Wednesday are now advice days at Magpie Girl. We can share our wisdom with one another about this thing or that. Launch your queries to moi @ magpie-girl dot com.

So last week we talked about three kinds of sadness: hormonal, empathetic, and pervasive. Your comments and emails have been wonderful, and I love that everyone is contributing to the wisdom pool.

I have a few more thoughts, and I’m struggling to make this eloquent. But better to get it down in the rough, than to not get it down at all right? So here goes…

Right Place: Right Time
One thing I wanted to follow-up on was this question asked by Tami:

“With all the grief and loss in the world, how would one not feel empathic sadness constantly?”

This was interesting to me, especially in light of what Lisa said about empathetic sadness helping her in her healing work with others. In my experience as a minister, I’ve found that people tend to have empathetic reactions only to certain people, situations, or physical spaces. This is sometimes called ‘having a gift of discernment,’ or ‘the personal prophetic.’ Let me tell you a story….

When I was a minister in the University District of Seattle, I had a strong affinity for the neighborhood. Although it was run down and dirty, with people begging on the corners and a plethora of homeless kids, I adored it. It gave me good energy to walk down the streets, and I enjoyed the personalities I encountered there. I did not even mind the garbage. (Once while walking down the alley from the church to my car with the kids, my then 3 year old pointed to a dumpster and said, “Look Mama! Wildlife!” She was pointing to the crows picking through the trash! I found it delightful that my urban a baby considered crows “wildlife.”) All in all, the place and I vibed together well.

Anyway, at the same time I had an acquaintance who came from L.A. to visit. He had a knack for discernment as well, and he lived in a pretty hardcore part of L.A., so I figured the U District would be a cake walk to him. I was so wrong! His radar was on high alert the whole time and he could barely walk down the street without having to back up against the wall and say a few prayers. The spirit of the place completely demolished him.

What I took away from that is that you can be attuned to different things. You probably will not be tuned in to every instance of sadness around you. If you feel panicked and overwhelmed, perhaps that is your radar telling you this in not the area/person/situation for you to work in or with. But if you are just feeling sad and have some sort of insight about an area/person/situation, then that might be a clue from God and the Universe to lean in and listen a little closer.

What do you think? Does that make any sense.

What to do if you are connecting with everyone’s sadness.
That being said, there are times when your empathetic sadness goes on high alert — you feel every news report, every blog post, and every tragic email.

One obvious answer might be that something is amiss and your are projecting, projecting, projecting. So check and see if there’s something you need to grieve in your own life. But if that comes up empty, try this on for size…

One of my favorite stories is told by Sue Monk Kidd in The Secret Life of Bees. In this novel one of three sisters has an over-active empathetic sadness reflex. Every sadness she sees, she experiences as her own. The sisters help her cope with this by building a sort of wailing wall in the back yard. The physical exertion helps dispel some of the energy, and it creates a concrete place for her to express, and deposit her sorrow.

At one point in my life I found this happening to me, especially in regards to world events. At the time I was attending Regent College and was fortunate enough to take classes under Eugene Peterson. He advised the class to sink into one place/issue at a time, and to only focus on learning about that situation. At some point along the path of following this advice, I glommed on to the situation in Sudan, and to help me focus my sadness, grief, and intercession, I built a shrine. There I kept images of people of Sudan, news clippings, a candle, and a jar for money I later sent to a relief agency. It helped to have a place to focus my connection with that situation, and to express sorrow for her people. Perhaps, if you are feeling overwhelmed by sadness, this kind of symbolic focus might help you as well.

What do you do when you are overwhelmed by either grief or sadness? What techniques to you have to channel your empathic energy?

Next Week: How to create a soulcare community when there’s nothing in the ‘hood that fits.

Practicing gratitude for things like this helps keep me where the light is.

Given that we’ve recently moved to a new nation, I’ve done very little public writing about our life in Denmark. There are sheets and sheets of morning pages in my spiral notebooks – mostly about displacement and how it’s triggering delayed mourning in me over a whole slew of lost things. Most of them I can’t bring into focus yet, but one or two are starting to get a little less hazy. Eventually I’ll be able to write about them here, but for now they are still percolating prior to public display.

One thing that has caught me off guard here is the level of depression I’m experiencing. In spite of the charm and adventure of living in Europe, depression is always waiting to find a nearby nesting place. Any of you who have been through a stint with depression knows how even one day of that old sorrowful feeling can make you fear sliping back into the abyss. I’m not overly concerned thus far. As long as the migraines stay relatively infrequent and the Spring unrolls into Summer, I should be okay. Keeping an eye out for my cycle buddy doesn’t hurt either. Still, there are days where there is crying, and phone calls to Jen, and where not even chocolate can help.

Staying present helps. I’m finding that living in the here and now is more helpful than slipping into a past I cannot reclaim, or spinning forward into a future over which I can only pretend to have control. But staying present does not come easily to me. My spirituality tends towards the prophetic which means I live a little less in the now and a bit more in the not yet. In addition, my works as a writer tips me towards the past to find connections between old stories, and casts me into the future looking for new inspiration. But the now, well, the now doesn’t come easily.

Having a rhythm for the day helps me stray present to the current moment. Every day that I deviate from my regular rhythms I find myself living in regret (I should have done X instead…) or being frozen by options (should I write? Bike? Clean the toilet?). Without routine my day too easily becomes a four-hour binge of Dexter, followed by a crabby afternoon where I try to write after the kids come home from school. (Never a good idea.) Last week, when I strayed from the routine, Jen had to spend the bulk of the day talking me out of the sobbing mess that once resembled Rachelle.

Right now the essentials to my daily rhythm include:

Walking through the college garden on my way home from dropping the kids at school. I’m finding that in this busy urban neighborhood I need the relative quiet of the park. Otherwise my tendency to get distracted by sparkly things goes on hyper drive and I can’t quite seem to calm my nervous system.

Writing my morning pages. This practice from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way are a mainstay for many artists and writers. My habit of penning three pages comes and goes as needed, and right now it’s quite needed. I write them every morning as soon as I get home from the school/garden. Now that it’s sunny I can write them on the bedroom balcony – any extra Vitamin D has to help the gloom as well.

Yoga. Yoga. Yoga. Thank god for yogis on DVD. I have to have at least 45 minutes of Vinyasa everyday or I wobble about completely off center. I don’t think I even knew how to be present at all until I started doing yoga. I spent all of my time regretting the past or wondering about the future. But yoga keeps me focused on the current breath, the work of holding one pose and flowing into the next – at least for a few minutes.

Working on a regular schedule. After yoga I grab a shower and get to my desk. Sometimes I actually have to set the kitchen buzzer to make sure I show up at the page on a regular schedule. When I first came to Denmark I tried to write 4-5 hours a day, but right now I’m finding that even 2 or 3 hours is a good day’s work for me – at least when it comes to working on a manuscript. Then I log another couple of hours answering emails and typing up blog posts. Then my alone-time is up, and it’s time to leaving once again to fill my bike basket up with the days groceries, then peddle to the school and pick up the kids.

Without this routine, this rhythm to my day, I’d be a) a basket case, b)completely unproductive.

What staves off your depression? and/or What helps you stay productive as a writer/artist?