Learning to Love Your Lows

Dear friend,

Last night I thought I’d plugged in my phone to charge, but somehow the connection had failed and the phone’s screen was blank glass when I awoke this morning.

I had an early coaching call starting at 7 a.m., and it was a relief to realise my body had awoken all by itself in plenty of time. I plugged the phone in and it made its customary electronic bell sound. I made breakfast.

I was feeling slightly odd and out of sorts.

I still am now.

The weather has changed and London is under its familiar grey-blue blanket of cloud. .

Two days ago, the sun was so fiercely hot I was wary of where the skin on my nose had been exposed, along with the skin over my cheekbones. Today the temperature dropped so that my feet are so cold sitting here typing, a hot water bottle is now warming them

After the coaching session, I took care of some admin and felt the urge welling up to be entertained. This is, as you’ll recognise in yourself, the slippy part of an even slippier slope.

This energy, the low feeling, is present because it is ready to be released, which means to be felt and processed and set free from the energy field that animates the body.

But rather than heal, my mind tugs and cajoles to be distracted. Anything. Random clips about the Kray twins on YouTube shorts, spiritual advice shared online. Something about AI and quantum physics, the history of cuneiform tablets in ancient Mesopotamia. All interesting, harmless—there’s plenty more where that came from, and some of it is very, very unpleasant indeed.

I swipe YouTube closed. I forget if the hot water bottle came from Mam and Dad’s or if I bought it for Chiara. My brain has long since pruned the origins of the object from my memory. I’m noticing how vast the information is that passes through my mind each and every day—how little is retained.

What was it I had to remember?

Oh, yes.

Allowing the body to do its work. Feeling into the discomfort, examining the fear with compassion and kindness. Learning to love our lows, especially perhaps when we can’t name or account for them easily, is a skill we can practice.

A huge, plump wood pigeon approaches on foot. They seem to be inspecting the garden. “Just checking you’re okay,” it says, and plods off, wings behind back like a kindly librarian. And I can feel the inner clouds shift. Behind the clouds, the warmth of the sun, shining just behind the heart.

I gave Scott his present last night, which has a design I made of his cat Ray printed onto an organic cotton t-shirt. Something childlike in me had fantasised that somehow the t-shirt would bring Ray back, and that’s one way I’ve been holding back the grief of losing a friend. The familiar soft eruption of emotional lava and salty tears expands as the low moves across the valley within. Bizarrely, the garden explodes in a burst of sunshine as changes in the weather outside mirror the inner.

More life admin notifications come into my digital awareness. I experience them as irritations. They can wait.

Missing Ray and feeling temporarily overwhelmed by feelings that don’t fit neat categories and which don’t require fixing is what is happening now. And I have the luxury of time to feel. If we can welcome our lows and invite them to get comfortable, in my experience, they soften and melt. Better to yield and go with them when you can.

The more we push them away, the more they strengthen themselves through the energy of our pushing.

All beings want to be loved and accepted. Why would our emotions be any different?

The entire universe is alive—we can say so confidently looking around at the many living things. Space-time itself is breathing, moving, ever new.

We’ve a way to go as a culture in learning to let our bodies do their thing. Processing the stuck feelings and beliefs we mistake for immutable reality.

I still wish that image of Ray would jump off the t-shirt and headbutt me and demand my full attention. He was pretty much an all-or-nothing kind of cat.

Here’s the t-shirt;

Till tomorrow

Love
Mikey