Regulate, Distract, Repeat

Am I grounding with movement or just keeping busy

Noticing moments of calm

What do you do when your brain is busy? When you're processing a lot and can feel the energy building up somewhere in your body; restless, unresolved, swirling?

If you look up strategies, expert advice varies. Breathwork, shaking, meditation, dancing, journaling, talking it out. There are many options, all valid, all good advice for someone.

For me, movement is usually part of the answer. When my body is in motion, the stagnant, anxious kind of energy tends to shift. Sometimes I shake or dance, and they help a little. Yoga also seems to do me a lot of good. But with my particular set of personality traits and sparkle brain, I've found that having a task, something to actually do, tends to break the grip of rumination even more effectively.

The thing is, there's a version of that which helps, and a version that doesn't, and the trick lies in identifying which is which. Where is the line between acknowledging what I'm feeling while I 'do', and distracting myself so thoroughly that I push it down, only to have it return later, with the added weight of having been ignored?

Lately I’ve been needing to navigate some big topics without my usual supports. Not abandoned by any means, but a significant and unpleasant shift. Left largely to my own devices, with more time on my hands than is usually good for me, I had no choice but to sit with the question of how I actually balance doing and resting.

My first reaction was frantic. Fill the time, fill the space - people, tasks, work, plans. Just keep swimming, because if I stop, I might drown. But that's not sustainable, and more importantly, it gets in the way of the inner work I actually want to do. That requires presence and rest.

So I started paying attention.

Busy bee

My little courtyard has been on the receiving end of this exploration. When the anxious feelings built up, I found myself wandering outside, finding something to do, something grounded and real that connected me to the present. Those kinds of tasks - hands in soil, secateurs in hand - bring me back to here and now, not what was or what might be, just this. Luckily, we were at that perfect seasonal turning point, a transitional time as we entered the cold months (Waring season here in Naarm) that calls for big pruning, hard chops, soil feeding, and getting winter crops in.

I also noticed when I reached for the doing as an escape. When going outside was not a way to regulate but to avoid. When jumping up to compost and mulch yet another bed was replacing the sitting, the feeling, and the rest. The distinction matters not so much in the action as in the intention, and the ability to choose. One assists in moving things through, while the other buries them temporarily with a productive-looking lid on top.

There is a lot of value in sitting with your feelings, wallowing in bed and crying in the shower, as well as value in being active and proactive in moving through things.

While I’m still finding ways of balancing busy brain, big changes, big feels, big sads and quiet contentment, my garden got transformed from its late summer dryness into a freshened-up, new-beginnings kind of vibe, and it enjoyed the attention without judging my motivation. Perhaps here lies one of the secrets to moving through challenges.
More kindness, more allowance, embracing the care and releasing some of the judgement.

What does stopping feel like when you let yourself? Is it uncomfortable, unfamiliar?
And is it also quietly needed?