Rainy days
We all get mental rainy days.
And when these mental gray days pop up for me, there are a series of things that I try to do to allow myself space to feel like shit and also space to offer myself love, compassion, and healing.
Gray day protocol:
don’t run. I think the most important thing when you’re not feeling mentally great is to not use a form of escapism. Don’t reach for alcohol, don’t grab the video game controller, don’t text your ex, don’t do drugs. Running away from ourselves only further that feeling of disconnection and loneliness.
Be sad/mad/hurt. Validate your feelings and experience. Write it down or talk about it out loud to yourself and simply bring validation to your own personal perspective and experience. Don’t try to talk yourself out of how you feel, allow yourself to feel that feeling in its entirety. this is where I really think that writing it down can be a very powerful experience of seeing your own perspective from an outside viewpoint almost.
Let it pass. This is by far the hardest thing about a gray day, a bad feeling, not holding onto it. When you let yourself be mad/her/sad let yourself go there, but don’t stay there. Reminding yourself to let it go, let it pass. I think that the teachings of impermanence can be really impactful here. Knowing that everything must come to an end. Our feelings, the situations that are bad and the situations that are good. Everything at sometime will come to its conclusion, that is just the way of life. (my own studies of impermanence have been monumental in helping me embody this.)
Cultivate joy. Even in the muck, even in the height of feeling like crap, don’t forget to find a tiny bit of joy. Treat yourself to your favorite coffee, wear your favorite shirt, watch your favorite movie. Find a tiny spark of joy and then feed that flame. We are the ones responsible for initiating happiness and joy in our own lives. We cannot wait for somebody to come along and offer those things to us, we have to be the ones to go out and seek it to cultivate for ourselves, to water those seeds of joy within.
Be there for yourself. This is something that I’ve talked about several times, but placing a hand on my heart, a hand on my belly and simply reminding myself. “ I am here for you.” has been some of the most powerful self connecting work that I’ve done. This can be done on your bad days too, reminding yourself that you are here to witness your own process and that you will never leave your side again. (This is how you heal an abandonment wound.)
No matter how many spiritual books, you read, no matter how many workshops you attend or courses you do you will still have a mentally rainy day. That is a part of our human experience is to go through these ebbs and flows of joy and suffering.
Learning how to tend to myself during these harder days is what has allowed me to reparent myself, it has helped me to tend to a lifetime of anxiety and depression with care and compassion. These are my action items for when I’m really not feeling my best, not to make myself feel better, but to give myself space and time to simply feel and be.
Sunny days ahead ☀️
