For my whole life I've wrestled with nervous system dis-regulation and all the things that go with that. Anxiety, overwhelm, and insomnia are three of the big ones for me.

I've used lots of tools and strategies along the way; one that I've found consistently helpful is focusing on my breath. You could call it breath awareness or intentional breathing.

It's taken me some practice to get in the habit of:

1. noticing that I'm tense, dis-regulated and scattered, and that my breathing feels restricted
2. focusing on my breath (even though its often initially uncomfortable)
3. staying focused on my breath (or bringing my attention back when it wanders) until the tightness eases and my breath can go deeper -- success!

That whole process can take as little as 3 to 5 breaths. (If I'm really tense and have been forgetting to do it, I might have to repeat the process several times before I get that sense of relief.)

It's taken me a while to get the hang of it, but as I've gotten better at it the benefits have been out of all proportion to the simplicity of the practice.

Here are three of the reasons I've become an advocate for the practice of conscious breathing, mindful breathing, or as I like to call it, "breathing myself home."

1. Focusing on your breath is restful and refreshing

Focusing on your breath can nourish and refresh you in ways that stressed out modern people don't even realize they're missing out on.

Try it. For three in breaths and three out breaths, just be with your breath. Let your breath bring you home to yourself.

Follow your breath inward. Be open, receptive, curious, about what you might find inside there where your breath goes.

Don't try to breath more deeply or slowly, just observe. Be ready to follow your breath deeper and feel the deliciousness of slowing down, when your body invites you. 

If nothing changes at first, that's ok. Repeat the process again the next time you think of it. (Consider how you could prompt yourself to remember to do it more often.)

Sooner or later, I feel confident that you'll experience a shift. For me, when the shift comes, several things happen. My breath slows down and deepens. A spaciousness opens up inside of me. Tension melts away.

Body tissues that have been tight and exhausted get to relax. Flow and ease (which could be our natural state -- just ask a cat) are restored.

2. Focusing on your breath brings you home to yourself

In my experience, awareness of your breath brings you into your body. To borrow words from Thich Nhat Hanh, it brings you "home." 

Our only true and unassailable home is "what the Buddha called the island of self, the peaceful place inside us,"¹. I say "unassailable" because it's the only home that, with practice, can literally become a safe sanctuary that's unaffected by outside events.

The severity of outside events that your safe island of Self can withstand obviously varies with practice and nervous system capacity. To me, practicing and building my capacity for this is SO worthwhile.

I'd go as far as to say its life-changing.

3. Using your breath to bring yourself into presence can give you back your time

I'm one of those people who never has enough time. There's always more to do than there is time to do it, and with this comes a sense of anxiety, hurry, and overwhelm.

I'm finding that dropping everything to focus on three to five full breaths (which doenst take long!) is giving me back my time.

Really. It makes time slow down, and the hustle recedes as the spaciousness inside me expands. What a relief!

To paraphrase some of THich Naht Hanh's wisdom on this:

Did I pay attention to my breath today?

If you keep a journal, even just a very sporadic one, try putting a prompt in there that you'll see each time you write in your journal (use a post it note for paper journals):

"Did I pay attention to my breath today?"

Related

The post "Emotional Regulation: 3 Simple Practices for Peace This Holiday Season" has more on short, simple breathing practices that can help when we get anxious, tense, or scattered. 

The full moon is the moment in the lunar cycle of peak light, peak energy, peak everything (like the Summer Solstice in the annual solar cycle).

Before electricity, the full moon was when communities held celebrations because you could see all night long.

Also before electricity, the full moon was the friend of anyone whose work took them outside at night -- because you didn't have to stumble around in the dark. Obstacles were clearly revealed.

We're less in touch with the lunar cycle now that we don't rely on the moon to light our nighttime activities, but metaphorically speaking, the full moon can still "illuminate" what we need to "see more clearly" in our lives.

The full moon is a good time for acknowledging the good things

The full moon is an excellent time for celebrations. Take a moment while the energy is peaking, to count your blessings and acknowledge and celebrate your strengths, commitments, good intentions, and accomplishments. 

Cant find any? For three days in a row over the full moon period, in your journal or on a piece of paper, write:

"I'm grateful for [...].

"I acknowledge [...]"

(Not sure what to acknowledge? Pick something good about you, something you've achieved, or even just something you haven't given up on. It gets easier with practice.)

And finally, write

"I want [...]" 

(Acknowledging our desires, especially the ones we don't want to admit to, is a way of honoring them -- which is much healthier and kinder than ignoring or suppressing them³. 

The full moon illuminates what's standing in our way  

Sometimes it feels hard to find much to celebrate, or any authentic desires.

Sometimes all I see at the full moon is obstacles. Frustration. Flare-ups of difficult patterns that just keep hanging on no matter how hard I try to shake them off.

The full moon brings a kind of "peak illumination" to whatever needs our attention. Whatever we've been avoiding addressing in our lives.

"What is obvious--fully illuminated--in my life right now?" is a question I ask as the full moon approaches⁴.

"What is most intense, obvious, or compelling; what is demanding my attention right now?"

"What am I compelled to notice?"

Don't be discouraged if all you see is obstacles. Obstacles present themselves to us more clearly and insistently when we're ready to resolve them.

Until then, they hide in the shadows. We stumble over them, we know they're there, but we don't see them clearly until we're ready to resolve them.

When we're ready, when we "see" clearly--not before--the insight, teacher, support, or resources we need show up. The situation resolves itself, one way or another. (Maybe not comfortably.) 

Our job in the meantime is to pay attention.

Right now, give your full attention to whatever feels intense in your life as this full moon approaches. Feel what you've been avoiding feeling. 

Where is it in your body? Does it have a colour? A shape? A texture? How might a small child describe it?

Identify how it feels in your body to be so blocked, miserable, frustrated, whatever. Be with it to whatever degree feels do-able for you right now. 

Take a long, deep, slow breath into the part of your body where you feel the sensations. Slower. Deeper. 

Then let your breath out.

Slowly.

Even slower.

Keep breathing out until your lungs are empty, and then breath out a bit more.

Do that three times: breathe into the sensations; breathe out slowly and completely. Make your out breath longer than your in breath.

Sometimes it helps to hum as you breathe out. Tunefully or not, it doesn't matter. When I hum, I sound like a drone or a bumble bee⁵.

Now. Now, you're paying attention.

And when you're paying attention (as opposed to just coping) you're more likely to recognize the help you need when it shows up (in whatever form it comes).

Related reading 

What will the Full Moon Reveal for You?

You know how the best ideas show up when we're relaxed?

When you're in the shower, or just as you wake up, or while you're walking the dog or playing with the kids... that's when the solutions to our problems often present themselves, as if out of no-where.

I believe that's because in those relaxed, unguarded moments we allow our hearts to open a little, which makes it possible for some kind of connection to open up between our individual selves and the World around us. 

For me, the experience of receiving needed inspiration in this way illustrates an important truth -- that when I manage to relax and reconnect, I find that the World has my back.

This post explores a related idea: that it's our responsibility to stay connected to the World (or to Source, whatever that means for you) and that when we take care of staying connected, Everything else takes care of itself.

Not that it necessarily takes care of itself the way we think it should... But I find that even (sometimes especially) when I feel HUGE resistance to the way things are turning out, I'm likely to look back with the benefit of hindsight and see why the way it turned out was ok after all. 

An Intelligent World

In giving World a capital w and Everything a capital E, I'm borrowing from Menstruality educator Alexandra Pope: 

The idea of an intelligent World, of Earth as relational, and of our sacred responsibility for maintaining our relationship with it, is as old as humanity. It's an idea I find deeply, reliably, comforting.

The emphasis in the quote above is mine. The only thing the World leaves up to us is our connection to it.

I'm not saying it's easy -- I know from painful personal experience that it's not. But the concept is simple, and I'll repeat it again: when we take responsibility for staying connected and open, Everything else takes care of itself.

When we forget and allow our hearts to close, when we break off the connection, everything falls apart, nothing works -- and that's when we find ourselves grappling with difficult emotional states like anxiety, overwhelm, frustration -- which are really just trying to prompt us to reconnect.

In my case, what happens when I lose the connection is that--like so, so many other midlife women and plenty of men too--I can't sleep.  

What happens when we lose the connection

Insomnia is a thing in my life. I know it so intimately, I can feel as I'm heading for bed whether my brain and nervous system are expressing "I feel afraid," or, "I feel safe" -- and that dictates how much sleep I'll get.

For me, fear expresses as insomnia. But insomnia (or insert your particular variation of fear-driven, dis-regulated, disconnected, emotional or psycho-spiritual discomfort) is only a symptom of a deeper malady.

We modern people are--as Stephen Jenkins⁶ puts it--like orphans. We've lost our connections, forgotten how to stay connected, and come un-moored in the World. 

We've been displaced--and have displaced others--so often that we've lost touch with the earth, each other, our ancestors, where we came from, and how the World and the web of Life can (must) be renewed and restored with every act of giving and receiving.

Everything is fraying and coming undone, including--especially--our own inner worlds, which are mirrored by the outer world. 

Disconnection, fragmentation, and isolation are the fruits of a culture that values "me" over "we," economic growth over relationships. 

Two worldviews - a hostile vs a friendly Universe

In the trailer for the film The Eternal Song, activist and ceremonial leader Pat McCabe says,

What I understand her to be saying there is that the darker-skinned First Peoples⁷ of the World know themselves to be a part of, and in relationship to, the beauty that surrounds them. They understand themselves to be part of a friendly Universe. 

In contrast, the waves of lighter-skinned people who displaced the First Peoples (who were ourselves displaced earlier in a domino game of displacement that goes WAY back), understood themselves to be isolated, disconnected individuals, alone in a hostile Universe. 

According to Albert Einstein, that's an important distinction to understand... 

In my family of origin, the Universe was most definitely viewed as hostile. There are tightly held and very limiting beliefs coded into my operating system that developed in a matrix of hostility, fear, and apathy.

Hence the insomnia (I'm obviously simplifying and abbreviating, but that's basically the gist of it). 

Luckily, we don't have to accept the operating systems we were given by our families or circumstances of origin. We can examine them and re-write them. I'm working on re-writing mine with my new belief that we live in a friendly Universe. 

I say "working on" because the idea that I'm an insignificant, fundamentally broken, isolated fragment adrift in a hostile environment is obviously still in place as far as the parts of me that govern sleep are concerned. It's a work in progress.

Here's Albert Einstein again, basically saying the same thing Pat McCabe said above...

All is well

Along with having come to the conclusion that ours is a friendly Universe, I also believe that the Intelligence that Orchestrates it does not make mistakes. 

Which can only mean that the experience I'm having is serving some purpose other than for me to be well-rested.

My reflections so far lead me to believe that I'm being invited, night after night, to pay attention, to turn inward, to look unflinchingly at what I see. To open my heart and practice compassion and courage -- towards and for myself.

Which in turn, progressively as I practice, allows me to move towards a little more openness and connection with the World around me. 

When I can stay open and honest, I feel safe and I sleep well.

When I'm unable to stay open or I continue to live a lie, I feel afraid and alone and...

Well, you know how that goes. Because you too know what it's like to lie awake while your mind runs around disconnected and unable to come home, unable to land in your body and sink into the ocean of peace that is openness and connection.

But every time I give those limiting, fear-based beliefs another re-run, I watch what's happening. I still can't stop myself from re-running that obsolete program (yet), but I can bring awareness to it.

Awareness -- the witnessing presence -- is the portal out of the prison that Einstein mentioned above, into the peace and freedom of relationship with the World. (That is, in my current understanding -- which is always up for review and further iteration.)

So. No matter how dark the night, sooner or later dawn comes and I look back with the power of hindsight and am reminded that the World has my back, that I am more than I was told I was, and that so long as I maintain a sincere intention to be open to what the World requires of me, Everything else will take care of itself in its own good time.

Most of us pay far more attention to our outer lives than we do to our inner lives, taking care of all the day to day activities that make our outer world go ‘round.

Meanwhile, our inner world is growing wild and out of control in some areas and wilting from neglect in other areas.

As in a literal garden, unless we're present, paying attention, and pro-actively taking action, the weeds will out-compete the things we want to grow in there.

Our fears, disappointments, doubts, regrets, and old ingrained patterns—the “weeds”—compete for available resources with the things we’re hopeful, excited, purposeful or passionate about – the useful and beautiful things we want to grow in our inner gardens.

The seasons - a framework for tending to our inner gardens

Luckily, there is a guiding framework for tending to our inner gardens. It’s the same framework we use for tending to our literal veggie patches: the seasons.

The energies of the seasons are the energies of the cycle of life: birth/emergence, growth, full bloom, harvest, decay, death/dormancy, and rebirth.

With the seasons as our guide, we know that spring time is for new beginnings, summer is for tending and guiding the rampant growth, autumn is for harvesting, pruning, and composting, and winter is for resting, integrating the lessons we learned in our previous efforts, and choosing what seeds we want to plant when spring comes again.

The same principles apply in our inner world.

The “seeds” of spring are the intentions you set. The visioning you do, the creative work of choosing how you want to design and orchestrate your inner life. 

The focus of summer is judging where to concentrate your efforts so that you can give time and energy to the beautiful, useful things you are growing, rather than letting the “weeds” take over all the resources. 

In autumn you gather the "harvest," tidy up, prune and cut back, and put what's no longer needed into the compost.

And in winter you rest and reflect, to integrate the lessons of the previous seasons and so be a little wiser when spring brings new opportunities for fresh starts.

Serious gardeners wouldn't dream of neglecting this seasonal work in a physical garden, but have you thought about how your inner garden needs just the same care and tending?

One way to tend your inner garden is with a journaling or free-writing practice that you align with the seasons (there'll be lots more on this, below). And you can think of the seasons as phases in the cycle of life. 

Micro and macro expressions of the cycle of life

Gardeners know that the life cycle expresses itself everywhere, all the time, zoomed in and zoomed out, endlessly repeating in micro and macro forms.

We find it in the short life cycle of an insect: emerging, growing, blooming, leaving fertile eggs, declining and dying all within a few days. 

It's also there in the waxing and waning energies of the 24 hour diurnal cycle, in menstrual cycles, in the lunar cycle, in the solar cycle (the solar cycle is the annual round of the seasons, which take 13 lunar cycles to complete), and it's there in the relatively long life cycle of human beings, repeating down the generations.

(There are even larger manifestations of the cycle, too, which astrologers and philosophers know about, but I’m only vaguely aware of them so I wont try to describe them here.)

In the next section I'll touch briefly on the topic of "weeds," then in the rest of this article I'll concentrate mainly on how you can align your journaling practice with the seasons of the year (the solar cycle) and with the lunar cycle.

When weeds crop up

One of the things that happens when you dedicate yourself to any kind of introspective journaling practice is that you get to look at your problems--the weeds in your inner garden--from different angles.

If you're a student of Permaculture or any other method/s of regenerative gardening or farming, you know that weeds are actually allies in disguise. They come to heal the soil and to support resilience and biodiversity in our systems. The trick is learning how to work with them rather than struggling against them. 

The same principle applies to the "weeds" in our inner gardens. Our problems, I believe without exception, hold  gifts for us.

The reason we so rarely get glimpses of those gifts is because  we usually try to shoot the messenger rather than paying attention to what it has to say.

So when you see "weeds" growing in your inner garden don't be so hard on yourself, or on the weeds.

In your outside garden, you probably ask yourself why the weeds are here, why these particular weeds, what they might be indicating. You can do the same for your inner garden, by asking questions like these in your journal:

With that said, let's get onto some specific ideas for how to tend your inner garden using a season-based journal.

Keeping a season-based journal for tending your inner garden

When you choose a cycle to align your journaling with, you need a cycle whose time frame is easy to work with -- not too short and not too long.

The solar cycle takes a year and could be as small a commitment as sitting down at the beginning of each season, and perhaps midway through the season, to do a journaling practice aligning with the energies of that season.

(As I wrote in this post, not all places and cultures mark "four seasons." But the archetypal energies of birth, growth and expansion, full bloom, contraction, death, decay, and re-growth are universal. Referring to them as spring, summer, autumn and winter gives us a useful handle with which to get a grasp on them.)

Let's begin with the season of Spring.

Spring, and the Spring Equinox

Around the beginning of spring, everything in nature is brimming with the energy of new beginnings. In your inner garden journal, you can ask and answer questions like, 

 A few days ago in the Southern Hemisphere (September 23rd) we marked the Spring Equinox. This is the mid-point of spring, one of two moments in the solar year when the daylight hours are equal to the hours of darkness. 

Jane Hardwicke Collings teaches that this moment of balance between light and dark is a good time to invite balance into our lives by contemplating the growth that has taken hold in your life and asking questions like these:

Summer

During summer, when you can hardly keep up with all the watering, weeding, mulching, you can ask questions like,

The summer solstice (the middle of summer, around December 21st in the Southern Hemisphere and June 21st in the Northern Hemisphere) is the moment in the solar cycle when the days are longest and the nights shortest. In the glaring light, all is revealed. You can ask,

Autumn, and the Autumn Equinox

Autumn is the season of harvest, reckoning, and then decline. You could ask,

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you have just marked the Autumn Equinox on September 23rd, the mirror opposite of the Spring Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere.

This is the mid-point of Autumn, and it’s the other moment in the solar year when the daylight hours are equal to the hours of darkness.

Jane Hardwicke Collings teaches that this moment of balance between light and dark is a good time to invite balance into our lives by contemplating what you need to let go of, what you need to  prune away or put on the compost heap.

Winter 

In the winter, you get to rest. Winter invites you to sink down, down, down. Into the deep, dark stillness. Into the earth. Into the dormancy and potentiality that lies between the ending of one cycle and the beginning of the next.

In winter, you can ask questions like these:

The lunar cycle 

The lunar expression of the cycle of life takes around 29 days, rather than a full year. So if you choose to track the lunar cycle and use it to prompt your inner gardening practices, the opportunities for growth, learning, consolidating and then taking a fresh start come around more quickly. 

The dark moon and the new moon

September 26th marked what modern astrology calls a New Moon – the moment when the moon passes between the earth and sun so that no light reflects from it to the earth.

Older systems of astrology name this the Dark Moon, and recognize its energy as still, dormant, but full of potential – some of the same qualities we recognize in the deep, dark, quietness of mid-winter. 

In the days after the Dark Moon, if you're looking into the morning sky before the rising sun obscures it, you may glimpse the first thin sliver of moon reappearing in the morning sky. 

This can be more appropriately called the New Moon, and its energy, like the very beginning of spring, is the energy of germination/birth. Delicate, vulnerable new beginnings are stirring.

Same cycle, same energies, zoomed in or out

Journaling by the phases of the moon is very similar to journaling by the seasons of the year.

The new moon and the waxing phases are the ending of winter, the spring, and the early summer of the lunar cycle.

The full moon is equivalent to the Summer Solstice.

The waning phases of the moon are to equivalent late summer, autumn, and early winter, and the dark moon equates to the Winter Solstice. 

Same cycle, same energies. Just zoomed in a little closer.

You may choose to pay attention to several cycles to guide your inner gardening practices, for example the seasons of the year and the phases of the moon. 

If you do that, you'll find that sometimes the same seasons of the different cycles overlay each other. Other times, they line up across from each other. Cosmic energies expressing sometimes opposite each other, sometimes together, always changing, never static, in the endless dance of earth, sun, moon, and your own inner garden. 

Your "seed bank," and new beginnings every spring

Not all seeds germinate in their first spring. Gardeners and farmers talk about a "seed bank," the accumulated seeds from seasons past, waiting for just the right conditions to bring them to life. Some seeds lie waiting for years, and some for lifetimes, before they germinate. And some types of seed are so very prolific that there are thousands of them in the seed bank at any given time. 

There is a seed bank in the soil of your inner garden, too. All the seeds that have fallen in all the autumn seasons of your life are there, and all the seeds your ancestors let fall, and perhaps also many newer seeds from more recent cycles since you started paying more attention.

***

In the Southern Hemisphere right now, two cycles are aligning in their spring seasons.  We're a few days on from the Spring Equinox and we're experiencing a New Moon.

(If you're a menstruating woman in the first few days or week of your menstrual cycle, you get a triple whammy: three spring seasons are aligning in your life.)

During the season of spring in any expression of the cycle of life, and especially when two or more spring seasons line up together, whatever you are doing and thinking is in effect germinating new “seeds” from the seed bank in the soil of your inner garden. 

Ideas, ways, habits, patterns, interpretations – all have moved through the deep, dark, still winter portal of potentiality and are now stirring with newness. 

The newness may express itself as a repeat of previous patterns – well established things that keep popping up in your life over and over again. Or it may express in ways that you choose deliberately, by making careful choices about the seeds you activate. 

As early spring ripens toward summer, the newly germinated “seeds,” establish themselves more strongly. If you bring them to fruition, they in turn will drop seeds that will wait dormant through the winter and may then germinate next spring, gifting their promise and their teachings to the inner garden of your life.

Can you begin to see the power you have to influence the way your life will unfold? You, and only you, are in charge of how your inner garden is cared for, or even if it's cared for.

You get to influence what seeds will germinate in your own inner garden, what you will nurture through the growing season, what you will discard in the fall, and what you will hold onto during the dormant winter, to carry on into the following spring. 

As within, so without

It's never too late to bring conscious awareness to your inner garden and to begin to tend it just as you would any other garden.

We have very little control over what happens in our outer worlds, but our inner gardens are ours to tend.

In here, if we approach the task with sincere dedication, we can develop the capacity to grow truly beautiful, productive, useful gardens. 

As within, so without. The attitude of uncaring neglect we so often see in our other world, toward each other, toward other life-forms, and toward our only Earth, is a mirror. It reflects to us how our culture has taught us to treat our internal selves. 

Repairing the damage we see in the world outside ourselves, paradoxically, begins as an inside job. 

Mother Nature's healing touch 

One last tip is this: remember that you are working with your inner garden here.

It may not respond at all to material things like changes in diet or schedules or working harder at something. It may respond much more to something as simple and subtle as a softening and opening in your attitude towards it.

If you're trying to make inner shifts, or to shift problems in your life that feel stuck and perhaps have been there for a long time, be gentle. Make space for a sense of possibility, rather than hardening and trying to force things.

Welcome your "weeds;" ask them what gifts they bring. Don't shoot the messenger.

Let the tears flow, if they need to, while you're doing this inner work. As you tend to the garden of you with gentleness and compassion, letting emotions move through you as water moves through soil, you're bringing Mother Nature's healing touch into your innermost self. 

Invite Mother Nature in, through the portal of the seasons. Let her help. She's been waiting to be asked. And as she helps you heal your inner garden, you'll be empowered to work more effectively in the gardens of your outer life. 

References and resources

None of what I wrote above originated with me. Here are a few of the sources I can think of to share with you right now. There are many more. 

May this starting point lead you on towards exactly the right teachers for you. And don't forget the best teacher of all: Mother Nature, who speaks directly to you through your own inner guidance.

Equinoxes and Solstices:

• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Ostara: Spring Equinox",  "Mabon: Autumn Equinox", "Winter Solstice, "Summer Solstice"
  
  

Lunar phases (the cycle of the moon):

• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Moon Phases and Corresponding Energy"
  
• The Moon School "Mysteries and Meaning of the Dark Moon Lunar Phase"
  
• The Moon School "Spiritual Meaning of the New Moon Phase"

Resources for women:

• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Spinning Wheels", a tool for women to track your inner and outer cycles and see how they all influence you at any given point in time.
  
• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Spiritual Practice of Menstruation," an eye-opening article if you have never thought of your cycle, your "inner seasons" as anything other than a nuiscance. Give it to your male partner to read, too, and your sons and daughter as they come of age. Everyone needs to know this information. 
• Jane Hardwicke Collings Blood Rites – The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation, a book. If you're ready for more after reading the article above, this is a deep dive. 
• Alexandra Pope The Woman's Quest Workbook. A 13 moon cyclical awareness course. I absolutely loved it. 
• Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer"Menstrual Cycle Awareness"
• Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer Wild Power. A deeply empowering read for spiritually-minded women who want to align more truly with their inner seasons and reap the rewards on offer.