A funny thing happened to me when I was preparing to leave for a long-awaited vacation…
As I write this, I should have been on the beautiful island of Flores in the Azores, hiking the caldera or exploring the gorgeous, verdant coast with my husband. Instead, here I am recovering from a an emergency 8 hour surgery to repair a perforated bowel…with a couple of complications. Here’s the thing… I’m a very healthy, active person. I do yoga, I do strength training 3 times a week, I walk a lot, I meditate. I eat super healthy, locally grown, organic, homemade food. And yet I ended up in the ER two weeks ago and was completely shocked to be very quickly dosed with heavy-duty antibiotics and told I would be admitted to hospital. And when the doctor told me I needed emergency surgery…well, imagine me negotiating with her to fix the rupture temporarily with antibiotics so that I could still go on vacation and do the surgery on my return!
I’m home now and on the road to recovery. But I spent 8 days spinning out in the hospital. I’m still trying to process everything, and especially how close I unknowingly came to a very life-threatening situation. As I’ve been thinking about it, so far I’ve learned 3 hard lessons that I need to share with you:
Don’t be like me, please learn from my lessons.
While I was lying in my hospital bed, I was literally spinning. From dizziness, from drug-overload, from the unexpected and unwanted things my body was going through. Strangely, I wasn’t afraid, upset or angry or even sad (except to miss my vacation). It was as though I was just observing what was happening to me. Perhaps I’ve cultivated enough equanimity over the years to move gracefully through this difficult experience. I don’t really know. But I was spinning.
And it occurred to me at one point that spinning in a hospital bed through a health crisis is sort of like the spinning we can feel in our daily life as we confront the troubles and crises in our lives and in the world these days. Politics, economic crisis, social upheaval…so much uncertainty, so many worries. Does any of this make you spin out some days?
As I was spinning and unable to focus in my hospital bed, I dug into my toolkit of practices to see if I could find something to calm myself, to get grounded, to slow down the spin. I could only find tiny, easy, calming practices, nothing else worked. And I thought to share these today as they might also be able to help us in times when we feel like our world is spinning out of control and we just can’t focus enough to roll out the yoga mat or to sit for meditation.
Here are the 5 micro practices that I was able to do to get grounded.
If you’re ever in a crisis, big or small, perhaps one of these micro practices will help you to get grounded and reconnect with the present moment.
Comments will be approved before showing up.