to join my private facebook group, The Bottom Line Is You. 

You'll get lots of videos about emotional hygiene and productivity at home.
You can even post a request, and I’ll address it in an upcoming video!

Click to join The Bottom Line is You.
See you soon!

Warmly,
Lynnea