Don't get sucked in to negative spirals

How to take response - ability for our own emotions,

and reclaim our response - flexibility to to world we live in.

I had a disturbing conversation with a friend, last night, who believes that the government here in Spain is manipulating the climate with silver iodine to make it hot and take our freedom away in a new wave of lockdowns, control measures for extreme heat. At the same time “they” are destroying dams and draining the water away to make it look like a drought and make money by selling “us” water.

The common theme with all conspiracy theories is that “they” are making “our” lives worse, taking away our freedom and profiting from the situation that “they” have created. It makes you angry right? They press your buttons and pull on your stings.

This iss the moment to take a deep breath and check in with your body. I did this and…

I came back with some articles debunking FAKE NEWS but - truth doesn’t matter anymore. Anyway it's hard to reason with people who’ve gone down that way. As I’m sure you can appreciate, because these days everyone has a friend who believes stories such as this.?

Emotions precede rationality, Or as the saying goes, “Don’t confuse me with facts, I’ve made up my emotions”. And our autonomic nervous system is the OPERATING SYSTEM that supports emotional “programmes”.?

After the shock of the last few years, we are all more on edge than before. Our nervous system is hard wired to detect threats and prepare the body to respond and get us out of danger. The problem is that the source of the danger is unseen, and these days people see danger everywhere.

In this fertile soil, such stories take route. When our nervous system is in DANGER mode, we get edgy and reactive, and many of us have an underlying feeling that something is wrong with the world.?

The vagus nerve detects baseline feeling across our body, 80 % of its information flow is from the body UP to the brain. When this GUT FEELING reaches the BRAIN the brain interprets the DATA and creates the story that our thoughts tell us about the world. So when the nervous system is on edge it’s easy to see how people get ANGRY and FRUSTRATED and share their stories on social media with emotional language that triggers others to react the same way.

In the UK a disturbing and distorted so called NEWSPAPER - The Light, is broadcasting similar messages to the edgy nervous systems about the country. Which needless to say they are absorbing and “lapping it up”.

This is a DIS - EASE that is spreading and only we have the power to step off the bus and reset our own nervous systems to come back to EASE, CONNECTION (with ourselves, others and the natural world, and back to a sense of BELONGING. When our nervous systems feel safe and free from danger, we can be the most authentic version of ourselves, we can get creative, we can work together as teams more effectively because we can tune into one another and communicate our ideas.?

If our nervous system provides the OPERATING SYSTEM of fear and anger, it can also switch MODES and move into a zone that supports community and connection. This is the fertile soil of all POSITIVE EMOTION that in today's narrative will make us feel happy, joyful and blissful.?

At the root of all felt experience in human life the NERVOUS SYSTEM is at work, deep in what we call the unconscious mind. But it has its own intelligence, the source of BODY WISDOM, it's only unconscious because it is far away from what we think of as the conscious mind - our normal level of awareness.?

By learning to understand the signals and messages your nervous system is sending you in the sensations, feelings and emotions in your body you can detect which operating mode it is in. Then you can begin to choose how you want to feel, by working with and re-tuning your nervous system.

This is the key to feeling good in life.

What practices work for you? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments.