Lower Anxiety By Living At The Speed of Sanity

In the movie The Phenomenon, the main character (played by John Travolta) was under a tremendous amount of stress. He seemed to be at a breaking point when he looked up and noticed huge trees swaying in the breeze.

By relaxing his body and allowing it to sway with the trees, he found his rhythm – a way to manage life’s mounting pressures.

Although this was written in a movie script, it illustrates the power of being in sync with the natural rhythms of our bodies. We can make ourselves anxious by spending too much time living outside them.

It is easy to get caught up in the speed at which we are expected to perform in the world of work or school or to meet the demands of a busy family. A digital world is a fast-paced one.

Where time is money, and where fewer people are expected to accomplish more, our internal engine can pick up the habit of running fast and forget to slow down.

Though we cannot change the world’s pace, it is essential to our physical, mental, and emotional health that we know how to return to our inborn signature rhythm or life pulse, and that we do it often.

All nature works, and then rests; works and rests. I caught its rhythm and worked and rested with it. When I felt that inertia stealing over me, I rested; and while resting my power recuperated - the tide rose in me. ~ Elizabeth Towne, 1904

One means of returning to our natural life rhythm is finding an image to think of or visualize, one that reminds us of our speed-of-sanity and helps us return to it.

Finding Your Rhythm Image

• When you have a few minutes, sit comfortably and close your eyes. Take a few deep, slow breaths; with every exhale feel your tension melt away.
• Imagine yourself outdoors, anywhere in nature that you find comforting, pleasurable, inspiring, or even exciting. It can be a familiar place, somewhere you have visited or an imaginary setting.
  What do you see, hear, and feel that moves with the same rhythm you do when you are at your best? It could be a rushing river or a quiet stream. Maybe you see long grass waving, snow falling against a mountain, desert sands shifting, a rabbit hopping, or a sea turtle swimming.
• Choose an image whose movement or stillness, gives you a sense of returning home, a sense of calm vitality, a sense of “Ahhh.”
• Whenever you find your internal engine running too fast, use this image to help yourself return to the life-enhancing speed of nature.

Many of us do not spend much time outdoors and that is unfortunate since our bodies are made from nature’s elements. Nature is the mother of us all. To be healthy we need to remember the wisdom of her cycles.

The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist.
~ J.W. von Goethe

Photo: Garon Piceli from Pexels