Navigating the overwhelm of change

(embodied processing, presence, and tenderness)

Dear friends,

Thank you for opening another Within letter. A click of the ♡ button makes a difference. So does sharing these pieces.

When your world is in turmoil, it often brings internal conflicts to the surface. Some might even suggest that when inner conflicts reach a tipping point, they manifest as external chaos, providing opportunities for healing and growth.

Through my own personal experiences, and subsequent training in trauma and energy healing, I’ve come to believe that, in a lot of instances, this can be true for us as adults. Yet, so much of the outer turmoil we experience—grief, loss, traumatic events—remains beyond our control.

So, whether change arises from unresolved inner patterns or forces outside our control, the question is: how do we navigate it when it brings us to the edge of overwhelm?

The most powerful lessons I have learned when dealing with change, however it arrives are:

• Deeply accept that you are part of any upheaval in your life. You can’t remove yourself from it, no matter how much you want to, or how much you try to. Any attempt to turn away from it, avoid it, or deny it will simply perpetuate the overwhelm.

• Recognise that each time life as you know it falls apart, it brings with it an invitation to change—just as nature does.  Once you learn to soften your resistance to change, and take a step into the unknown, you are opening the door for your deeper self to rise up and carry you through.

• Understand that your deeper self longs to grow and evolve.  Carl Jung believed that the soul, or "Self," has a kind of innate drive to seek out experiences — including painful or challenging ones — for the purpose of growth, expansion, and self-actualisation.

• Know that your deeper self will never take you anywhere you don’t have the strength to go.

• Turn away from trying to unravel the cause of the overwhelm, and turn instead towards the sensations of the overwhelm - the energetic struggle that is arising from the parts of you that have a tremendous fear of change, the parts that have spent their whole life avoiding re-visiting the excruciating sense of overwhelm they experienced in childhood. (These parts are what you experience as inner conflict.)

• The very act of turning towards the overwhelm creates a space within you for these vulnerable parts to be seen and heard.

• Meet them without making them wrong. 

• Meet them without trying to fix them or bury them further.  

We talk about 'trusting the process' but really, it's about trusting yourself as you move through the process. Can you sit with what is appearing without trying to change it, or intellectualise it, or bend it to suit your will? Can you gently meet the part of yourself that is wanting to rise up and hold back each moment so that you can be somewhere other than here? Can you be still and know that the open space of nonresistance is all that's required to allow the right gifts to come towards you?

The danger of intellectualising overwhelm

Rumination—the habit of mentally revisiting a thought or experience repeatedly—is a learned mechanism we use in an attempt to feel safe. We believe it will bring us to a place of completion, resolution, or relief.

We believe it will ultimately lead to inner peace.

But shifting into the mind to ‘resolve’ something actually keeps us from addressing the inner, energetic conflict that needs our attention at a deeper level.

Safety, relief, peace is here right now: in the ground beneath your feet, your breath, your hand upon your heart.

Your capacity (which can be practiced daily) to ground yourself in the empowered place of your body, your deeper self, your true nature, will bring you the safety you are looking for.

Your body is a safe place.

The wholeness of who you are is a place of safety.

Resolving inner conflict

The parts of you that are resistant to change are the parts that feel unsafe. These parts need to be nurtured; not condemned, or shamed.

Growing up, these parts felt unseen, unheard and unwanted. So the antidote is to see them, hear them, and give them what they need now.

Each time you feel resistance arising—fear, procrastination, anger, impatience —ask yourself the following:

What can the wholeness of me do to help bring this part into the light?
How can I help this part feel safe?
How can I let this part know that it is now okay to soften and heal?

Everything within and around you is here to teach you that something needs your attention: more nurture, more love, more self-care. From the ache in your shoulder, to the negative thoughts, to the darks aspects—make nothing about yourself wrong.

Learn to create enough space inside you to hold it all, and welcome it all.

Love everything.

There is a further practice in this post here that will help you work with any parts that are resistant to change.

Tender reminder:

If you can weave small moments of meaning and wonder into the fabric of your life while the world moves around you and experiences you have no control over suddenly appear; your inner light will brighten.

In moments of overwhelm, may you return to your body with loving tenderness. Softly, April x

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