What To Do if You Are Languishing

The New York Times suggested that languishing may be the dominant emotion of 2021. Are you familiar with the term? Therapists speak of a spectrum from depression to flourishing. In the middle are feelings of stagnation or emptiness, which some call languishing. Apparently over the long haul of the pandemic, and as the holiday season approaches, more intense feelings of fear and grief have given way to this aimless blah. Many people are finding motivation and enthusiasm hard to access.

What do you do if you are languishing or know someone who is?

There are two things you can do: uninterrupted alone time and completing a small goal. Excellent practices, both. The Numina at-home retreat is a great way to do just that and to explore yourself more deeply, granting yourself the gift of self-discovery while clarifying what has held you back.

There is no better time to discover where true motivation and enthusiasm comes from! People who study their own low times notice an unexpected strength. It turns out that what animates you is not conditional on how good or bad you may feel. You will do what really matters to you regardless. So even if you are successful in finding an antidote to blah feelings—and few emotional antidotes last—you would not have found the source from which motivation flows.

If finding that flow is a challenge for you or someone you love who is struggling with just that, The Numina Transformation Retreat could be the gift to invest in this holiday season.

The Source From Which You Flow

Here is a ten-minute reflection you might want to try. Make a list of times in your life when you were flourishing, brimming with motivation and enthusiasm. For each occasion, note the feeling and also what mattered to you most at the time.

Make another list of times when you were languishing, joyless and aimless. Again for each occasion, note the feeling and also what matters to you most at the time. Now on a new page write about all the things you can observe that were different qualities present in the flourishing times not present in the languishing times and what was in languishing and not in flourishing.

Finally—and this is possibly the most interesting list—write about what was present in both. What is still here whether you are languishing or flourishing.

When we know our own bedrock in this way, we emerge into a confident and stable sense of who we are and the unique gifts we bring. It doesn’t necessarily make the low times more comfortable, or up times less exciting. What we do find however is that we show up fully whatever may be arising. Psychologists call that “flow,” where your sense of time, place, and self melts away.

How do we make flow the dominant experience of our upcoming New Year you might wonder?

The Numina Transformation Retreat. It contains 5 experiential processes, each about a half-hour. At the end of the Retreat, you will feel a renewed sense of purpose, drive, and awareness of what the future holds—a wonderful way to start off the holiday season and continue into the New Year. If you feel hesitant, frustrated, doubt or languishing, we know you will find aid in our Numina Retreat. As our gift to you, dear Spirituality & Health reader, we’d love to offer you 20 percent off the Retreat. Use code 20SpiritH at checkout for the next 30 days and give yourself the gift of transformation.