to pause and ponder
on practices that cultivate change
Hey friends,
I’m back with my version of a newsletter which I’m lovingly calling to pause and ponder. Like last month, what’s spoken to me has a theme: the differences we can create in our lives and the lives of those around us.
But as I read these essays, it made me reflect on how these practices or insights might not be accessible to everyone right away. And that’s OK. We all have different capacities to experience them, skills we might need to develop or sensations we might need learn to decode in our bodies first.
As always, take what resonates, tweak it for where you need and leave the rest.
Let’s start with a lovely little practice by Alex Elle, a writer I truly enjoy.
In one of her latest Substack essays, Alex describes how she looks for moments of joy. It reminds her that joy is always around, even on some of her most challenging days, waiting to be discovered.
She just had to be aware enough to notice.
I’ve tried similar practices before, but they didn’t always go as beautifully as she described. Why? Because I couldn’t become present enough to pause, let alone begin to notice things around me! Everything felt too much! Too much sensation in a body means no capacity for it and a lack of capacity means the body doesn’t feel safe.
Yes, even joy can feel unsafe in the body.
Y’all, I was in the depths of burnout and despair. Even if I could pause, I’d have to notice what I was feeling and understand it. Then after all that, I’d have to find something to experience joy.
Smdh
No. That wasn’t happening.
My flavour of neurodivergence made it so I wasn’t sure what joy felt like. At first, it was all unnatural to me and none of it felt good in my body. Writing the joy down felt inauthentic and reading it back later felt worse. Joy wasn’t working for me because feeling wasn’t working for me. But what I went through was a natural reaction to my body’s capacity at the time. It might even be a natural reaction for some of you too.
If you’ve been in a survival state for most of your life, experiencing what we’ve been taught to see as a “positive emotion” like joy, can feel too much. Your body just doesn’t have a lot of capacity for it, yet. Like anything we do in direct opposition to the conditioning of capitalism and the dominant culture, it’s going to feel unsafe in our bodies at first. But I want to assure you that like Alex shows us, finding and experiencing joy is a practice we can cultivate too.
We just might have different starting places for our journey.
Recently, I had a conversation with someone I work with in my counselling practice over “the despair-ness” that arose for them when thinking about the current state of the US. Their dreams of wanting to pursue a creative field felt pointless in the wake of all the harm, destruction and chaos around them. How could their “learning to draw better” change anything?!
And in comes, yet another of Elif Shafak’s short essays. In it, she describes waking up with an unwillingness to write fiction, especially since “the world has gone off its axis”. What good would writing stories or poetry do? Why waste all that time putting together the perfect phrases or finding the right words when it’s all going to hell? She was ready to toss her pen in the bin and stay in bed, because how could writing fiction help anything?
Then she turns to her bookshelves, learns a few lessons and stops feeling sorry for herself.
As the person I was counselling drowned in their hope for things to be different, fearing they couldn’t change their current reality, they lost sight of their connection to themselves. This blocked them from seeing the skills and knowledge they had that supported the development of their talents (mainly, their stubbornness and persistence), and how these could sustain them as they developed their talents to use in supporting their community. When “the despair-ness” tried to tell them that their “creative work could never make a difference”, they’d draw on their skills and knowledge that proved otherwise.
It’s amazing the strengths we find when we face our discomfort instead of running from it.
I have no opinion on Michael Moore, but the title of this Substack essay caught my attention, so I opened it. I’m glad I did.
The essay basically reminds his readers that, “We (white) Americans are not good people. We’ve done horrible shit for centuries. Why are we so surprised that we could vote for him, even after knowing he’s a convicted felon and him telling us all the horrible shit he was going to do once elected?”
I mean, he’s not wrong.
But, I’ve added this short piece because he lists some simple, basic ideas to support ourselves, each other and the causes we care about. This will be particularly helpful in what will no doubt be the shitshow of the next 4 years. We could sit around feeling sorry for ourselves, complaining while doing nothing, or we could take a small next-best step forward and then another one. And then another.
I wonder what would be possible if we all accepted our present moment. And rather than staying frozen in fear, guilt and shame, hoping things were different, we just endeavoured to align our next steps in compassion, care and love, instead.
I bet we’d see endless possibilities for what we could achieve.
Writing this newsletter took me a little longer than I had planned. It brought up a lot of insights and themes I want to write about in future. But the initial one that came up for me was pausing. And pausing long enough to stay present (don’t worry, I wrote a brilliant essay on this that’ll send out next week).
Our power to make a difference is only when we stay in the present moment. However, mindfulness is a challenging practice to develop, especially for brains of the neurodivergence variety. It’s not impossible to do, but all too often, we learn about these practices and try them out, only they don’t go as we expect them to. Then we beat ourselves up about why we can’t do them, can’t sustain them or need to change things in the hope they work for us.
So as you ponder on these essays, before comparing someone else’s outside to your insides, consider the kind of inner work and resources that might have supported the writers in thinking and doing differently. We all need to start somewhere and that somewhere can be exactly where we’re at.
With love and gratitude,
SC xo
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“I’ve tried similar practices before, but they didn’t always go as beautifully as she described. Why? Because I couldn’t become present enough to pause, let alone begin to notice things around me! Everything felt too much! Too much sensation in a body means no capacity for it and a lack of capacity means the body doesn’t feel safe.
Yes, even joy can feel unsafe in the body.”
Well thank you for the immediate recourse to wanting to cry with relief at the validation and permission and “both and” of this - 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
I feel like this piece & your intro to the poetic as fuck “to pause & ponder” newsletter is such a spot on reflection of how you help the people you work with (LUCKY MEEEEE SERIOUSLY AHHHH!!!!!) -
Aka -
“What happens when even the most nuanced & helpful stuff doesn’t work for us” -
The answer always being some version of hating and self blaming & feeling broken wrong gross & urgh shudder .
Thank you for writing for existing - I love you xxxxxx
For me, your post is a reminder that I must make my connection *to myself* a priority, because it’s the foundation of my ability to function in the world. I have a very entrenched habit of paying little attention to what I’m feeling in my body, and instead I just try to push through and do the things I feel I should be doing. As you said, it often doesn’t work, as we are not in a place mentally and/or emotionally to make changes (big or small) in our lives. And chastising ourselves does little to rectify this.
The second thing your post brought up is our tendency to feel that things *outside of us* have to be fixed before we can pursue our own personal goals. When you take some time to examine that way of thinking, you realize how much of your own power you’re giving away to outside forces. This again reiterates the importance of a solid connection to ourselves.
Finally, probably many of us who have sensitive nervous systems are having a hard time with what’s happening in our government right now. Please tread lightly and compassionately when you suggest we take small steps in the right direction and “accept(ed) our present moment . . . rather than staying frozen in fear, guilt and shame.” I’m sure you must realize we are all experiencing collective trauma , and the freeze response is part of that. “Feeling sorry for ourselves” is not wrong but is part of what we need to do to feel our feelings about all of the chaos and hurt that is occurring; this shouldn’t be bypassed, but we also shouldn’t choose to camp out there indefinitely either.
I thank you for your post. You have given me a lot to think about.