(For Leaders, Managers, Students, Teachers, or Anyone Who Suddenly Became Disoriented and a Shut-In)
May I recommend an 8-minute listen?
This podcast, produced by On Being Studios.
Positive emotions are not just light and fluffy things. They actually help regulate our physiology; they're an antidote to the stress response (fight, flight, or freeze). Which matters if we need to be creative thinkers, see the bigger picture, take smart risks, or be productive. Said another way, chronic stress prevents us from accessing the internal resources we need to work and live optimally. (To say nothing of what it does to our physical health.)
It's been mercilessly stressful these last months.
The good news is, it doesn't take much to shift our own chemistry in a given moment by tapping into more life-giving emotions. Many paths lead to Rome. You already have some wonderful sources, I know.
Yet here’s one more. It comes in the form of a listening recommendation. An 8-ish-minute-an-episode podcast. If you tried to guess, you might say, "a dance party playlist!" And that would be an excellent idea—yet what I'm recommending is a poetry one.
Stay with me here.
An 8-minute podcast is ingenious. But equally so is that Irish poet and storyteller extraordinaire Padraig O Tuama has gorgeously curated the content: one poem per podcast, which he reads then unpacks with examples from his and others’ lives. Then he reads the poem again.
Even if we’re someone who doesn’t “get” poetry, the poems make if not literal sense, then emotional sense through his translation.
If we've been on the deep freeze we can thaw in their familiarity. Armored up, we get to let down our guard as we’re reminded of our essential humanness: sometimes raw, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes lost or alone, which we discover doesn’t make us less ourselves, but more. Return, is the offering, to our better selves.
It’s worth noting that these poems were selected even before “pandemic” was part of our daily vocabulary. Yet, the episodes are listed on the podcast menu like timely, tender prescriptions. “A poem for what grounds you.” “A poem for what you learn alone.” “A poem for ritual and reset.” And more.
What we’re feeling now isn’t new. What may be new is how to purposefully manage the feelings and all at once. But managing them, paradoxically, may mean touching them, even just lightly. To get to more positive emotions we have to give space to their very opposite. It's okay to feel. Because we get liberated back to ourselves. We get rewarded with more self.
We also discover, that no single feeling is final. It's not a one-and-done proposition. They shift, change, and become something else yet again.
What we find in O Tuama's gentle company is that we're not alone if we endeavor into ourselves. Others have gone here before us and charted the terrain, lending to us more of another human thing, courage. They’ve not just found their way out. They’ve also found their way through and been transformed.
I wish you times of greater peace and more self, so you can do your best work now and going forward.