Low blood sugar of the soul

Honesty requires that I write about down times as well as up ones. Yesterday, after I wrote that enthusiastic post about Feldenkrais healing, I slid into a funk.

This happens to me often when I am alone, as I am for several days in the middle of every week. Vic is in Chicago. I work from home and communicate only intermittently with my colleagues. And sometimes the work I do is downright draining. I get so tired of fundraising proposals and other forms of persuasive writing.

Yesterday started with an email miscommunication, continued with evidence of the strength of the enemies of the environment, and went downhill from there. Suddenly I felt like I could not do this work any more. Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t do anything any more. At that point my daughter called and soon ran afoul of my mood. “Low blood sugar of the soul?” she guessed.

Exactly. I would have called it “running on empty,” but “LBSS” is more accurate. It comes on suddenly, with no warning. It requires immediate treatment. What was I going to do?

Treatment for LBSS must start with what is possible. Was it possible for me even to move my butt off the rocking chair? Possible or not, everything else seemed to depend on at least getting the body to move. And so here is the treatment that unfolded yesterday for that acute attack of LBSS.

A. Coaxed myself to move.

1.     Folded laundry. This required going upstairs. It was a tiny bit satisfying to see all the clean clothes dried environmentally correctly on the drying racks and then stacked up, socks matched, everything tucked away in the drawers.

2.     Got the mail. The driveway goes downhill to the mailbox and so I could persuade myself to go that direction, and then, of course, come back up again. It did require the effort of putting on my coat.

3.     Since I had my coat on and was in motion I found I could actually exert myself enough to carry in wood, filling the woodbox for the next 24 hours. This brought the satisfaction of promised coziness and was sort of environmentally correct although there is a study that says if we got rid of all the woodburning stoves in the world we would eliminate a lot of soot and greatly reduce global warming as well as save a lot of health problems. They’re talking about Third World cooking fires, aren’t they? Not my woodstove!

B. Pulled out the spiritual props.

1.     Having put my coat on and set myself in motion I could take the short walk into the woods to Sister Tree. You’d think, as powerful as this tree is, I would visit her first thing. But it is hard to do anything at all in a soul-blood-sugar crash. I sat at her base for ten minutes and thought about nothing. When I got up the dark cloud wasn’t hanging right behind my forehead any more. I didn’t feel good yet but I didn’t feel bad any more. Neutral.

2.     Back in the house I swallowed four drops of the latest flower essence blend Joanna had made for me and took my Sanibel dolphin vertebra off the shelf. I sat with the bone over my heart. I felt warmth, embrace. Better and better.

C.  Snacked, just in case my body blood sugar was low.

1.     Red mango tulsi tea in front of the fire.

2.     A handful of Trader Joe’s wasabi snack blend.

3.     One licorice twist. Getting there.

D. Wrote.

Having raised both body and soul blood sugar levels just enough that I could write, I did. I wrote this. And at the end of it I felt restored.

How do you treat LBSS?