One of the side effects of our rich, abundant 21st century
lives seems to be frequent bouts of feeling overwhelmed. You
know the symptoms: inability to focus on any one thing because
there are just way too many things that needed your attention
yesterday; disconnection between your words and your thoughts,
probably because your mind won’t let you complete any
one thought before rushing off to remember something else
urgent that you’ve forgotten; exhaustion so severe you
can barely stay awake on the road or the computer or the phone,
while at the same time you are unable to sleep soundly through
the night as, again, you keep remembering so much of what
you have forgotten (but if you get up to write it down you
will again forget that urgent piece of flotsam before you
find pen and paper); complete distortion of time so that you
actually think it will only take a few hours to move into
a new home or a few minutes to write that chapter; inability
to complete any task because every task is so huge and depends
on 50 other things being completed first….
You can add your favorite symptom to this list.
In those moments of panic and desperation in the face of
unending need, call on your own warrior goddess for help.
Inside each of us there is a reservoir of clarity and strength,
a warrior goddess who will fiercely protect what is true and
tender for us. And though it may seem like constant busyness
is just an irritating but necessary part of our daily lives,
in truth it is much more than that. Continual motion and endless
doing erode our creative drive, our health and our personal
power. They distort our inner compass, sending us spinning
and swirling, unanchored to face the world without our own
reference points. We need nothing less than a warrior goddess
to remind us of what is really important, to reconnect us
with our wisdom and truth.
Fortunately we each have an inner warrior goddess ready to
help us, eager to share her wisdom with us. To find her, simply
slow down, get quiet, go within. She resides in your heart,
and your gut, in your blood and your bones, not your head.
Call to this warrior goddess within you. Spend some time feeling
her, connecting with her, remembering her. You may want to
ask her what for you is true and tender and needs her protection
in the midst of all your busyness. She may share with you
ways to get out of your overwhelming whirlwind or tell you
how to use her strength to create the life you want. Know
that you can connect with her whenever you need to. Her wisdom,
your wisdom, is what’s best for you. Here are some of
the ways I have learned from my warrior goddess to get out
of overwhelm and back into myself:
Either
go up or go down
Either get solidly grounded or soar above it all. Remember,
being overwhelmed indicates we are swirling around, completely
ungrounded or unconnected to what has deep meaning for us.
One way we can re-connect with our truth, our meaning, is
by sending our roots down deep into Pachamama, Mother Earth.
You can visualize yourself like a tree, sending your taproot
deep down into the solidness of the earth while standing spine
straight, solidly connected to the web of life.
Breathe and rest for a moment here. From this place of connection
to Earth and Spirit, to the ancestors and the future descendents,
and to your life purpose, as a warrior goddess, you can look
at the many tasks before you and see them for what they really
are.
You could also get this connected view from soaring above,
like an eagle, looking down and seeing all the demands on
you as part of the ebb and flow of your life, as part of your
role within the unifying web of all life.
From this high view, notice the importance or insignificance
of all these things you absolutely must do. As you soar like
an eagle you can use your clear, far vision to help you put
your current challenges in a different perspective.
Once you locate yourself and the tasks before you within
the web of life and see the connection to the Work you are
here to do, then gather your energy. A warrior goddess, like
a sorceress, is one who can “source” energy that
is then available for her use. You will need all kinds of
energy to meet your challenges. Since huge tasks require lots
of energy, you have to keep gathering that energy from somewhere.
Use whatever techniques work for you to gather your energy.
Sleep is a good place to start. All those things that keep
your body healthy and strong are good, like drinking water
and herbal infusions, eating well, and exercising. Meditation,
yoga, connecting with Spirit through prayer or journey, dancing,
singing, or drawing up energy from the Earth are all ways
to source energy.
One of my favorite ways of sourcing energy is doing what I
call “belly on the ground meditation.” In this
simple meditation, I lie stomach down on the ground in my
garden, clear my mind, connect my belly with the Earth, feel
my roots intertwine with the plants all around me, and draw
up the wisdom of the Earth and Green Ones. Your inner goddess
can suggest the ways that are best for you. Excessive amounts
of caffeine or junk food may give you short bursts of energy
but they won’t sustain you in the long run and they
usually lead to even more ungrounded swirling around. Drink
up power from those clear springs that nourish your core.
Determine what you desire
Ever notice how we can work really hard, completely involved
in a project without the energetic stress that feels overwhelming
when we are engaged with something we really love? My warrior
goddess reminds me to keep figuring out what I want. Far from
being selfish or unloving, getting clear about what I want
keeps me responsible for meeting my own needs and not depending
on others to take care of me. Often when I get grounded and
connected with my inner goddess and then look at what is making
me overwhelmed, I see that I am giving up what I desire, so
much so that I often don’t even know what I want. So
I swirl around gobbling up all kinds of things, experiences,
or accomplishments that are only surface desires, not necessarily
what I really want. I have censored my deep desires before
I have let them even surface in my conscious mind because
I think I just can’t have them. “Whoa,”
my critic says, “If all you do is what you want you’ll
just lie around, being selfish, losing your family and friends,
becoming bankrupt and homeless. It is hateful and dangerous
to be motivated by desire.” But my warrior goddess says,
“Not true. You came here with the desire to live your
dreams, to do your Work, to give and receive, to contribute
your part to the beauty of creation. What you want and what
you love can point you in the direction of your purpose. Don’t
settle for the superficial. Stay connected to your deep desires
and your big dreams.”
Often we do things we don’t necessarily want to do in
service of something we really do want. I may not want to
cook dinner tonight but I do want to feed myself and my family
nourishing food. I don’t really want to write that letter
to editor but I do want to support a cause I believe in. You
know the things you do that you would rather not, but you
do them because you are committed to the bigger picture they
paint. That is good. My warrior goddess reminds me to make
sure, though, that I’m grounded and not swirling, that
I can easily backtrack from what I am doing to what I really
want in a few steps. Otherwise I may be taking a longer route
than I need to on the path of my life’s purpose.
Look at the illusion with your strong eye,
with your inner wisdom
Most of what we think we just have to be doing originates
as messages from monkey mind. You know monkey mind –
the place of an endless stream of confusing thoughts that
lead nowhere, most of which are generated by that insatiable
inner critic. Our thinking minds also get confused between
what is a garden hose and what is a snake. Everything becomes
urgent, terribly important and unable to be dealt with by
anyone but us right now. And our monkey minds create all kinds
of illusions to keep us from some hard truths. Sometimes we
run faster and faster on the treadmill as a replacement for
looking deeper. Check to see what you may be avoiding by staying
busy. Let your warrior goddess help you see with your third
eye, your strong eye, through the illusions. Call on her to
help you see the truth about the importance or urgency of
the tasks before you. Let her help you decide if these tasks
are yours to do, to delegate, or to dump.
Remember that every “Yes” comes
with a built in “No”
My job is to decide who or what gets the “no.”
Consider this: every time we say yes to something, it means
we are also saying no something else. If I agree to help you
paint your kitchen, whatever else I could have used that time
for I am now saying no to. When I decide to answer email at
11 PM I say no to a bath or reading or sleep. We usually don’t
want to let go of things so we just keep taking more on, saying
yes to more and more. In reality we are saying no just as
much as we are saying yes, but we usually don’t see
the full impact of the no’s as easily.
Ditch any desire for perfection
The desire to have things perfect makes any task overwhelming.
Striving for perfection is the inner critic’s way of
reminding you, yet again, that you just can’t do it
well enough. Counter that idea with another perspective. My
mother says there are a whole lot of jobs that are best done
half-way. One of my yoga teachers suggested that for optimum
results in yoga we would do best to apply C+ effort. Yes,
this way is a far cry from “If it’s worth doing
at all, it’s worth doing well,” but I think the
person who said that must have had full time help at home
and at work.
Warrior
goddesses don’t need to do things perfectly,
they know that they are perfect just as they are.
Get clear about what part of this task is yours and what belongs
to someone else. When we feel overwhelmed, we may forget our
boundaries. We can, in confusion, expand ourselves too much.
Take some time to own what is yours and give back what belongs
to someone else. When in doubt, check with you-know-who. You
have a vision for a harmonious, successful future, but it’s
not completely up to you to make in a reality.
Let death be your ally
This is a powerful deflator of feeling overwhelmed. Our ego
keeps telling us that no one can do this job but us, or that
no one can do it as well as we can. The truth of the matter
is that everyone is expendable. All of us will die without
finishing everything on our to-do list. And even if we are
deeply missed and mourned for eons, someone else will do what
we thought we absolutely had to do, or it just won’t
get done. Death, and her sisters illness, accident, and bed-ridden
burn-out, have a way of cutting our ego-based control issues
down to size. So occasionally imagine what would happen if
you just plain cannot finish this task. Start prioritizing
from there.
Some of us have jobs or projects or creative endeavors that
we believe in completely and are deeply committed to completing.
We are moved to give all we can to what we know to be our
Work. What if we are overwhelmed by unending need that we
wholeheartedly desire to meet? Again, connect with your inner
warrior goddess and return to knowing your treasured place
in the interconnected web. We are not alone. No challenge
is ever faced alone. Call on a prayer circle in Georgia to
help you with your work in the inner city. Ask your ancestors,
who faced incredible challenges, to remind you of how they
did the really hard things. Call on the trees to lend you
their strength. Keep stepping outside of your linear, dualistic
way of thinking. Keep letting go of the need to control. Give
from your heart as much as you lovingly want to and then trust
the wisdom of the Goddess.
Recognize the power of the void
Sometimes we lose all control and drown in feeling overwhelmed.
These are the times when our desire to manage everything sends
us headlong into the void. In the Wise Woman tradition we
recognize the power of the void, the great mystery from which
all is born. In this place of chaos, of all potentialities,
of “the great nothing dark womb of the goddess,”
as Susun Weed describes it, anything but control is possible.
Not to worry – this is the blessed place of healing.
This is the place of shut down, break down, going down, down
and deep, into the dark unknown. Sometimes the only way through
the illusion of control is to surrender to the chaos of the
void.
Courageous are the embodied warrior goddesses who let the
great unknown engulf them. This is not defeat. Rather, the
void is the source of all possibilities. From this place entirely
new approaches to challenges are possible. New life, new beginnings,
new ways of living, new growth all come out of the dark chaotic
void. Like the Goddess Innana we can return from our descent
more whole, more powerful, and more deeply aware of our truth.
These are some of the things my warrior goddess has taught
me. See if any of them have meaning for you. Remember you
can trust that source of wisdom and strength within yourself
to find your own way through the hectic pace of life.
Christine Thomas is a personal life coach
in the Wise Woman tradition. You can find out more about her
and an expanded version of this article on her web site www.hawkview.net
. Christine offers a monthly phone circle for women called
Walking the Path of a Daughter of the Earth. This ongoing
mystery school empowers women by reminding you of your hereditary
wisdom, of your innate connection with Earth and Spirit, and
of your much-needed role in creating a loving, sustainable
future for all our children. If you want to sink your roots
deep into what is holy, to know and access your personal power,
to be seen and honored for who you are and to re-enchant your
daily life then join wise women from across the land on this
path.