It Is What It Is: How to Return to Neutrality

I’ve talked about neutrality for years. It’s a useful state of awareness to cultivate, especially as an antidote to ‘charge’ or emotional activation.

Emotions can generate charge. They stimulate the nervous system, causing pulses to race, breathing to shallow, adrenalin to surge. Attention! Pay attention!

Charge can be important. For example, charge is helpful if you’ve got 14 minutes to make it to your gate before your flight departs.

It’s also useful as an aspect of self-awareness. If you feel an activation occurring, your autonomic system is letting you know that something requires your conscious attention.

Neutrality is a state that can be achieved once you’re safely on the plane, or perhaps checked into your hotel to await the next day’s flight, having missed the doors closing by two minutes.

Cultivating neutrality begins with acceptance of what is.

I walk in a federal wildlife refuge nearly every day. The refuge is wetlands and riparian forest, with a river winding throughout. Teeming with wildlife, it is a privilege to be there in the early morning hours, observing the animals as they go about their business.

There are quite a few great blue herons in the refuge. I’ve had the good fortune to observe their actions up close on many of my walks.

They’re solitary birds, patient and purposeful. They stand with their feet buried in mud on the shoreline, intensely focused on the water under their feet. Watching for fish, they wait quietly, fully present to the moment.

When they spy a fish, they move like lightning. Their sharp beaks penetrate the water, grasping the fish.

They tend to walk about as they grapple the fish into position for swallowing, dipping it into the water as they walk, only to grasp it again, hopefully parallel to their throat.

I watched one heron follow this process, walking slowly forward, releasing and reclaiming the fish repeatedly. Until the fish got away.

The heron ceased moving, staring at the water.

I created stories in my mind—the expletives, the frustration, the pent-up energy dissipating, releasing as the bird stared at the water.

Slowly, the heron turned around, and walked purposefully back to the shoreline, sinking its feet into the mud, casting its gaze intently at the water at its feet.

It is what it is. The charge of the capture and the dance of preparation to indulge, the loss of its prey.

Staring at the water, finding neutrality and acceptance.

The reset. It is what it is.

How to find neutrality:

• Acknowledge the activation, the charge
• Acknowledge the emotions
• Accept what is so … for now, this is what it is
• From above your head, bring down a ball of golden, Cosmic energy into your crown chakra, imagining it filling the entire crown
• Notice that the charge in your body, and even your emotions dissipate, as your crown vibrates with the neutral energy of the Cosmic field
• Reset your energy by grounding, owning your body, your energy and your experience