Find peace when you’re feeling crowded

At any one time, you can be moving through more than one experience, on varying levels of joy and difficulty, outcome and liminality. And yet, there is an expectation grounded in a false sense of duality that you are either 'this' or 'that': you have faith or you doubt. You're either good or you're bad, winning or losing, wise or immature, grieving or laughing, failing or thriving, broken or healed, wrong or right, arrived or not there yet…

We are complex beings with nuanced programming and sensory pathways; we have the capability in our bodies, brains, hearts, and spirits to carry the multitude of things that we all are and all experience, individually, relationally, communally… and still, we lean into the one track, the 'this' or 'that,' the single issue, the lone standard.

So when seemingly opposing things come into our lives, we white-knuckle onto one and reject the other, attempting to prolong one experience while trying to rid our lives of the other, all the while seeking to avoid the dissonance and heaviness that sometimes comes through experiencing everything all at once.

But listen, you do have the capacity and biology to hold the tension of all that is happening in your life right now, from everything labeled good to everything deemed bad and everything in between; there is a way to live through the experiences without needing them to be something else, while also allowing seemingly contradictory emotions, happenings, occurrences to live side by side in your body and heart.

Dr. Alexander Shaia said that:

"Peace is a verb about tension. It's the peace that comes when we enter into mutual respect with diversity. And every time you have diversity, you're going to have tension… Tension is the energy that brings forth expansion, and we need expansion to get into wider awareness and greater harmony."

It may feel as though peace is what happens when things settle down, problems are solved, nothing is happening, and everything agrees with everything. But peace is what happens when we accept and allow all the variables their space instead of needing them to be something they're not.

Unfortunately, growing up or spending any amount of time with doctrines and dogmas of miracles, it can seem as though we (humans) are just waiting for God to show up and do what God does. We wait, and we wait, and we wait. We blame ourselves and our lack of faith when the miracle doesn't show. We blame others and their lack of faith; we blame the world and our bodies and the media and so many other different things and places and traumas and moments… and yes, some of those places deserve blame, when things don’t go the way we desperately hoped and wanted and even needed them to. We spend our prayers on wishing things were different; we spend our hope on fantasizing about radically unrealistic transformation; we spend our dreams on regret; we waste our time trying to make things even, performative, and easy.

Marie-Louise von Franz said:

“If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality."

This is a series about holding the tension in nuanced and complex situations and finding peace even in places that seem out of balance - emphasis on the word 'finding.' No more waiting for a miracle; it's time for you to venture into your own experiences, all of them, not one at a time, but as they are, here, now, nuanced, complex, beautiful, valid, true; they're waiting for you to give yourself permission to seek and find the treasures therein. After all, this is how you give birth to new realities; this is how you expand; this is how you grow. This is how you stay grounded within the movement of everything, everywhere, all at once.

AFFIRMATION: When everything seems to be moving at different speeds and intensities, I pause, breathe, access the peace that keeps me grounded; I find the stillness within the movement of life.

See you in the App,

Liz Milani xo
Instagram: @thepracticeco 

From this week’s series titled "Grounded Movement" with a subscription in the App. Hope to see you there.