Anxiety involves feelings of worry, fear, and apprehension that have cognitive, emotional, and physical effects. It can lead to negative thoughts and cause people to feel out of control. It can also lead to somatic sensations, such as sweating, trembling, or shortness of breath.
These symptoms are common for people who have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. However, they can also affect anyone to varying degrees at different times. Fortunately, there are effective strategies that you can utilize to help cope with anxiety in both the short and long term. Join me today as we discuss some of the strategies that may be helpful for coping with anxiety including breathing exercises and mind-body connecting.
0 Comments
What an honor to land with you at this moment in time, in this brand new year. Drop in for a moment and you’ll feel the gates, the portals opening, offering us entry into a new paradigm, a new “way.”
If the past years have been an era when all kinds of repressed anger and frustration and fear have surfaced, this new era is a time of reckoning. On every level – individually and as part of the collective consciousness – we are asked now to take the lessons and release the war. This is a time when our actions come under the intense light of spiritual truth, and our hearts are meant to open to embrace the new at every level. Join me today for this first Wisdom Wednesday of 2021, and enter this new place ready for a complete reevaluation and realignment of thinking and being. Fear is seeping through almost every aspect of life right now. You may not feel it so much or acknowledge it. Or you may be hyper-aware of its prevalence as you try to move out of the frozen states that we have all had to climb into over the past couple of years. You don’t have to feel afraid to be afraid, to unconsciously make decisions that limit your full experience of life.
Fear, the greatest teacher of all, invites us to engage with it, to feel and acknowledge its brittle structure, its “no you can’t,” or “just stay safe” messaging. We are all, without exception, breathing the smoky air of fear right now. Just look around you, beautiful souls afraid to get back into life, or others pretending nothing’s wrong. We can try to deny it or get into a fight with it. We can get angry or frustrated or sink back into our hiding places. But until we open our arms to embrace fear as an ally we will remain in fear of fear; we will stay in the frozen wasteland of our own stuckness. Please join me today to explore the healing power of facing into fear.. Sometimes, as they say, we make plans and the Gods laugh. We wonder, “why are they laughing?” We get frustrated, seeing so many possible roads before us and not having a clue which is the “right” one.
There’s nothing funny about needing to find a direction in life, to figure out what we really want and need, what makes sense in our particular universe. Mostly, we will employ our egos to figure out what feels good or seems right. Other times, we will try to copy a path walked by others who we think are successful. If the Gods are laughing, it’s at the folly of our thinking that we actually have so much control over our destinies. We do – to an extent. But so often we try to decide what we want to do, instead of finding what it is that is actually calling out to us. When we discover that inner voice, we begin to have a feeling of something greater than ourselves sending us signals. They may not be clear, may not make sense, and it may not lead to a lifelong profession. But if we follow that voice, and do the work of it, that trail will always lead us somewhere usually unexpected and in alignment with the true needs of our soul’s journey. Confusion – you know, that noise machine that moves in like a fog and mingles together thoughts and feelings until there is nothing identifiable left to choose from?
It’s like torture to get stuck in it. Everything seems possible, but nothing seems definite or clear. We try to make a decision from that place, and we get even more lost in the “what if’s” only to find the ground shifting constantly below our feet. Confusion is the first line of defense that our patterns set up to keep us a prisoner and running on the mouse wheel of the status quo. It’s a protective mechanism set in place by fear usually. Coming through its gauntlet of doubt, indecision, vacillation and all the rest leads us to clarity and the realization that the choices themselves aren’t as important as just making one. We need a total reset. How do we come out of our self-centeredness and acculturation in order to have a personal and collective reset? We who are the edge dwellers who dance around on the edges of time hoping to usher in the new age that is coming whether we take the ride or note: this is an invitation that is coming in for us all to do what is needed to get what's needed. Will we allow for the revolutionary shifts that actually want to happen? How do we find our way to yes?
HOW TO SUPPORT SOMEONE IN PAIN
In this Wisdom Wednesday, we are addressing something fundamental to life itself – how to support someone who is in pain. Recorded from my “hall of mirrors” we address the reflections we give to those who are close to us and who are in pain, whether it’s mental, emotional, physical or even spiritual pain. When someone, especially someone we love, is in pain, our first thought is to try to help them get away from it. We may try to fix it, to help them get distance from it or we will simply sympathize with them and take it on ourselves. But none of this is truly supportive, and the person in pain can feel more frightened and alone than ever. In order to really support someone – or to be supported ourselves if we are in pain – we have to come out of conflict with the pain itself. Pain is not necessarily bad, or something that we need to “fix.” Pain is the body, or the mind warning us that something is out of alignment. It is signaling a healing process that is either underway or that needs to happen. To support someone in pain means to not make the pain wrong, but to help them take the ride with it. Even as anger or deep fear or hopelessness might arise, support means witnessing more than it means fixing. Helping is about reminding the person that you have their back in the process but that it is a process that needs to be lived and engaged with. THE GREAT UNDOING. Do you ever feel like you’re coming undone? You start becoming aware of the thousands of pieces that have to work together to make you work. And then suddenly they all feel like they’re at war with each other. The results can be devastating, mentally, physically and spiritually, depending on where the misalignments are. We live in a time of undoing, with many of the institutions, belief systems and norms of our society falling apart, and even coming into conflict with each other. Times of change are perilous but necessary.
This undoing, whether it’s personal or societal, needs to happen. As painful as it is, the process of undoing releases all that is not in service to our highest needs. Coming out the other side of a great undoing requires opening to change. Personally, the undoing asks us to let go of everything we think we know, to come to a place of openness and healing. As a society, we are being asked to let go of so many of our old ways of being and thinking so we can come to a whole new way of life with each other. Please join me today to explore the ways we can allow this Great Undoing to be a healing process. |
AuthorA spiritual teacher, healer and minister, Racquel helps people clear the emotional and energetic blocks that keep them from discovering their true and unique spiritual connections. Archives
October 2022
Categories |