Manda Scott

So by now, I hope you have a suite of things that work for you, that will help you to come back to being fully present in this time and this place, which is part of what being resilient is.

And then we want to move from the general.

These are all generalised things.

Breathing deeply and slowly works for absolutely everybody.

But each of us will also have a suite of individual things that help us with what Sophie Banks calls micro-returns.

The things that when we are slightly off balance, bring us back into balance.

So for me, that would be going out to walk on the hill, playing with the puppy, going to feed the chickens, leaning on a fence, listening to the bird call, going to visit friends who really get it, people where I can just drop the masks and be me.

Or doing the inner work, the various forms of meditation or morning ceremony or being in ceremony with people that I trust and that I love.

So I would strongly recommend that you work out what works for you.

What is it that helps to bring you back in balance?

How much of it can you readily access?

And are there ways that you could change your world very slightly to allow more things to be there and accessible?

Give yourself more space so that you can meditate in the mornings or the evenings or lunchtime or whatever.

Find a place where you can just go and walk on the world and be alone or be with the people that you love and that you trust.

Whatever it is, find out what works for you and then create a sense of a toolkit and know what you can reach for easily in an emergency and then the things that you might have to call someone up and ask if you can come over or set aside some time to go and really walk up a hill.

Whatever it is, know what you can access in the moment when you need it and then have a sense of how you can structure your life so that the other things are there to bring you back into balance.

And then on a similar basis, work out the things that are guaranteed to knock everybody off balance.

So there are things like low level, low frequency noises pretty much trigger everybody.

Fridges, air source heat pumps, airplanes overhead.

All of these things set us on edge, whether we understand it in the moment or not.