Reconnecting with Enchantment
If you’re anything like me, when the state of the world weighs heavy on your heart, or you're going through a personal loss or hardship, you may find yourself overcome with difficult emotions like grief, fear, or even despair. When things feel overwhelming, our regular coping mechanisms might fail us, making it hard to keep showing up everyday in service of who we want to be.
I have a pretty solid mindfulness and self compassion practice, after years of meditating and training to be a teacher of Mindful Self Compassion (more about that on my classes page), so I often look to those exercises to ground myself, honor my feelings and how they are showing up in my body, and ask myself, and my body, what we need.
Usually what helps is to get out of the house and take a walk in the neighborhood or by the river, looking for signs of beauty and finding “glimmers” of joy, little nice and soothing things I can see and appreciate. This practice trains my nervous system to orient to connection, joy, and presence in the moment - right now, instead of ruminating on the past or what might happen in the future.
But lately, I've seen too many posts of really scary things happening in the world, and I’ve found myself needing more than to simply greet myself with warmth, cry and take a little walk in search of beauty. So I embarked on a search for how other people find meaning in overwhelming times, and I started to see a pattern in recommendations I found: enchantment as an antidote to despair.
making sand shapes on the beach with my son
Enchantment seems to go a little deeper than a glimmer, in that it asks us to tap into both pleasure and meaning at the same time, at an even deeper level, and in a way that gets underneath our rational, thinking mind and reminds us what we are really living for. Even if the world is burning, or feels like it is, we can connect to awe, and transcendence, so we can be present to all of what is here (the hardships and the beauty), and show up in our lives more energized and able to do what we came here to do.
How do we find enchantment? We can remember what we loved and got fired up about as young children, or teenagers, and see how we can give ourselves back a little taste of that sense of wonder, and the pleasure we get from following our excitement wherever it leads.
For me, I am awed, always, by the miracle of the body. How it heals after trauma of all sorts, how it keeps going, even in untenable circumstances. Watching my own body contend with all sorts of stresses and regenerate itself, axolotl-like. Watching your bodies repair after a stressful period, or after surgery or injury. Watching the tissues change right under my fingers during a session. Remembering how lucky I am to do this work, where everyday I get to engage with the wisdom of bodies.
searching for four leaf clovers
What else enchants me?
Getting my hands and feet in the dirt.
Learning new things.
Swimming in the river.
Watching the birds and animals in my yard.
Making art that my middle school self would think was cool.
There are a lot of things we can’t control, but we can decide how to engage with what is actually in front of us. We can connect with our sweet, beautiful bodies, and notice what they need, what helps them feel safe and alive.
I am curious, what brings you joy right now? How do you connect with awe, or enchantment? Or if you haven’t done that in a while, what were you enchanted by, as a younger person? I hope you do one thing today that enchants you.
