Sometimes, life can feel heavy. The heaviness can be particularly evident if we are working in challenging environments or with challenging content. I remember when I used to work in the charity sector supporting women who had experienced some form of violence, I’d take that heavy feeling home with me. The heaviness seemed to seep into all areas of my life. I’d try and run it off, or drink it off, but it followed me around and eventually took it’s toll and I felt I had to leave the sector.
Heaviness can come from all sorts of spaces; from being perpetually busy and stressed, from our own internal gremlins making life seem scary, or from the information we receive about awful events that happen in the world.
Heaviness shows up in some way at some point for all of us.
But there are ways to move through the heaviness.
In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown talks about ‘guide posts’ that help us to live what she calls a Wholehearted Life. There are two guideposts that I think are particularly relevant in releasing any heaviness that we experience.
The first is ‘Cultivating Play and Rest’ and the second is ‘Cultivating Laughter, Song and Dance.’
As adults, we tend to get serious and forget that the simple acts of playing and laughing are essential for us. We get too busy to play, to sing, to dance, to rest into existence. We get too busy and too serious to cultivate our lightness.
Lightening up for me means dancing in my front room, it means making up silly words and phrases with those around me, it means actively letting go of the monkey brain nattering that makes me worry about stuff that actually I can just let go of. Lightening up is about remembering that life can be light, that life can be easy.
In a world of challenges, darkness and heaviness it’s up to us to step into our light.