The Knowing Within

Happy New Year.  I hope this finds you safe and well and that you managed to have a peaceful holiday season. 

Just before Christmas my family and I caught the Covid bug.  It started with my daughter who seemed to bring it home from school, and then things cascaded as one by one we all became affected.

It’s been a bumpy ride at times.  Although I am on the mend, this thing seems to ebb and flow and the changeability of the symptoms can really mess with your mind.  Given my work with Chronic Fatigue, and the amount of fear that has been conditioned into us about this virus, it’s been really interesting to me to see just how revved up my mind has been about this at times. 

I think had I not had the experience that I have had recovering from Chronic Fatigue, I can easily see how someone recovering from Covid could end up in a quagmired mess of confusion.  This could lead them to go around and around in their hamster wheel minds struggling to understand their plight and and how to navigate the uncertainty, all the while firing up their nervous system in a way that is not too helpful to their recovery.

This is very human, and I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t gone down this route a few times since getting this.  But those moments have been, luckily, short lived, and I can attribute that mainly to one thing:

"I have a better sense of where my ‘Knowing' comes from”.

Some years ago, my daughter became unwell with what looked like a normal childhood bug.  We did our usual at the time treating her as we would any other childhood bug, but as time progressed she didn’t seem to be getting better.  At some point, my wife and I concerned at her state looked at one another and we just “knew” to take her to hospital.

There was no thinking involved. 

No figuring out.  

No weighing up the pros and cons.

Just simply: a “Knowing” from within.

We drove her straight to the hospital where she was admitted immediately and placed on intravenous antibiotics.  She had early stage septic shock.  We were told in no uncertain terms that our actions had saved her life.  Had we not taken her to the hospital it is very unlikely that my little girl would still be with us today.

The world we are living in is more uncertain than ever.  Right now I know that many of us feel like we are walking down a dark tunnel with not a lot of visible light.  How will we manage and what do we do with ourselves?  How is this all going to end?

The answer from what I can see is simply: “We don’t know”.

Humans don’t like “not knowing”.  I know that I don’t!  But what I can say is that when my daughter got seriously ill that day some years ago, we had never been in that boat before.  It was an unknown to us.

Yet, our 'Knowing' was still “online”.  It knew what to do then, as it has as I have been recovering from this bug.

Yes my mind has quite often wanted to do things about what I was feeling. I’d find myself in figuring out mode literally going in circles and not finding many solutions.

But then there would be those moments where I’d know and I would just find myself taking action.  All of a sudden out of nowhere, I’d be ordering a top up of my supplements, or emailing a friend who had already gone through this.  Or I’d just know to go to sleep or eat certain foods.

From what I see, the knowing comes from within - from the quiet of who we are.  It does not come from our crazy hamster wheel spinning minds.

Despite the 2020 that we have all gone through - we all likely have examples of seeing this.  We’ve had to chop and change our lives and accommodate doing things differently.  Whether we’ve recognised it or not, that knowing has likely kicked in time and time again to help us to navigate things that we hadn’t even considered or thought about. 

Good to know!

But it’s also good to know that understanding this part of ourselves in not a guarantee that things will always work out positively.  Again, I think we all know this.  Life does go up AND down.  Sometimes bad stuff happens, and things we don’t want to happen occur anyway.  We aren’t immune from this happening as part of the human condition even when we understand our Knowingness.

But understanding where our knowing comes from allows us to be more graceful as we navigate the great unknown that we are going through.  It means that even though we may want to know what we are going to do, that actually we don’t have to drive ourselves crazy spinning the hamster wheel of our minds to navigate the uncertainty.  We can allow ourselves to dwell in the quiet and the peace of who we are, and know that if there is something we need to do or change, that deeper part of ourselves will nudge us, in the same way that it nudges our heart to beat and our lungs to breathe - moment to moment.

Sending you lots of love as always,

John

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