"acknowledge your world and exist in it."

Leave yourself alone for a minute. Lie down on your bed or couch or patch of grass or whatever and stretch your arms out as far as they can go. Reach out with your fingers, palms down, and absorb the underlying solidity of your surface. Feel your cells settle and feel still and grounded. Don’t move until you’re ready. 

Take the time to notice things. Take the time to really look at things. Develop a relationship with the things in your periphery and consider where you are in relation to them. Notice how changing small things makes you feel. Notice how motion in general makes you feel. Think of your body as a constantly moving object and sit with how unreal that is. 

Listen to music that gets you, songs that seem to have been written specifically for you. Read books that have the capacity to do more for your well-being than multivitamins or therapy. Don’t think about the fact that it’s just a happy accident that a certain song relates directly to your life, or a certain book seems like it was written by your omnipresent best friend. Listen to it, read it, let your heart fill with it and feel immersed and safe. 

Listen to someone else. Just sit there and let them talk it out. Absorb their words and consider them, really think them through. Don’t interject or try to steer the conversation back around to yourself or your own problems or anything, just listen. Make the conscious effort to understand another human being. It’s harder than it sounds but it will change you. 

Say what you want to say. If you want to say no to something, say no to it and see what happens. If you want to say yes to something, say yes to it and see what happens. Take note of the magnitude of the actual result of saying no or yes in comparison with your initial expectation of the magnitude. It’s probably not as serious as you thought. The world is probably still happening. 

Acknowledge that not absolutely everything sucks. Yes, there are about a hundred things wrong at the moment, but there are probably also a hundred other things that are not wrong. In fact, regardless of how minuscule, some things are probably going right. It’s not about not allowing yourself to feel like shit because you live in the first world and have a microwave or rich dad or whatever, it’s about a healthy dose of perspective. Go easy on yourself. 

Turn off your shit. Shut your laptop and bury your phone under something. Just stop for a second and acknowledge willed solitude. Acknowledge how it feels to not have people buzzing for attention from all angles at all times. Suspend yourself in the silence and focus your attention on things you routinely ignore. Or just ignore everything if it’s too much to handle at the moment, whichever feels better and makes more sense. Acknowledge your world and exist in it.

thought catalog.