When the world feels like too much, you do not have to power through it. You can return to calm in small moments, all day long, and let your body rest.

There is a great deal happening in the world right now, and you can feel all of it pressing in, and maybe your own life is full on top of that — full of people to care for, work to carry, a schedule you keep filling — and somewhere underneath it the fear rises, or the anger, or a weariness that nothing quite explains. This is the moment the guides wanted to speak into. Not to fix your life. To show you how to keep your nervous system calm while you go on living it.

Most of us do the same thing with hard feelings. We shove them down into the body to deal with later, and later never comes, or later comes much later, as a fatigue, an illness, a health crisis that forces the rest we would not give ourselves. The guides are offering another way, and it is smaller and gentler than you would think.

They call them islands. Little islands of rest scattered through the day — two minutes, three minutes, sometimes only a few seconds — not scheduled by an alarm, but returned to again and again, the way you return to your own breath. Here are the islands they gave me.

One

The first island is the one you are always standing on: this moment, your own body, right where you are. Feel yourself in your body. Feel yourself in your body in this space. What do you see around you? What do you hear? What is your skin feeling — the air, the fabric, the temperature of the room? Is there a part of you asking for a little movement, or a little stillness, or to sit up straighter along your spine? What do you taste? What do you smell, and is there a scent nearby that brings you even a small delight? That is all it is. Ten seconds of coming back to your senses, and you have given yourself an island.

Two

The second island is movement, and it is short, and it is fierce. One to three minutes of something hard — as many squats as you can do until you cannot do one more, a wall sit with your back against the wall and your knees bent until your legs give out, burpees, jumping jacks, a plank held until you are shaking. There is science underneath this, but you do not need the science to feel it work. It is very hard to keep worrying about the thing when your whole body is busy doing everything it can. The anger goes somewhere. The dread goes somewhere. And on the other side of it you are not only calmer, you are a little more awake, the way you are after a shot of espresso — except this one came from you.

Three

The third island is stillness, and it can be just as short. One to three minutes where you are quiet-ish, still-ish, alone-ish. Slip off to another room. Put on headphones with nothing playing in them at all, just to turn the volume of the world down. And if it calls to you, go inward, to a place that is yours — I have an inner cave I go to, and a bed made of crystal where my guides gather around me and fill me with energy and ease until the tightness in my mind and my body loosens and there is room to breathe again. You do not need my cave. You need one to three minutes, and somewhere, inside or out, quiet enough to hear yourself.

Four

The fourth island you can do with your eyes open in a crowded room, and it takes about ten seconds. Imagine a pool of light in the center of your chest, in your heart space — warm if you are cold, cool if you are overheated, whichever you need — and let it begin to grow. Then watch what your body does on its own. The shoulders drop. The chest opens where the phone had hunched it closed. The face softens, the shoulder blades settle down the back, the spine takes your weight. Then let the light keep going, down through you and into the earth, into the core of it, and up through you into the sky, into the vast reaches of space, all the way to the source, the unified field, until you are a pillar of light connected at both ends — rooted in the deepest earth, opened to the widest heaven — and held, completely, between them.

Five

And the last one is not a technique at all. It is permission. Whatever is happening in this moment is exactly right, and it is safe for you to settle into it, safe to go with the flow of it, safe to set down for a little while everything that is pulling at you. The world will not fall apart if you do not watch the news, if you do not check your phone, if you leave the urgent thing that is not truly urgent for five more minutes. You are the one who decides where your attention goes, and you can always call it back — back from whatever has hooked it, back to your breath, back to your body, back to this moment — and let your life move like a slow, refreshing stream instead of a raging river.

If one of these islands is yours, I would love to know which one, and what it did for you. Leave a note below. And if someone you love is running themselves down to the bone right now, send it to them.

— Juli Martin, The Love Lady