For the last two weeks, I’ve pretty much followed my shower routine: shampoo, face wash, conditioner, teeth brushing, soap, rinse.
But, I kept getting stuck on step one. Wait, what is wrong with this stuff? Why won’t it lather?
I knew there was something funky going on, but I just kept doing the routine.
A few days ago I figured it out. It won’t lather, because it’s conditioner.
Oh geez. No wonder my new Mia Farrow-style hair felt so weird and greasy.
I had been using conditioner followed by conditioner for TWO weeks.
This is stress.
Creating hazy veils of Maya, the Hindu word for illusion, so subtle that our senses malfunction and wrongly perceive or interpret things the way we want them to be. And, when it goes unchecked this sneaky stress becomes Avidya, generally agreed by Hindus and Buddhists as a state of misconceptions and misunderstandings of the world.
I bought shampoo. Of course, I’m using shampoo, I told myself each day.
Everything looked the way I wanted it to look.
Sure, it was just conditioner.
Just as it was just burning the rice, and just a speeding ticket, and just a dead battery after leaving the lights on and just wet laundry sitting in the dryer for a week.
As present in my life and day-to-day as I thought I was, I wasn’t. I’d pared my life down to the essentials this year: What could be stressful?
No more busy, no more crazy, way less complicated.
And yet, I still had blinders on.
What have you been ignoring? Has your gut been nagging you about something?
After countless “oh geez” moments of late and the mounting chaos, I had started sensing that something more was going on.
- Streak of bad luck?
- Mercury in retrograde?
- Signs from the universe?
Perhaps.
Whatever the cause, my past experience is that chaos precedes breakthrough. Something from deep down needs to come to a head. A problem itself and/or resistance to reality.
Low grade stress was rapidly compounding and leaking into everything, especially the everyday.
The conditioner discovery was the last straw for me.
You know those moments. Mundane but profound. Tiny but significant. The crack where the light gets through.
I had been spinning out from my center, feeling undone, and wondering how to cope better. What to do to regain wholeness, a sense of integrity?
Just as it wasn’t actually shampoo, I realized it wasn’t about what to do, but what I wasn’t doing. What I was ignoring.
It was the moment I had just read about in Wild Creative by Tami Lynn Kent:
“Let go of the urge to flee when intensity and a sense of inner chaos build; the form within is being pressed and changed. Stay with the discomfort as long as you can. The physical, emotional, and/or spiritual compression you feel is your resistance to your expansion. Surrender the tension in your body, the resistance in your mind, and the hesitation in your heart. Surrender, and you will fill with new life.”
Depending on how you react to staggering truths, you stop cold, you breathe deep, you sit down. Or maybe you cry in the shower, like I did.
Hard, grateful tears.
For my deepest knowing. For answered prayers. For the stress.
The stress that has been my blinking “check engine light.”
Just as Kelly McGonigal describes in her TED Talk about how to make stress your friend that my friend, Tiffany, reminded me about:
“When you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement: you’re saying that you can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges and you’re remembering that you don’t have to face them alone.”
My trusty body had been talking all along—through my gut and my actions.
And I was finally listening. Finally ready to receive the vulnerability, detachment, and decisiveness I’d been praying for.
True to form, since this breakthrough so much has showed up.
Vulnerable, detached and decisive things I wasn’t ready to do a week ago, like debt consolidation through a bank loan.
And some beautiful synchronicity, like the text I just got from a woman in my neighborhood Buy Nothing group. She’s moving and needs to purge her bathroom. She’s got shampoo! Real shampoo.
May your eyes be wide and your gut be loud this week,
Jules