How to Listen and Find Aliveness in Containment
For many, staying at home during this time can be disorienting. It can be more difficult to find a sense of purpose without feedback from coworkers and customers. Knowing how and where to direct your energy can be hard too. Without a consistent schedule, every moment means making a choice. Given that we are greatly supported and regulated by routine and community, finding your own rhythm can be challenging. You still have responsibilities, but how you go about them is completely by your design. Because the systems you grew up in and work in were not designed with each individual's wholeness in mind, you may not know how to make choices to create a balanced life or how good you could feel if you had adequate rest and your needs were tended to consistently. Confinement is an incredible opportunity to learn to listen deeply to what’s truly supportive and alive for you moment to moment and find your own rhythm. Once you find your own authentic rhythm, you might find yourself making some significant changes.
When you’ve grown up and been conditioned to listen more to external ideas about what you should do than what is wholesome, listening deeply doesn’t necessarily come easily. The voice of your needs and what's truly alive for you and life-serving can easily be drowned out by craving, thoughts of what you should do, habits, and distractions. If you choose to embrace this opportunity to listen deeply to your aliveness, a couple of things will be helpful to attend to and practice .
It begins with care for your body. When you work more hours than is sustainable and opt in for more activities than you have energy for, your body gets worn down and as it does, cravings are triggered, and as you follow cravings, you become more dysregulated, which leads to more poor choices. Whether the object of your craving is food, alcohol, media, or zoning out on screens doesn’t matter. Decisions made from craving are the same as decisions made from external standards and shoulds. Both are out of tune with what would support your well-being.
Especially in the beginning days of confinement, you might have been surprised to notice how tired you were. You might have noticed feelings going unfelt and needs that were ignored in your daily life before lockdown. Now you have the opportunity to attend to yourself. Giving your body the sleep, exercise, and food it really needs, is foundational. It calms craving and opens your ability to attune to your needs. Being able to make a distinction between what is truly nourishing and and what is craving is an essential part of learning to listen deeply to aliveness. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help discern:
Is there a pulling or pushing sensation? If yes, this is craving.
What is the need behind a given impulse? Is the impulse directing you to the best strategy to meet that need?
How else could I meet a need for comfort?
Do I need more coffee or just a nap?
If I am drawn toward a distraction, what need am I ignoring?
Releasing your mind from external standards and shoulds can be a very difficult practice in normal everyday life. In containment, with very few cues from others and the environment you have a rare opportunity with less external distraction, you can bring attention to internal ‘shoulds’ and standards and find release from them. Simply watching for the internal word ‘should’ is an easy way to catch this habit of mind. Attuning to a sense of listlessness, shut down, or flatness of emotion is another way to know that you are making decisions from shoulds or external standards. Each time you notice one of these symptoms pause and turn towards listening deeply.
Listening deeply and finding aliveness means being able to come to stillness several times a day. Set your intention to sit still and quiet your mind for a minute or more several times a day. You can quiet your mind by following your breath, listening to ambient sounds, feeling your feet, looking out into nature or into the distance, etc. Each time you do this, you interrupt habitual tension that pushes or pulls you toward the next thing. Tension and anxiety ask the question, “What should I do next?”
When you become still and listen you simply ask, “What is next?” Then, wait for the answer. If the answer isn’t accompanied by tension then it comes from aliveness. An answer coming from aliveness has just that, a sense of aliveness or energy moving through your body and your heart. Your body, heart, and mind are relieved you are listening and so they relax and let the energy flow. This is the voice of your needs.
Tension may follow soon after you make a choice from aliveness as parts of you wonder if it is okay to follow the aliveness of your needs. Critical inner voices may tell you that you are being selfish or indulgent. Fearful inner voices may imagine you will just spend the whole day following your needs around and never tend to your responsibilities. While it’s true that the rhythm you find when you follow the aliveness of your needs does not match external systems designed by fear and greed, it will lead to balance. You may be so accustomed to relating to work and responsibilities as “have to’s” and “should’s” that it might be hard to imagine that when you live from your authentic rhythm, you will naturally attend to responsibilities from a place of aliveness and choice. It isn’t distance that makes the heart grow fonder, it’s balance. When you listen to and attend to them, needs naturally arise and drop away in a balanced rhythm.
In confinement, you have lost access to many trusted strategies that met your needs and perhaps many that didn’t. You now have the opportunity to listen deeply and engage creatively to meet your needs in new ways in collaboration with your heart.
How would the world change if more and more of us fully accepted the responsibility for self-care that translated into physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual thriving? How much more able would we be to dismantle systems of oppression and privilege? How much more able would we be to greet the day with hope, gratitude, wisdom, and love?
Practice
Take a moment now and find stillness in body, heart, and mind. Listen deeply and ask, “ What's alive for you right now?”