Retreat from this World

This week someone asked me if I ever got stressed as someone who teaches de-stressing and nervous system regulation techniques for a living.

And the answer is, of course I get stressed. And of course I don’t always deal with it in healthy ways. When I get really stressed, I put up a wall between me and the outside world. But this week I was reminded of this:

“To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength and it betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.” - David Whyte, from Consolations