Day 105- How To Calm Yourself Down
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📖Daily Reading
Psalms 131-134
🎥 Video
Join me on my morning walk as we rise and shine together by walking through the Bible daily and learn a practical applicable coaching nugget from the ultimate life coach - our creator (whatever that means to you). No judgement zone here, all are welcome, we are all on a spiritual journey because we are after all spiritual beings having a human experience.
📝 Reflection
Psalm 131
Lord, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty. I don’t concern myself with matters too great or too awesome for me to grasp.
Instead, I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who not longer cries for its mother’s milk. yes like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, put your hope in the Lord-now and always.
As I am writing this it is Good Friday April 15, 2022. Why do we call it good? Because we know how it ends and that the pain, suffering and seeming hopelessness and defeat was necessary for the greater to come, the Holy Spirit. We don’t like pain and change and we have a desire to understand it all in the moment. But that is just not how it works. Experience will teach us and we can draw on it to help ourselves calm down. The illustration in these verses of a weaned child is so vivid and relatable. They had to have the TLC of the mother to reassure and walk them through the feeding, weaning and self soothing process. It probably took a lot of fear and confusion in the beginning while the went through the process of being hungry and not being fed immediately and learning for themselves that they would be safe.
It doesn’t happen immediately it is something that has to be learned through experience that at the time seems scary, uncertain, and painful, there are no short cuts. Well with maybe one exception as we are reminded of in this psalm, we can take a deep breath and remind ourselves that we are not in control, somethings are beyond our understanding and out of our control. This is not always a fun place to be, but it can be a calm place to be. Anxiety is wisdom wearing different clothes. It is our survival brain try to convince us that we must ‘do something’, but our executive brain knows it is out of our control. But being worried, overwhelmed and anxious can give us the illusion of ‘doing’ something about it.
As also pointed out in the psalm when we allow our lower self to run the show, this is our ego and pride also in the drivers seat trying to convince us that we do have in fact have some control and it is all up to us. This is exhausting, am I right?! Many of us are natural leaders and can live from a place of ‘over’ functioning, in our need to control and fix others and situations. If you are a people pleaser like me, you might convince yourself that you are just trying to ‘help’. Our help or advice especially unsolicited is just as controlling as those that are more overt with their ways of controlling, jic you didn’t know that already. If this is the first time you are hearing this, you might not like me very much right now. But don’t shoot the messenger!
So when you are feeling anxious and overwhelmed, take a deep breath, it might even help to ‘shake’ it off and ask yourself is what you are worked about something really in your control or is it ‘too great or too awesome for you to grasp’? Can you remind yourself like David did and help yourself calm down by tapping into your wisdom that is trying to tell you that, but you just aren’t listening. Don’t mistake calmness for inaction or not caring. Calmness allows you to stay focused on what you CAN do and what is yours to do. This is a place of effectiveness and meaningful contribution.
The more science is learning about the brain, the more we are understanding that we also need to be self compassionate. So I want to remind you that if you are caught up in over functioning, don’t condemn or criticize yourself that is not helpful either. Our brains are really trying to protect us with these ways of being. The survival brain likes certainty this is where it knows how to take care of us, uncertainty causes fear which is what is the underlying broader emotion of anxiety and overwhelm. Fear drives us to ‘do’ even when we don’t know what to do. So it will often create ‘drama’ in one area of life, this creates a great distraction that we can ‘do’ something about. We may have a behavior that is comforting and makes us feel productive and distracted, and it may also create some side effects and consequences that keeps us more distracted and busy so that we can get our focus off of what really needs our attention, but where there is some uncertainty. These are often referred to shadow addictions or secondary benefits of an addiction. This is just a very simple explanation of something more complicated.
It is nothing new to God and I love how he can use a simple explanation like a season of childhood and growth like weaning to demonstrate how our brains work. What are you caught up in right now? Are you feeling anxious or overwhelmed? Maybe frustrated or angry? Can you see where pride and arrogance might be contributing to your own experience? Can you see how the drama swirling around these emotions might be taking you away from something that really would be ‘good’ for you to be doing and that you can do, but might have some uncertainty attached to it by going in that direction? Can you breathe, calm yourself down and do something that is for YOU to do?
This is how the enemy wins, he gets us worked up by believing lies and getting all worked up and focused on what isn’t ours, and then we make a mess of things by trying to control, fix and manipulate all disguised as ‘but they/it need(s) my input, help and guidance. Often in this mode we actually rob people of doing their own work as painful as it maybe. We all need to go through the pain, learning and subsequent growth of the weaning process.
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
What are you caught up in right now? Are you feeling anxious or overwhelmed? Maybe frustrated or angry? Can you see where pride and arrogance might be contributing to your own experience? Can you see how the drama swirling around these emotions might be taking you away from something that really would be ‘good’ for you to be doing and that you can do, but might have some uncertainty attached to it by going in that direction? Can you breathe, calm yourself down and do something that is for YOU to do?
📖Tomorrows Reading
Psalms 135-136
Coaching Opportunity
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