Okay so this past week has been somewhat stressing. Not for any reason in particular but just that a lot of things have come at me and have disrupted my peace so to speak. When this happens I almost feel as though I am shutting down that my body been injected with poison and its slowly spreading through my body and taking over. I get quiet and huddle up to camp out and listen to the negative thoughts that have accumulated and just sit back while they tear me down. Now in previous blog posts I have talked about my anxiety and how it has been apart of my life, and how I have learned to manage it. This doesn’t mean that I have mastered the feeling or that I have somehow become unaffected by it. Not at all. Sometimes it does rear its ugly head and gets comfortable in my mind and I some how let it take over. I forget to question these horrible thoughts and immediately believe them. I stew about things that are not in my control; such as other people’s thoughts, other people’s actions, other people’s choices.

                I can get so focused on other people, and I lose touch of focusing on me. It’s like my mind takes a break for just thirty seconds of worrying about myself and one thought floats into what other people must think of me and then the downward spiralling vortex begins. Last week one thought floated in, then the next and then all the sudden there was a party of thought bubbles that really had no business crashing my party and they have consumed all my energy. I sat there wondering, where the hell did my self confidence go? Where was my self love? Did I really care so much about something that wasn’t even true? My questioning nature was long gone, it was like I lost myself and my body had been taken over by a nasty damaging parasite. I was searching for a reset button, a way to make this mindset leave and give me back the old self I had just days ago. How could this have happened? How had I relapsed into this self doubt and harmful shock wave after years of managing stress and negative energy? These are the questions that moved rapidly through my mind as I desperately grasping and clawing for my old self. The drowning sensation had come back, and it stayed with me for those few days.

                My mind had run away from me. This feeling felt like it was here to stay but I have become so stubborn I was keen on sending it on its way. How do you turn yourself around when shit like this happens? Well it took me three days, but I figured it out. I worked on shifting my mindset. My focus was on all this negative bullshit that clearly was not serving me. Each day I wrote down what I was upset about, I wrote down why it upset me, and I listed things and why they affected me. I also put down what it would look like if I didn’t react to it or give it energy. I worked through how can I change this? Do I want to change this? What was my life like before this event or thought? And when I started to piece it all together, I slowly started coming out of the negative fog. In these situations, I must dig deep get to the root, and start digging it up to be rid of it, working through the feelings. I must question the negative thoughts, interrogate them, pick them apart. Otherwise they are there to stay. After mapping it all out, the next thing I had to do was change my state of being. Slumping on the couch and wallowing in my woes was most definitely not going to change anything. I had to get up, go for a walk, go ice fishing, do yoga, go grocery shopping something that didn’t have me sitting and just stewing. Get the f*** up! Isolating myself was the worst thing I could have done, but I sunk into it. I surrender to the negativity so easily, but I realized what I did and made a fix.

                Shift the mindset, move the body, ok took some time but I got there. Now what? Well that’s the scary part, quieting the mind. If any of you have had a similar experience after going through the work and then coming back to quiet time can be terrifying. What if it’s a trap? I promise it’s not. After doing the work to question the negativity, after moving passed it and into a more positive mindset and then physically moving your body from the caged harmful energy then its time to be at peace again. I sat on my bed and meditated, a guided one to try and keep the mind from wandering. I needed to quiet all the thoughts. It is hard to come back to a place to have confidence in myself and trust that I can not slip into that darkness. I sat on the bed listening to the meditation and follow along to the voice guiding me. Putting in some “exercising” brain therapy helps me come to a place of peace. This may seem strange, but this is my reset. I need the moving through the feelings, actually moving and moving my mind through a “thoughtless” place.

                There will be more experiences and thoughts thrown at me that shake my equilibrium but it is important that I don’t stay there. That I find ways the help me get back to the place where I am not drowning, the place where I can control the energies thrown at me. Focus on the things your can control.

Xo Kristy