Five Practices for Hard Times
- Bridgett
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
How do you care for yourself while also caring about the world? These past few days, this is the question I’ve been grappling with. I wonder if many of you are feeling the same thing: how can I stay awake to what matters while also not drowning in information and anxiety?
Last Monday, this inquiry hit full-force. I was drinking my morning tea, thinking of what this day meant in the U.S., and I could feel myself being drawn toward a familiar precipice: anxiety, overwhelm, numbing. This cycle is familiar to anyone with a nervous system. Outward manifestations can differ, but at root, it’s a very mammalian way to try to keep from being pulled beyond our system’s capacity to cope. Unfortunately, it can also mire us in hopelessness and anxiety. Not only does this not feel good, but it’s not a great place from which to try to create the world we want to live in.
The good news is, there are many practices that can gently introduce new responses into our systems. Instead of anxiety, we can learn to cultivate energy. Instead of collapse, we can begin to engender calm. From this place, it becomes a lot easier to do what it is we actually long for: to protect the world we cherish while also living well-as-we’re-able in our own lives.
What follows is a little list of practices for rooting, resourcing, and expanding as we also seek to love this world. I’ve been feeling my way into them this past week. I hope they offer you solace, nourishment, and a sense of (as the extraordinary Krista Tippett likes to say) “muscular hope”.
Five Practices For Hard Times
1. Seek connection: More than perhaps any other species, humans need safe, ordering, genuine connection in order to thrive. Isolation is bad for us - body, mind, and soul. Without contact, we atrophy. Even for those of us who have a hard time with intimacy and connection, or who love solitude and the inner realms (guilty as charged :), we need each other, particularly in difficult times. There is much in the world - societally, technologically, politically - that actively or passively works to keep us apart. Instead of focusing on resisting these forces, I like to turn in the opposite direction (see #3 below) and frame it as seeking connection. This mobilizes and inspires me to reach out, even when it might feel challenging.
Last Monday, feeling the weight of the day, I texted my sister, telling her I was feeling grief about what’s happening in our country and the world right now. Even just receiving her response - “I completely understand this” - filled me with feelings of gratitude and connection. We need this affirmation of our humanness. We are not meant to be doing this alone. The difference this makes is truly enormous.
2. Choose two or three things you care about most: Trying to care deeply about everything is tempting but impossible. We simply can’t maintain that level of care for everything that matters, and if we try to - consciously or unconsciously - we inevitably feel overwhelmed, which causes our bodies and hearts to shut down, which leaves us feeling helpless and listless and distant from ourselves and what we love.
I believe there is a better way to care.
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a practice while journaling that felt like one possible medicine for this cycle of worry, overwhelm and burnout: clearly naming the two or three things I feel most passionately about protecting and uplifting, and then encouraging myself to pour tangible presence and care into these things. Rooting my care in the tangible & embodied was immediately grounding. It whittled the world down to size; it gifted me cares I can put my hands around. Instead of vague and agitating unease, I suddenly felt compelled, uplifted, and vitalized to cultivate and protect what I love. What had previously felt hazily overwhelming became suddenly rich and poignantly alive.
Each of our lists will differ, but here’s what was on mine: Real, in-person community & connection; compassionate free speech and the flourishing of art that tells the truth of its maker’s life; the flourishing of natural places & creatures. What were a few tangible, hands-on responses to this that came to me right away? Going to the Imbolc gathering my sister-in-law is holding early next month; supporting slow & thoughtful journalism and opting for paid newsletter subscriptions for a few writers who speak vital & nuanced truths; joining the Sierra Club again to stay abreast of protecting places & beings I care about.
Bringing things down to size in this way doesn’t immobilize, and it doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to feel care beyond what speaks to us most deeply. But it is a way of emboldening our spirits and focusing our limited energies, making care for this life tangible and possible.
3. Turn toward the light: Biologically and culturally, we are tuned to focus on what’s going wrong. While this can certainly be of value, it often outlives its usefulness. The energy of ruminating on wrongness has a self-perpetuating quality. Creating the kind of world we want to live in doesn’t come from pouring our energy in the direction of what’s wrong; it comes much more powerfully when we grow our energies from a place of what we love, from what gives us energy and strength - and this is true even when there’s complexity in this.
This doesn’t mean we can’t be grieved, or outraged, or sometimes feel immobilized or numbed. It’s not about feeling a certain way, but rather about how we frame our approach to the world’s pain. “I’m resisting this bad thing” has a very different felt quality to it than “I’m helping create this beautiful thing”. The experiential difference between these two approaches can make a tremendous difference in not only our own well-being, but also the effectiveness of our presence in the spaces we care about.
Orienting toward goodness in this way is not about ignoring what’s wrong or sugar-coating destructive forces; it’s about putting our bodies, minds, and hearts in the best possible place to love this world into healing.
4. Take care of your body: It’s amazing how easy it is to forget the foundations of our well-being: eat nourishing food, respect and cultivate your sleeping hours, drink lots of water, limit sugar and caffeine, roll your body around and get your heart pumping at least once a day, walk outside in the fresh air and sun, remember to breathe. If we take care of these basics, it’s amazing how much more energized and prepared we are to be with both the beauty and difficulty of the world.
For those of us who’ve experienced early childhood neglect or trauma (or simply who grew up in resource-poor environments, even if we had relatively attuned & regulated caregivers), such “basics” of living can seem not very basic at all. It’s common for folks with these experiences to forget to feed themselves, to ignore their body’s pleas for water or rest, to have a hard time relaxing enough to get deep sleep. So if you’re finding these things hard, please be kind to yourself. It’s not about imagined perfection, but the slow and steady cultivation of compassionate self-tending.
5. Live beyond the human circle: Humans are not the whole story. There is a world out there brimming with unbelievable wildness and aliveness, and it’s as close as walking out your front door.
One of our greatest possible strengths comes from living in contact with what is beyond us. We started this list with human connection, and that is absolutely vital. But connection goes beyond this, too. Humans take up a whole lot of airtime in this world, but there is so much - so much - beyond us. Go out and be with this world. Feel its textures, its roughnesses, its smooth places, its astonishing creativity and its shocking beauty and its fervent devotion to being here. Love its wild aliveness. Get to know the names we’ve given it (fox squirrel, summer tanager, white pine, cumulus cloud), not because names capture everything, but because specificity cultivates familiarity, which cultivates love, and I believe it is love and that which love gives rise to that ultimately heals and frees us.
Dear fellow sensitive souls who feel the world so deeply, may you let yourselves be embraced by the living world today, by all that goes beyond us. In challenging times and in beautiful, may you reach for connection with others, may you care for your body, may you center what you love, and may you keep turning toward the light.
