Your overwhelm is a teacher
Your overwhelm is a teacher - it's guidance, letting you know that life is beginning to deliver the 'more' you've been asking for and that you have reached an 'edge' in your willingness to welcome it.Overwhelm points up the ways that you believe you are not ready for the life that you've called toward you - your own doubts about whether you can 'handle' it. You can.When Overwhelm arrives, you may think it's about creating order; making a tighter schedule; cleaning up the house or controlling the people and circumstances that keep interrupting you, distracting you. It's not. This teacher is about learning to welcome the full flow of what you've called into your life.It's about the courage to meet what comes.It's about doing the work to strengthen and maintain your 'container' so that you can.This work is simple, though it can feel challenging, even terrifying because we are working with change... and though we ask for change - crafting vision board and setting goals and visualizing the spiffy new lifestyle we're going to lead - we're attached to our familiar ruts, our favorite haunts, our routines. So when the ground starts moving, we get upset and overwhelmed.Here's what to do:1) Calm down. You have been overwhelmed before and survived it. You are capable of handling this situation - all of it.2) Sit down. Close your eyes and instead of reacting to the overwhelm; instead of running from it with stories about how it's going to take away your freedom, your time, that special afternoon ritual, let the overwhelm reveal its own story to you.3) Listen to the overwhelm. Seek to know it, to see it. What IS this overwhelm? What has it come to show you? Let the overwhelm reveal the places where you feel afraid of change. What feels too precious to lose? If you think of the overwhelm as a rising tide of energy, like water, what parts of your life feel vulnerable to the oceanic surge that's trying to push its way toward you? Where do the levees of your life need shoring up?4) Finally, greet the overwhelm as the teacher that it is. Welcome it, love it, the way you would honor an old friend who has come to help you expand your idea of yourself... to help you grow strong enough to let your life change.