A Teeny Tiny Vacation For You: Setting Down your Burdens in One Minute a Day

So, I wrapped up last week with a sunset trip to the beach. I live an hour and a half drive (on easy traffic days) from Galveston Island. I love going there for many reasons, like I am in love with the ocean, but it also feels like a different place. Sometimes when I’m there, I’ll see a Texas license plate and think, “Hey, I live in Texas!” Then I remember we are literally in Texas and just about everyone here lives in Texas and just about every license plate is Texas. I think I finally used the word Texas in a single paragraph enough to finally qualify to be a Texan.

Sunset at the beach with an airplane and the moon in the sky

Anyways, I like the escape. It feels so different there than the rest of the state. I love to go to the public beaches with all the people having fun and I take a long walk with my feet in the water. That reminds me, I forgot to take the seashells out of my pockets. When I’m done writing this, I better do that before they go through the wash. A very Persephone problem. Haha. It feels like a little vacation to go there, and the other night I pulled out my picnic blanket I bought years ago for Reiki in the Park and put it on the sand next to the water, and laid down and watched it get dark. It was heaven!

A bar on a pier over the water

On that trip and in a session I got from another healer today, I consciously set my burdens down so I could start teaching my nervous system that it is safe to feel lighter. Now I should say, I’m a healer because I have needed so much healing over the years. I have ADHD and CPTSD and have had a lot of hard things to go through, so for people like me, and maybe you, too, setting our burdens down might not be super easy or straight forward.

Our world, the media, the politics of the day, capitalism, social media, and patriarchy are all set up to keep your nervous system activated in fight, flight, freeze, fawn or faint at all times. The more you can stay in that dysregulated state, the easier you are to control, manipulate, be sold to, and be played. It’s the unfortunate reality of the times. It’s also complicated because if we have a heart at all and emotional intelligence at all, we are upset by what’s going on in our country, but we also have to work hard to stay regulated anyways. Developing a practice, even if it’s for a single minute a day at first, of setting our burdens down, so we can learn what that feels like and train our nervous system to create that state for us when we need it is so important and can be a game changer.

Seagulls and sunset

Okay, we are going to start with a ChatGPT prompt. Here is the prompt for you to copy and paste into ChatGPT or to answer yourself.

"Based on what you know about me from our past chats, help me notice what burdens I’m carrying right now that I could set down, even just for a while. Please name them gently in a way that feels personal to me and then guide me through a simple practice to imagine placing each one down so I can feel lighter in my body and spirit."

When I did it, it spelled out what has been worrying me and then it had me imagine I was laying on the beach with a basket next to me. It had me take my burdens and put them in the basket for a few minutes. When I put them in the basket, I had to take some deep breaths to let my body lean into the peace. My body also started having knee jerk worries come up. That was just my nervous system recognizing my slide out of fight or flight and it was trying to help me by creating that state again so I would stay activated. It took a minute or so for it to let go more and more. Then I just laid in that state for a few minutes, like I was on a mini vacation. I even did a little chanting that one of my clients had shown me because it felt comforting. I’ll put the link below. After a few minutes I felt so much better than before I started.

Guided Chant

The thing I love about this practice is that it can be done regularly, but it doesn’t need to be a big deal, just a couple of minutes at a time, and you can begin to train your nervous system to get into that state easier and easier.

Just know, that a dysregulated nervous system isn’t a fan of regulating so you might meet with some resistance. That doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. In fact it probably means you are doing it right because it notices you slipping to regulation and it is trying to get you back to dysregulated because it believes it’s safer for you there. This is a practice of pleasure that happens to be healing, so it’s not about discipline and forcing yourself. It’s about leaning into the enjoyment of it. The pleasure is the healing place.

The street where we stayed in Rome. I loved to wake up in the morning and go out to the street and take a deep breath and just be there.

Another tip is you can visualize times and places where you felt happy and regulated. For me, I kept thinking of being in Rome in the morning and stepping out of our apartment to the street and taking a deep breath. I also thought about when my parents would read to me as a kid and I would love the stories and looking at the patterns on the patchwork quilt with the sun shining through the windows.

Doing this exercise might be easy for you or it might be hard or somewhere in the middle, but either way, you deserve to have your burdens lifted and set aside for a few minutes a day at least. I’d love to hear how this plays out for you and in what ways it was hard or helpful or all of the above. Feel free to comment and share your experience. Thank you and I hope this little practice helps you day by day reset your nervous system so you feel lighter and more free.