Tethering to the Here and Now
You Are Here. The phrase is a tether.
The word “untethered” - or maybe it’s my thought about the word - haunts me for reasons unknown though I suspect it’s a complication of anxiety. My old friend Anxiety is never far away, always lurking. It’s the tactile invisible web that stretches across my skin when I walk in the woods. You’d think I’d get use to it always resting in the shadows, dormant and silent until - it’s in my face.
I walk in the woods to stay grounded, to return to my body, to feel the uneven earth beneath my feet, to be cognizant of the 3-D effect of moving through layers of foliage and light, through space and time. I’m sure it sounds curious, maybe crazy even, to someone who has never experienced the feeling of aimless detachment born from an internal sensory overload but I assure you I’m about as sane as most people. I believe that we over-thinkers and highly sensitive beings who are prone to anxiety are often high-functioning as well. Meaning, we look as “normal” and “calm” as the next person, it’s just that on the inside, we are freaking out. For me, there’s a kind of multi-tasking that occurs. I’m appearing present and doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing, and simultaneously there’s this program humming in the background of my being that is full of static and chaotic noise and it feels overwhelming, a force that might spin me off my feet.
How does over thinking fit into my profile? On the daily, I have more questions than time could allow me to investigate but it doesn’t stop me from trying. The things I ponder are those “big questions” that have no simple answer on Wikipedia and so I must continue digging, zooming in to focus on the breadcrumbs, sometimes losing sight of my original quest. It can be a bit maddening. I always feel that if I could just get to the bottom of things, to the penultimate root, then the logical order of the Universe will reveal itself and set me free.
What I’ve discovered is that our brains are designed to be pattern recognition machines on a mission to solve problems. When my thinking mind is allowed to pirate my operating system, and run haphazardly in the background, it drains the energy right out of me! This idea was introduced to me through the science of Human Design. It suggests that when we let our mind run the show, it influences the body to do things it shouldn’t do (ie eat the wrong food at the wrong hour, enter into doomed relationships, take on jobs for the wrong reasons. Learning how to read the subtle signals of the body results in making correct decisions, thereby living in harmony with heart and head. When our active minds demand to be in control of the path we choose, we continually stumble and hamper our own progress. With the act of over-thinking, I self-sabotage by creating the background static so that it’s harder to “hear” what my body needs. The question for me becomes, “Can I power down my mind, and reduce the noise?”
I’ve discovered some effective masterful tools for this purpose, like meditation and breathing. But even more simplistic than that is grounding.
If my mind wanders too far away from the Here and Now, I can get momentarily turned around, disoriented, untethered. It’s like driving in the snow on a dark road with no lights, only the headlamps to illuminate the foot or two beyond the window where snowflakes hypnotically appear and disappear in a rhythmic dance. The untethering is that feeling of not being able to detect if I’m moving forward or the environment is slipping around me, if my compass has been demagnetized, if my GPS has gone dead. When my body kicks into anxiety from this untethered state, I think it’s actually me coming back online; it’s not unlike when an overtaxed computer shuts down unexpectedly then blinks back to life with a vague error message. My racing heart, my sweaty palms, my tingly extremities, my wild mind - they are all blinking signals, ways of returning quickly to a safe location after a close call. So while my anxiety feels scary in the moment, it helps a little if I reframe the sensation as, “Whoa! I blinked out for a minute there. I lost my connection!” My body is reminding me that I’m here. In the now.
This is a good thing, because for years, probably since the age of ten, I’ve been experiencing that blank space between Here and Lost, and it’s both frightening and disempowering. All the work I’ve been doing to discover ways of managing anxiety has pointed me to the practice of grounding; it’s a physical way of recalibrating my mind and body to connect in the present moment through my senses. I recognize deep value in training my brain to relax and trust my body. We need to intentionally remind our bodies that they hold the key to our power within.
Resources that have helped me learn about and manage anxiety:
On Instagram, check out the account @theanxietyhealer
On YouTube, see Therapy in a Nutshell
