When your world comes to a FORCED stop, the present moment may not bring the peace you expect it to.

Guides, including myself, stress the magic of the present moment. Thinking about the past can cause suffering, as we have a tendency to feel regrets over decisions made that felt best knowing what we knew at the time. Focusing about the future can cause stress also. None of us know exactly what is next in life and for many, the future is up in the air. We can have dreams and goals for what we want to come next, but if we are ALWAYS fixated on the end goal we are forming expectations. Often times what we envision isn’t the exact picture of what comes to be. This is why the present is stressed so much. It is where we physically are and what we can currently work with. Made mistakes in the past? Thats ok, just don’t repeat them now. Stressed about next steps coming in the future? OK, what can you do now to prepare and ease your mind. All your control rests in your present moment. Unless it doesn’t. Let me explain further…

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This post will not have details of why our lives are currently paused. I have a blog ready to share those details and will when the time is right (very soon). So, I thank you for staying with me for these cryptic blog posts and following along the best you can. I HIGHLY recommend coming back to these posts after I make that certain blog entry live in order to fully understand context. I think you will be surprised and learn even more when you have the full story behind my recent self help and care posts and will gain a better understanding into the importance of the mental health management advice blogs I have posted here.

Things have been on pause in our existence since April and I have eluded to big, heavy shifts in life and the anxiety along with lessons learned during this season of life. When your life is forced to halt due to systems and influences beyond your control it is a limbo that can become very surreal and hard to grasp as your reality. As stated above, I do plan to share the details surrounding these unexpected circumstances, and in the meantime I am sharing epiphanies. What does it look like when a pause is forced upon you? Well, outside influences have put a hard stop on plans you were moments away from implementing, causing a delay or total change in what was originally envisioned. In this circumstance, your future was actually just about to be your present, so your mindset was definitely on the future event. When it is abruptly stopped or paused, the disappointment you feel is warranted and definitely not due to you having your attention in the wrong timeline. (I mean, you were just about to jump right?) Depending on the length of time you are forced to pause, the present moment can cause major distress and a shit ton of worry. (I get it! We will be at the 4 1/2 month mark when we will get to put our reworked plans for the future into the “drive” gear! Each day has cost time and money) So how does one manage in an emotionally healthy way when forced into a Present Moment Pause? Well, true to who I am and what I believe is my purpose, today I will share how I have managed since April in hopes my experience can help others.

One thing I will share, because it brings major context to this subject, we are no longer moving to Tennessee. We ARE still leaving the town we currently reside in and at NO TIME during this pause was it discussed to stay. We had been planning for better opportunities, new exciting surroundings, along with a new beginning and all of those points have kept our eyes on the prize of a new location. NO forced pause was going to change our desire for growth outside of what had become mundane and stagnant! We had a desire to evolve & no outside forces would hold us back! When we were initially hit with the circumstances we have been navigating, our plans for TN as our move location was immediately thrown out. There were curve balls thrown that no longer made TN a viable option because we had to change the manner in which income was earned. To be truthful, the money stashed for an expensive move across the country has kept us comfortable without 9-5 jobs and facilitated our ability to rework our plans in order to still move. We focused on the gratitude that we were taken care of financially for the time being, and could focus on moving through the emotions we were feeling without having to deal with stressful jobs and paying bills.

I often went to gratitude to help being frustrated at our situation. Gratitude, finding lessons, looking for the bigger picture and stopping to breath were practiced constantly. See, this pause in the present forced us to look at the past and reflect, as well as plan for the future to be prepared. Staying anchored in the present would actually cause anxiety because the now fucking sucked!! The only bits of positive light I could muster were how PAST decisions (saving money) was helping us in the moment without having to work, and FUTURE plans of being able to leave the town and trauma we were in behind us. If I fully surrendered to the present it was a given that a full on panic attack would come forward. I would melt into a puddle and be so exhausted afterwards that noon would become bedtime. The present moment brought a lot of intrusive thoughts, fear of what could happen at any moment, and very real possibilities of worse case scenarios knocking at the door. I realized pretty quickly that for the most part, especially at the beginning of our situation, the present moment could not be where I anchored. The future was where a sense of peace could be found.

WAIT! WHAT? Did I just break the status quo of mindfulness? YEP! I sure did! See, at any given moment when we are truly in touch with ourselves, the status quo can and will go out the window because there are always exceptions to the rule and we need to do what is best at the time. 95% of the time the present moment feels more controllable. When our power is stolen and our control is stripped, we will then automatically take ourselves to a timeline we feel we have more power in. Trauma often times makes ones brain block out events that are too hard to process at the time without us having any control over what is remembered and what isn’t. What I did was similar but I was still very aware of what was happening in the present moment. I just chose to not hold my focus there. I noticed and then shifted my thinking to the future if the present was sure to cause anxiety and panic. Still fully aware of the circumstances around me, yet unwilling to accept the irrational emotions that those circumstances would sometimes cause.

(Are you still following what I’m dropping even without the full context? I hope so! Stay with me… Again, please come back and read after you have the full picture in my future post if this is just too cryptic to follow! Haha)

When all control is taken from us in the present, are we really living in OUR present lives in that moment? This is a question I pondered. In my mind I was living in a reality that I had NO PART in creating and was literally playing a roll in someone else’s false narrative. This just wasn’t unacceptable to me and the part I was playing isn’t one anybody would audition for. Sure, I could continue to try & be grateful for the small things but at times those small things get redundant and depending on the situation, they can slowly fall away and be nonexistent. This is what happened to me as more and more information came everyday that took away the things I had been grateful for. That is when I began to dig deeper for a solution. I knew I wasn’t living MY present life but I WILL live my future and certain aspects were a 100% given! Not plans that could be changed, but a tangible item that needed preparation and care to be ready for next steps! With that came the intentional act of just noticing the bullshit in the present, and then shifting to visions of adventure, travel, & excitement to become part of a community who have taken social distancing to an awesome level. This was a BIG jump and needed A LOT of prep time, and time was all we had. The future was now my anchor!

Now that I had found a safe place to anchor myself, I assumed that I would then in turn experience the same calm that I get when the present moment isn’t a total shit show. Not the case. Anxiety has settled into my muscles and I carry it with me all the time. I went almost 2 months of trying to anchor in the present. I only felt comfortable to write in my gratitude journal because it is just a list of things I am grateful for each day. (Paranoia kept me from writing feelings and thoughts in other journals. Another cryptic message but stay with me!). With each day that passed I began to realize “I woke up” and “I have shelter” were not cutting it to grow my gratitude. I then just stopped. It had become one more thing in my self care tool box that failed me in this insane situation that NOBODY could prepare for, and felt more like a chore than a soul filling ritual. I believed then, and still believe now, that REAL journaling would have made a HUGE difference! At the time tho, I was too scared to expose my real feelings in any form of print. I honor those feelings now as I was reacting from a point of vulnerability and I grew by ways of adjusting my “norm” into a workable plan that I would have never considered before! I mean, I am a Mindfulness teacher and we ALWAYS preach that the NOW is where we should anchor. I never thought of scenarios where the present isn’t safe. (think rape, violent abuse, tragic accidents…all are not present moments you would want to anchor yourself in!)

In the process of this forced pause I have actually learned a lot about myself as a woman and healer. I’m more aware now than ever on how fragile mental health is. I can see how cocky I had gotten with my self care tool box thinking I was untouchable. I understand it is OK to show where I have weakness and reach out for help. I am also so grateful to had a good relationship with myself BEFORE trauma hit like a ton of bricks. That foundation of being solid in what I was capable of handling wasn’t fool proof, but I definitely was able to catch myself and adjust WAY SOONER than any time before. That being said, this is at the very top of the list of fucked up seasons in my life so I am showing myself a ton of grace! I have learned that no matter how grounded, centered, and shielded you are you can still be stripped to your core and there is NO SHAME in admitting that! I am blessed to be able to coach/guide others and have the ability to be able to meet them where they are due to my own personal times of struggle. I was also able to take a practice that has been HUGE in my life for 6 years and adjust it for what I needed during a time where I definitely wasn’t in a problem solving mindset. I went by instinct and intuition which were thankfully still functioning, when I trusted them.

So to recap this particular epiphany, it is so damn important to pay attention to your WHOLE health during times of extreme stress. There will be moments in your life that will make you question everything up until that point, and the work we do BEFORE those moments hit count in so many ways. Something that I seriously love about the journey that I am on is that I have the liberty to take the knowledge I have, use it for all it’s worth, and then have the freedom to adjust it to my needs when I feel the status quo needs to be thrown out. I am not bound by any rules or laws except the ones I make for myself, because nobody knows me the way I know me. I actually implore you to do the same! Whether you work with me or another coach, always do what is right for you. If you feel leery or uncomfortable with a certain practice, speak up with your feelings so you have tools that are right for YOU. If something works and then it doesn’t, speak up so things can be reworked for your benefit! If you are solid in your self care practice, if you have tools that help you stay calm and centered, and all the shit you think you know fails you…Trust your intuition and do what is healthy for you!! Nothing here is written in stone and the only rule you need to follow is to trust yourself! After all, nobody knows you, better than YOU!!

P.S. Thank you for finishing these cryptic posts until the end. Really tho, when I release all the details of our ordeal in a future post I will remind readers to go back and read previous ones. Believe me, with full context you will have a better understanding why it was important to share the blogs I have been since April.

P.P.S. A special shout of love to my husband who has actively been my stress ball while he lived a hell much worse than mine. Walking me through panic melt downs shouldn’t have been one more thing he dealt with but he ALWAYS takes care of his family and he did amazing once again.

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