The strange, beautiful gift of overwhelm

How a simple understanding can power a revolution

Overwhelm is a thief. Its kiss steals with cold lips our life force, creativity, purpose, clarity; leaving in its place a strange paralysis. It’s all too easy to rail against it instead of perceiving the gift hidden in its cloying embrace.

Overwhelm calls us to listen, when the chaos of our outer world has overloaded our inner one. It is a necessary marauder. It is a messenger.

It’s all too much, our beleaguered nervous systems scream. Too much information, too much pain, too much insanity.

After a certain time fighting avalanches, we simply can’t take in any new data. When our emotional in-tray is full, when we are simply exhausted and wrung out, our clever bodies respond by doing the one thing they can, shutting down all but essential processes. There is simply no more room for new information.

This is a beautiful and powerful call.

When overwhelm strikes, and that strange numbness blankets us in its diffuse fog, it’s a call to self-nourish. To find some way to pour life back in, give balm to our bruised psyches and broken hearts. To listen to the intelligence of our own nature.

Many flowers close their petals at night, then open them again to greet the sun. Nature exists in cycles of activity and receptivity. We are grown from nature itself, and are designed around these same movements. The animal of our body does not understand the times we are in, but it does understand the ancient cycles of life. It knows what to do when our minds feel lost and our function for empathy is so exhausted it feels broken.

Our bodies are asking us to go in. Find solace. It’s essential. To give quietness and breath to the parts that hurt. The parts that are scared, feel like they are drowning in data, emotions, confusion, terror, exhaustion.

Our ravenous culture of disconnection feeds on our relentless doing, rather than nurturing our receptive being. It prioritises productivity over connection. We have become commodities instead of artists. Addicted, as we all know but are helpless to stop, to delivering our attention in fragments to glowing screens that suck us dry and delivers ever more frequency to our overwhelm.

Our needs are at the bottom of the pile. It’s up to us to get those needs met. To reclaim our life force.

A simple, beautiful movement, and a necessary one when we are in overwhelm, is this. To choose a moment of self-care. Draw in the petals of our hearts, give ourselves space to regenerate, and ask…

What is the most nourishing thing I can do for myself, right now?

Not tomorrow, not for someone else, not to save the whole world, but to save our own, in this moment. So we can pick ourselves up again, battered but unbowed, and make the choices we need to make for ourselves, for those we love, and for our future.

What is the most nourishing thing I can do for myself right now?

Not the thing we ‘should’ be doing. The unmet need that hides under that ‘should.’ The need that, once met, gives us the energy to carry on.

We are always worthy of care. And we’re of no use to the greater world if we fall over from lack of nourishment. This simple replenishment means we gather our strength, feel energy start to flow again. Our minds start to file and order their overloaded systems, and in this growing clarity, solutions can reveal themselves. Connections form. Intuitive leaps reveal themselves in dazzling colour. We rebalance, so we can wade once more into the fray. We reconnect with a sense of hope. We understand that nobody is coming to rescue us, so we must rescue ourselves, and that this rescue is in a thousand tiny steps of repatterning. Starting with self nourishment. We repair our connection with ourselves so that we can renew those connections with others, our communities, with nature and our spiritual lives, whatever they may be. And from these healthy connections, pathways of balance reveal themselves. We find our people. Our roots entwine. Communities grow.

We are designed to connect. Interpenetrate. It’s how we’re made. By going inside and consciously rebuilding, we open up the trillions of nodes of connection we have available, and by giving ourselves the break from connecting with streams of poison, we create a deeper capability to connect with people, ideas and practices that can nourish us.

If we need reminding, nature waits with open arms. With wild swathes of connection and the dance of glorious life, in every song of bird and insect, every rustle of leaf, every growing shoot. In the ten thousand tiny lives hiding in bark, under indolent leaf litter that smells of good earth and quiet rot. In the scribble of clouds against a sky clear as forgiveness. Falling into a horizon gives us context, allows our gaze to soften and fall up, so we feel our place in an expanding universe.

Overwhelm is a symptom of overload, and a call to take care. When we heed its wisdom, allowing ourselves the gift of that bath, that book, that walk in the forest, that night around a crackling fire, that hug with a friend; when we allow the liquid trill of wrens to find our ears, and the lulling perfection of waves to remind us that everything changes; we bring ourselves home to our own essential nature. The interconnected web of life that pulses and sings around and through us every single minute of every single day feeds us, gives us energy. Breath by breath, moment by moment, we come home to ourselves, and reclaim what was lost.

And then, maybe, we remember that we are not alone. Dust ourselves off, take a deep breath, settle our shoulders and move back into the chaos of life with a renewed sense of purpose, clarity, compassion and courage. And possibly even wonder.