Clearing Out Our Cobwebs

Struggling with the craziness that is happening out there in the world right now?

Longing for an intervention?

Are you like me, desperate for someone to step in and change the direction of where we appear to be going as a human race?

I sit with this feeling daily. 

And even as I aim to do good work in the world, coaching people and supporting non-profits who are struggling to clean up their own corners of the universe, most days it just doesn’t seem like enough.

What do I then do with that?

I love a line from feminist and poet Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light. Lorde takes a stand for caring for ourselves in these moments—not just caring for others. She argues that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

In other words: Physician, heal thyself.

This phrase has long roots—it’s from Luke 4:23, but it may have existed long before in even earlier ancient Greek and Jewish traditions.

Apparently, we have been trying to convince ourselves of this for thousands of years.

And it doesn’t apply just to doctors.

It applies to coaches. Baristas. Beekeepers. Doulas. Managers. Engineers. Potters. Actuaries. Bartenders. Non-profit leaders. Parents. You.

Where in your own life and work you be pouring too much from an empty cup?

And are you swept up by the idea of constant self-improvement—as in, the solution is I have to do more, be more, acquire more?

In other words, just keep adding new efforts and things to do in my life?

We can sometimes do this and while we are so busy with activity, we never notice how much of our own inner house may be dark and unswept.

Amy Elizabeth Fox shared an idea in a Coaches Rising podcast about this. Fox said we can’t just continue to dole out our individual love and hearts to heal this big, wide world. That approach will always lead to burnout. 

And most of us are already there.

These days, working in the world as a coach or other practitioner must be less about adding new skills and new activities and more about doing our own deep healing.

Fox suggests that our work may be about going down into our own healing and trauma and consciousness—as opposed to going up to connect with Spirit or the mystical to understand life’s meaning.

Doing deep inner work—diving bravely into our own muck—frees up the space for us to access something greater.

There is so much generational trauma and experiences that get in the way of our own freedom to be joyful. This is the work we need to do ourselves to help clear the cobwebs out of the way.

Fox had one other concrete suggestion in the podcast about how to ensure we don’t burn out. And that is to connect with the broader, unified field of love. We can touch the wide-open energetic landscape of love that exists in so many places—it’s in nature, Spirit, joy, relationship, beauty.

This is the only way that we can stay whole as we do our work in the world.

Imagine no longer trying to generate more from within yourself alone—and instead let yourself connect to and be replenished by something larger.

The world doesn’t need more of us running on fumes, white knuckling our way through the chaos. It needs us to be rooted. Replenished. Brave enough to be vulnerable in this moment we are in.

What old wound, belief, or pattern is blocking your access to that larger field of love right now?

Can you turn toward that thing in this moment instead of away from it?

And as you do that inner work, can you connect with the broader field of love that is also out there?

Friend, we don’t have to fix the whole world today. We probably can’t. 

But we do have to tend to ourselves—and not as an afterthought, but as the work itself. We must clear out our own cobwebs. 

This is where the work starts.

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