👁️‍🗨️ Calming Overwhelm

Hello YOU!

Humans are wired for story. It’s our mythology that has helped us make sense of the world for as long as we have walked the planet.

Right now, however, we are in-between stories and we don’t currently have a coherent mythology to guide us.

When we largely abandoned mythology for reason and ‘enlightenment’ a few hundred years ago, we not only lost a crucial thread, we let go of a both/and mindset and began our long march down an either/or path. A path that would only ever end here.

When there is no connecting narrative in our lives, everything feels overwhelming. It feels like there’s no rhyme or reason to why people act as they do or why the world is in the state it’s in. Without a framework of mythology we also don’t have a tether to our own internal processes. It all just feels like a mess.

When things feel like a mess we shut down. The technical term for it is functional freeze. The most basic, life sustaining processes are kept online, but at the minimally allowable level. So we are able to get up, go to work and LOOK like we’re performing, but on the inside we’re hollow, stuck and afraid.

It’s like some sort of weird suspended animation where we can pay our bills but are incapable of truly feeling joy at seeing our kid take their first steps.

This is where most of the planet is at the moment. Frozen in place with no idea of how we got here or what we should do next. It’s why there’s so much time spent yelling and fighting with each other. We literally don’t know where to effectively focus our energy, but it has to go somewhere so we just spew it out at each other.

It does release the pressure, but it only creates more problems.

If we had kept our connection to mythology, we would recognize this polarity, uncertainty and tumult as the natural order of everything. The cyclic nature of endless rounds of birth, life, and death. Having mythic knowledge would help us navigate this seismic shift of an old way coming to it’s natural close and a cycle of new life beginning.

Human Design has it’s own particular mythology that weaves ancient ideas with modern science. What this story tells us is that we live in a cosmology of 400 year cycles. Each cycle brings it’s own particular energy to the planet that spurs innovation and evolution.

2027 marks the end of the 400 year Cross of Planning that was all about people coming together on a grand scale in order to support the building out of all the things. We clearly did that.

2027 is also the beginning of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix when the background frequency is shifting to renegotiating these previous tribal agreements and reestablishing our personal sovereignty and responsibility.

This age of institutions, outside expertise and the power-over structures we were all born into—and conditioned by—is giving way to a new way of living on the planet. This new way will be a space where true individualism comes into full flower. We will recognize that our truest individual self can only be expressed when we simultaneously accept the sovereign individuality of every other being. In this relatively near-future world, humans will drop the divisions of power-over paradigms and return to living in ways that honor our deeply interconnected and interdependent nature. In the future we will thrive because we will realign with the natural environment and re-adopt a shared-power worldview.

But right now we are in neither place. The old institutions no longer serve us and the widespread, embodied understanding of our deep need for one another is still hidden to a critical mass of humanity—and we don’t have any shared narratives around any of this.

Stories bring awareness.

Awareness is the threshold to understanding.

This is what stories are for. They utilize the creative potential in the brain to allow us to see ourselves through the lens of the story. They bring us back to ourselves.

Now, the ‘rational’ part of your brain may not buy into this Human Design story of a future of shared power and personal responsibility and sovereignty at all. But the rest of your brain is deeply connected to the mythology of endings, beginnings and possibility. This recognition and connection to story is wired into us. It is what connects us across cultures. Jung called it the collective unconscious.

How does any of this relate to calming the overwhelm?

It’s my hope that reminding you that you are connected to a long history of people who have lived through many endings and birthed many beginnings will bring your attention and awareness to your own innate strength and resiliency. You are more than capable of meeting the challenge of these times.

On a more practical level, bringing your attention to your energy—specifically your fear and/or anger—can be especially useful in these moments. When you are feeling overwhelmed by the news of the day, pause. Just pause for 5 seconds and bring yourself out of your mind and into your body. Where do you FEEL the fear? What does the energy FEEL like inside your body? Where is the anger located?

Notice too how you are using this energy. Are you releasing it by posting in the comments, are you suppressing and burying it in work, or are you channeling it into growing your garden? No judgement about any of these paths, but YOU may notice one way feeds you and the others drain you.

In Human Design we say, don’t trust me. Run your own experiment. Only you can know the ‘best’ way to use your energy. I’m just offering up some pieces of my own experiment that have proven useful.

Let me know how you’re doing. What’s really got your attention at the moment? Where are you feeling overwhelmed? What stories are you leaning on right now? Maybe I can offer some Human Design insights to help you navigate this in-between time.

Go be the YOUest!

PS: Turns out, we are the people responsible for building out our collective future. Like any big task, we need to break it down into small, manageable steps. The first step on this journey requires that we Break Out of the Matrix. We have to see the stories that no longer serve us so we can drop them. This frees up mental space for inspiration and imagining new stories. Join me in April for a gathering where, with the help of your Human Design, we’ll do just that.