I love to be cozy in bed when it raining and am extra delighted by the wind. It’s just a feeling of cozy safety to be inside and warm in such weather. It touches on that deepest hindbrain feeling that comes from ancestors who had to deal with weather directly, living out in it. To know I am not out in it, but safe inside is lovely.
I have a tin roof over my balcony area. Rain on tin roofs is also a lovely sound. It seems to hit a note in my head that resonates nicely. Happily the place I work also has a metal roof and so I get that lovely noise quite often.
I had a lot of anxiety dreams last night. And woke up to one that kept it’s hand on my chest even after waking. In those moments, finding a thing I can deliberately delight in, is a path away from from the anxiety. I usually have to look for it. Because my mindset was already in anxiety, a significant portion of my brain wanted to consign the noise of this rain into the anxiety. But I know that I have always enjoyed that noise while in bed. So I recalled and considered that past delight until it arrived in the present.
This post is part of the process. Sometimes the delight does not come spontaneously. Sometimes it needs to be pulled out of the ground like a paleontologist pulls out a dinosaur bone. Much digging into my memory, much slow and deliberate brushing off of that remembered feeling, much consideration of where the delight belongs in the moment I’m living right now.
It doesn’t always work. But it seems to have done today. The pressure is off my chest.
Cozy in bed while it rains outside. Sounds delightful.
The rain is so infrequent here that it’s now a surprising, almost jarring noise. Even though it is welcomed.
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I do that too. It’s odd how something even slightly unusual defaults to a bit of jarring rather than instant delight.
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Glad that worked for you. 🙂 … rain on a tin roof is one of the best sounds ever. 🙂
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It really is. It’s sort of meditative.
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I’m glad you’ve come up with a technique that helps you get through bad moments like that. I’ve come up with something similar to deal with times when I wake up with an anxiety attack at night and for me what works, sometimes at least, is archery, believe it or not. I try to imagine I’m out at an archery range, fitting the arrow to the bow, pulling it back, aiming, etc. For some reason going through that mental process sort of calms things down and helps me focus. I have no idea why.
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I think having a technique – whatever it is – is the most important thing. I have several things I can do, depending on the context.
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Water is healing in most forms.
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Yes. Comforting.
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