Awareness: When things go wrong as they sometimes will

Sometimes I feel like life knocks me down with a Rocky-sized punch, and I am down for the count. We have all had this type of day, where nothing seems to go right, everything feels more challenging, and we don’t have the energy for the simplest things.

For me, these days happen when I have depleted myself so entirely that I crash. The truth is that it isn’t life that has knocked me down. So often, I fall into a trance. I’ll work through mealtimes, as I’ve stopped listening to hunger so often that I’m numb to hunger pains. The hours can pass well past the sun setting so utterly unnoticed that I am now working in a room that is too dark to see. I get so tangled up in what I am doing that I miss the signs of fatigue. Even when I struggle through complex tasks, I keep going without asking for help or taking a break deep in frustration. 

It isn’t life that knocks me down. It is how I see life. 

I often don’t even see it coming. We can feel stuck in our pattern, falling further into their destructive autopilot momentum.

Until that magical moment where awareness comes, I can see my pattern. Now what? 

The awareness rebound

What do I usually do at this moment? I leap into a deep dive into the pool of self-judgment, shame, and isolation until I am suffering so entirely that I crave anything that will numb the pain. 

The rebound is equally as destructive. My hunger, now recognized, turns to a binge. Needing rest turns to over-sleeping or distracting from the thoughts of my mind with a sleep-deprived Netflix binge. My ignored body is now loudly announcing achy inflammation. 

What I need to do in these moments is stop, step away from the doing, begin listening to my body communicate its needs and start renourishing and replenishing. I need the community I’ve prevented, so I can speak the truth of my shame story and stop carrying it in my guy.

The problem is this depleted version of me no longer trusts that I even know how anymore. So I question my wisdom.

The danger of awareness rebounds

Edgar Guest says, “when things go wrong as they sometimes will… Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.” His poem is a perfect example of our push culture. “Rest if you must,” as though our body doesn’t need it, “but don’t you quit,” taking our agency. We have been trained that we have to keep going. 

We have seen our pattern’s destruction, but “don’t you quit” plays like a mantra. So we deny our body’s wisdom, keep going and farm out our intuition, becoming easy prey to the spiritually superior narcissistic guru who knows how to engage our shame. Their words latch onto the deepest dark thoughts within us, that we are broken, that we deserve our experience, that we “need” them—we easily miss the empathic void.

This individual believes they have become somehow enlightened in a way that others have not and operates from a disconnecting stance of spiritual superiority. Which makes it easy to misuse spiritual practices, energies, or experiences to bolster themselves as the guru we must follow.

Whether it is the holistic guru claiming a journey to the “pure consciousness” they have, the fitness industry claims of “hacking our body’s wellness” for the body they have, or the self-development event where we will “master every area of your life,” and live “unleashed fully self-expressed and completely free” we want the life they claim to have.

Blindly following the guru, we are pulled further away from listening to our bodies. When their advice doesn’t work, we are to blame. When it is causing more suffering, we are “sicker than I thought.” Sitting on the “expert” pedestal we envisioned, we blindly follow their advice, even when it causes more suffering, so that we can continue the pattern of self-destruction