My Favourite Coping Mechanisms For Difficult Times

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

Conrad Joseph

Hey, Lovelies.
It’s been a busy time for me. I am settling into our new home. I am unpacking. I am writing our Planner for 2022. I am back at work, conducting psychic readings. And I am supporting our community, many of whom have lost loved ones to COVID in these past few weeks, or whom have received traumatic health diagnoses of their own.

I love what I do, and part of that means I hold space for a lot of people going through trauma and life upheavals.

I’m sensitive. I care deeply about the people I help. When they hurt, I hurt too. Not just emotionally. When your heart is breaking, mine does too. When you have a terrible diagnosis I feel it in my own body, and I have a sense of what is to come. I’m psychic. I feel your trauma as my own, your thoughts as my own, your worries as my own. I can feel along your timeline, whether I want to or not. I can’t turn it off. When I’ve created or been given a strong connection into you, the information often keeps coming long after we have stopped working together, or talking together. I have never been able to make it stop. It can be absolutely overwhelming.

So, no matter how much I look after my physical and mental wellbeing, sometimes I need more, in order to get myself back into a place of peace and emotional stability.

One of my tried and true coping mechanisms is Morning Pages. I write three longhand pages in my journal, free writing about anything and everything, in order to get what’s in my head down on the page. I do this religiously, after my morning meditation and before my morning cuppa. It helps. A lot.

I also do ten minutes of yoga stretches and breathing before I get dressed to start the day.

That way I have stretched body and mind.

The other thing I like to do is to get out under a big sky. Maybe that’s an early morning sky. Most often it’s a night-time sky. I stand outside, looking up, until I feel the energy of the sun or moon or stars. I feel the energy of the trees around me, and the land under my feet. I let myself and my worries get smaller and smaller as I feel the land and sky around me getting bigger and bigger. I surrender everything to the earth and the sky. I surrender everything to the Universe.

Soon, I feel completely held by the landscape, and it puts all of my worries into perspective as I see how transitory my life is, and that I belong to something so much bigger than my immediate pain.

Last night I stood out under a cold dark sky filled with stars for a very long time, trying to quieten my pounding heart and the busy-ness in my head. The air was crisp and scented with trees and earth. Owls and bats flew in the nightscape above me. It took what seemed like an eternity for my breath to slow, and the pain to leak out of my chest and out of my eyes, until finally I was filled with silence and peace. That peace, when it came, was a light inside me, and it brought me a stillness that resonated in every cell.

I still feel that peace within me this morning, and I know that I am filled up again, ready to go back out into the world and do whatever is called of me to do. It is only by surrendering that I can do the work I came here to do. I can’t fight it, I can only give myself over to it. I can only be who I am. I can only do what I can do. The harder it gets, the more stillness I seek for myself, so that I can come back to balance.

I highly recommend these simple coping strategies. Perhaps they might help you too.

Love, and the beauty of a silvery sky in the early hours of tomorrow, Nicole xx