The first thing I noticed when I woke was how much I didn’t want to move. Then, the clouds. They slid across the stark blue of that just shifting September light- the kind that reminds you summer has passed, yet how can that be because everything still feels so good on bare skin. Some mornings I feel okay as I wake, but often I feel like I have a fine film of something I don’t like all around me. Like something is off, but I don’t really know how to fix it since I’m not even sure what it is. Like low-grade anxiety dipped in dread about something you haven’t even been told you have to do yet.
This morning it probably had a lot to do with returning from a three day trip, four hours of driving each way, and only four apartments seen in the search to manifest the perfect (or any) rental in what is supposed to be our new town in… two weeks or so? People keep talking about miracles right now, so I’ll just assume that all this is getting ironed out in a few miraculous twists. That doesn’t really make it any less anxiety inducing.
At one of the four appointments we arrived to a realtor unable to open the gate of the parking lot because there was a neighborhood power outage. The electronic locking system on the building opens everything up instead of locking everyone in during an outage (reassuring) so she led us up the unlit stairwell to the apartment, the smell of fresh paint clinging to the air and igniting a collage of paint smell memories in my head. Before I had time to open the balcony door, she announced there was a problem and started a monologue about how the owner has decided to renovate the kitchen, and it’s not actually available when we want nor when we absolutely need it. Unless… no, she can’t do that… unless… maybe she could… no, that won’t work, no, it’s just too unprofessional… let her think… no, it just won’t work! She concluded, with a lot of exasperated arm waving, that it’s not possible. Even if it were, the new renovations will raise the rent past what we asked. So we left, not sure what the point of all this had been.
Miracles. Miracles are fixing this. We waited until five thirty to see a promising looking listing with another agency. In the last hour before the appointment, the only time I decided to leave my phone in the car so we could go swimming and feel for an hour like this trip was something we actually wanted to be doing, I missed two calls saying the agency hadn’t received a confirmation from me about the appointment nor received our rental file so she was cancelling. I’d understood I could give her our file in person at the appointment, and I couldn't have said any more clearly that morning- see you at five thirty. A whole lot of Mercury retrograde vomit.
After a couple years of testing many healing/relieving tools and techniques, something usually pops into my head at times like this asking to be used. As I lay in bed, I thought of To Be Magnetic’s anxiety DI in which one is told to pin all the worries they have to passing clouds in their mind until they dissipate. It seemed appropriate. Afterwards, I wanted to stay there watching the real clouds outside, but instead got up to do some of the many things on some list in my head. In the afternoon, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. The ick hadn’t dissipated as per its usual pattern. I gave up and walked to the park to lie in a field where the thick grass was still warm from the sun. Ashley Wood sometimes talks about how she asks the Earth to remove anything that isn’t hers to clear it out of her field. I’ve been trying this out, and find it to be one of the simplest practices with immediate effects. A few moments after asking, I usually feel a sucking sensation along my back body as though all that unneeded energy is being drawn out through a giant straw.
I decided to play around with the technique and went on to ask for more specific things to be removed- any energy I’ve received from specific people, anything that might be mine but is preventing me from accepting simplicity, ease and flow. Different requests resulted in a feeling of energy being drawn out of different centers of my body. I took note of the locations to think about which chakras or areas of my life had possibly been affected by whatever I’d been holding on to. When that felt complete, I asked for supportive energy to fill those empty spaces because that felt better than wondering if I might take on more useless energy if the spaces were left open and unprotected.
It felt like I’d become part of the landscape, melting into the sun's leftover warmth watching the tips of the trees brushing the sky. There were clouds here too, and I traced their progress until I finally felt better. I realized I could have trusted myself that morning and just let myself watch them for as long as I’d needed to. It would have been a faster route to where I ended up in that moment without all the attempts to struggle through… whatever it was I'd thought I was getting done all day. I actually can’t remember what it was, and I guarantee you none of it got done the way it probably needs to.
There are days we feel like doing something because it’s exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. It’s exactly what we need. Experiment with trusting this, and share- here or with those around you- how it turned out.