I’ve come to believe that the ability to self soothe is one of life’s great accomplishments, at least it is for me.  Sometimes I am rubbish at it.  Two nights ago I stayed up til 3 am, my brain like a hamster in a wheel churning away. But then I tuned into Abraham Hicks on Youtube, and the pain and anxiety seeped away.

Nowadays, fortunately, my stuck patterns are usually fairly short and ever more quickly I can get back to having fun and experiencing the bounty of the planet. It wasn’t always thus. As a child, I don’t think I was aware when I was upset or anxious. The pain was squirreled away so deep.

Instead my body developed its own alarm system. In place of feeling overwhelmed or anxious, I got sick ( a form of physical respite when all else failed). Over the decades I’ve learned how to feel my feelings in real time. Probably went too far in the other direction at first (and turned into a sort of emotional firecracker), but over the last 1o years I’ve been learning how to feel deeply (both the good and the bad), let these feelings go and move on…all in increasingly rapid succession. With the result, I now feel like an emotional short order cook.

Does any one thing work for everyone? Probably not.  We all have things that give us comfort – eating, drinking, loving, working, sleeping, meditating, music, cleaning and ordering and sport – even expressing anger for some –  the list is endless.  I’ve witnessed all of the above and more. But for me these weren’t enough. What helped? Learning to soothe from within. Listening to Abraham Hicks obviously,  but also asking my higher self what to do. I think of my higher self as my spiritual umbilical cord. A tap root to all knowing conscious.  Nutty – maybe?  But who cares, it works ..