Do you always feel like you are in a hurry or can’t stop and rest? You may be stuck in an active response, which is trauma. Think about how you can shirk this feeling of constant urgency and feel more rested and healed.
Today I want to talk about this thought that I’ve been having quite a bit as I talk to colleagues and my own coaches and my clients, which is urgency, is a trauma response, and I just wanna emphasize that urgency is a trauma response.
It’s not the only trauma response, and it’s not always a trauma response, but it’s possible that urgency is a trauma response. Think about the stages of trauma response, and we have an episode on the stages of trauma response when you encounter a perceived danger, It does feel urgent. It’s like get up and go or fight or do something to get away from the danger, and that is very adaptive.
That is necessary and good for us. My coach and mentor always says stress is necessary. It’s just when it becomes chronic that it becomes the problem. So really, I should have named this. Chronic urgency is a trauma response. Urgency in and of itself is not a bad thing, and we need it, and it is relevant and good in specific situations, but it is meant to be acute or temporary, not chronic or long term.
It’s meant to get us away from a danger if we feel like we are always in a hurry. Things are always urgent. We’re constantly putting out fires. Most likely something is quote unquote stuck. In our nervous system, something’s keeping us in that activated response that makes us feel that like, I gotta go, go, go fast, fast, fast all the time.
And also conversely, if nothing is urgent, if we don’t have any motivation, that can also be a problem, right? So I’m not saying that on one end of the spectrum, this urgency. It is the only problem. All I am making a case for here is that if we always feel like everything is urgent, we have a hard time deciphering what is more urgent and less urgent.
If we feel confused about, well, what should I do next? I know that I should be doing something. If when you sit down to rest, you have that feeling like I shouldn’t be sitting down. There’s, it’s almost like a revved up feeling in your body, and I believe that is most of the time a trauma response. So that’s just something to think about as you notice yourself in your life.
Do you always feel that way? Is urgency a chronic condition for you? I personally want to get to the place where, When I need urgency, I can operate that way as needed, but also I can feel really confident and secure and good about resting and slowing down. Last week we talked about how American culture is toxic, and I think one of the most toxic parts of American culture is this sort of go, go, go, constantly working, producing that, that element of our culture.
It really doesn’t allow us to spend time being present, slowing down, just being right. And if you think about, you know, yoga or meditation or you know, some of these more eastern traditions, they’re the exact opposite of American culture and the exact opposite of this urgency, this, this push, push, push to always be going creating that kind of thing.
But the truth is in nature, there are seasons and in nature, not always is something growing and producing. There are fallow times and I actually have a podcast episode about that, the fallow period. So just, I just wanna encourage you to just sort of reflect on your own experience and think about, do you constantly feel this urgency?
I believe that this is one of the reasons why we have a lot of car accidents, because we’re always out there like, I gotta get there, I gotta go fast. And when we sit back and we think, do I really have to go fast? I mean, there might be an element here that we’ve just overbooked ourselves. We have too much fit into the time that we actually have available to us but sometimes it’s not true.
I’ll be out driving with my husband and he’s always like, “I don’t wanna sit in traffic. I’m in a hurry.” And I’m always asking him, what’s the hurry? Like, we have nothing urgent. But he’s like, I just don’t like to sit in traffic. Which I get that nobody likes to sit in traffic.
I just wanna encourage everyone to think about, is this coming from this sort of state of your nervous system? This, oh, I can’t just not. Be still right or I guess it’s, I can’t be still, I have to always be constantly moving and going and then that is just a perfect recipe for burnout. So I just want you to like take a deep breath and recognize that there are very few emergencies in life.
Mostly everything we do is not urgent. If we don’t get it done, if we don’t get it done on a certain time period, it’s really truly okay. I wanna, I just thought of this, it popped into my head, Sometimes when I’m feeling like I am late or I’m behind somehow, usually I get in the car and I’m driving somewhere and I’m like, oh no, I’m late.
Oftentimes when I hear myself think that I’ll just take a deep breath and I’ll say, I’m gonna be there at the perfect time, and I just keep saying that I’m gonna be there at the perfect time. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but something’s gonna happen. Maybe all the lights will be green, and so I just zoom straight there.
Maybe they’ll start the meeting late or whatever it is. And I’m gonna show up at exactly the right time, and almost every time I do this, probably 95% of the time I prove myself true. So it’s this sort of weird phenomenon that happens like when you act as if. You’re not in an urgent state. The universe responds like, okay, we’ll wait for you.
I remember one time I was on my way to church and I was like, oh no, I’m gonna be late. And then I just went, you know what? I’m not gonna be late. I’m gonna be perfectly on time. I’m not gonna miss anything that I need to hear. And turns out the meeting started late.
So I walked in about 30 seconds after I sat down. They started the meeting, so I was like, oh, look at that. So just to encourage you to just play with this, play with what if I’m wrong? What if I think I’m gonna be late? What if I think there’s a rush? And there really isn’t, even if something shows up late, most of the time, 95% of the time, It’s okay.
People have grace. People are like, I get it, whatever. It all works out, right? But so often we just live in this chronic state of, oh my gosh, I’m gonna be late. I gotta go, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And I just like wanna encourage everyone to just breathe and let things be how they are and trust that everything is going to be okay.
Guess what? The doors to my amazing group program are now open. I am so excited for anyone who feels like this is the time for them to come in. I love presents. I love the people that are in there most weeks cuz we’re only like, I only started this a few months ago. Most weeks I still get a little nervous about.
Being in a group and kind of being the leader and all of that, but at the end I’m just like, this is my life’s work and I love it so much. I love the reminder to slow down, to be in your body, to be present, to feel what the current moment is offering you and magical things are happening. I. Like I’ve mentioned before on this podcast, my business, the programs that I offer are always a faith response or a faith journey for me.
So I started this group, not quite super knowing what it was gonna feel like or looked like, and it has just evolved and unfolded and it’s been so wonderful. It’s been a great experience for me. People in presence. Keep telling me that they love it. Um, so I really encourage you, if, if you are enjoying the podcast, I think that coming into presence will be a hundred times better.
It just is. And it’s an experiential thing, right? It’s an experiential experience. It’s not something I can really talk about and tell you about other than. It’s a small group and I try to get everyone coached as often as possible. I am adding a second hour a week starting this week, so now there will be two possible hours to meet, um, to hopefully hit more people’s schedules.
Uh, we have a portal where a library of. Of all the replays is held, and any PDFs and meditations that I create go there that you have access to for life. The library portion you have access to for life. It. It has two options to, um, when you sign up, if you decide to sign up, there are two payment options.
One is 222 a month and one is 22, 22 a year. So there is a little bit of a discount just to incentivize you to pay for a year. Honestly, it’s not about the money for me, but about this feeling, this urgency feeling that I find a lot of my clients find themselves in when they’re paying month to month. It feels like I gotta get everything I can out of it this month and then maybe I’ll cancel and I’ve totally been there, so I know what that’s like.
But I would prefer that you imagine that you’re staying for the year and feel like you have this spacious amount of time to really work on yourself and become more present and get what you need. There are perks of other perks to being in the group, group members get a discounted rate on my private sessions.
You can schedule a one-off session with me for $99 if you’re in the group. Otherwise it’s usually quite a bit more expensive than that. So, come join me. Come join me in bringing more presence into your life in letting go of the urgency that our culture says we need.
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