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There is a universal spiritual principle that our life grows out of what we pay attention to.

Sometimes times of depression, anxiety, and burnout can be signs that we are not living true what really matters to us.

We may be struggling with physical aches & pains, tiredness, headaches, gut discomfort – all of these can be indications that we need to slow down and tend to the causes of our pain.

We may be feeling rushed, panicked, irritable, impatient, and jumpy. These are signs of hypervigilance in our nervous system, showing us that we need to take time and space to ground ourselves in who we really are and tend to what is actually happening, so that we can centre and get our balance back.

Times of feeling low in mood, lost, despairing, purposeless, and losing our enjoyment in life can also be a message to us that we need to spend time with the hurting parts of us, and continue to ask the deep questions of ourselves.

These experiences can lead to us feeling overwhelmed, stuck & paralysed, and we may need to look at getting help to make sense of it, from friends, family, our doctor, a psychotherapist, or life coach.

Within whatever help or support we receive, we can gently keep following a deep thread of inner questioning, exploring questions like:

What really matters to me? What do I really want? What do I need?

Using these as a guiding light brings in energy and inspiration from where our deep values come from. These come to us as feelings, senses, images, or ideas from within the deep layers of ourselves that we often don’t pay attention to.  We touch base with what gives us meaning, what energizes us, what motivates us, and what sparks us to move forward. This energy can help us stay with ourselves in our suffering, tend to our wounds, and allow growth to emerge from our discomfort.

It takes courage to take the time and space to refocus our lives on what we really value, and the impact of doing it can have far-reaching effects on us and those around us.

Times of overwhelm and exhaustion in our lives can leave us feeling lost and disoriented. If you can sit with this confusion, you may begin to notice the different of directions you have been pulled in and see where your energy has gone.

You may see where you have been pulled into trying to fix things for others or take responsibility for things you have no influence over. You may see that you have been doing things that do not feel of real value to you out of habit or someone else’s agenda. You may have been working hard trying to prove yourself, earn approval or get things that you think will make you feel better.

We can be drawn away by our own defences and coping strategies. We may be so used to distracting ourselves from our difficult inner experiences that our avoidance becomes a habit that takes us away from who we really are. The work involved in keeping up this avoidance exhausts us and may lead to these moments where we recognise that we have lost where we truly need to be. We move from needing our defences to needing gradually let them go.

If you can open to the pain of this overwhelm and exhaustion it can be a helpful sign to guide you in your confusion. Your struggle can help you see that you have been pulled off your path and begin to gently guide you back on track.

Your way forward means being present to how you feel in the moment and tuning into what feels helpful for you. Listening to yourself helps you take simple steps along the way of what feels healthy, calming and replenishing for you. Practicing letting go of the pressure you had felt can help you gradually recover your strength and energise you take realistic steps in the direction of what you deeply value.

Take one small step at a time towards experiences that give you a sense of rest, beauty, meaning and connection. This practice is all you can ever ask of yourself on your journey.

This way you can redirect yourself back to your unique path.

What happens when you feel like you need to stop… slow down… be?

You may notice your mind racing.  You are constantly planning what you need to get done, when to do it, how to do it quicker,  more efficiently. You see yourself planning, predicting, analysing all your experiences. You are caught in a need to either be doing activity or thinking about doing the activity.

Under this relentless doing you see your need to always be improving things, achieving and being productive. There is a desire to tick off your to-do list, to see things completed or know you have made something/someone better.  You see too that others have come to rely on your doing and you have come to see yourself as someone who gets things done. This doing has become who you are.

It is painful when you are suddenly confronted with your need to rest. When your body, mind and spirit tell you that you are exhausted and can do no more. Somewhere deep inside you your weariness lets you know you need time out to rest, heal, nourish, and replenish yourself.

Resting can be challenging because it gives us space to feel a little of the pain we have been avoiding by rushing around being busy. In slowing down, we may begin to feel the ache of loss or sense somehow that something deep is missing. We may tune into our inner conflicts and how they bring up fear, anger, and grief. It’s no surprise to realise how so much of the time we are distracting ourselves from feeling how disconnected we can be.

Resting invites us to consider:

What is left of me if I am not doing those things?

Who or what am I when I am at rest?

It offers us the time to tune into who we inherently are beneath our activity, roles, responsibilities, words, and actions.

A self, an essence with no conditions placed on it.

A being that is and is enough just as it is.

Rest introduces you to the effortless you that exists just because it does. Here you can learn to be ok in your incompleteness, with your to-do list undone, with work still in progress. It invites you to practice sitting in that place of not doing, to learn to tolerate, accept, inhabit, savour, and enjoy it.

Resting is letting you be in this moment, now, enough as you are.

Sometimes our expectations of ourselves can make our lives daunting. They can create a powerful pressure that is overwhelming and can leave us feeling paralysed, unable to take any helpful action. We can get caught in patterns of procrastination where we withdraw from our lives and neglect ourselves to avoid the pressure.

We often have long lists of things we expect ourselves to do. This can take over and create indecision about what to do next. We feel this deep inner conflict if all the things on our list feel equally important or essential. This can leave us feeling weighed down and dreading taking action.

In these times of being stuck in our expectations, it can help to:

Stop …gently pause, find space to be alone and take stock.

Reconsider……. which things really need to be done?

• Which things aren’t necessary – can I let them go?
• Which are there because others are doing it or expect me to, but I don’t want to or need to?
• Which things are there because I have always done them, in a certain way, but now things have changed, and I can do them differently or less often?

Reconnect… focus on what is essential and most helpful to you.

• What really matters to me?
• What will really help me in my life now?
• What fits with who I really am right now?

Let go …. gently practice dropping our expectations of doing or being anything that doesn’t feel helpful.

Softening our expectations involves allowing ourselves to fully experience our feelings and be attentive to our vulnerability. We slowly learn to let ourselves give up trying to be the ideal person we were expecting ourselves to be. We also let go of trying to be how we imagine everyone is or what we think they want us to be.

This allows us to let the expectations or goals we have for ourselves just be ideas or possibilities that we move into if it seems helpful. We relax the tension of holding the weight of the pressure we were under. This brings us the deep relief of living more lightly.

We let ourselves just be how we are in each moment and learn to live with this. We do what we can with the reality of what we are, not what we except ourselves to be. This simplifies our experiences and gives us the freedom to fully live our lives as we really are.

One of the challenges of going through a difficult time can be allowing yourself to admit you don’t know what to do about it. This realisation can be terrifying and confusing, and we have all learned strategies to avoid this reality. We may have never been allowed the space to struggle with the experience of not knowing.

Often, we have been taught to present ourselves as someone who can always cope, and this causes us to easily default into a mask of pretending we are ok. Others may have come to rely on us to be the person who always knows how to help, and it can feel impossible to change this perception due to the affect it may have on them.

We may believe that saying we don’t know means we are a failure. We can then lose confidence in our ability to solve problems and feel that it means we have lost hope of finding a way forward in our lives.

The surprising thing about finally admitting we don’t really know what do is that doing this can create the space to help you better grapple with your dilemma.

Allowing yourself to feel the anxiety, despair and anger that often comes when we face barriers in our lives is an act of self-compassion that helps you to begin to heal the pain of your situation. This is a humbling experience that can help you to see your struggle as an understandable response to the challenge of our human condition and learn to offer yourself support in the suffering you are experiencing.

The honesty of allowing yourself space to fully experience being stuck can free up energy to generate new ideas and creative solutions. If you can also be open with others that you trust it can allow them to help you process your experiences and support you to shift your perspectives.

Practicing the art of “not knowing” can be a helpful stance to cultivate to help you find your way through challenging times.

Written by Kirsty Turner

The experience of losing touch with yourself can feel painful, confusing, and sad.

Sometimes we first notice an ache that makes us feels as though we are missing something essential. We may feel a longing for something that we need but cannot get to. At other times, our need to tend to ourselves can express itself through an intense sense of crisis – a feeling of panic, overwhelm or brokenness.

Many things in our lives can contribute to us losing our connection with ourselves. You may find the busyness of your life distracts you from keeping in touch with how you feel and what you need. Or you may realise that you tend to focus so much on other people’s needs and priorities that you forget and neglect yourself.

No matter how we experience this, we can learn to try to respond in a way that helps us honour being with ourselves whatever state we are in.

The beauty of learning to listen to our pain is that we can begin to be more alert to this disconnection. We can then practice, over and over again, returning back to ourselves, and giving ourselves the attention that we need.

As we awaken to this, we discover that there are many ways, big and small, to heal from this separation. Grabbing tiny moments to savour small pleasures, expressing ourselves through art, or committing to some regular time alone can all help. Being with a person who can listen and support us to make this reconnection, such as a close friend, psychotherapist, or counsellor, can give us a powerfully restoring experience of self-care.

When we do this consistently, we find we have more energy to sustain our focus on what really matters to us and enjoy our lives more fully. We will discover that the effort it takes to give ourselves the attention we need is well worth the reward of returning to a sense of being back home in ourselves.

Written by Kirsty Turner

Life invites us at times to take the step of going deeper into ourselves. Things happen that make us realise we are being pulled to notice, to feel, to question, and to heal the painful conflicts that hurt us. It can be immensely challenging to take this step as we may be afraid of what we will find as we begin to pay more attention what is going on inside.

Where do we find the courage go within?

For some, it comes from a realisation that that they don’t really know who they are, how they got to where they are in their life or what they really want. For others, it may feel as though necessity is driving them to search themselves – they may have grown tired of looking everywhere around them all their life and inside themselves may be the one place they have not yet looked. Curiosity to find out what is in us and intense need to make changes can also be catalysts for us to start the path.

We can take courage from those who have gone before us, from the many throughout the ages from every generation and culture who have explored, created, and expressed out of what matters most to them.

Many different paths can support us to take this step to go within ourselves. These can include psychotherapy, relationships with others, exploring creative or physical pursuits, developing spiritual practices and spending time alone in nature.

And we may find, as we begin, that we have been this road before….  In a way, we have always known ourselves deeply and intimately. It is the traumatic experiences of our lives that have at times cut us off from this knowing and left us looking elsewhere for direction. Our work now is to keep practicing ways of reconnecting, of returning continually to who we really are.

The deep paradox of this journey is that we find the courage to go within precisely when we take the step to go within…

We discover, in the rich intensity of our daily experience, that the courage was there within us all along.