More questions, fewer answers.
What would happen if you could surrender to uncertainty?
Our brains are designed to seek the familiar, make predictions, keep us safe.
Novelty sparks curiosity and the unknown.
It’s possible to navigate these two territories — one familiar and one uncertain.
It’s possible when your awareness recognizes that uncertainty is present, and your brain kicks into ‘figure it out mode’ in desperation to discover the pattern and keep you safe.
You pause and you notice your brain doing that thing again. Trying to figure out what can not yet be known. What can only be known through continuing to be grounded in the present, moment to moment, which inevitably becomes the future.
Out there is only created from here.
What happens when you catch yourself worrying?
Worrying is a low-level nervous system flight response.
This may sound harsh, although in no way is it an attack on character, rather a characteristic of a particular nervous system default pattern.
When faced with the reality of impending change, do you tend to worry and wonder what will happen then, how you will react, how the change will impact you and those who matter to you? Do you get lost in the mind and in your imagination, seeking to get the answers to all of your questions so that you can feel safe? In control?
This is a nervous system in flight.
This is a nervous system circumventing feeling the feelings in the body around uncertainty.
Out there is only created from here.
And now, take a deep breath and gaze at these pictures of a changing sky, taken within minutes of each other. Notice the reality of change in nature.
The flight response is within the sympathetic nervous system and under threat (like due to uncertainty), energy is being mobilized to respond. Your energy is streaming towards avoidance of emotions.
Let’s pause and honor the energy at work within you happening below your awareness.
To focus on bringing that awareness up into your field of consciousness reconnects you to your power.
Your power is always within you, but that doesn’t mean you feel it, or that you feel empowered.
Knowledge is power. Awareness is power. Understanding your nervous system design that exists to serve your survival is empowering.
In her book Call of the Wild: How we heal trauma, Awaken our own power and use it for good, Kimberly Ann Johnson beautifully maps out the nervous system highlighting Polyvagal Theory.
There’s actually three parts to the human nervous system: social, sympathetic and parasympathetic. We are intrinsically connected to each other and this is at the nervous system level.
When a baby is born they do not have a developed nervous system and rely on the regulation and rhythm of their primary caregivers.
As humans, we go to the social system first when under threat.
Kimberly writes,
“The social nervous system sometimes compels us to pull threats closer, and we feel ‘safer’ with proximity to a known threat than with one that is lurking somewhere out in the world”.
Sometimes human behavior is perplexing. From the lens of the nervous system, perspective is gained on why it is sometimes so hard to match our ‘desired responses with your present moment capabilities’.
Each of us has had a lifetime of relating with other nervous systems. Our biographies are held within our tissues and nervous systems. We place so much value on what we can explicitly remember and recall. When it comes to why we behave the way we do, why we feel the way we feel, why we have our particular default patterns and tendencies, all roads lead to the nervous system.
When a baby is born they do not have a developed nervous system and rely on the regulation and rhythm of their primary caregivers.
So, compassion.
Understanding and education.
Curiosity towards our experiences instead of stories and certainties.
I keep having a recurring thought recently about how much I don’t know.
I’m almost in awe about how much I don’t know, how many questions I have. I do the math on how much ‘time’ I have left to seek all those answers and learn all there is to learn in this lifetime.
I can’t! It’s a no sum game. It’s impossible!
I have to love learning as much as I do, which is A LOT, and rest and settle into knowing I will not gather and know as much as there is to learn.
There is always more to learn. There is always the continual process of learning.
Quick way to contact awe, by the way.
So the next time you approach a new opportunity for uncertainty, I dare you to pause and notice your mental process around being left with the reality of not knowing.
You’re beginning a new job, you’re ending a relationship, your child is developing into new territory, you or a loved one’s health is in crisis.
These are big unknowns. To our brains, the unknown is the unknown..
Your nervous system will speak to the degree of alarm your body is perceiving.
With the flight response, from low to high degree of alarm is follows:
worry
anxiety
fear
terror
panic
Can you notice the worry?
Can you say to yourself, I am feeling worried?
Can you make space for the worry?
Can you take your worry on a walk asking your body to shift the worry and help you find clarity?
Can you disrupt the tendency to make a story about why you’re worried and instead stay in your body and in relationship to the worry?
If worrying is avoiding, then the baby step to feeling whatever is below the surface of your awareness is to stay with it.
Your nervous system will speak to the degree of alarm your body is perceiving.
Breathe with it, acknowledging it’s there.
Making contact with your body.
Moving your body to help with the already mobilized energy moving in one direction that may need some redirection from you.
This is being in your body. This is being with your humanity.
“The compass is ourselves” says B.K.S. Iyengar.
It takes courage and discernment and practice.
I practice with you and I commend you.
Keep going, always.
xx,
Britta