Can We Be Okay with Now?

Learning to break the habit of resistance as the key to health and happiness

I had an amazing experience at Sandy Newbigging’s Reconnect Retreat in Leicestershire last weekend. And since then I’ve been thinking about how we go on retreats to reset our lives and, hopefully, turn a corner into a new reality. With any luck, the world will look different, and we don’t want it to melt back into its old shape. I’m definitely feeling that way.

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Sandy is the coach I’ve been working with. I love his work because he integrates trauma-aware therapy and spirituality, covering everything from how to regulate your nervous system to how to settle into the awareness of who you really are. He has a strong knowledge of how the mind and body affect each other, which is what first drew me to him. (I began with his book Body Calm.) And now that I’m feeling better physically, I am continuing on my journey to overall health.

The word HEAL, comes from the Old English world haelen, which means WHOLE, as Sandy likes to say. Merriam Webster says that HEAL means:

“to make free from injury or disease : to make sound or whole.”

Health, then, means wholeness. When we aren’t healthy in mind, body, and/or spirit, we feel broken. And in order to feel whole, we need to heal our relationship to our mind, our body, and our spirit. They all work together. If we are sick in spirit (overcome with shame or guilt, for instance), we will be sick in mind and body as well.

What does it mean to feel “whole”?

Some of you (maybe a lot of you?) may not be feeling very whole lately. I’m guessing that because most of you have come to this newsletter because, like me, you yearn for something more. You’ve been drawn by my writing about my transition away from a “default” life—defining myself through my academic career, marriage, motherhood—to a new life of my own making and choosing.

I went out into the world to meet people and see new places, hoping that I’d find my niche, that little corner of the world into I was meant to fit. I imagined it as a place or a relationship or both—a HOME—a nest where I would feel complete, after utterly breaking apart. But three years on, that hasn’t happened.

Yet, for the first time perhaps in my entire life, I’m feeling WHOLE. To me that means:

Being content to just sit in the present moment without feeling that jittery ache to have something more, to do something else, to be somewhere else.

Those feelings still arise, but they are no longer my baseline. There were very good reasons that I was feeling that way in my old life. I needed to break it open and create something new.

But as the months and years have ticked on, I’ve had to start asking myself, what I am waiting for, to feel okay? Am I going to let this restlessness rob me of my health and peace forever? I could. And I think a lot of us do, without realizing it. We are always looking into the future, always wanting something more, when actually, what we seek is right here in front of us.

So this is the experiment I’m currently undertaking:

Can I let go of the nagging feeling that I’m not okay, that something is wrong? Can I just be content with life as it is, right now?

Can I be okay, even though I’m not living where I want to, don’t have the cute little cottage I’ve fantasized about for years, don’t have a partner to share my life with, haven’t finished my novel, don’t have a book contract, haven’t established a new career identity yet?

What if none of those things is actually necessary to my happiness—let alone all of them? How much time have I spent being dissatisfied with life because I didn’t have the things that I had decided were necessary to my happiness?

I’ve asked before, what do you truly want—what is your heart’s highest hope? I remember that many of you wrote in the comments that you wanted HEALTH and HAPPINESS. Researchers have found that health and happiness are intimately connected. It’s hard to have one without the other.

I saw this tree on my walk yesterday.

Where can we find what we’re looking for?

When I set out on my journey in September 2022, I wanted to find out what I needed to be happy, and I kept coming back to the things that I didn’t have anymore. But as it’s turned out, the key to happiness has not been in finding a new home, a new relationship, or a new career.

The key, I’ve discovered, is actually in finding peace with what is—or simply being okay right now, no matter the external circumstances of my life.

Sandy told me a while back that until I had learned to find inner peace and stillness, no matter where I am, I will not have learned the lesson that I came to Manchester to learn. I thought I had gone there to complete my MA in Creative Writing. But being so sick with vertigo had other lessons to teach me.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from Sandy—and there are many—is that resisting your current circumstances is the greatest sources of illness and unhappiness.

Spending so much time alone, actually listening to the constant chatter in my head, I’ve come to recognize how much resistance is in there. It’s a conditioned response, a habit. We all learn to judge everything that happens to us as good or bad.

And then we try to control the outer circumstances of our lives to make things as good as possible. We search for the perfect restaurant with the best reviews, or the best cup of coffee, or the best book to read. As often as not, though, we are dissatisfied with what we find.

It’s hard to feel okay when we’re constantly judging what comes in front of us. We make ourselves miserable by deferring happiness or peace until things are just right on the outside.

We can still have goals and dreams, but that constant inner resistance to what is will rob us of the happiness and health that we want more than anything else—not off in some distant future, after we’ve done the things or gotten the things that we think we need, but now.

I’ve made my peace with being in Manchester for now. I’ve scheduled some housesitting gigs in some lovely places, so that I can explore more areas where I might like to live next (without the expense of doing a lot of traveling). Right now I’m in the Scottish Borders taking care of a cute little dog named Tilly.

And then I’ll go back to my rather bare apartment in Manchester and I’ll be fine. I won’t spend my days looking for ways to escape or wishing I was somewhere else. I’ll enjoy having my things around me and walking along the canals, looking for the swans and the lavender bush I found, not dwelling on all of things I don’t like.

This is my “job” right now. It’s how I’ve been able to soothe my nervous system and get out of the cycles of fight-or-flight that were causing my vertigo.

I’m making my heart’s highest hope my priority, over everything else. At some point, I’ll start looking ahead again, hopefully in a healthier way, and I’ll share that with you when it’s time. For now, you’ll find me walking Tilly and just being here now.

Now it’s your turn. What have you been deferring your happiness for? What feels necessary to your health and happiness—but is far off in the future? Can you see yourself undertaking an experiment to be okay with what is in your life right now? It could start small—just being okay with the small things that usually irritate us, for instance. What kind of shift could that make in your life?

Until next time,

Anne

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