How to embrace the seasons of your life without guilt

You’re not wasting time when you’re in alignment

by Seichi Hayashi

Lately, one of the biggest lessons I’ve been learning is just how much more pleasant, easeful and light life is when I am in alignment, and I just allow myself to be where I am. Sometimes, complicated or painful things happen in your life and they will emotionally dysregulate you. And you don’t have the energy for work or creativity or all of the usual things you’d be ‘applying yourself’ to. There are two ways to respond to this:

One: force yourself to do everything you wanted yourself to do, or thought you needed to do, and suffer. Do it slower / less well, spend way more energy than you usually would just getting yourself to start, and resist the emotions your body is trying to slow you down to experience.

Or, two: just let it be. Go inwards, feel what you are feeling and then let it go. And when your energy returns, move towards what is calling to you, what is needed of you, and harness your now-recalibrated energy to do so.

To resist or to allow

Most of us tend to take Path #1, because it’s all we know. It’s all we’ve ever been shown or pointed towards. Path One feels ‘normal’, maybe even ‘safe’ to us. Because we don’t realize that it is safe to pause—to slow down and feel what we are feeling. So we try to push through. In the end, we probably don’t do the thing we were pushing ourselves to do (or don’t do it that well, anyway). We feel drained, exhausted, emotionally dysregulated, and are left with a pretty bruised self image after all of the forcing and effort that was applied to just get ourselves to do the thing.

You can just not do things, too

But sometimes, it really is about the not-doing-things of it all! It’s about allowing, feeling, surrendering. And that core thread—the balance between doing and being, allowing and exerting, willing and receiving—is the key that unlocks life for us… Because our path is not meant to be 100% FORCE. It is not meant to be us just doing things all the time. (How do you know you’re doing the right things if all your time is spent doing, hm?) It is meant to be a balance of us letting ourselves become still enough to hear what we feel the need to do, and then taking action, doing those things in moments of clarity and energy.

Read that again: Stillness > Rest > Pause > Receive the inner signal of what to do > Then, act! Enjoy the doing, fuelled by life force, intention and ferocity.

But don’t do things just to feel good about yourself, if those things aren’t things that are actually helping you move towards what you genuinely want or need.

This subtle difference—of actually accepting that life is meant to be a combination of sprints and rest, of stillness and momentum, is SO liberating, precisely because we are creatures that are capable of, and require, both.

Act like a King

Lions lay around and rest, sleep, or peruse their environment for up to 20 hours a day, conserving their energy for decisive, quick, fierce bursts of action. Yet, they are feared and revered by most beings. Why is that? Because they act when necessary. They don’t force themselves into constant exertion such that they will be too drained to act with ferocity when the moment demands it.

Art by Gillian Lahav

We need rest to take action with our full energy.

We need to act with our fully energy to actually crave rest.

It is a balance. How much have we heard that word? Balance, balance, balance. Everyone talks about balance. But how often are we actually living it? Embodying it? True balance is about tuning in and noticing. Noticing what you need, and when. Then, listening. Without doubt, without negotiation, without persuasion or making what you need ‘wrong.’

Noticing what brings you closer to yourself. Noticing what your body and mind are bidding for. Noticing that you are here. Right. Here. And that if you’re willing to be a patient, humble observer—your body is telling you exactly what you need. And you might not like it. You might wish it was different. In your mind. But if you are willing to listen anyway, to allow it to be true anyway, you will find that simply embracing and surrendering to this moment, this feeling, will help you bridge your way to the next thing… The thing you want to just get to already, or feel ready for now.

There is no trick to make this process easier, no secret hack. Except the act of noticing > allowing > embracing > feeling > doing > releasing > noticing again. This sometimes means resting, baking four times in one weekend (who said that?) or, sometimes it can mean taking action on that big, scary task ahead of you that you have been avoiding, but finally feel that sacred tinge of readiness for.

We are complex, dynamic, ever-evolving creatures. But there is a way to make things harder than they need to be, and there is a way to make things only as hard as they need to be. And Path One (trying to force yourself past your feelings even when you don’t have the energy + capacity for the thing you are trying to force) is a sure-fire way to make things HARDER than they need to be. And surrendering to / allowing the feelings that actually need to come through, is the only way to make things exactly as hard as they need to be.

The more you do this—feel exactly what you are feeling and approach those feelings with a neutral curiosity that is not full of resistance—the easier it becomes to embrace even the hardest moments. And the easier it becomes to act, because you will be ready and charged up for action, by the time you turn your attention toward what needs to be done!

This is a practice, it really is. And as you integrate it, you will still occasionally catch yourself forcing something, and that is okay. This practice is all about noticing, returning to what you are feeling, where you are, taking care of yourself the best you can, and not resisting or pushing down things that will leave you in more pain later on.

What if my urges don’t appear healthy?

You might be thinking: well, if I took Isabel’s advice, I would just want to lay on the couch all day and eat chips and watch TV. If that is the case, I would say, that is a very useful reflection for where you are at with respect to giving your body + mind what they are bidding for from you! The more you earnestly tune in, listen to yourself and remain in tune with your genuine desires, the more healthy and aligned your inner requests become. Just as it takes a bit of time and conscious intention to ‘crave’ working out, or eating healthy food, it takes time to show your body that you are granting it healthy ways of resting and recharging. Reading by candlelight. Creating a project as a way to recharge. Crafting. Cooking. Baking. Cleaning. These are things you will start to crave when you consciously make space for yourself to rest and recharge through aligned means. But if you never grant yourself time to recharge or rest, of course your body is going to ‘steal’ that rest from you in the most aggressive, self-numbing ways. You need to train your mind to crave aligned rest by granting yourself rest consciously, instead of waiting for yourself to burnout and then watching yourself feel drawn to the lowest impulse actions you could possibly reach for.

Rest feeds action, action feeds rest! They are equals; it is not a hierarchy

We glorify action/productivity, and antagonize/shame rest, but the truth is that they are both just neutral objects. Two sides of the same coin of existing. We need rest to act, we need to act to feel the satisfaction that lets us fully rest. It is not one over the other, or forcing / avoiding so much we cannot even detect what we need. It is about being a patient, clear observer, noticing what you need, and granting yourself permission to do (or be) without guilt.

Seasons come and go. So do emotions!

Most of all, the greatest comfort you can take in this process is that emotions, like seasons, come and go. Impermanence is one of the only certainties we have! We know that everything changes.

As a lifelong east coast dweller, I can tell you that every winter, I get so used to the cold that it feels like it is never going to leave. Not even in a bad way; it honestly just feels like it is going to be winter forever. And then eventually, inevitably, that first above-zero day emerges, and my serotonin systems reboot in a way inconceivable to my five-months-into-winter-mind, and I remember that the seasons come and go, actually. It is truly remarkable how much this catches me by surprise every year, every season. That they come, and then they go.

I warned you… link

Emotions are like this too; they come and then they go. And yet, when they are here, it feels like they are going to be here for truly ever. Like, this is just life now, this is just how I feel now… perhaps, this is even who I am now? But it isn’t so. And one would think we learn this lesson quicker than we ultimately do. After all these years on earth, living in this body, I still sometimes feel like, when I am sad, I am going to feel sad forever. And same with feeling happy. But one thing we can rely on is the impermanence of our inner seasons. Just as the weather changes, no matter how convinced we are that it will be winter or summer forever (unless you live in California, I guess), the seasons come and go.

As I write this, large, thick, fluffy snowflakes are falling in sheets from the sky, covering the earth with a thick white blanket of fresh snow. Yesterday, everything was melting and the sun was out and it felt like spring had arrived. I like to laugh at these rapid changes, because they are a mirror. You might think you are through something, before it pulls you back in. And instead of trying to convince yourself it is sunny and warm out when it is actually snowing and the sky is an opaque white that shows no hint of sunlight, it is wise to let our inner state simply be instead of trying to convince ourselves it is not so. And just as when a snowstorm comes, what you want to do is stay inside and get cozy and enjoy the beautiful scene outside, tending to yourself and your home as you do, we can do the same thing with our ‘colder’ emotions. Instead of forcing action and exertion, we can just cozy up by the embers of our psyche and watch the fire crackle as we give ourselves an easier time on a day where we have less energy and need a little more self-tending. This is how to embrace the seasons of your life without guilt: let what you are feeling be true, don’t judge yourself for not having the same amount of energy and hunger for doing each day, you don’t force things too hard, and trust that, like the seasons, your inner life will bloom and die and be reborn, over and over and over again. And remember that even when a feeling seems permanent, fixed, just ‘the way you are’ now, it almost certainly is not. That if anything is certain, it’s that almost nothing is.

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