"How's Your New Year Feeling So Far?"
What's the pulse out there? Many of us opted for a quiet New
Year's Eve choosing Mozart and a glass of wine in front of the
fireplace over getting drunk, hanging off the rafters, and
negotiating a statistically dangerous drive back home in a sort
of mad compensatory gesture.
It's really just not that time of year.
I'm a coach, and judging from the mailbag and phone sessions,
it's a low energy right now, mentally and emotionally. This is
our natural desire for homeostasis, self-correcting after a
change. Wanting things externally and internally to get back to
normal. One of the rules of physics is "What goes up, must come
down." It applies to emotions as well.
Picture a graph. We went way UP over the holidays and now our
inner wisdom is taking us way DOWN, so we can restabilize at the
midpoint again. This is where our system wants to be because
extremes of emotion in either direction cause stress and strain.
If you're feeling "uneasy" about this rather peaceful state,
it's likely you got the sort of parental message my client
Rebecca did. Whenever she was bored, or idle, her mother gave
her a nasty chore to do. She began to connect idle time with
punishment.
EQ is all about unhooking connections that don't work. If a
peaceful state stresses you out, look at what you're doing to
yourself and give yourself a break. That's not good Emotional
Hygiene. If pleasure makes you feel guilty, or contentment makes
you uneasy, or feeling grateful feels like tempting fate, or
someone giving you a gift makes you suspicious or feel
obligated, how about taming those feelings and then reconnecting
them in a new, better way? That's what EQ is all about.
Accept this energy. Enjoy it. It will change. Put down the whip
and let yourself rest. Hibernate like the bears in the woods. It
will all be there when you come back, mentally and emotionally,
and if you've been good to yourself, you'll have more than
enough energy for it. In honor of this energy, I'm not rolling
out my programs for 2006 yet. When I went to the store
yesterday, it was jarring to see the more efficient retailers
had already stripped the Christmas displays down and replaced
them with Valentine's. "Not yet," thought I. "I'm not through
with Christmas yet. I haven't the energy right now."
The energy will return unless you feed it. Feeling lazy is a
part of nature's rhythm. Chastising yourself, or worrying about
it, or lashing your partner into a frenzy to compensate is not.
Rest, restore, go with the process, not against it, and whatever
you do, please don't demand of others that they "snap out of
it." Ponder instead this wise Arabian proverb: "He who makes a
mistake is still our friend. He who lengthens or shortens a
melody is still our friend. But he who violates the rhythm
unawares can never be our friend."