Living Outside Facts Creates Overwhelm

Living in denial of facts creates that overwhelmed feeling because there are some facts about being human. They are truths - like those in science - like gravity. Imagine for a moment if you lived whilst defying gravity. You would be stepping through broken things all day long. That would create that overwhelmed feeling whilst you tried to keep up with the cleaning and avoid cutting your feet on the shards of glass and crockery. This is a wonderful metaphor for how we create overwhelm.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A transformational life coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today's exploration is around what it's like to live your life outside of facts.

What comes to mind initially as an example of that is those very funny films that you can watch on YouTube of people during the first experiences of flight while they were trying to fly and you will have probably seen them.

They are quite humorous although I dread to think what state the people are in after falling off what they fell off many,

Many times.

The reason those people couldn't get those machines to fly to take off is because they were missing some principles,

Some facts about how life worked and those facts are lift,

Drag,

Speed and gravity I believe.

I've probably got those wrong and I'd love somebody to correct me but anyway there's some facts around flight and those people who were trying in the early days were missing those scientific facts so they kept falling and didn't manage to fly.

And when we're trying to do something against the facts it creates a lot of overwhelm,

A real overwhelmed feeling and an example that you might be able to relate to better than flying because I suspect you may not have tried to fly apart from in an actual aeroplane is gravity.

You know all day every day without really thinking about it we work within the realms of gravity don't we and that's why you and I without really thinking it's a really unconscious decision that when we pick up a glass when we put it down onto a table or a unit or whatever we know that we can't just release the glass from high above said table or unit because we know that it will break.

We know that gravity will make it fall down.

When little children are learning about gravity what they tend to do is throw and drop things and if you've had children when they've been small or been around small children you will have seen that thing where they're always throwing things and dropping them and it looks like they're being a bit naughty but actually they're just being scientists they're trying to to work out does this thing happen every time you know every time I drop this dummy or whatever does it always fall to the floor this food does this food always fall to the floor so it's an experimental process.

By the time young children get to primary school age-ish they have an embodied what's called an embodied understanding of gravity which means they have no idea about the word gravity they don't know what gravity does really but they want all the science behind it but they know that when they put something you know they have to put things down and not just allow them to fall and then as adults we spend our lives just working within gravity because it would not make sense to do anything other than that.

Even if you did though imagine if one day you woke up and went I'm not going to work within gravity anymore I think it's a pain I don't want to do it not going to believe it I'm just going to not believe that gravity works you would literally be walking around in broken crockery and glass and imagine the overwhelm from that you'd have to just keep picking up things all the time you'd be just cleaning up all the time you'd be kind of creating a mess yourself that you would then have to clean up and that is why that is a beautiful analogy for how in our human experience in our human lives when we don't work within the facts of how human life and human experience is created we do spend a lot of time and we get that overwhelmed feeling from trying to manage everything whilst you know going against the facts of how life works.

So what are the facts about how life works you might be wondering and my invitation right now is just to let this wash over you.

You don't start making notes or trying to intellectualize what I'm saying.

There are three principles which are how life works for human beings and for all of nature in actual fact which we are part of and that is the first thing that is the first thing there's an aliveness we're alive that's the first principle anybody like to deny that with me just go for it but there's an aliveness running through alive things whether that's me and you whether that's the flowers and the trees whether that's I nearly I'm going to say bunny rabbits I don't know why I want to say bunny rabbits rather than just rabbits but anyway whether it's animals whatever it is there is this aliveness and if you've ever kind of been around somebody who's no longer alive then there's a real you can really sense that that that something has left them this this energy this aliveness has left them and that's that's so important understanding that aliveness and understanding that we're part of this energy of life that runs through everything because it seems to me now that one of the things that's causing a lot of that overwhelmed feeling is the idea that we're almost robotic that our lives should be this nice straight line kind of emotionally this way straight across horizontal and and and you know going through our lives like we're on a railway track straight line not experiencing ups and downs or and that those things shouldn't be part of life those ups and downs and I think that's one of the ways where that overwhelmed feeling comes in because if the facts are that we are part of nature and we're therefore fluctuating and variable and yet we're trying to not be like that that creates a massive amount of an overwhelming so that's the first area where you know the fact is we're alive and we have this aliveness and this energy of nature if you're kind of trying to live outside of that increased overwhelm is the result the second truth is that we are conscious and we are aware and where we put our awareness is what we experience and you will have seen that in really simple interactions in your life here's one you're in the middle of an argument with somebody in your life and your awareness is totally on what's going on between you and then something happens you know the smoke alarm goes off or you know something funny happens and it breaks the moment or whatever it is you get distracted and then suddenly your awareness is on something else and it it's gone that the feeling that you had when you were with that person and upset is it's just gone it just goes because your awareness has just gone somewhere else and as it does that you're giving less energy less awareness energy to the thinking you had in the argument and then it just kind of fizzles out and another example of this is that where we think things are really stressing us out like a full inbox when we're focused on our full inbox and we look at all the numbers and we're looking at and thinking about perhaps we're thinking about in the early hours of the morning then it we feel that that awareness brings that to life but then we're not thinking about it anymore and the full inbox is still there and we don't feel it anymore so that awareness we are aware it's an undeniable fact we are aware and that's where we can really kind of start to to not manage but we can use that as a tool as a way to to see how life is working out and the third fact is that you are never feeling your circumstances or other people or anything else no one outside of you has the power to make you feel anything but thought is what's creating your experience thought in the moment is what you're feeling which is why you and I can experience exactly the same thing whether that's a piece of music a movie or a situation with the weather or the news or anything else and we can feel completely differently about it because there's something unique that we are bringing to that circumstance which which is then what creates our feeling we're always feeling thought in the moment we are never feeling our circumstances and the thing is that if you think the outside world is making you feel stuff then that is hugely contributing to that overwhelmed feeling because you're going to spend a lot of your life trying to manage the outside world to make yourself feel okay and that is what for me led to burn out no two ways about it people attribute it to my job or anything else but I know for a fact is because I was trying to make the outside world make me happy by trying to control it and that is an absolute source of that overwhelmed feeling and it certainly was for me to the point of burning out so I guess you have a choice you don't have a choice like in any in any moment that choice can disappear because you can forget all of this but for me the choice is to look in this direction or look in the other direction look towards the truth or not look towards the truth if you don't look towards working within gravity you'll be working in a mess if you don't look towards working within the truth of how life works then life becomes much more complicated and there's much more of that overwhelmed feeling and that the invitation here is to just bring bring some awareness to this bring just start to notice how this is playing out in your life thank you so much for listening there's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm this has been the calm cast with Claire Downer Queen of car take care and keep listening.