Unmoored

Sacred Chapel on the Island of Sifnos, Greece

This word unmoored is lately swimming about in my brain as the best description of how I often feel these days.  A sailing vessel might, for example, be unmoored, as in the case of the photograph above, where the ship is hanging somewhat precariously from the ceiling of a sacred chapel in Greece,  unmoored from the ocean, as it were, and surrounded by a plethora of sacred beings.  Perhaps these saints and angels were painted with the explicit intent to send spiritual courage and protection to a vessel that at any moment might be swept into a storm.

People like you and me might occasionally feel unmoored like a vessel trying to negotiate the ever-changing weather patterns of the Aegean Sea, and we therefore might at times exhibit “symptoms,” including sensations of insecurity, deep dismay, or even a sense of having lost contact with reality, or at least the reality that we once knew. 

Watching the news can make us feel unmoored, for we might ask ourselves why there seems to be an epidemic of human beings who claim to represent love but who seem to have become unmoored from the very definition of this word, which implies a deep concern and caring for the plight of others.  It’s unmooring when we are lied to, either in person or telegraphed through the media. If we could only sit down and process what exactly hit us so hard, as untruths and distortions tend to do, we might regain composure and a sense of inner congruity.

We might pause to remember that, as humans, we’re wired for truth.  Being fed falsehoods the same way a baby might be fed cotton candy feels wrong, as if we’ve been slapped down hard, violated in potent yet intangible ways. 

One strategy might be to turn away from the deluge of misinformation that continuously comes at us, some of which rings true but disturbing, and some that’s discombobulating, because its contents violate the integrity of our very beings.  The false information hits hard, like an invisible betrayal. And yet, to cope we might numb ourselves to the pain of what’s happening in order to feel the sense of security that might come from confabulating a world in which “everything’s okay,” the ultimate self-betrayal of our sense of inner knowing.

A toxic environment of propaganda and misinformation means to render us overwhelmed and incapable of thinking critically or with courage. But we can regain our sense of baseline intelligence and agency if we reclaim the domain of silence and allow ourselves time away from the disorienting work of attempting to make sense of a deluge of information born of a world in which any human being with a cell phone now has a platform.

Oh but the myriad of ways that an episode of feeling unmoored might be triggered—often by the very tools of communication that we hold in our hands!  In a moment, we download the energy of people in our actual or virtual presence.  We might sense hostility instead of love, a flash of anger instead of peace, or betrayal instead of steadfast affection.  Oh how can things change in a micro-second!  Where there was once a job, there’s none, once a loved one, now a person departed from the earthly plain, once a baby, now a mature adult.  The very fact of change, “good or bad,” can unmoor the body and make us feel as if the ground beneath our feet has profoundly shifted. 

Our own bodies can bring on a sensation of being unmoored as well.  The other day, my husband was feeling creaky.  He’s recently started to run and lift weights again, and so his body is telling him the story of a new era in his life.  Walking across the room, no doubt dialoging  with his hurting limbs, he declared that he wished he was in “spirit form,” his way of acknowledging the unmoored quality of making acquaintance with—and one hopes peace—with a new phase in life beyond the limber years.

It’s unmooring, too, in the most deeply sad way, to observe what at this moment is happening in the history of humanity, as we are living in a time of genocide, famine, and historic levels of displacement, as if the simple concept of human beings needing a home, a place to educate their children, food, water and a doctor is somehow a difficult one.  As if we don’t understand that we will never be safe or secure as long as we let fear and violence  rule the day, while somehow pretending that inflicting trauma upon others will have any other result other than making its way back to the source of that violence. 

It’s unmooring, isn’t it, to think that we don’t understand the implications yet of the spiral of violence (explained so well in the archbishop Helder Camara’s book Spiral of Violence, 1971) and the consequences of creating intergenerational trauma that may very well last for centuries, barring a global healing event initiated by divine forces beyond our sphere of concrete knowledge or understanding.

It’s easy, and moreover natural, to feel unmoored on our earthly plane in a time as exciting and also challenging as the one that we’re all experiencing.

But what can we do, because for me feeling grounded, and at peace, is something I not only need but require, if I am to function like a healthy, non-toxic human being.

I imagine that we all have our little ways of grounding ourselves, tethering ourselves to reality, coming into congruence, once again, so that we can feel that our lives are generative, heart-centered, and stable.

Here I will sound like a typical “spiritually-oriented” person, but for me it helps very much to isolate myself for “a minute” so that I can calm my nerves, sink into silence, and truly feel the emotions that often pour through me when I take the time to pause.  Deep meditation and yoga help my body and soul immensely, and if I’m outside, and feeling warm winds on a fall day, this entering into silence and nature is a balm to my soul. 

I’m no whirling dervish, but that sort of dancing must be absolutely transporting.  For others, it might be engaging creatively in a myriad of ways, including gardening, or simply gazing out a window.  I recently read a short story by Edith Wharton called “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (see The New York Stories of Edith Wharton) about a woman who in her old age did nothing but gaze out of the window of her room.  This activity eventually inspires her to attempt to burn down a neighbor’s house because of their plans to build and thus block a segment of her view. Not everything we try to do to stay calm and occupied actually works to bring us into internal coherence.  But  it’s worth developing,  if we possibly can, a repertoire of practices aimed to bringing us back into a non-reactive, more reflective state of mind. We might take time to reflect upon small things we might do daily to bring ourselves into a state of coherence. 

But even with these practices ‘in place” what’s the bottom line here?  How can we leave the fractured, tortured, unmoored self behind in order to step into a broader, more expansive and healthy sensibility? 

The key is in cultivating our own authenticity, in learning to love ourselves for who we truly are and not for what others (or society) has told us in a myriad of ways we should be.  It comes when we are able to say, “The way I am made is so imperfectly perfect just as it is, because this is how I was created, and it is only in emanating my truest self that I can truly find peace, composure, internal coherence, and a confidence that I truly belong in this world.

In this way, when we feel unmoored, psychologically at sea, lost, we must step by step walk ourselves back to our authentic selves, where there’s nowhere to go but more deeply into our truest essence, into the heart of that person we were born to be.