There are times when it feels like the earth is quaking beneath our feet. This might be when we’re enduring a personal challenge or transition, it might when we’re drowning in the cesspool of intrusive thoughts, and it might be when the global uncertainty feels like it’s too much to bear.

As I’ve shared in many other posts and webinars – several of which you can find here and here (in particular the webinar called “Finding Your Stillpoint in Turbulent Times”) – the healthiest and most reliable way to I know to find solid ground amidst the shakiness of the world is through our personal, meaningful spiritual practices. By “spiritual” I don’t necessarily mean religious. Rather, I mean the pathways that guide us back to source, calm, and wisdom that we can turn to every day, and especially when we feel destabilized by the shakiness of life.

What are these pathways? There are as many as the creative source itself, but these are the ones that are most commonly practiced in our modern world:

• Connecting with nature
• Creativity
• Dreamwork
• Prayer
• Meditation
• Healthy rituals
• Connecting with ancestors

It’s this last one that Victoria and I explored in our most recent Gathering Gold episode. You can listen to the full episode here, and the following are a few excerpts.

Connecting with Ancestors

“This is something that so many of us in the modern West have lost, not just the stories, we have lost so many of the stories, but also that sense of honoring and reverence, that we don’t have alters dedicated to our ancestors, we don’t light candles on their birthdays or death days. Embedded in everybody’s heritage, whether it’s religious or just their cultural heritage, there are beautiful traditions that can help us honor, and in the honoring, we stay connected. And we can imagine, whether or not we think it’s true, that they are also staying connected to us.

“It can be really small, but that we make it a point to bring our past into the present. And for highly sensitive people, we struggle so much with the passage of time and our nostalgic feelings for how quickly we grow up and our kids grow up and all of that. And I think that one way that we can mark time and also sort of dip into circular time as opposed to linear time is by bringing the past into the present in this way of honoring the ancestors. So yes, we are in this month of October, and we’ve heard this phrase, the veil is thin in this month.”

 

We are Not the First to Endure Hard Things

“People have endured and gone through hard and joyful things from the very first humans that ever existed. And all you have to do is look back to see that our ancestors endured, they survived. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. We carry that in us. We carry those stories of survival in us, whether we know it or not.

“There are so many ways that connecting with ancestors does help us to feel more rooted, and does help us to feel more grounded, especially in hard times. We can call on whoever we’re connected to or somebody that we don’t even necessarily feel connected to, to just kind of say, “Hey, help. I’m going through a hard time. Maybe you could come a little closer.”

Finding Healthy Tethers

“That’s what Grace Through Uncertainty is about. It’s finding your healthy tethers, your healthy anchors, because we are tethered and we are anchored. We have just forgotten how to find those places.

“And so left to our own anxious minds, we go to intrusive thoughts and worry and rumination and obsessions and compulsions. And for some people, addictions. There are many unhealthy ways to try to gain that foothold into feeling more grounded. It’s a desperate attempt, but it’s our best chance when we’re younger to feel more grounded as we go up into our heads.

“And there are many healthy ways to try to gain ground, to try to connect to something bigger than ourselves, to try to reunite with and rediscover those ancient tethers that we are all a part of.

“It’s an open forum in terms of encouraging people to find their own ways because what has happened is so many people have left organized religion and for a long time religion provided some of those ways, but for many people at a huge cost. And even for those still embedded in organized religion, many of them don’t still have their daily medicine bag.

“What is your medicine bag that you can rely on in daily life? We need them in the daily unsteadiness of daily life because just living, even when things are going well, is in precarious existence, especially with a sensitive mind who’s aware of how precarious it is. But then when things are hard, that’s when we need those tethers even more. We need those places that hold us up, that make us feel held, that make us feel loved.”

 

A Roadmap to Find Grace Through Uncertainty

If you’re struggling with uncertainty in any realm – relationships, friendship, self-doubt, parenting, health, money, decision-making, the world – and you’d like to be guided through a roadmap that will help you find reliable ground amidst the groundlessness of life, please join us for this 7th and FINAL live round of Grace Through Uncertainty. It starts on November 9th, and I look forward to meeting you there.