Beneath the Spiral: Trusting What You Feel
Beneath the Spiral: Trusting What You Feel
When the Mind Can’t Lead You Home
In the middle of a storm, when clouds swallow the stars and the horizon disappears, a compass does not panic. It does not spiral. It simply feels its way to north.
You may know a version of this storm from the inside. The body still, the room quiet, and yet somewhere behind the eyes, something is running. Looping. Listing. The kind of sleeplessness that has nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with a mind that cannot find its north.
This week, I am writing to you from inside this exact spiral. I just came off a grueling two-month project cycle where I poured my absolute all into a new launch, and the results didn’t match the immense energy I put out. My mind immediately rushed in to panic, to analyze, to fix. I felt utterly depleted. But yesterday, I finally stopped. I closed my laptop, walked outside barefoot, and let my feet sink into the grass. I realized I was trying to think my way out of a moment that simply required me to feel.
This is the landscape many of us are navigating right now. Wars, earthquakes, economic uncertainty, a world shifting faster than our plans can keep up with. The mind works harder. The spiral tightens.
Here is what often happens when we are frightened: we think instead of feel. The mind rushes in to analyze, plan, protect, because sitting with fear is uncomfortable. But what we have not allowed ourselves to feel shapes us just as powerfully as what we think. And the avoidance keeps the spiral going.
There is an older way of knowing. Indigenous peoples have always read the land, the body, the signs moving through nature, listening before strategizing. Like roots working quietly underground in the dark, drawing sustenance long before the tree shows any sign of it, this knowing does not announce itself. It simply holds.
Your body carries more wisdom than you may have been taught to trust. The gut senses before the mind names. The soul leads. The mind, at its best, listens and then organizes what needs to be done.
Darwin observed that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change. Think of the early days of Covid. Businesses shuttered, routines dissolved, the future turned opaque overnight. And yet — DoorDash, Instacart, Zoom, entire ways of living rebuilt from the rubble of the old ones. Not by those who panicked fastest, but by those who stayed open long enough to sense what the moment was asking for. Chaos has always been the birthplace of possibility. Opportunities do not disappear in difficult times. They change shape.
The moment before dawn is the darkest and the most still. You cannot force the light. You can only be quiet enough to be present when it arrives.
You don’t have to figure everything out today. You only have to be still enough to feel what is already true.
And then take one step.
Reflection Questions:
A compass finds north not by thinking but by sensing. When was the last time you paused long enough to let your inner compass speak, and what was it pointing toward?
We often think our way around fear rather than feel our way through it. What feeling have you been avoiding, and what might be waiting on the other side of it?
What we do not allow ourselves to feel shapes us just as powerfully as what we think. Is there something your body has been signaling, through tension, sleeplessness, or unease, that your mind keeps talking over?
Chaos has historically been the birthplace of something new. Looking at the disruptions around you or within your own life, where do you sense possibility beginning to stir, even quietly, even now?
Feeling opens the door; thinking walks through it. What is one step your intuition is already pointing you toward, that your mind has been too busy to notice?
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