what's the nature of your emergency?

how learning Vedanā triage will transform your relationship to tectonic stress

dear friends,

This past weekend was about family. No politics, almost no news. We simply spent two days cooking, eating, playing games, napping, swimming, lounging, reading and talking. There were hamburgers and hot dogs, ribs and coleslaw, lobster and biscuits, lots and lots of corn, and s’mores (of course). It was a time for reconnecting with people I adore. And, as I waved good-bye to my brother’s family before they drove back home, I couldn’t ignore the sense that we were all trudging back into a dark world after a much-needed respite from battle.

We’re all carrying extraordinary emotional stress right now. This isn’t the normal everyday stuff that we’re used to. This is tectonic stress, like waiting for the tsunami or aftershocks after an earthquake. Sure, the tried-and-true practices we all know and love still help: good sleep, regular exercise, healthful diet, and connecting with friends and family. But I’m not sure it’s enough for these times, this kind of stress.

Why?

Because the speed, breadth, malevolance and irrationality of what we’re dealing with is hitting us all in very different ways. Are you impacted by DOGE cuts like my friend’s daughter who wrote grants to support battered women in the state of Utah until she was unceremoniously fired? Are you trying to keep your business going in the face of mercurial tariff announcements like a shoe designer friend and owner of one of my favorite shops in New York City who is spending sleepless nights trying to avoid tariff chaos by sourcing materials from countries he thinks the current president likes? Or are you simply trying to rebuild your life after a catastrophic flood or forest fire?

It truly is everything everywhere all at once. That can make us all feel very alone and isolated in our troubles.

But, we’re not alone, we’re not isolated. And we absolutely can handle this moment and all the ones after it.

The best way I'm finding to do that is to recenter more frequently throughout the day so that I carry as little of this tectonic stress with me as possible. How? By creating automatic check-ins to heal whatever needs healing right then. This is essentially a Vedanā practice, but is faster and simpler because, well, who needs slower and more difficult right now?

Think of this practice as your way of becoming an expert at triage, which simply means to make an assessment of a patient’s need in order to determine the need, its urgency, and the nature of treatment required. I’m borrowing the term because I think it fits here so perfectly: We all need to be able to determine what we need, how urgently we need it, and how best to treat.

This is how I’m doing it:

(1) “How am I feeling right now?” I ask this question before I get out of bed in the morning because my anxious self is at her loudest first thing. If your mornings are always stress free, then do your first check-in whenever makes sense for you. Because I find it much easier to do these practices when I piggy back them on something I’m already doing, I check-in when I meditate, work out, eat lunch, get on my yoga mat, and floss and brush my teeth at night. After a week of doing this pretty religiously two things surprised me: The first was how often I was carrying tension with no apparent source, just clenching my jaw out of habit. The second was how quickly this practice became both automatic and pretty easy. More on that below.

So, pick a handful of times that make sense for you. At first, you’ll probably forget a bunch of check-ins. No worries. Just check-in the next appointed time. After a week or two, it’ll become a friendly, automatic greeting with yourself. “Hey, brushing teeth now, how’s it going?”

(2) “Do I need to do anything?” Western culture is so tilted toward action that we’re frequently blind to how often doing nothing is the most skillful choice. And, let me be clear, I think that doing nothing is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do. It is extraordinarily challenging for me to sit with my anger about the latest senseless cruelty and not rage for the rest of the day or week, but what I’m discovering is that when I ask this question and the answer is, “No, Alison, there is nothing you can do,” the most skillful next step is to sit with the anger, acknowledge that it’s okay to feel it, but that it’s not going to serve me or anyone else to carry that energy.

Sure, I get teary-eyed a lot these days, but asking this question is giving me a way to breathe with the sadness and anger until I’m through it, and then move on into the next moment. Sometimes the only thing we can do is honor the moment we’re in and then honor the moment after that. That’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay because if there’s one thing this world does not need, it’s more anger. Mine included. The more of us who can come quickly back to our wiser, calmer, more peaceful selves, the better. For us and for everyone.

(3) “What is the most skillful remedy?” Okay, this question is something we’re all trained for: Something is wrong, what can we do to fix it? But before we get to fixing, we have to be ruthlessly honest about what is skillful. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a lot of habitual fixes. And, if you’re anything like me, some of those habitual fixes may not be all that skillful.

This is a slightly embarrassing example, but I’m sharing it because I think it illustrates what I’m talking about in terms of automatic unskillful responses. Anyone who knows me, knows that I tend to be an early riser. The rest of my family, and most of my extended family, are not. So, when we get together and everyone else is just starting the night, I’m ready to fall asleep. The other night I was about to make a bowl of popcorn at 10:30 pm, but, because I had been doing these check-ins, I paused and asked the questions. The answer to the first was, “You are tired, Alison.” The answers to the second and third were, “Yes, you do need to do something, and that something is to go to sleep.” My habit energy told me “eat something even though you aren’t hungry so that you can stay awake.” Because I had been doing this triage practice for a while, I didn’t make the popcorn and went upstairs and crawled into bed. Sure, I missed out on some of the fun, and I also was skillfully responding to what I truly needed in the moment.

That’s it for this week!

with love, as always,

alison

p.s.

If you liked this, you can find more about Vedanā in my April 4, 2024 newsletter “a gentle (almost) instant way to calm: how feeling tone practice helps you get out of your head and into your life”