“Becoming Soul-ar Powered – gifts from crisis and challenge”

March 25, 2020 Barbara Clarkson

In these blogs I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned from my year with cancer and cancer treatments about our human struggle to find peace, hope, self-compassion, and calm in times of great challenge. Cancer provided me with an in depth and intensive training in dealing with fear, uncertainty, change, limitation, restriction and financial scarcity. I can’t say I have mastered any of these fully, but I have definitely acquired some resources I didn’t have this time last year, and they seem highly relevant to what we are all experiencing at the moment. So, I thought I’d share them with you. I’m a psychotherapist who has worked long and hard to understand and be with my past and how it shapes my behaviour in the present, and some of the ideas to come might seem a bit simplistic or basic and brief, but believe me, they have been almost literal life savers for me in the past year.

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I’m so glad you could join me.

GIFT – SLOWING DOWN

I’m currently noticing how my “Hurry Up” driver is getting activated by the enforced “STOP” that so many of us are experiencing with lockdown and the changes to our normal routines. I’m list making like crazy, and, bizarrely, can easily find myself beginning to panic about “not enough time to get it all done”. I reacted to the “stay at home” directive from the government with a need to structure time, to stick up Post Its with ideas for things to do, tasks to complete, old abandoned hobby projects to dig out and restart, piles of exercise DVDs that of course I will be diligently working through every day (not!). My body has gone into threat survival mode – as someone wrote recently, our brain has a threat detection centre (the amygdala) that is reacting to what is happening with this virus as if a Bear is chasing us, and being confined to the house is creating a great deal of physical stress as the amygdala voices screaming “Bear! Bear! Bear! Run! Run! Run!” or “Bear! Bear! Bear! Fight! Fight! Fight!” are being forcibly ignored. That stress then translates into our more socialised survival behaviours – for me these lists and Post Its are all about the fantasy that I can create safety by getting a grip, getting things under control, and getting on with it.

All of these tactics are fine in themselves, but they do ignore the blocked energy and bodily impact of not fully listening to all the “Bear!, Bear!, Bear!” sirens going off in our brains, so ultimately they lead to panic, anxiety, depression, anger outbursts, muscle tension, increased blood pressure, weakening of the immune system and ultimately some sort of illness or ailment – anything from migraines, tummy upsets, and bad backs to becoming more vulnerable to whatever virus might be around.

So we need to shift out of “Bear! Bear! Bear!” mode somehow, even if it is only for moments here and there throughout the day, for the good of our health, and to enable us to survive weeks of either close confinement, or distant connection with family, without rows and outbursts creating feuds that can last generations!

GO DEEP – understand your own process more

Reflection questions for journaling or simply considering for yourself:

How do you know when you are responding to threat “Bear! Bear! Bear!”?
What does that feel like for you, in your emotions and in your body?
What sorts of thoughts go along with it?
Connect with your body and notice how your breathing, your pulse, your shoulders, neck and back, your legs are all responding to fear even in this moment – fear of the virus, fear for family members, fear about your job, fear about not having enough (food, money, disinfectant, toilet roll etc).
What impulses come as you notice the fear – need to check things, plan for things, buy things, eat things, drink things, shout, scream, cry, hide etc etc etc?

Get familiar with your personal experience of this threat response and you’ll get clued in to when it needs interrupting.

GO WIDE – a simple practice to tap into some Soul-ar resources

One of my greatest learnings last year was that I can change this amygdala driven stress state very simply, by slowing down. Not by nagging at myself in a breathless and panic filled voice “Come on, slow down” (which is just a slightly better disguised reaction to threat than “Bear! Bear! Bear!”), but by consciously focusing on my breathing and slowing it down. This is such a simple, but very powerful tool, switching the brain from threat/survival mode to relax/safe mode. There are all sorts of GIFs and apps out there that can help us with it, (Google “4 second breath”, or “4-7-8 breathing”), or try Calm – https://youtu.be/5DqTuWve9t8, or Headspace etc – the key elements being a deep breath in through the nose and a longer slower breath out through the mouth. What I have found extra helpful whilst doing this is using a very short “mantra” of sorts –

Breathe In & think “Slow Down”, then Breathe Out & Think “Let Go”.

As you breathe in, Slow Down. Allow yourself to take in the permission to pause, to come off guard a bit, to ignore the lists etc for just a moment. As you breathe out, breathe out the panic, let go of the rushing, the trying to fit things in, the demands of the lists and plans you may have made. Let Go.

It’s not magic, or if it is, it is an ordinary magic that is already built into our biology. It will not permanently take away any sense of panic and anxiety, or the mental list and the pressure to keep busy, keep working, keep going, but it WILL create a space where you can Slow Down, and where your body and brain get a different set of signals that will override “Bear! Bear! Bear!” for a while. The words are a reminder to yourself that not everything needs to be sorted NOW, and that there is nothing to be gained by continuing the Hurrying Up this time. If you can interrupt your Hurry Up, interrupt the stress about getting stuff done, interrupt your desperate attempts to get control over the uncontrollable, you can turn down the volume on the alarm siren. If you can interrupt it several times in a day, you will begin to experience real changes in your wellbeing.

Breathe In & think “Slow Down”, then Breathe Out & Think “Let Go”

I hope you find Going Deep and Going Wide useful in the week to come – and I look forward to reading your comments! Join me next time when we will be looking at the Gift of Stillness.

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