How many times have you found yourself obsessing about a situation, a person, or a project? You feel stuck, unable to come up with a solution, unable to see past the end of the very pen you’re holding in your hand. The page is blank. The drawing is not right, the project is not advancing, the story of the person you are thinking of consumes you. You are unable to see anything else but your problem, as if the rest of the world does not even exist anymore.
Fear creeps in, you are simply not able to move forward. You dread sharing your dark thoughts with anybody, because letting others see the “real” you could mean rejection. When you go out in public, you cover up your fear so well, that soon you start to believe it does not exist. This is denial. You start living life in your head, you lock up your fears in a virtual Tower.
This is your “safe” place, it shelters you from the “outside world”. In this way, nobody knows your struggle. Soon though, it becomes too much, you cannot hide it in anymore, it is so overwhelming that even little tasks seem to require an immense effort. How do you get unstuck? What gets you out of your head? What stops the incessant stream of thoughts that paralyzes you at times? How do you deal with your fear and your pain?
How do you “pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again” (yes, this is a line from the “Pick yourself up” song – one of my favourite songs by Diana Krall). For the longest time, I used to think there was this “invisible hand” that “picked me up”, shook me well and tossed me onto a new path. What I now realize is that, among other things, what helped me get “unstuck” was a dog, and her name was Moxie.
I did not have much awareness at that time, I did not really pay attention to the people around me, to what was going on, nor was I listening to the signals my body was sending me. I was going in a downward spiral, and I simply did not care about it.
But there was someone I paid attention to though throughout all this: Moxie. I had a “duty”, a responsibility towards her. She needed to be fed, groomed, walked, even played with, as much as I did not feel like playing at that time. I put my body in the “dark mode” just like a phone screen you can switch to dark when you want to. Moxie saw this and she found a way to bring the light back into my heart.
She was a true “Toltec”, a true artist of the soul. She succeeded to gently make me pay attention to something else than the thoughts in my head, she brought me back to the present moment by connecting me with Mother Nature in a beautiful and heartfelt way. I was not numbing my pain anymore; I was releasing it. She used to stop on the pathway, look straight into my eyes, almost like checking if I am truly there with my whole being or am I still in my head, conversing with my thoughts?
Her silly jumps through the snow, or should I better say her snowploughing, would always make me laugh and bring me back to Earth from my Tower of Fears. Because in essence, this is what my virtual reality was, this was theTower I created. I was living with the regrets of the past and the fears of the future. In my mind, at that time, Moxie WAS the present moment.
Over the years I learned that if I give my brain, my mind, something else to focus on, the chatter in my brain stops. I was learning to connect with myself, I was learning to have awareness.Service work with Moxie in the hospitals and senior homes certainly put things into a different perspective for me. Many of us hit the famous “rock bottom” and the way we got up was similar and different at the same time.
The question I keep asking myself though is: if I know how low I can get, I wonder then how high can I fly? What are some of the amazing things my brain, heart and soul can create? Can one have obsessive joyful thoughts? Is there such a thing? Moxie says yes, so I’m on a quest to discover my own human potential, going in the opposite direction: the direction of living a joyful, loving, and harmonious life. Let’s see how that feels for a change.
The idea is that it does not have to be a dog that gets you out. It does not have to be service work. But it sure must be something different than what you are doing right now. Take a new class, sign up for a meetup event, learn a new language. One of the best advice given to me was to create a list of things I used to love when I was a child or a teenager. Then start doing these things, start playing again. And I sure did!
Try it! Give yourself the gift of connecting with your true self. You may be able to find a way to get “unstuck”. May you find “YOUR” invisible hand, the one that helps you “pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again”. There are so many joys we have yet to discover!