Everything is so up in the air! The uncertainty of our times – from Covid, to hurricanes, to elections, to economic craziness – just keeps growing.
It’s times like these when we benefit from better understanding our own natural tendencies towards scrambling for answers or plugging our ears and lowering our gaze simply to get through the moment.
I love thinking about how we engage (or don’t) with the things we don’t understand in our lives. It’s a topic that fascinates me. As I look back on my own life, I can see hints of why uncertainty, ambiguity and unpredictability interest me. I experienced a lot of change and uncertainty as a young child. We moved a lot and my parents didn’t have a particularly stable marriage. My reoccurring dreams were always about being left to drive a car where I couldn’t reach the peddles.
But…moving on from psychoanalysis…
The point is – I find this to be a really interesting topic and my mindfulness practice has only deepened my desire to spend time in the spaces where I feel uncertain. To notice my natural tendencies and to look at the ways in which I try to fill the gaps…or ignore the confusion for more mundane things (like Netlfix and popcorn).
This is actually a topic we touch on in all of my mindfulness courses. I enjoy helping my clients look at Engaging Ambiguity as a practice. We don’t all have to feel comfortable with uncertainty, but it is a normal part of life. When we can build a better relationship with how we handle uncertainty, we’re more likely to be able to make shifts to adjust. Those shifts can help us avoid the blind, disconnected reactions we may have when uncertainty is there, wearing us down, without our awareness. Like all mindfulness practices, becoming aware of our habits, enables us to move from reaction to response.
If you’d like to spend some time looking at how you engage with ambiguity – I invite you to try this exercise from my Essential Practices and Finding Your Way courses. You can print it straight from my website!
If you’re ready to dive even deeper – join my completely online, entirely self-paced mindfulness course Essential Practices for Life Between Worlds during the month of September (2020) and get 50% off with code HALFOFFSEPT2020!
