Are you feeling overwhelmed? If you aren’t right now, chances are you will be soon.  Most of us are busy people with work and business obligations, family and home responsibilities, and we try should throw in fun as well.

With the busyness, disappointments tend to pile right on top of each other, or so they seem.  You may be trying to ignore a negative feeling today.  You wake up tomorrow to more issues.  The challenges seem to have your name printed on them, in red.  Soon you feel like, well, let’s be honest…you feel like bolting.  Where is that state? You know, the one where nobody knows your name?

Do things really pile up? Perhaps they do.  But, you do not have to stay submerged.

This is the process that works for me.  I call it peeling back the layers:

Find a quiet spot, alone if possible.  Concentrate on your breathing.  Breathe through your nose.  Steady and intently.  Let your jaw go slack, work your way down your shoulders, work your way down to your toes.  Consciously release the muscles.  Do you feel yourself relaxing? Imagine the challenges that you are facing, visualize them as sheets of paper, with one on top of another, causing you darkness.  You don’t need the outside layer.  Imagine lifting if off (nearly shedding it) as if it where light as a feather.  Peel back the next challenge, the second layer.  Can you feel yourself breathing?  Can you feel the fresh air? Can you feel the weight lift? After several layers, as many as it takes, allow yourself to know that you have returned to your core, your good place.

What piles on top of us are real challenges, what we process them as is not real.  The layers that we smother under do not make us who we are, unless we let them.  Make it a practice, as soon as you feel the heaviness begin, peel it off.  Give your own self a gift – light and air.  Do it for you, you’re worth the effort.

P.S. For those of you that pray, give the discarded junk to God.  He’ll take the trash for you, gladly.