Finding Your Ground

“Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.”

― Pema Chödrön

Today’s offering is a guided meditation with my colleague and seasoned meditation instructor, Marty Janowitz, on how to work with groundless challenging times of great anxiety towards a path of compassionate abiding, which allows us to connect with who we are on a deep level. This, he tells us, “turns out to be the best ground both for accommodating difficulty and discovering the possibilities, even the joy within it.”

We’ve all been there: the feeling of groundlessness, the drawing feeling of overwhelm that makes you feel untethered and floating, or tight and gasping for air. Life comes at us full force on a good day, giving us plenty to work with. The happenings on the world stage as of late are a compounding layer to what our tired nervous systems may already be trying to find regulation with. 

Whether it’s a successful former founder taking it all on her shoulders and moving fastly headlong into a new venture while managing a cross-continent move, or a young non-profit executive juggling the data, the team, and the news, it’s easy for the ground beneath you to feel like it’s missing. Yet, by coming back home to ourselves, we can always find it again. It’s then we feel more steady. The key is to unhook from the ride our anxiety takes us on.