Find Presence in The Midst of Chaos
Has anyone ever asked you, like really asked you, “what causes you chaos?” I ask you this, because I believe it to be a question that most have never been asked before. So pause, just for this moment and ask yourself what causes you chaos... In sitting with this question, maybe for the first time, we can actually recognize some of what puts us into chaos. And with this, we can be empowered to find ways to combat it with the opposite - presence.
As someone who was born into a family of seven, I often feel like I was born into chaos. That is not to say that it was absolute and utter mayhem, it’s just that being the youngest of five, all under ten years of age, creates a high vibration of energy that is inevitable… I believe this to be one of the reasons I have a strong tolerance for chaos and a great amount of patience. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that I have in turn been attracting chaos as a part of my familiarity with it, especially in the workplace. I became aware of this through how it presented itself to me through anxiety and insomnia. This way of being has become a baseline for me, and a very uncomfortable one at that. I made the decision (or my body did rather) that this baseline was no longer sustainable a few years ago. As a part of this new understanding, I made it my mission to discover practices that helped me find more presence, and in turn attract more peace.
When you dig into the world of tools for instilling presence, you will find a lot of information around meditation and how it can support a state of “inner-calm.” As someone who has great respect for and studied psychology at a Buddhist, contemplative university, I am very familiar with meditation. In fact, a meditation practice was infused into every day of my undergraduate degree and happens to be a vital part of my life present-day. Regardless, at the time I was honestly quite burnt out on it. Meditating felt like work, like yet another thing to add to the list, aka more CHAOS.
So, instead of adding something that may feel like just another line on your list, I explored the idea of using a meditative approach to finding presence, with a few simple, hands-on practices. These tools start at the core of it, by first asking yourself what feels like chaos to you? And then, using your discoveries as a means to recognize them early on, shed light on and acknowledge them, and in turn simplify and rationalize the triggers.
You will find two resources available here which I have found extremely helpful to me in coping with anxiety and insomnia (my symptoms of chaos). The first is your opportunity to be curious… Be curious about how chaos translates in your body and what some of the themes are. Try counteracting the symptoms of chaos in your body with a practice I call “finger-tracing breath” (which I first learned of on Spotify’s “Daily Wellness” playlist). You can find an example of this practice here. Finally, I then encourage you to do an effortless, yet potent, “brain dump.” All this does is help you unleash everything sitting in your mind and on your shoulders so you can not only witness the magnitude of what you were holding, but also release that which isn’t presently important. The hope is to shock your system into a state of presence with a compassionate but rational approach to what you can do, what you can control, and what serves you in the moment. With these and other simple tools, my hope is that you feel empowered to make a plan... A plan that is founded in peace and away from chaos.
Be well,
Mary
