Last weekend, I just felt…blah.

As a professional representative of “living your best life,” I get stuck thinking I should be able to engineer mine well enough to avoid dull moments. Like I’m just not working hard enough at it.

Nice try, but no. Empty space can be like a slip’n’slide for our fears and insecurities. We have one unsettling thought and then here comes a parade of eager, wet children tumbling down after it. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” “You can’t call yourself a healer!” And, “Are you even helping anyone?”

It seems absurd looking back. But from inside, it feels like an itchy sweater that’s sewn into my skin. No amount of scratching brings relief. 

These “moments” can last any amount of time. Minutes, hours, days, even years. 

I did spend years being hopelessly depressed. Maybe that’s why they can feel so intense. Or maybe that’s just how emotions work; they’re designed to seem like multidimensional portals we’re doomed to swirl around in forever. 

Anyway, I started writing a poem in the midst of this blah day. And on this blah day, the poem seemed pretty blah, too. Maybe it had one or two good lines, but it needed too much work. Actually, all of my poetry is bad. Why do I bother writing anyway? (WHERE ARE ALL THESE WET CHILDREN’S PARENTS?!)

The next day seemed to be going the way of the blah day before it. Then, suddenly, (well, after an hour of meditating, because I remembered for the 957th time to be patient with myself) the poem didn’t seem so bad and actually, the lines that needed work were coming together. And the things I liked about it were actually worth saying. The storm was passing. I watched myself weather it. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was pretty cool. So here’s the poem. It’s called, “The Space Between the Sparkle.”

Today 

never had to be the best day.

Not all days can be, after all.

Some are just the glue,

a mix of simple ingredients 

holding us together.

A day to lay the bricks.

A day to tend the fields.

A day to water.

A day to rest.

The minutes crawl.

The hours drift.

There are no breakthroughs,

no explosions

and no photographs taken.

The kind of day we crave when we’re too busy.

The kind of day we hate when we feel alone.

We seem to be moving backward

toward things we left behind.

We can’t see the bigger plan 

so we start to question everything.

Don’t be fooled by your perception.

The unremarkable is just as holy

as the fireworks display.

It’s the foundation,

the boring, solid backdrop

for surprise to be seen again.

The ocean reflects every inch of sky,

the blue, the clouds, the Sun.

Don’t lose hope in the space between the sparkle.

Every drop makes up the one.

I had a dream the other night where some lines of a poem came through. One of the characters said them to me right before I woke up. This happens sometimes and it’s very exciting. It feels like someone or something is speaking to you through your own subconscious. 

I try to be available to receive inspiration as often as I can. I use meditation, visualization, writing and talking to people to keep myself clear and open. I believe we can all use these tools to plug into the Universe.

But sometimes, life piles up and my pipe gets clogged. I sit down to write and everything feels lame and overthought. Or I lay down to meditate and my brain keeps pulling me out.

I’m currently on the East coast where I grew up, visiting people and places from my past. This triggers ALLL these old versions of myself, and A LOT of interference. I’m trying to keep my channel clear and stay present, but I’m experiencing an avalanche of old thoughts and feelings threatening to bury me. It’s been really frustrating, and sad. 

Before this trip, I felt so strong. I had tasted the next version of myself coming down the pipeline. She felt SO GOOD. Clear, grounded, and easily in flow. Now, it feels like I’m falling back into old patterns and losing touch with the person I’m becoming.

In retrospect, these moments of regression always precede a big leap forward. I know it. I’ve seen it a million times, in myself and others. It’s almost as if they were the necessary pulling back of the slingshot before we launch forward. Still, it is hard to weather these feelings as they are happening. I keep meditating, I keep visualizing, I keep writing and talking, and it’s still hard.

Sometimes, that’s all you can do. To just allow it to be hard and stop trying to force yourself to feel different.

And so I tell myself, as if I’m that new version of myself from the future, “It’s okay. I love you. I’m coming.”

Two days into renting a camper van, it’s pretty clear van life isn’t for me. I spent the weekend confidently telling everyone at my sister’s 50th birthday party that my partner and I were planning to build one so I can live between LA and Mexico. 

Probably not.

Major respect to people that make van life work. Personally, I can’t stop hitting my head on the ceiling, finding Internet to do our jobs is its own job and although we can cook because it has a fridge, a stove top, a microwave, a sink and a pantry, they just take up space because all we want to do is escape to the sweet, sweet sanctuary of a restaurant. 

I thought having everything in one small, well-designed space would make life easier. But in trying to do everything, it’s doing nothing.

On the heels of the Super Bowl of family time, two weeks into traveling and cohabitating, and now squeezed into a van while on my period, I watched myself contract into someone unrecognizable. Except, I recognize her as who I used to be. Someone living for others at my own expense, while trying to be invisible.

It didn’t work.

Hearing old thoughts bouncing around my brain again is scary. I forget that it’s only temporary, that we can weather these emotions, and that we know exactly why we’re here. This whole trip is about revisiting the past to clear the wounds those thoughts were born from. 

But it’s hard to keep the flame alive in these suffocating environments.

In a much needed session with my coach, I got a message:

Wide. Open. Magic.

She needs breathing room and connection. To herself, to others and to the bigger universe. To remember herself as a carrier of joy, spontaneity, inspiration. To feel her part of nature, emotions flowing, undammed and free.

Thank God I can lie down, diagonally across the mattress, stretch and feel the sun on my face through the tiny window above my head, and remember what I am. 

I started writing about some anxiety I was feeling - I call it “Ambient Anxiety.” Sometimes, it feels like it’s about something specific on the horizon, in my case, a call I have in an hour or so, then I have to get to the airport for a flight later. But there’s also an accumulation of smaller things, lingering from the past. I lost a crystal someone gave me last night. I tried to go to a different cafe for breakfast, but found out they don’t serve food on Mondays, blah blah blah. It doesn’t amount to much, but it’s hanging out there. (Update, as I’m editing this a couple days later, none of these things still carry an emotional charge.)

And yet, that little amount of “aliveness” never really goes away. I can usually find it when I look for it. And if I look for reasons, they’re there, too. Sometimes identifying reasons brings it on stronger. Thinking about that call sends a teeny spurt of “oh god!” energy through my stomach and chest.

I can try to think my way out of the feelings. I can try to convince myself there’s no real reason to be anxious. “It’s going to go how it’s going to go. I’m prepared. I’ve done these before. I trust myself to be in the moment and know what to say.” And yet, the feeling sits there in spite of my reasoning.

I can also remind myself that there’s an energy that comes with just caring about something. I want this call to go well. I am invested in what I’m doing. I care about the person on the other end. I can more easily accept this feeling as a natural byproduct of my attachment to what I’m doing. And I can have compassion for the version of myself that has these attachments, even though there may be a more advanced, more Buddhist version of myself that wouldn’t. But I’m just not there yet.

Here’s what else I know:

1) The Ambient Anxiety does seem to come and go. It’s unclear to me if it’s always there, waiting to surface when something triggers it, or if it’s triggered anew each time by an event.

2) I can close my eyes, focus on it and breathe. This helps me feel more “in control,” so to speak. It feels better in my body when I slow down, let myself sense it and accept it.

3) I am the one deciding that it is a “bad” thing (because it’s uncomfortable) and deciding what it means - that it’s about the call or the airport. That usually feels true to me in the moment, but looking back, those individual events no longer trigger it.

4) It helps to set aside whatever stories and associations I have, and be with the sensation itself.

“Okay, I’m noticing a tightness in my chest. It feels like my breathing is constricted. There is a warm pulsing around my heart. There is a concentrated tension in my forehead. When I bring my focus to it, the pulsing in my chest seems to intensify. My head feels heavy. Numerous thoughts compete for my attention. My stomach feels full, there is a churning energy that rises and sinks. My shoulders feel heavy. There is a wide, achy expanse across the middle of my back.”

5) When I take the time to patiently and non-judgmentally inventory the sensations I’m experiencing, one by one, as they come to my attention, they seem more manageable. I can be aware of them without fearing their impact.

6) There are things I can do to shift how I’m feeling (like writing about it, talking to someone about it, or channeling it into a physical activity).

Here’s what helps me most with Ambient Anxiety: naming it, observing the sensations it produces, and reminding myself it’s a sign that I care and am alive, even when I can identify other stories and explanations.

It can be helpful to list the stories, but it’s more helpful to set them aside and focus on the feeling itself. The stories always change. One day, I link my Ambient Anxiety to a phone call, the next, it’s needing to do the dishes. In a year, you’ll have 365 different stories, most of which will be behind you and won’t trigger the feeling anymore.

Working with your relationship to the feeling is where the magic is. I’m personally not expecting to wake up tomorrow without any attachment to life or feelings or events or people, so it’s unrealistic to think I won’t experience it.  Any time I can be that honest with myself and that connected to reality as it is, I feel more grounded, more self-trusting and just, better. I hope anyone reading this also feels better about their Ambient Anxiety. Bye for now…