Day 140 - Mattering vs. Meaning
📖Daily Reading
Ecclesiastes 5-7
🎥 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
Ecclesiastes 5:3
Too much activity gives you restless dreams, too many words make you a fool.
I read through chapters 5, 6 & 7 of Ecclesiastes this morning. It is not a ‘light’ endeavor to ponder the meaning of life. I am the daughter of a philosopher, theologian and minister. I watched this up close and it didn’t leave a good impression on me or my nervous system. I concluded in the ‘wisdom’ of my youth that it was indeed all meaningless and that it didn’t matter, so might as well just make life about the pursuit of happiness and fun!
As promised by ‘proverbial’ wisdom this led to my life feeling chaotic and out of control. So I decided to push the pause button and do some re-evaluating of my life choices and habits. As I am earnestly seeking true wisdom I see the peril of being on either extreme. We are witnessing this first hand with Solomon, he went to the extreme of trying to be the wisest and to seek to understand what it all means and that left him frustrated. So then we see him swing to the other extreme to conclude that if he can’t understand it all, then it must be meaningless and he indulged in all the ‘earthly’ pleasures he could handle. This also left him frustrated.
In my journey a lot of the work I did early on was to down regulate and re-regulate my nervous system. So many of us suffer from unidentified or misidentified sources of anxiety, depression, mood disorders that lead to maladaptive coping strategies. The mind is so much more than the brain. We are a whole system - the central nervous system, the gut and the brain work together. There is a lot of wisdom and intelligence that is left unexplored by many of us. If we can let go of our ‘intellectual’ brains, logical thoughts and ‘reason’ and tap into our entire mind which includes our consciousness, nervous system and gut - then we can start to understand and grasp that life matters even if we don’t understand what it all means. We don’t have to understand the meaning to know that it matters. Our nervous systems and gut are often dismissed especially in our western culture. Western medicine has chopped the body into pieces and disrupted our understanding of our selves as an entirety and wholistically.
Many us are living in bodies that have nervous systems and gut systems that are staying in overdrive and contributing a lot of anxiety, depression, maladaptive coping strategies, and ‘disorders’. Many of us are constantly ‘looking’ out there for a solution to what is happening on the inside that we don’t even fully understand, but we are driven and we know that it matters. This verse above got me thinking about the nervous system, when we get tired but wired and we either can’t sleep or we have restless sleep and we can talk a lot out of this same nervous energy and then we are ruminating over what we said, didn’t say, could have said, should have said, blah blah blah…
We are looking for outside solutions and to ‘check out’, get a break from our thoughts and feelings that we don’t understand and that we wish would just leave us alone. I am a self professed ‘gobbler’. A gobbler of wine, food, books, research, learning, podcasts, tv, movies - my nervous system was looking for an escape and a solution for all of this nervous energy. As I have learned to slow down and get quiet with practices like meditation, prayer, body scans, breath work, I am realizing that in order to ‘check out’ I first have to ‘check in’. When I check in I am reminded that I matter, I don’t have to understand it all or for it to all make sense and understand the meaning for it or me to matter. I can just rest and know - just like Psalm 49:10 reassures us just “be still and know”. It doesn’t say, think ponder, try to understand, it says - be still (calm mind; your nervous system, gut and brain) and then you will know…
These are hard concepts to put into words, hopefully I have been able to capture it in a way that makes sense. If not, that is ok too, maybe get quiet and ask God to help you understand and see how much you matter and how much the choices you make and how you live your life matter, beyond what you can even imagine. This isn’t something that can be understood fully intellectually, you have to let go to grab on to it…
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
How is your nervous system doing? Are you a 'gobbler' like me? If not what is your mode of checking out?
📖Tomorrows Reading
Ecclesiastes 8
Coaching Opportunity
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