When the shit starts piling up (and for me, this would be right now), this can become quite a trick to pull off. The more things go south, the easier it becomes to lose focus – and this negative energy can just feed on itself, becoming stronger and more destabilizing as it grows.
This is exactly what you don’t want.
So how do we turn this around? Well, it’s not a panacea, but for me the single most important weapon I have to reorient myself is meditation.
Sometimes even that is no match for a tsunami of trouble, but it will definitely take things down a few notches.
How it does this is somewhat of a mystery to me, because when I’m meditating during times of extreme duress, it sure doesn’t feel like I’m reclaiming my center. I often feel like I’m not really meditating at all – my mind never seems to get “quiet.” My mantra gets tossed around by a deluge of worried thoughts like a cork in the ocean, or at least that’s how it feels.
But then, 20 minutes after I start, I open my eyes and I realize something happened.
I’m no longer perseverating on the worst case scenario, and I usually get back to feeling like “Okay, I’ve got this.”
Works for me – YMMV, but what do you really have to lose except 20 minutes?