👁️‍🗨️ Reorienting

Hello YOU!

When I crossed the border into Maine at the beginning of May, it felt like stepping back in time. The trees were still bereft of leaves, the temps were barely in the 40s and the continuously flat gray skies felt unusually oppressive. Weeks passed before the first green leaf buds emerged.  

I’ve lived in Texas far too long to be upset by long stretches of rainy days, but I could not find my footing with all this wintery weather.  I thought I was leaving the deep spring of Texas and would be landing in an early spring-y Maine environment, but that was not at all the reality.

When I got to a cold, colorless, soggy Maine, my body just couldn’t quickly reorient to a landscape that it hadn’t lived in for decades. 

I can see now how I busily got on with work stuff anyway, but was feeling this low level disorientation underneath it all. I couldn’t name the thing in the moment, but now I wonder if the dis-ease was the rapidity of the change from one place to another, one environment to another and, this year, one season to another.

Humans aren’t really designed to move as quickly as we do in the modern world. Our bodies and brains aren’t totally equipped for being in Alaska in the morning and Dubai that same evening. Or, more commonly, at home with the kids at 6am and then traveling 70 miles per hour in a car to a job 50 miles away to spend the day alone at a desk in an air conditioned box. This is weirdly different from any previous human experience on the planet, yet it’s ‘normal’ to us. 

To our bodies, however, all of this is baffling. 

We are designed to move through a natural environment in a sensical way, but the modern world removes us from nature and from a natural human pace. Speed is confusing to our senses.

This is what I was feeling all last month. My body could just not make sense of what was going on around me. Everything in my environment had changed drastically over the course of two nights and my senses were unable to keep up with the rapid rate of new inputs. The cold was especially jarring. I definitely hadn’t packed enough warm clothes and that damp-cold that New England does so well was keeping me chilled to the bone all day. Buried under several layers of blankets at night offered the only relief.

Looking back over the month I can also see how I was pushing through the discomfort by trying to match my work pace to meet the level of nervous system activation I was experiencing. Like if I could just move as quickly on the outside as it felt like things were happening on the inside, then I would somehow bring everything into coherence. This is classic conditioning. We distract ourselves with busyness in order to not feel the dis-ease in our bodies.

You’ll no doubt be shocked to hear that this strategy failed miserably. All I have to show for work product from last month is a shop littered with half finished projects in about 4 different mediums. I kept jumping from one thing to another and couldn’t find traction with any of it. 

I couldn’t make because I couldn’t make sense. 

This is, of course, what happens when our nervous system is dysregulated. We can’t make sense of anything. Yet often we keep moving because we are caught up in the flow and pace of the modern world. We look busy and productive, but really we’re just going through the motions hoping that somewhere in our movement all the gears will eventually sync up and start working in unison. 

One thing I did have going for me last month was this new-ish understanding of how impactful the Sun’s transit can be on our day-to-day. It was helpful to know that when I was feeling frenetic that we were passing through a particularly frenetic background energy as a planet. It didn’t change my state, but it did allow me to shift the story. 

If you haven’t caught any of the conversations I’ve been having with my friends Lauren and Lois over in The Coherence Lab about these ever-shifting planetary energies, you might find them intriguing and maybe even useful for your own process and experiments. 

We look at two of the upcoming Human Design Gates/I Ching Hexagrams/Gene Keys and game out a bit of what we might expect to see and feel over the 11 day period. Even though I’m not great at holding on to the details, I've noticed that this experiment of contemplating the upcoming collective energy does stick with me and ground me in the fact that reality is wonder-full at its core. 

There is more going on than meets the eye and, in the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I've had some real success using Human Design to help people navigate these difficult times. It’s a lens that can help you see life not as endless trials and tribulations, but more as a long series of experiments. Learning to see life as happening FOR you instead of happening TO you to can help you access more agency and allow in more joy. If you could use some fresh perspectives, this might be the perfect time to learn a bit about your unique Design and reorient yourself to your own ever-changing environment.  

Get out there and be the YOUest!

PS: I’ve teamed up with two amazing women from Your Life and Land to create Embrace the Chaos, a free, drop-in zoom space on Wednesdays from Noon to 1 EST. It’s a place to come together to chat about how we are navigating these transitional times. There’s no agenda, but it is a Human Design informed space, so there’s an opportunity to ask questions and explore with other Design-curious folks. I’d love for you to join us.