I have a newfound respect for the substantial impact of chronic stress. Three months ago, I left my job of 18 years with the federal government. As a result, I am having new insights of what happens when significant stressors are removed from my life.

Let me tell you a little about how stress came into my life and decided to stay. I had two significant stages in my chronic stress processes. First was the slow onset of the stress of being in solitude for three plus years during the pandemic and the second was the intense, acute stress of being a federal employee in the changing political climate.

As I remember it, before the pandemic I was someone who could easily access and live from my soft heart, inspiration, creativity, passion, insight, intuition, peace, stability, spiritual connection, and expressiveness. I experienced my world so vividly beyond the physical; I was able to perceive energies and connect with others beyond their human selves. As my solitude continued, I slowly lost access to these parts of myself that were at the center of my daily experience and identity. Ultimately, it became very difficult to connect with people because I could no longer “feel” them. To say the least, it was extraordinarily painful and confusing.

I’ve come to recognize that my response to stress is that I become uber competent, get into a place of “just the facts ma’am”, and my brain not only leads me in the world, it is the only thing I have easy access to. I operate at a speed much faster than my heart and am constantly in “to do” mode.

So, there I was on May 1st, stressed out of my mind (or is that into my mind?) and stepping into a life with very few stressors and absolute clarity on what direction I was going to steer my life. For several weeks, I continued working as diligently on my new business as I had in my previous job. I chose to organize my day so that I would tend to this stress directly and put my focus on “coming down” from it. My first month was primarily about creating a structure for my new life and being productive. It wasn’t until the second month that I really started releasing the stress from my body. I slept or hung out on the couch for almost 2 weeks. When I sat on my (meditation) cushion, I would yawn and yawn and yawn. Tears would roll down my face, not because of emotion but just from releasing. It also happened when I would go to places where others would support me. If I sat, got present, and slowed down, the yawning would start. It would come in steps and waves. I would have these releases every few days then every week or so. In the third month, these releases were periodic but not very prominent and things shifted to releasing emotions. These days, I am still in the process of releasing stress; I have a ways to go before I get to meet myself again on the other side of this stress. Currently, I’m at the stage of when I’m on my cushion, I’m visiting my past self, crying deeply, and releasing the stuck energies in my system. I’m not just releasing stuff from the last 5 years of chronic stress but from all stages of my life.

My meditations has been particularly revealing. When I first started mediating immediately after leaving my job, it was hard to sit, my body raced, my mind raced, and I just wanted to get up and do things. As I started releasing more, my body became very still but my mind continued to be very active. Now, I have started just sitting with myself and checking in before I meditate and this is when the emotions come up.

You may be wondering about the most important part of this journey, what happened to my access to my heart and other cherished qualities? Well, they have been coming back online steadily and consistently. The more I release, the slower I go, and the more I relax, the more I touch those places that I used to live from. I feel my heart quite often now. I have a particular deep experience with it when I sit in communion with myself. That’s when it leaps into presence and showers me with its deep gifts, insights start coming to me easily, and I feel inspired again.

I still spend a lot of my time in solitude, so there is quite a contrast when I am actually in the physical presence of others and we are connecting deeply. Let me digress for a moment to really drive this point home. When I lost my ability to connect to guidance, track energy, and generally touch base with the higher consciousness that I had cultivated a deep connection with, I constantly questioned if I had lost those abilities. I was constantly trying to troubleshoot the “issue” and get back to what felt like my superpowers. I explored so very many things. Nothing worked…nada…zip…zilch. I partook of more online learning opportunities that were similar to the teachings that lead to those cultivations in the first place. My abilities sputtered and sparked but never quite came back online. So, now that I am releasing my stress, guess what?!? They are coming back online and are completely available again when I am with others. So, it seems that the covert and constant stress of solitude resulted in those skills being out of reach. Now I see them perk up when I am around others. It has been very surreal to realize that this devastating loss was a result of the stress of extreme solitude!

I’m now starting to see behind the curtain of this thing that we call stress. During the solitude of the pandemic when it was a slow onset, my mind understood that I was probably in stress but I didn’t experience it as being stressed out nor could I grok that my experience of self was different because of that stress. When my work environment turned on a dime, I recognized that my stress level was out of the stratosphere and my coping mechanisms had taken over, separating me from my sense of self as a tenderhearted person. Now, I’m coming to understand that chronic stress acts as a veil; it keeps us hidden from ourselves and obscures the things that we have known ourselves to be. I can speak from first-hand experience; it can be gut wrenchingly hard to feel like one has lost the most important and potent aspects of self. From what I’m understanding, it’s not that we’ve changed so much as it is that stress is so impactful that it separates us from even our most basic nature. That’s something that breaks my heart because I know that in this society, people are under a great deal of stress. If this is also true for them, it means that they too can’t get in touch with the softer, deeper, more tender, and more subtle aspects of themselves. It’s no wonder there is so much emphasis being put on separation and that it’s so hard to connect these days, especially with people that are different from us. We need our heart to bridge that divide!

If my observation is true and were accepted, maybe some people would stop giving themselves such a hard time about neither being able to meet their self-imposed high bar nor connecting with their most important parts. Maybe they would give themselves some grace. Maybe it would lead people to having a deeper respect for how stress impacts us and would redirect them to do what they can to reduce their stress.

For those that feel disconnected from their true nature, I heartily wish you great kindness, patience, and commitment on your journey back to yourself.

With great love and warmth,

Andie