Wall therapy. Who knew?
You have appointments, meetings, and events you just dread attending? Anxiety to the max? Overload-city?
Of course you have. You’re human.
Returning from one of those high anxiety appointments, I found myself sitting, staring at my living room wall. It’s definitely a nice wall. My favorite woven tapestry, a tree, is the centerpiece. The beloved tapestry, however, was going unseen. I was staring, straight ahead, at the wall. Feeling surprisingly comforted.
“Don’t you have better things to do than staring at a wall?”
Uh, oh, it’s ’s baaaack! My eons-long internal argument. “No, no! Staring at the wall feels calming. I love it. I’m tuckered out from the anxiety and over stimulation of my appointment. I need a break!”
“A break? Why a break? Go DO something. The world needs your active presence. Now! I mean, you’re non-stop staring at, of all things, a wall! For heaven sakes, find your putative boot straps, pull up, and get a move on it. Geez…. You’re coddling yourself. There’s great NEED in the world and you’re spending precious time staring at a wall?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! This ‘great NEED in the world’ thing? What am I? Chopped liver? Don’t I have needs too?”
“Yep. I do have needs as a vulnerable human being. (Like you, perhaps?) I’m one of the many, many human underpinnings working to heal our fractious world. But hold it. Whatever happened to ‘healer heal thyself?’ My underpinnings are in dire need of healing, too.”
“We must dig out the roots of unpeacefulness in ourselves....Without this effort, we can never hope to have any real effect on others.” (Adam Curle, Peacemaker)
Yours truly is quite happily staring at the living room wall. Allowing the wall do its own smoothing within me. I need a reset. Moments of stop. A mini-hibernation from overwhelming input (usually, from our damn world.) An emergency brake, allowing my overstimulated brain to rest, recover, and return to being a good human. That counts, doesn’t it?
Wall therapy. Who knew?