How to go with the flow
It’s the beginning of a new year but not the end of Covid and the layers of difficulty, uncertainty and anxiety it brings into our lives.
But if it wasn’t Covid, there will always be something else that threatens our sense of safety and security leading to anxiety and stress.
So is now the time for us to learn in earnest how to be with uncertainty and anxiety – both of which are an intrinsic part of life?
How can we relate to our experience in a more helpful way?
We don’t have to feel anxious about our anxiety, to feel that we shouldn’t experience it, despite what many voices in society lead us to believe. We must take some time to pause and acknowledge to ourselves and to the people we live and work with that it’s been another challenging and difficult year. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to be sentimental. Just saying how it is. And perhaps we also need to acknowledge that life is tough and unpredictable rather than hold on to the view that it should be easy when it isn’t.
What would it be like to bear and experience the disturbing aspects of life – Covid and others - without turning them into a problem that we must try hard to solve? Sometimes our very efforts not to have an experience ties us to it and makes it worse. It’s a paradox.
The uncertainty of Covid, the changes and complexity that it brings to life are difficult experiences indeed. However, they are just unpleasant experiences. They are just what we don’t want, what we prefer not to happen. Disturbing experiences can still be there. When we bring kind, open and curious awareness to our experience, when we can feel it without pushing or pulling, it changes and becomes more manageable.
Does there really always need to be a resolution?
When difficult things happen we intuitively want to push them away, to get rid of them (and conversely we want to hold on to pleasant experiences which can be equally painful). Furthermore, we add unnecessary layers of thoughts, judgements and emotions and in no time we find ourselves in a sea of despair, in a mind-made future scenario that has not happened yet and may never happen. This type of future thinking, catastrophising, causes most of our anxiety and stress because the mind can’t distinguish whether something is actually happening or if it is just a narrative scripted by the mind. The impact on our emotional life is the same.
Photo: Burak Kostak
Here are 7 ways of going with the flow vs resisting difficulty:
1. We can reframe anxiety and uncertainty.
Instead of it being a problem that has to be solved, we can see clearly that sometimes we experience disturbing and difficult experiences and sensations. And so perhaps we can give up feeling anxious about experiencing anxiety and uncertainty. It’s okay to feel anxious, it’s human.
2. We can remember that we are emotional beings that think and not thinking beings who have emotions as Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s ground breaking neuroscientific research into emotions has shown (How emotions are made – the secret life of our brain, 2017).
3. We can recognise that thoughts about the future are just thoughts, that we are not our thoughts and that not everything we think is necessarily true.
4. We can notice when we are caught up in a narrative about what might happen to us, our loved ones, our job, colleagues, the world and come back to our senses: what we see, hear, feel, taste, touch, smell. When that happens we are in the present moment and we can have powerful agency of the choices we make, i.e. how we respond to what’s happening (vs merely react).
5. We can choose the attitude we bring to difficulties, such as anxiety and uncertainty.
We can choose to beat ourselves up for feeling anxious, calling ourselves a wimp or weak only to feel more anxious and overwhelmed. Or we can choose to bring kindness, openness, sensitivity and compassion to ourselves and the situation we are in. A word of caution here: kindness and compassion are non-sentimental attitudes that require a sturdy and courageous heart, one that can bear to be with difficult experience without pushing it away or getting overwhelmed by it.
6. We can relax into the changing nature of all things.
We can choose an activity and explore our experience of it – a chat with a friend or colleague, a walk in the park, cooking a meal, playing with the kids, doing a task, yoga or meditation, and notice how everything changes moment by moment.
When we can go with the flow vs resisting it, life becomes easier in the midst of difficulty.
7. And in the midst of difficulty we can always choose to notice enjoyable moments – they are always also here: a kind word, a helping hand, a generous act…
Working with our heart / mind is one of the most remarkable things we can do with our life. - Vidyamala Burch, co-founder of Breathworks UK, author and international speaker.
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