Why is everything going wrong?

Have you ever had one of those days where everything seems to go wrong? There's no parking space; traffic is bottlenecked; you're running late; you drop your keys in the mud; you spill your coffee, forget to bring what you needed, etc...

This means more than you think. From a metaphysical perspective, when this happens we are out of synch with our true selves and with our Source. In other words, our energy is disconnected from the larger context of our lives. This tends to happen when we stay too much in our heads and not enough in our hearts, when our thoughts rule our lives instead of our intuition.

We are so much more than our thoughts. Our thoughts would have us believe that being an individual is all we have and is all we are. But this is a lie. Individuality is only a part of us—the part that gives unique expression to our spiritual gifts. We are so much more than an individual.

Consider this. As newborns we aren't aware of an identity. This reality feels strange and foreign to a being who feels infinite. Babies look around with wide-eyed wonder at everything around them, their mind not yet able to sort the field of life into thoughts and descriptions, disconnected bits and pieces of data.

As we grow up, all attention goes to nurturing our thinking minds into a linear process of sorting, reasoning, describing, labeling and categorizing. We lose touch with our spirits and intuition, to our sensory and energy bodies because this modern culture does not see these as having value. And we are domesticated to believe we are nothing more than a mentally-fabricated conditioned identity.

Maintaining this conditioned identity becomes the priority to our sense of survival. As we take on more and more of this identity, our connection to our true self, our infinite nature, wanes. At some point we ignore and/or forget that who we are at our core is infinite and we become a reflection of our limited, finite conditioned identity.

Disconnected from our true self and Source, life becomes disjointed and choppy. When we over-identify with our conditioned identity, we act in ways that not only go against ourselves, but they go against the larger dance of energy we are a part of. We forget this life is a unified flow of energy created by a dance of infinite and interrelated moving parts. No part is truly separate from any other; although they act independently, they inescapably impact each other. There is no way to escape this. We are as individual drops of water composing an ever-evolving, ever-changing sea of life.

Forgetting this, we focus all our energy on growing our conditioned identity, on being an individual looking out for our own needs and desires. But this is just a small part of the larger dance we are participating in. Trying to live as if it's all there is causes stress, tension and discord inside and out. To relieve this, we must find our way back home.

So how do we get back in synch with our true selves and with the flow of life around us? This is the big spiritual question of the ages. We are talking about spiritual evolution and transformation of the self...essentially, spiritual awakening.

Not quite ready to embrace that? Outside of the quest to awaken, there are many simple things you can do to help in the moment. I'm sure you've heard of counting backwards from 10 or taking slow deep breaths. These are short-term ways of helping you come present and return to your center.

Here are eight more quick tips that help bring you home:

1. sit or walk with and in nature: the energy frequency of the natural world is clean, uncontaminated at its core, and immersing in it can help clean and revive our own energy field.

2. take an epsom salt bath: epsom salt baths help clean and restore our energy field, washing away invisible debris.

3. do something creative like make art or dance: giving our creative spirit room to breathe enlivens us, opens our energy flow, and expands our mind.

4. close your eyes, rub your palms together briskly to generate heat between them, and rest them on your heart, right over left: this simple act can help bring us present, calm our nervous system, and attune us to our heart wisdom.

5. bounce on your heels: shaking the body is a primal way of calming nerves, shaking off stress and resetting our mind to the present moment.

6. do jumping jacks: this simple movement helps us shake off stress, get our energy flowing and reset our mental focus to break unhelpful mental looping and bring us present.

7. smudge yourself: smudging our body and the space around us is ancient energy cleansing ritual that helps purify our heart, mind, energy field and the field around us of negativity with the smoke of burning dried sage plant leaves so that we can access our deeper wisdom.

8. practice Earthing, another way to come present, clean our energy field, calm our mind and tap into our heart wisdom by putting our bare feet on the ground or laying down on the ground to connect with the heartbeat and wisdom of the Mother Earth.

These are all short-term ways of grounding, a metaphysical concept meaning you take action to come balanced within yourself (connected to your natural rhythms), centered in your heart (your true self), and linked to the source of all things (your infinite nature). This makes life easier because things naturally flow more smoothly when we drop our resistance to what is and connect to a higher wisdom than our conditioned mind can provide.

It is such an essential part of living happily and in our personal power and purpose that such simple and more sophisticated tools are included in my work with clients. Why not better manage things so they flow? Why not ditch resistance for ease? Why not reclaim your personal power and step more fully into who you truly are? And from an energetic perspective, the summer months are a great time to take on such practices.

Re-synching or grounding is an essential part of cultivating inner peace. Most of us feel the difference and the positive impact when we re-synch ourselves with the natural rhythms because our bodies are naturally aligned with these rhythms, but it can take some time, depending on our personal situation. Give any one of the eight ideas in this post a bonafide try to experience it for yourself. You may respond more strongly to one of the options than the others. Go with what works for you. Doing such things on a regular basis can provide a holistic renewal of the self. It seems so simple, yet once we experience the difference for ourselves, it can seem magical.