Many of us feel anxious, lost and stressed right now.

Yes, elections are over. But our world needs to heal and grow. COVID is still raging like a wildfire, and many of us are isolated and alone. Some of us are homeschooling while working (is that even a thing?), and most of us just feel super uncomfortable with our future and don’t know how to sit with this huge question of the unknown. What can we do to feel in control? What can we do to feel powerful in a powerless situation? How can we stand in our truth, and finally feel some sense of normalcy inside when the world feels not normal?

We can do two things when we feel anxious, lost and stressed:

1. We can numb and be avoid-dancers.
2. Or we can align with our spiritual truth, knowledge and guidance to release anxiety and stress.

Let’s talk about your first choice. Busyness, numbing, and running are all options that we may choose to not deal with how uncomfortable it feels inside our lives and our bodies right now. Running looks like this: running from one task to another, and falling into bed every night exhausted and wondering how you will do one more day like this. Avoid-dancing, which is avoiding the emotions and stress that you feel inside your body, is a form of running when we push our feelings away by eating more, drinking, watching too much Netflix, shopping, drugs, or social media. Anything outside of ourselves can be used to numb out and avoid dealing with the real issues that are causing you to run in the first place. The consequences of being too busy and avoid-dancing is that we never actually release the anxiety and stress that we are trying to run from. We start to notice the extra pounds rush in, which adds to our stress. Our relationships begin to decline. We feel exhausted and disconnected to ourselves and others.  We may also begin to feel hopeless and helpless about ourselves and the state of the world.  Running is a downward spiral that leads to more anxiety and the inability to make decisions based on our highest good. The second option to deal with anxiety is to align with your highest truth and open to receive spiritual guidance through what I call the GREAT PAUSE. The great pause, slowing down, is a pathway to align with your truest self and highest guidance.  When we stop and slow down, we can live by our highest, best decisions. We create the space to see what is the Divine’s will in every situation, instead of making decisions based on fear and anxiety. The GREAT PAUSE allows us to serve a higher truth rather than follow our anxiety down a trail of poor choices. We can align ourselves by asking this question, “How can I best serve in every situation in my life?” We then can give: to ourselves and others in a way that gets us out of our heads and into our hearts. Our hearts don’t know anxiety. They know love. When we serve and give, we remember that we are not our anxiety. We are our love, and the anxiety can take a back seat.

This is the time to learn how to: Pause, Give, Heal, and Serve.

We do this by creating a slower pace of life. We then can slow down, to feel our emotions, which heals anxiety. Feeling is like a warm compress to a sore muscle. Feeling is healing the wound that no one can see. Anxiety is the open wound that keeps on getting fed by our inability to slow down and truly feel an emotion fully.  Once we feel why we are so anxious and really give our bodies permission to feel, then anxiety can release and we can live in peace.  We need time to heal. Heal our bodies, heal our wounds, and heal our country. We need a collective cry, a warm hug (please!), and to build our consciousness to a higher way of living.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that it is time to align ourselves with our soul purpose and our spiritual self.

Anxiety lives in the earthly body until we sit long enough and slow down to feel it and release it. This awareness releases the limiting beliefs and blocks we have, which allows us to live in our soul purpose and truth. Anxiety can’t live in higher consciousness. When we are aligned, it is then we can ask, “how can I live my life with purpose and help others discover their higher purpose?” We are hungry to know how we can help and how we can make a difference. We see that life is short and want to do our best. During a time of anxiety, when we have turmoil, we are being forced to look at ourselves, our surroundings and shift our priorities. This is a time of transformation. But we don’t become butterflies, we grow into butterflies. We may be anxious because we are in the cocoon stage, in the dark, and feeling into unknown territory. That makes us want to numb and check out. Or run and be busier, focus more on the outside of ourselves vs. the inside. This is the exact time anxiety is at its highest. Why? Because we aren’t trusting in the Divine. We aren’t in our alignment in our bodies and in our emotions or spirit. We are in fear because it’s dark and there’s no way out (or so it looks). This is the time to transform: Stop Feel Heal Serve Feel the fear and do it anyway. Being there for others because service (guided action), makes us feel more aligned in our knowing, and our seniority.

We can’t jump into the butterfly.

Anxiety is here as a messenger to teach us to sit in the darkness of the cocoon and grow. To grow we must get quiet, we must face our fears, we must wait, and be patient, as we grow into butterflies. We need nourishment to grow, we need patience, we need rest, we need trust, we need to breathe to grow.