Integrate. Integrate. Integrate. My chiropractor uses this word often when he's working on me. It's a word I repeat to myself over and over because it's a great reminder. He used to say discover too, which I don't have trouble with externally. I am always taking in everything around me, taking advice from people from all kinds of forums: books, podcasts, social media. But I need to discover myself again.
At the last singing bowls meditation I attended, Kate from Temple of the Higher Octave suggested that as nighttime outnumbers the hours of the day in fall and winter we are called to introspection. I love this perspective on darkness. It's not a bad thing. It's a way for us to stop focusing on all the distractions around us and instead focus internally.
It's proven that if we turn off our screens hours before bed, we'll get better, more restful sleep. The blue light from our devices tricks our body into thinking that it's day, so our bodies have a tougher time turning off when we are glued to our phones before we try to sleep. And yet we have found ways around this.
Rather than simply turning off our phone before bed, we've now created a way to stay on our devices and still sleep better, blue light glasses. What if we're just avoiding that time of introspection because we've been distracting ourself all day and can't bear to be alone with our thoughts? I think this is why many people can't have a second of silence. Rather than driving in silence, we blast music. Rather than eating in peace, we watch T.V. And it's another reason why so many people refuse to sit in meditation.
I know sometimes I try to avoid confronting the emotions I've been stuffing down all day, like worries about how I reacted in a conversation earlier in the day or anxieties about the future. But what happens when we ignore our emotions and refuse to sit with our thoughts and instead distract ourselves with social media and daily tasks, like e-mail and checking our stocks? We become zombies. We don't truly live in this world because we're more concerned about the persona online we've created.
It's like living in a video game hours out of our day? We feel we can control what happens to us online and that sense of control gives us the peace we're seeking after. But then when we return to our every day lives and put down the phone, we feel powerless. And when something goes "wrong" or doesn't happen the way we planned it out, we haven't created coping techniques to react in a positive way. We have become like toddlers, throwing fits every time something doesn't go our way, or in the case of some people, we retreat within ourselves and swallow all our emotions, to be dealt with another day. And then, the ticking time bomb explodes one day because all our emotions have been ignored again and again and again.
So how do we remedy this toxic cycle we've created that is the reason our mental health is such a struggle today? Introspection. Unplugging. Learning to live in our bodies again. Mindfulness.
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