Stability in the Storm: Finding Your Inner Anchor

There’s no question that the times we’re living in are harder than we’d like them to be. The collective energy feels tense, uncertain, and uncomfortable. Everywhere we turn, we see evidence of our world in a massive state of flux. Under these circumstances, the future often feels like a big question mark. It’s easy, in the face of such instability, to feel shaken or overwhelmed. And that’s exactly why it’s so essential to find a source of stability that doesn’t depend on external circumstances aligning just right. But how do we do that? Where do we turn? The first place is inward. Because when life isn’t offering us the stability we crave, it’s time to create our own. 

The thought of having to generate stability from within might seem daunting, especially in such exhausting times. But the practice of it doesn’t have to be. In fact, developing a deep inner anchoring process is a series of several small and manageable steps. There are three key ways we can find internal stability and anchor ourselves: through our bodies, our minds, and our lives. Each of these provides a powerful foundation we can lean on, no matter how unpredictable, chaotic, or destructive things may get around us.

Anchor Through the Body

The first step in navigating times of instability is learning to regulate our nervous systems and connect with sensation. Grounding ourselves in our physical bodies helps us stay anchored in the present moment. When we’re centered, we become like bamboo bending in the wind—resilient in the face of life’s turbulence. Practices that encourage us to return to our bodies help us shift out of self-protective states like fight/flight/freeze—responses that kick in when we feel threatened or overwhelmed. As we soothe our nervous system through bodily practices, fear and anxiety naturally begin to subside. We become more responsive and less reactive to the world, seeing and processing things more clearly, and approaching life with curiosity, flexibility, and calm.

Anchor Through the Mind

Once we’ve cultivated a sense of stability in our bodies, we can turn our attention to our minds. Our thoughts play a significant role in either grounding us or throwing us into even more unmanageability. Challenging unhelpful thinking patterns, practicing problem-solving, and exploring new perspectives are all ways we can create mental anchors. When the world feels uncertain, engaging intentionally with our thoughts and beliefs can make all the difference. By doing this, we gain the power to shift our mindset and find stability within, no matter what’s going on around us.

Anchor Through Our Lives

The final frontier of internal anchoring is found in how we live our daily lives. When the world feels chaotic, it can be incredibly stabilizing to focus on what’s directly within our control. This might mean cultivating meaningful relationships, getting involved in our communities, or making choices that align with our deepest values. In uncertain times, being purposeful and intentional about how we show up in our own lives offers an anchor of its own. Working on this level helps us stay grounded through the instability we experience in the larger world, offering us direction and peace in the process.

The Power of Internal Anchors

Whether we’re anchoring through our bodies, minds, or lives, we stand to gain immense stability by turning inward instead of relying on outside circumstances. In times of upheaval, this is not only the best thing we can do; it’s the only thing we can do to find a real sense of sturdiness. By cultivating our internal anchors, we give ourselves the foundation we need to weather the storms that come our way.

 

Why Resting is Revolutionary

If I had to guess, I’d say that in most conversations between two adults in the Western World, at least one of the people will utter the word “busy” to describe how they’re doing. This state of being—or, rather, of constantly doing—is so common and so pervasive, that it’s often what we lead with when speaking about our lives. Sometimes, we say it with exhaustion, like a quiet admission of feeling trapped by all our obligations. Other times, we wear it like a badge of honor—proof of our productivity, importance, or success. Either way, we say it a lot. And, for the most part, it’s true. 

In our fast-paced, industrialized, capitalist society, productivity is praised above all else. We’re trained to be more like human doings than human beings, and we often have an unreasonable number of demands on our time. The pressure to produce is immense, and what it takes to survive—let alone to achieve or acquire more, as most of us have been taught to do—just keeps increasing, so that we never feel like we’re doing enough. 

With this as our backdrop, the act of rest becomes revolutionary. To commit to slowing down, unplugging, setting aside the task list, and allowing ourselves to do nothing is a radical act in a world that has taught us to conflate our productivity with our worth. But prioritizing rest isn’t just about subverting societal norms. For many of us, it’s also about challenging things we learned in our childhood about resting—that it means you’re lazy, for example, or that you can only rest once you’ve earned it. Because of all the things we’ve been taught to believe about it, rest can feel like a selfish or slothful indulgence, rather than a necessity. 

Sometimes, resting is not only difficult because of what’s going on in our minds, but also because of what’s going on in our bodies. It is often the case that slowing down and attempting to shift from the doing mode to the being mode feels uncomfortable or even unpleasant. Some of us grew up in chaotic, unpredictable environments, where our nervous systems were shaped for vigilance. Letting our guard down to rest can feel exposing, even unsafe. Or, it can feel boring and under-stimulating, because we’re so unaccustomed to being in the present moment that attempting to rest in the here-and-now feels like torture. 

Rest is a natural and fundamental state for any living being. Yet, our culture has shaped us to perceive it in layered, emotionally charged, and overly complicated ways. The customary way of life in our culture places legitimate barriers in the way of us resting as much as we need to. And, if we aren’t mindful, we can participate in building our own barriers to it.. This is why we must become revolutionaries when it comes to rest. Rest isn’t a luxury; it’s a reclaiming of what’s most natural. If we want to truly live—and not just survive—we must teach ourselves to honor the deep truth found in nature: that we can only be as active as we are rested. 

Waking Up From the Dream of Unworthiness

In almost 20 years of doing therapy, I’ve come to discover a few universal threads that weave themselves through all our lives. Whenever I take a step back and look at the experiences of my clients as a window into what it means to be human, I always get brought back to one consistent theme: the belief in our brokenness. Over and over, in almost every single therapeutic process I get to be part of, I see traces of that common core belief. Through many intimate conversations over many years, I’ve come to discover that this belief about our unworthiness is more common than any of us realize.

The belief that we are unworthy, that we are not enough, takes root very early in our lives. Before we have the conscious ability to thoughtfully reach this conclusion, we unconsciously determine that it must be true. There are evolutionary reasons for this. As defenseless, dependent beings, children quickly grasp how little control they have over their world. But what’s one thing they can control? Themselves. This is where the belief in unworthiness begins—because if I am the problem, then maybe I can be the solution.

If I assume that I’m the reason my needs aren’t being met; the reason my parents seem so exhausted and overwhelmed; the reason my siblings are getting everyone’s attention; the reason things feel so scary and unpredictable, then maybe I can do something about it. I can make sure to make others happy with me, so I don’t give them anything else to worry about. I can hold back my needs and try not to bother anyone, so I don’t make things worse. 

As it turns out, believing there’s something wrong with us was, at one point, a strategy for survival. But over time, this belief takes root inside us and starts to influence the way we see ourselves, the way we carry ourselves, and the way we engage with others. 

At some point in the therapy process, almost every single person I’ve ever worked with comes into contact with an unworthiness belief. Usually, when it comes out, it’s attached to a second core belief: one that’s equally damaging, equally scary, equally common, and equally untrue. Not only do most of us deal with believing there’s something wrong with us, we also believe that we’re the only ones dealing with it. The thought process tends to go a little like this:

There’s something deeply, fundamentally wrong with me. And if others knew how broken/damaged/undeserving/unlovable I actually am, they wouldn’t want anything to do with me. 

That’s a pretty painful thing to walk around believing, isn’t it? Yet so many of us are walking around this way, cut off from each other out of fear and shame. And while we’re all playing small and safe, hiding and performing so that nobody catches on to our unworthiness or brokenness, we fail to see the universal quality of our condition. We fail to see that actually, we’re all in this together. I can’t help but smile when I touch on this ironic truth that emerges from the work I get to do with people. The only thing that’s really wrong with us is the belief that there’s something wrong with us. And one of the biggest reasons we feel alone is that we’re keeping each other at a distance, already believing we’re alone in our experience. It’s interesting to consider that if we all could just recognize how universal this core belief is, we could stop feeling so shut down, fearful, and ashamed around each other. We could let ourselves be fully and imperfectly human, understanding that all we’re surrounded by are other imperfect humans. 

Waking up from the dream of unworthiness is a vital step on the path toward personal growth and transformation. It’s a process of

  • healing the child within, who did the best they could with what they had, 
  • coming into a more gracious, loving, and accepting relationship with ourselves,
  • choosing who we wish to be in each moment, rather than continuing to run on old, outdated programs,
  • being generous in our interpretations of others’ actions, understanding that it’s easier to be forgiving of others’ flaws when we are accepting of our own.

Most importantly, it’s a process of entering a state of awareness that allows us to be fully connected to ourselves and others. In this way, waking up from the dream of unworthiness isn’t just about healing, it’s about freedom—the freedom to discover that we were never broken or alone to begin with.