How to handle uncertainty
Uncertainty is one of the hardest things for us to deal with. So afraid of the unknown are we humans that 9 times out of 10 we’d choose an uncomfortable or even painful present over the choice of an uncertain future.
What we usually do when we feel uncertain is reach out to find what other people have to say, to try and find some sense of reassurance. And I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like whenever I log onto a social media site, or open an email, there are people trying to tell me what to think about things, or what to do. Whether it’s things I agree with or not (I have strong political opinions, as most of us do, I assume), I still find myself feeling like a shuttlecock, being batted about: think this! Do this! Act on this! Pay attention to this! This is what you need to know about X! This is why your opinions on Y are wrong! This is why I am right about Z! It’s sorta reassuring: other people are anxious too, and other people have answers or opinions that either alleviate my fears, or confirm them.
Or, we create a scenario, or ‘reality’ in our heads and decide that this is certain. We look for solid ground, and if we can’t find it, we create it.
Another thing that we do is picture disaster scenarios, in order to prepare ourselves for the worst. You’ve done this, right? Lay awake at night imagining what you’d do if X happened? We do this to try and protect ourselves. It’s like bracing for a punch: it protects your internal organs and stuff. Except, you know life’s punches— the really shitty ones— they never seem to come from the direction you’re bracing in. The thing about mentally bracing is…
1. Your body doesn’t know the difference between perceived realities and actual reality. If you’re picturing it, over and over, then it’s affecting your stress levels and physiology (because you’re releasing stress hormones, which in turn activate your sympathetic nervous system, which has a cascade effect on your body’s functioning).
2. When shit hits the fan, we cope. It’s one of the remarkable things about being human: when terrible things happen, we find reserves of strength that we didn’t know we had. It’s not remotely the same as what we picture when trying to preempt disaster. In fact, I think those of you who do this would probably agree with me: imagining all the different worst case scenarios doesn’t actually prepare you for them at all.
All of this is to say, when we cast about for solid ground to land on, mentally, it brings reassurance of one kind, but isn’t necessarily great for us, physically or mentally.
When there’s so much going on in the world, what are our other options? How do you cope with an unknown future, when the present feels like such a mess?
That’s what this newsletter is about. In it, you’ll find two things.
The first, is a bit of perspective on where we are currently, in time. When we get stressed, our focus narrows, and we forget about the world outside what we’re focusing on. We forget, for example, that we have made, and are making progress in many areas in society. We forget that while terrible things happen there are also good things happening. We forget that this is a point in the evolution and unfolding of the world and human society, not the end-point. So the first section of this newsletter is to give a bit of perspective on time and change and what a mess the world looks like.
The second is about broadening our vision in an embodied fashion to be able to sit comfortably with the unknown. For that I have made a little video exercise for you. You can do this as many times as you want, throughout the day. If you find yourself scrolling on social media and getting more and more tense and worried, play the video and do it again, to get back to a place of deeper surrender to the big picture.
Because, I think that’s what it comes down to: surrender.
-I am doing my best and it is enough.
-You are doing your best and it is enough.
-We are all doing what we can with what we have available.
-When we see that in ourselves, then we are able to trust that other people are also doing their best, with what they have.
-The rest is out of our hands.
Big hugs, and may you please guard your energy levels and attention well over the coming weeks,
Rebecca
Contents:
1. How to organise your pantry (I swear this has a point)
2. What this means for right now.
3. An exercise for you, to help you feel more comfortable in the uncertainty of these times
1. How to organise your pantry
(I swear there’s a point to this)
I made the mistake of watching the Home Edit TV show on Netflix a few months ago.
It was a mistake for 2 reasons:
The first was that I was utterly horrified at the sheer amount of STUFF that people have. I have always thought of myself as a stuff-loving-person, so for me to be horrified it really has to be a lot! It just really put me in a state of looking closely at my own stuff-consumption.
The second was that I decided right then and there that I needed to organise my entire house from top to bottom. What followed was weeks of projects, in which my husband and I lived in a disaster zone as I decided on random afternoons that various rooms and closets could not possibly go another minute in their unorganized state.
I am now an organizing expert. (Also, fair warning, if you ever come to my house, the first thing I’m going to show you is the pantry because is a work of art.)
Which is why I am about to talk about organizing. I’d like to be clear, that I am not changing careers, and that what follows is a hopefully helpful metaphor for the state of the world right now. If it inspires you to sort out your jam jars then that’s a bonus.
How to organise your pantry.
First you need to pull everything out.
That includes the jar of 5-year old jam that your neighbour made that wasn’t labeled properly and you’re not 100% sure how their preserving techniques are. It includes the rancid oil and the 3-years past sell-by-date of canned pineapple that you bought for something and now don’t remember what.
Put everything, and I mean everything, in the middle of your kitchen or living room, until it has covered every square inch of floor.
Now you start organising it into categories: canned foods, oils, grains, beans, honey, jam, etc etc. Everything has to have a category, and if there’s no category for something just make a new one.
Anything you don’t use, or is out of date, goes in the trash.
At some point in the process of this, a person who lives with you will come downstairs and see that there is nowhere to step in the living room. They are effectively trapped on the stairs, above a sea of non-perishables, and from their perspective, the entire world of the living room is c eomplete and utter clusterfuck.
They ask you what the hell is happening, and say that they thought you were going to make the house look better, not like it was a part of the Blitz circa 1939.
This is when you say ‘it’s ok. I have a plan. This is a work in progress, and when I’m DONE, it’ll look better than it did before. Until then, however, you are trapped on the stairs unless you’d like to practice your en pointe skills’.
Roommate practices tiptoeing through living room. Piles of things are knocked over. The mess gets worse.
Eventually, hours later, many many more hours than previously thought, everything has a place, and has been put back. There is more trash than you are comfortable with, and a part of you wonders if it was maybe better to just leave it hidden in the back of the closet than see just how much waste you actually generate.
You are horrified, also, to realise that you, too, want to order some plastic containers from a large corporation, to make it look better.
Exhausted, sore, and still a little horrified, you go to bed and need to rest for days. It turns out, you realise later, that a pantry should never be re-done in a single day, because it is too much work for any one person, on any given day.
For months to come, you subject anybody who comes to your house to a pantry tour.
2. The point
I have a point here, and I hope it’s obvious by now.
There’s a chance that we are in the midst of a cosmic pantry-reorganisation.
That everything is in the middle of the living room, and looks like a total mess.
We’re starting to see just how much waste we generate, and are not happy about it, and are wondering if it’s possible to shove things back in the pantry the way things were. It occurs to us at the same time that shoving things back is not the answer, and that it doesn’t do justice to any of the things that passed their sell-by-date and went to waste because they were hidden behind the beans. If we don’t want to generate that kind of waste in the future, if we want all the things in our pantry to be seen and used, then we need to carry on.
The only way out is through.
Which is fortunate for any future mystery jams that come our way.
(Unfortunate for our housemates right now, though.)
The cosmos is constantly in a dance of chaos and order. From order, chaos is born, and from chaos, order emerges. It’s the LIFE cycle, when you think about how things settle, and then two different atoms rub against each other and something new is born, and that new thing creates a disturbance in the order that was previously established, creating a new chaos, which will eventually settle into order, before chaos ensues again.
We, the world, society at large, are pulling everything out of the pantry and it looks a mess.
The mess was always there, its just that not all of us were aware of it before.
Now, some people are like ‘put it all back where it was because the house looks terrible’.
Some people are like ‘this is a disaster I can’t believe this is what our house looks like it’s all shit and I hate pantries’.
Some people, who had to actually use the pantry all the time, are like ‘this has been a long time coming, and I can’t believe I had to put up with a pantry like that for so long.’
Some people now hate pantries in their entirety and want to burn them all to the ground and never cook again.
Some of us are aware that re-organising is both important, and takes time. We can live with the mess, because the mess is a part of the process.
This is important:
We think we know everything. We think we’re in charge. We think that the present moment is the end: that we are so in control of our lives and our world that even in the process of pulling everything out, it ‘should’ look good.
Take the entire timeline of humanity as a whole, stretch it out like a piece of string, from one end of the globe to the other. Then put your pinkie finger somewhere in the middle of it. That is what you get to see and experience: one tiny, tiny piece of a larger whole. It is not your job to make it perfect: we might not even get to see the pantry in a moment of perfection. It is only your job to do what you can, in what time you have.
The rest is not your job.
These days around Samhain (in the Northern hemisphere) and All Souls day mark the time when the veils between worlds are at their thinnest. It is a time of death and rebirth, of paying attention, and of letting go of falsehoods. These days reveal to us that the ‘truth’ of our reality is not just the immediate physical world that we see in front of us, but something infinitely more complex, magical, and varied than we could ever possibly imagine. Our place, in this grand scheme of things is so out of our control and understanding that our philosophies are laughable; our truths are grasps at feeling like we have solid ground under our feet.
Ride the energy of the season and choose something to let go of: some kind of pressure that you put on yourself and the world. Choose to let go of somewhere that you’re trying to force reality to be other than what it is. Choose to let go of a tiny bit of your resistance to the flow of the bigger picture. Want to learn how? Read on…
3. An exercise for you, to help you feel more comfortable in the uncertainty of these times
In this video I’m going to guide you back into feeling more open and connected, and slightly more ok with the swirling unknowns around us all.
Reality is around you right now. Not what’s in your brain as you think about the future or dwell on the past. Here, now, in your body, in your immediate environment, in the uncertainty of not knowing.
This exercise is to get you out of your head, and back into your body. Whenever you feel yourself starting down a rabbit-hole of thinky thoughts that are affecting your emotional state and outlook on the world, do this.
Once you’ve done it, respond to this email and let me know if it helped :).
Click on the image to take you to the video. Please excuse any background noise-- there's someone cutting a tree down a few houses over.
Exercise transcript:
Sit or lie down somewhere comfortable, and settle your bones into the surface you’re on.
Breathe into your belly, in, two three four, hold two three four, out two three four five six, hold two three four.
Again.
In two three four. Hold two three four. Out two three four five six. Hold two three four.
Once more.
In two three four. Hold two three four. Out two three four five six. Hold two three four.
Let your breathing become relaxed and natural, and let the air flow in and out, as you bring your awareness into your belly, and let your belly soften. Let that softness spread out from your belly, down your legs, softening your thighs, your knees, your shins, and the soles of your feet. Let your entire legs and lower body become heavy, soft, relaxed and open.
Now let that softness flow up, through your pelvis, the deepest muscles of your belly, your diaphragm. Let them soften even more, and that softness spills up into your chest, softening your sternum, your ribcage. Let it soften your spine, your shoulders, your neck, jaw and scalp. And on your next exhale let every muscle in your body relax, open, become heavy and loose.
Now, choose something that you’re fixating on, where you’ve been mulling it over or fixating on outcomes in your mind. Picture the scenario that you’re fixating on in your minds eye, and instead of letting yourself try to sort it out or understand it in your head, just picture the scenario, before your mind wants to kick in.
Good. Start to pay attention to your body now, while holding this scenario in your mind’s eye. Can you feel how your body’s response to this situation is tension?Pull it up in your minds eye. Let yourself start to tense again, but this time, notice how your body is tensing and becoming more narrow: your field of vision is narrowing, and your field of awareness and focus is narrowing.
Can you feel that? How your broad, open perspective is getting closer and closer as you focus on the thing that’s stressing you out? Look at the areas that your body is tensing in response to picturing this thing. Is it your shoulders? Across the front of your chest? Deep in your belly? In your pelvic floor? The soles of your feet? All of the above? How does *your* body create a narrowed focus with tension?
Look out this tension, without trying to change it. Observe how your body is responding to the thing you’re thinking about. Feel the narrowing of your energy as you focus on this stressful thing.
And now, start to tense this narrowed focus more. Increase the tension in your body more, and more, and more. If the other areas you were noticing tension come along for the ride, then let them tense too. Increase the intensity of this pattern, so that you can really feel, in detail, how your body feels about the scenario. Tense, and tense, until it’s really deeply uncomfortable. You might be shaking with effort by now.
On an exhale, drop it all. Drop the tension, drop the thought, let it all go.
Breathe. In and out. Let the air flow into areas where you’d been tensing, and flow.
You might have released a lot of tension and need to move it out: if you feel like moving of wiggling then please do so. As you do this, allow your breath to flow.
If you notice yourself tensing up again, see if you can soften it again as you breathe.
Now, keeping your eyes closed, start to look outside the edges of your vision. As if you’re staring straight ahead but trying to make out more detail in something on either side of you. As you do this, allow this feeling of looking out the sides of your eyes spread to your whole body, and all of your energy: you’re not just trying to look out the sides of your eyes, but trying to look out the sides of your entire being. Instead of focusing on what’s in front of you, you’re focusing on what’s on either side.
As you do this, without thinking, let yourself fall back inside yourself a bit. Like you’re stepping back to take in even more of the view, even more of the world around you.
You might feel waves of energy, or fear bubbling up in your body as you do this. Simply let them come up, and move through you, and dissipate. You might want to tense again in response to this, and that’s ok. See if you can soften that tension, either by letting it go, or by tensing it slightly and then dropping it, and then re-focus on the feeling of falling backwards, and looking out the sides of yourself. Feel that you are surrounded by space and movement.
Good.
Now, while staying in this place of space and movement, let go. Feel the larger flow of energy in the world, and let it move through you.
Feel here, how you cannot know any answers, or have any control over outcomes.
Feel how you are a small piece of flotsam in the larger ocean of universal being, and that you are being carried along, and are not in charge of what happens.
If fear arises, let it come, and move through you, but you don’t need to follow it: you can let it go and return to focusing on the feeling of the larger flow.
Picture the scenario once more. This time though, pull it up in your minds eye and feel the uncertainty, the lack of control, and the unknown.
Relax your pelvic floor, and soften your jaw. Soften your shoulders. Relax the bottoms of your feet. Keep your attention broad and wide. Breathe softly. Feel the ground where you rest against it. Feel your back body, and let your back body be held in the flow.
Now, open your eyes, and look around you. How does the world look from here? How does the world FEEL from here?