Pressing Restart

Hello again. I know, I know, it has been a while. A little over 2 years to be exact. Amazing how time flies by. In the blink of an eye everything changes....and I have been blinking A LOT in the past few months, how about you? From one day to the next, heck from one moment to the next, you just never know what is going to happen. I have had a lot of thoughts running through my head and I wanted to find a way to share some of them. So I thought I would come back here and restart the blog. After all, many of us are in the process of redrawing our comfort zones practically every day right now, so why not? Here's to a little more comfort in the zone for the second half of 2020!

Roots and Branches

When I was in shiatsu school I had the privilege to study Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about many things. The concept of yin and yang comes out of that tradition. They also talk about roots and branches when treating a condition of the body. In that modality it is believed that in order for an ailment to go away and not come back, you must treat the root of the issue as well as the symptoms. If only the symptoms (branches) are treated, then it is very likely that the ailment will resurface because the root cause is still present. For example, if you have a headache because of a neck injury, someone can give you something for the pain and it might make you feel better in the short term. But if the neck injury is not treated, the headache will just return because you didn’t treat the root of the issue. Just like if you pluck the flower of a dandelion without pulling up the root, it will grow back.

This is the same with things outside the body as well…like social issues. We can treat the symptoms by trying to soothe tensions in the moment, deescalating violence, or making minor adjustments to protocols. But if we don’t dig deeper, getting to the root of what is causing all of these eruptions, and treat the systemic causes, it will all just “grow back”. Treating the branches is necessary, in the short term, because sometimes you have to quiet the symptoms to see what is really beneath them. But that is only the first step. Once the root cause is exposed it can be treated and the symptoms will be relieved for good.

This all feels so overwhelming sometimes, and if you are like me, overwhelm leads to shut down. When I see a challenge that feels so much bigger than me I just want to walk away and leave it for someone “stronger”. Someone more equipped to handle it. A professional of some kind. But then I remember something else I learned from TCM and I use an analogy that brings me back to earth and the reality of the situation. It is the example of the spiderweb.

When you look at a spiderweb from a distance it looks big, intricate, and complex. It’s composed of a lot of little strands and they radiate out from the center. One of the most important things to realize is that each and every strand relies on the others for strength and stability. If you pluck even the outermost strand of that web, the entire thing vibrates. If even one of them breaks, the web is weakened. The same is true of humankind.

We, each of us, is a strand in a complex web. We have our own piece of the web to tend. It is not our responsibility to tend to the whole thing, just our little piece. By keeping our piece strong, we are able to take up some slack for others who are not quite as strong at any given moment, and who need our help. By tending to our strand and recognizing how it connects with all of the others, we keep things strong and resilient to the storms that come along.

So when the overwhelm starts, I pull my focus in to my strand and see what I can do to make it stronger. One thing that I can do to help in the moment; reading a book to educate myself on the issue, listening to someone who needs me, having even one conversation. All of these are doable tasks, and while they might seem insignificant in the scheme of things, each one adds to the strength and integrity of the whole. And when you add all of the tasks being done by all of the people who are working toward that goal, they add up to something much bigger than little ol’ me.

That is how I keep moving forward. That is how we can dismantle the broken systems (the roots) and have the inequities (the branches) go away for good.

If we all tend our strands we can make this a strong, viable, and thriving movement toward a much better tomorrow.