Month: October 2025

When the Universe Falls on Your Shoulders

That feeling of overwhelm — when everything seems to reach critical mass — is unsettling. Yet it can also be an invitation: a chance to practice mindfulness within crisis, not apart from it.

Often, what we call a “crisis” is simply too many things happening at once for us to navigate. This makes it hard to see what’s what. The pressure compounds because in the mess there are always few tasks that must get done — or else they might turn into a crisis. Letters unopened, emails unread, a bed unmade, laundry spilling over the hamper like it’s coming to get me. Most of this happens in a dimly lit room — and somehow this feels heavier on a beautiful day. It’s as if I’ve come to resent the sunlight.

Maybe that’s a New York thing.

I once heard a story about the Ramones’ first trip to California — they bought umbrellas. People laughed and said, “It doesn’t rain that much here,” and they said, “No — they’re for the sun. We can’t go back with tans; that would ruin us.” Everyone seems slimmer, happier, more functional — while I’m here staring at a pile of papers, an inbox full of needs, and laundry whispering my name. My throat tightens; my shoulders rise. It feels like I’m living in The Upside Down — to borrow from Stranger Things.

This “upside down”  might a self-imposed form of defense, as though chaos is our invisibility cloak. But the more we hide, the more life keeps calling from outside the door, and the higher the piles get, the more overwhelmed we feel.  Avoidance doesn’t stop the demands of living. It just enables more pressure.

So, how does anyone seeking balance, keep their sanity when life feels like it’s closing down on us from all sides?

Before any tasks are attempted it’s important to eliminate what we don’t need. Self-recrimination, distraction, longing looks out the window.  Let’s turn toward the chaos, so we can navigate a way through it.

 

R A I N

One helpful approach is the RAIN method:

R — Recognize that life has become unmanageable.

A — Accept that this may stem from a lack of mindfulness or attention.

It’s been said that the only real mistake we make is failing to pay attention — because if we’re truly present, we have the capacity to meet whatever arises.

The less attention we give, the more pressure builds, and the less capable we feel.

I — Investigate what’s happening. Sometimes that simply means doing one small thing to get started. Maybe its triage, just creating a list of things we need to address in descending order.

I once had a coach who told me, “Today, just organize your paper clips. Nothing else.”

That’s from Kaizen — a Japanese method of steady improvement. It’s based on the idea that we aren’t failures; we just haven’t yet learned to succeed. We don’t accomplish what we wish to because we’ve never learned how to look.

And finally, N — Non-identification through Nurturing. Don’t take the overwhelm personally. It’s not a verdict on your self-worth. It’s not a punishment. It’s just a state that we can see best by stepping back and taking a clinical view.

What can I do now?

In an advanced coaching seminar, my assigned mentor asked, “What are your goals?” I said, “I just want to be competent.” He frowned and pushed for a grander ambition. But honestly, that was it. I had come to see that chasing something “grand and wonderful” often creates more pressure — more weight — and keeps me from seeing the ordinary, manageable things right in front of me.

It is said that people tend to overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can do in the long term. The antidote to both is simple: take the pressure away. Pressure is not conducive to mindfulness. Mindfulness is essential for competence and simple competence is what builds the confidence to learn more.

Learning more about our unmanageability does not require unpacking the labyrinthine motives of  self-sabotage. We can just acknowledge a manageable problem and begin to take the simple steps toward it – instead of pulling away from it.

TRIAGE

So, we’re talking about a kind of triage for our lives — a way to sort what’s essential from what’s noise. Much of what overwhelms us is self-recrimination: “I should be walking more… I should be meditating longer… I should be better by now.” We seem to love piling on and then feeling incapable because we can’t see our way clear. “Unless I can do it all perfectly, it’s not worth doing at all.” We’re trying to comb through the chaos and still having conversations with our parents in our head. Just stop. Be a scientist. Let all the unnecessary voices go. Maybe we can figure it all out. But what can be done now?

We can love ourselves now. We can encourage ourselves to regain mindfulness.

The first priority must be our own well-being — physical, mental, spiritual. Without that, mindfulness itself becomes hard to reach. So start small: ten minutes of meditation, then look at the work you wish to accomplish and break it down.

What can I do today? How can I prioritize the tasks?  Then break it down. If you’re like me it’s too much, so break it down. Do less so you can learn to do it better.

One task at a time. One breath at a time. Learn how to accomplish less right now, so you can accomplish more over time. Breath  And let all the unnecessary judgment fall away. Self-punishment doesn’t motivate; it corrodes. We don’t need to prove our worth by suffering harder.

Feel your body. Tension doesn’t help. It never helps.

Breathe. You’re a human. Treat yourself with respect. Pull away and go back. Find your flow and since you’re so expert at avoidance, avoid all tomorrow’s tasks, so you can learn to work with what is here now.

Then the Upside Down begins to turn right-side up again.

 

Learning to Work with Emotions

The idea of the “inner child” may sound simplistic, but it gestures toward something true about being human: our emotional life is often far less sophisticated than our thinking mind wants to understands. The intellect would rather manage, dismiss, or reinterpret emotion than feel it directly. But like any child, our emotional world doesn’t grow through suppression—it responds to being seen, accepted, and guided with care.

When people hear the word emotion, you can practically watch them contract. Some get sad, some start overthinking, some feel perplexed, as if feeling were a foreign language. I have a brilliant tech-minded friend who looks at emotions the way I would look at a confusing line of code—she identifies so strongly with her mind that her feelings get overridden. But when we ignore or exile what’s happening inside, our “inner child” doesn’t disappear; it acts out in subtle or hidden ways. We go on pretending we’re sunning on some Malibu beach while a storm is quietly raging in the background.

Although sunshine seems appealing, humans cannot live by beach alone. And those that do, find ways to challenge the beach, such as surfing, deep sea exploration or operating a cabana. But the most successful surfers have real love, acceptance and understanding of the waves. This deep connection is not intellectual, it a felt sense. One doesn’t think their way through riding a wave. That would be a sure way to crash. As the song goes’ “ya gotta feel it.” Maybe when our emotional state crashes it’s because we are thinking rather than feeling our feelings.

Working with emotions doesn’t require a degree. Emotions don’t need to be traced back to their original parents before we’re allowed to meet them. Therapy can be valuable for history and context, but meditation begins in the immediacy of now: What am I feeling? Can I acknowledge it? Can I allow it? The practice is less about solving and more about connecting.

One skillful way of doing this is the RAIN process: Recognize, Accept, Investigate, Nurture, which naturally leads to non-identification. Recognition is like taking a snapshot—you see the child as they are in this moment without insisting they be otherwise. Acceptance is the simple bravery of letting the experience exist without making it bigger or smaller than it is. In loving-kindness practice, this is like the first soft smile before compassion opens.

After being seen and accepted we can investigate. Meditators do this by looking into their present experience. Not with analysis, but with curiosity, with feel, just as an improvisational jazz player feels their way through music. Trungpa Rinpoche spoke of “feeling the feeling” fully, letting it be absorbed and digested until it becomes nourishment rather than poison. If we attempt to push our feelings away, or cling to them with tight identification, emotions are prone to the poisonous.  The nurturing in RAIN isn’t coddling—it’s intimacy. When we let the energy of a feeling move through without argument, we can allow it t nurture and enrich us. And we don’t need to keep identifying once it passes. There was anger and now it’s gone. Suzuki, Roshi said his anger was like a comet scorching across an otherwise open sky.

Emotions rarely respond to logic. Reasoning with fear is like telling a frightened child there are no monsters, or instructing a dog to let go of a stick because it has no nutritional value. The wise parent doesn’t exile the child for being afraid—they hold, guide, and stay present. At different moments the child may need a hug, a boundary, or a quiet “back to bed now.” But always, the foundation is relationship, not rejection. The parent understands the point of the family are it children. But the children don’t need to burden of making decisions for the family. The wise parent knows that the child, despite its protestations, needs to be guided.

Tara Brach calls our emotional inner terrain “the muddy middle”—the space between the narrative-making mind and the body where feelings actually live. We identify with thought, but emotion often starts and storms in the body. The mind scrambles to define and control what it hasn’t yet acknowledged. Artists understood this long before psychologists named it. Freud and Jung began to map the inner world, but it was people like Artaud, Picasso, and Francis Bacon who refused to squeeze feeling into rational shapes. They gave form to what can’t be neatly explained.

Feeling is not a problem to be fixed or a possession to defend. Emotions arise, move, and dissolve when they are not clung to or condemned. When we acknowledge, accept, investigate, and nurture them, identification loosens on its own. Then we’re no longer saying my anger, my fear—we’re simply noticing, there is fear, there is anger, there is grief. This quiet shift is the beginning of freedom.

Feeling our feelings is not indulgence—it’s our birthright, and perhaps the central labor of being human. When we stop treating our inner life as an interruption and start relating to it with courage and kindness, our emotions mature. And so do we.

 

• The image in the post is of a Tibetan Buddhist deity called Dorje Trollo who is the embodiment of compassion in the form of liberated passion and anger. Once released of constraint, emotions can become a liberated a force for deeper understanding of the art f being human. 

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