As the seasons start to change around us, the team at Inspirited Living is thinking about how to choose joy in a time of flux even when the world around us feels more anxious, more stressful, and more filled with fear. Our Inspirited Living newsletter, InSpire, is a great place to start letting the joy into your world and choosing to shift your perspective. The inspiring, uplifting, and supportive stories from around the world and from the Inspirited Living Community remind us how beautiful life can be. Here are six ideas to support your choice to #LiveInspirited!
1. How to Tune-In and Shift Perspective
At Inspirited Living, we know that one of the most powerful tools we have to overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed is always at our fingertips: the power to shift our perspective. Where we choose to focus—using our power to pay attention to what we see, smell, touch, taste, and hear in our world matters. When we are able to choose where we focus, we can harness our ability to choose what we want to allow in our lives, and what we want to move away from, or avoid. Here are five more ways to shift perspective and #ChooseJoy.
2. Tune-In to How You Feel
Start by noticing that when things change around us, we feel things like joy and fear. Notice that as the seasons change, our world is giving us all the prompts that change is happening. With these simple signs, we may feel anticipation and anxiety. We may not know why, but we feel it all the same!
As nature shifts with the seasons, the world around us is shifting too. We experience the changes as a community as well as individually. Sometimes we are more sensitive to change because of our own background. The childhood traumas we experienced when we were overwhelmed and felt alone can resurface when we experience change and disconnection from others, even as adults. As a grown-up we know “this time” isn’t the same as “that time” but the part of us that watches and worries about something happening starts to stir.
Just noticing, and saying out loud to ourselves, “Change is happening.” And, asking “How do I feel about it?” can help us notice what we are sensing, feeling, and experiencing. If you get stuck here, reaching out for compassionate support from a friend, a family member. If it seems like too much, and you are looking for “therapy near me?” on google, try the very compassionate horses and Integrative Equine Therapists at Beachwood. They can help get you unstuck!
3. Tune-In: Notice Where Stress Shows Up in Your Body
Noticing, and bringing our awareness to the places in our bodies where this stress shows up, can be the first step to recognizing that stress. Ask yourself: how do I feel physically when I’m thinking about this change? Where does this feeling show up in me?
We can normalize and internalize the anxiety and fear around us to such an extent that we think, “this stomachache is normal” or “this headache is normal” or “this “jittery, heart racing, short of breath feeling is normal.” Noticing that we physically “feel bad” is the first step to figuring out why. Does this need medical attention? Does this need spiritual attention? Does this need a shift in perspective so that I can move away from what’s causing these feelings to even figure it out? Listening to what our bodies are trying to tell us is an important first step to finding that out!
4. Tune-In: Choosing What We Experience
What does the change smell like, taste like, and feel like to our bodies? Perhaps we feel melancholy and sadness that the trees are starting to change color and the season of cold and dormancy is coming? Do you feel cold, do you feel restless? Does a warm hug or a warm drink help you change that perspective? Do you need to move your body? To dance, to boogie in your chair, to lift your face to the sun and sing?
What does change smell like? What are the tastes of change? Is it the season of apples, apple cider, apple pie, and apple picking? Do we want comforting tastes that we know so well, or is this the time to try new foods and explore culture by familiarizing ourselves with trying new foods? How do we engage our senses in the change around us to welcome what feels good?
5. Tune-In: Choose News to Savor instead of News that Screams
Shifting perspective includes shifting what we see and hear. Social media is filled with stories that create more and more anxiety and stress until we lose our joy to the overwhelming sounds and feelings of fear. Raging music filled with anger can stir our fears and fan the flames of our anxieties.
Shifting perspective is a choice. We choose what we allow into our feeds, our media, our music, our movies, and our bodies. We get to choose what gives life and what feeds us, or what feeds the fear.
When we choose inspiring news from the world and our communities, it stays. If it is uplifting, it stays. If it is supportive, it stays. If it contributes to joy in the world—ours or our community—it stays.
Inspirited Living’s newsletter InSpire is built on this shift in perspective. It’s a collection of news from the world and the Inspirited Living’s Community that lifts us up, that helps us find new connections and inspiration, and that creates joy in our world. Sign up to make the choice to savor the good news and connections!
6. Tune-In: Notice How You Feel After You Shift Perspective
Martha Beck’s blog on the “Light Side Rising” is a great example of how it feels WHEN we notice what is inspiriting, uplifting, and supporting in the world around us. She uses the analogy of Star Wars and the darkness rising to point out that there’s an amazing, powerful, and global network of people who are doing the opposite: they are choosing to change the world for the better.
When we notice the Inspirited lives of those around us, it’s like tapping into a galaxy of hope, and creativity; of connectedness, and inspiration. Noticing how it feels to be part of that world helps to reinforce our conscious choices to shift perspective, to chose joy, and to live inspirited lives.
