Many years ago while living in L.A., I experienced a fairly significant earthquake. Imagine being in the shower doing your thing and out of nowhere, the shower starts rocking back and forth. Unnerving to say the least!
I made it out of the shower to safety, turned on the TV news, and then the aftershocks started. Unexpected, unpredictable and unsettling. The ground, which I took for granted as being solid and dependable, shifted. It was out of my control, and the sensation kept repeating itself.
That’s sort of the way things are feeling now. Nearly every one of my energy healing clients in the last 3-1/2 months has told me they feel anxious, scattered and ungrounded. At the energetic level, we can sense a big shift happening, and although many of us believe we are rising toward a better world, it’s a shift nonetheless. Like in an earthquake, there will be loss, pain and struggle as things change.
It seems a focus on our roots may be in order. In our culture, we are conditioned to aim toward a goal and to work hard to rise up to meet it. We think of growth only as an upward motion. Rarely are we encouraged to take care of what’s below the surface, to take care of growing down. We forget that in the natural world, the plants and the trees flourish only when their roots are nurtured so that they can grow deep down into the soil.
To truly rise, we must be solidly rooted. When we are anchored, we rise higher.
One of the lessons COVID has taught me is that I am much hardier when I carve out time to focus on my inner life. When the stay-at-home order forced me to slow down, I realized how my previously busy life had distracted me from my own growth. Now, as my activity level begins to ramp up again, I am committing myself to carving out quiet time for wandering in nature, journaling, meditating, dancing, creating and otherwise nourishing my spirit. I have had to say no to some things that seem like fun, realizing that I can’t do it all, and that my ability to rise is completely dependent upon the strength of my roots.
I don’t like the “rocking shower feeling,” and I’m guessing you probably don’t either. However, if a high magnitude earthquake-like shift is what we need to create a more peaceful, loving world, I’m all in. But I’m going in rooted.