Chapter 1- Four Anchors to Balance the Psyche During the Present Time
Everything around us is uncertain…
A lot of us are still under lockdown, whose end is still unclear. The discovery of more Covid-19 variants portrays how life, as we know it, has changed and we should adapt to a new reality. In many places around the globe, there is a sense of political and social turmoil…
The lockdown, isolation, and uncertainty provoke among many an emotional burden, impatience, and mental distress.
Many people around the world have reported a deterioration of their mental health since the pandemic’s outbreak.
Depression, anxiety, financial distress, loneliness, an experience of losing control and lack of purpose, boredom, or alternately overload, are some of the reasons for a collective mental crisis that we are currently going through, and its result will be seen in the future to come.
What can become an inner anchor that creates mental balance?
What can assist in coping with the complicated mental state?
What can assist in overcoming fear, depression, or feeling distressed?
━━━
There are four main anchors that can assist in coping with the challenges of these times:
⚓️A supportive community – Maintaining a connection to a community in which its members enhance each other, support one another during moments of distress, providing a clear perspective when needed, and maintain an experience of connection that assists to overcome the loneliness and alienation which the lockdowns create.
⚓️A sense of purpose, mission, and objectives – Even if covid-19 has changed plans and disrupted them, and increased the mental sensation of imbalance and uncertainty, it is essential to define purpose and goals that provide meaning to your daily life, enriching them with actions and activity that holds intention which encourages the psyche to creative thinking, guiding your thought towards proactivity, and enhance a sense of vitality.
⚓️Developing consciousness and awareness – So the psyche is capable to contain the emotions and thoughts which arise as a result of this intimidating and challenging time, allowing you to process them, provide them with inner solutions, and create a constant transformation that leads to a sense of capability that holds a broad perspective, balance, and hope.
⚓️Connection to values – The values are your credo. They create a stable mental infrastructure that influences your orientation and ability to observe your reality, and the emotional world, and allows a clear decision making and management of risks, challenges, and opportunities using wisdom and balance.
Chapter 2- Four Recommendations to Establish Anchors for Mental Balance
In the previous chapter, I described four key anchors that can greatly assist in coping with the complex routine of life, under the shadow of covid-19.
These anchors are essential now, and in the future to come, because reality, as we have known it, has changed and requires us to reorganize on a mental-emotional and practical level.
To assist with the readjustment, I have prepared for you several recommendations. These recommendations offer ways to implement the 4 key anchors in your life, so you and others can face the challenges of these times.
〰️〰️〰️〰️
First Recommendation – Getting Assisted by a Supportive Community
Maintain a connection and cultivate communication with everyone who constitutes a supportive community for you, that encourages you and enhances your positive and vital mental experience.
These can be friends with whom you have a common ground or family that supports you and is there for you. These can be people who share the same vision that you wish to cultivate and fulfill together or people with whom you have common interests, and you can share tips, advice, ideas, and experiences related to these interests.
If you are lonely try to engage with online communities dealing with your interests and show involvement that enhances your sense of connection and your communication with others.
Remember that many times when you feel lonely and drained, setting your attention towards bestowing others, changes your experience completely and enhances a sense of wholeness and strength.
Therefore, look at what exists within you, which you can give to others, and thus open a door for communication whose basis is generosity, human love, strength, and a sense of capability.
Second Recommendation – A Sense of Meaning, Purpose, and Objectives
Set yourself goals and objectives that match the spirit of this time, and can strengthen your sense of purpose daily and infuse meaning into your life.
It can be a personal purpose and goal concerning your development or your self-fulfillment, and it can be a purpose concerning the fulfillment of a more comprehensive vision and a voluntary contribution to the whole and the community, on matters that are important to you.
Plan your vision, organize what you wish to accomplish in your life, and set goals you wish to achieve, using flexibility, lack of attachment, and recognition that the times in which we live are dynamic and everything is open and changeable.
Take part in challenges that interest you in various fields, whether it’s mental challenges like reading, contemplating, and delving into contents that are a source of inspiration for you, which you have not had the availability to read and delve into before.
Whether it’s gaining new skills that you wanted to learn, but didn’t have time for (sewing, knitting, sports, music, writing, chess, drawing, online courses in various fields, etc.).
Whether it’s the formation of new hobbies (cooking, growing plants, vegetable garden, music, movies, sports, animals, etc.).
And everything that can bring a refreshing breeze into your life and enable you to challenge and enrich yourself and enhance a sense of vitality and motivation.
Third Recommendation – Developing Consciousness and Awareness
Expand your consciousness and your self-awareness and dedicate time to nurturing your psyche.
Acquire tools for establishing mental resilience and balance and open yourself to empowering knowledge, allowing you to look at both yourself and reality from a mature, clear, and broad perspective that identifies visible and hidden trends.
Create a mental and conceptual renewal, receive inspiration, and develop in a manner that empowers you and gives you a sense of stability, power, and capability.
Connect to online channels that you feel are providing you with inspiration and a new perspective and enhance your positive, constructive, empowering, and promotive mental experience.
Forth Recommendation – Connecting to Values
Define for yourself values that are your credo and start translating them into practical and daily action that creates a stable infrastructure for your life, from the mental level, through the emotional level to the practical level.
Become aware of how to bridge ideas and ideals into everyday habits and thus shape your psyche as a force that supports you during these times and along the way.
More about values as a supportive force in the period we live in – in the next chapter.
Chapter 3 -Values as a Supportive force in Coping with the Times We Live In
Why is the connection to values so important?
In such an unstable, uncertain reality, that is full of different influences, values create a balanced mental infrastructure that enables the ability to inspect reality, clear decision making, and a resilient mental anchor.
Values enable you to observe yourself and life through standards that are based on the values, and thus assess and diagnose the cases and people you encounter, estimate reality with clarity, and make decisions that support you and your values.
I often find that people relate to values as a theoretical thing, and don’t know how values can be expressed in daily life, and how one can shape a personal, simple, and day-to-day conduct by a set of values. This stems from the gap which lies between what people comprehend as moral and ethical standards and their practical expression, by using an active and aware choice.
Values are not just theoretical standards, since if we keep them unrelated to reality or do not act to realize them, we can’t manifest what we believe in, in our lives.
Indeed, values represent one’s high moral and conceptual threshold, however, it isn’t a utopic threshold that can’t be realized. Once we have succeeded to translate an abstract idea into a value and give it a name, we can mediate this value into a practical thought, from which the path for practical realization is already paved.
This is exactly where your commitment to what you believe in, and your agreement to prioritize your values over habits, conditionings, accepted norms, and urges – enters the picture.
Values represent the essence of what you wish to fulfill in your corporeal existence, and the meaning you wish to infuse into your lives.
When you define values for yourselves and remain loyal to them, you enable yourselves to become the best version of yourselves.
The ability to prioritize your values over instinctive urges, addictions and habits portray paves the path to aware conduct where your spirit influences matter and your psyche constitutes a balanced vessel for your enhanced fulfillment.
Chapter 4-
How Can One Translate Values into Daily Life?
As said in the previous chapter, one of the key mental anchors during times of uncertainty and lack of stability is the ability to translate consciousness and theoretical values into practical conduct within the changing reality.
Therefore, once you wish to draw for yourself a bright and sustainable future, it is essential that you define which are the values you believe in, and what priorities you are committed to maintaining in your lives.
It is also important that you agree to release habits that distance you from fulfilling these values in practice.
This process requires independent thinking, self-awareness, commitment, and the ability to observe yourselves with honesty while emphasizing the conscious mediating between what we want to achieve (the values and the personal vision) and what is our current state (the practical conduct in daily reality).
When you come to lay the bridge across the values and the practical conduct that supports those values, it is essential that you do not judge yourselves over the gaps you discover in your conduct, but create an honest and simple analysis, and focus on building the bridge, step by step using patience, perseverance, and a proactive and uncompromising attitude.
Also among people who engage in spiritual evolvement and self-awareness, there are many who do not know how to use the values which they speak of on the theoretical level, in order to create a reality check on a practical level, and in the moment of truth, they do not support the values and the consciousness they speak of, since they do not know how to express them on a practical level, or because they do not want to, since it is uncomfortable for them.
4 questions of essence
When you wish to create a balanced mental anchor that is connected to values, it is essential to constantly ask questions of essence, such as:
- How do the values I believe in are translated into practical conduct?
- Are the values I believe in expressed in the agenda I hold in my daily conduct: My political opinion, my religious belief, my place of work, my hobbies, my relationships, my consumption.
- What resides at the top of my priority? What comes before the other: Do my values come before my habits? Values before conditionings, norms, and traditions? Values before a religious belief? And so forth.
- Am I committed to support the values in the moments of truth that lie throughout the complex and challenging daily reality which we live in?
We are deeply connected to each other, in a manner we cannot deny and cannot untangle. Each one of us is crucially important to influence the reality we live in.
Thus, the more people agree to take leadership over their lives, to act by significant and clear values, that are translated into daily life, and to stabilize themselves on the mental level throughout the changing and unstable reality, the more we can collaboratively generate a change of the collective reality, and create a balanced space of a collective evolvement.
Unfortunately, I find that among the people who wish to create a conceptual and spiritual awareness and create change, some look for an external savior, a Messiah who will redeem them and others, from this extreme and complex reality.
The search after an external force or catharsis, which is busy dealing with the war between ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and categorizes reality dually, positioning people and trends under this division, is a waste of resources over what is insignificant, and shifts the strength to an unknown external factor, instead of focusing on enhancing the personal mental ability, maintain a balanced, wise and centered conduct, that might not hold the excitement of the victory of light versus darkness, but rather has the connection to an inner resilient anchor that creates reality, presents alternatives, and enables everyone to become a leader who acknowledges their strength and impact over their surroundings.
━━━
In the collective reality we live in, we see the gap between values and their practical expression.
This gap represents the loss of the path, which is a result of the loss of values.
Many would say that they aspire to freedom, equality, and justice, and wish we would collectively act using values of integrity, ethics, Enlighted Heart, mutual respect, and responsibility, but once they need to express these values in actuality, many would give up on those values in favor of personal interests, due to fear, survival instincts, political opinion, etc.
Thus, those who consider themselves believing in the values which I described, might support representatives who do not represent those values or trends which harm those values, since those values don’t reside at the top of their priority, but only at a secondary level.
The ability to prioritize values is essential since they can create a stable infrastructure also on the social level, which will allow us to collaboratively create ethical standards that we all agree upon, and can become the basis for creating a reality that reflects those values – a reality that holds freedom, equality, and mutual responsibility.
