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spike bullet August 2009 - Finding Support During Challenging Times

What is a "Support Circle"?
What is an "Anchor"?
More About the Anchor Position
In the Mean Time ... Tips for Coping with Everyday Challenges 
Resources (links, books, articles, the lighter side)

color bulletSupport Circle: Anchor

by Emily Baumbach

As we make our way through a lifetime, all of us have what's called a Support Circle of 12 people.

What is a "Support Circle"?

These 12 people are there for us even when we go in and out of being in contact with them.  When we bump into them after a lapse, they're still there offering us support.  Each of the 12 people in our circle has a special function:

Intimate Group

Grounding Group

Love

Humor

Knowledge

Discipline

Compassion

Anchor

Spiritual Lessons Group

Teacher Group

Mentor

Healer

Beauty

Enlightenment

Child

Muse

For instance, our Love Position person is someone who always loves us no matter what; and we love them no matter what.  Our Healer Position person can be our health practitioner, massage therapist or just a friend to take us to the doctor.

One of the most important people we can have around these days is our Anchor person.  

What is an "Anchor"? 

Our Anchor will help us feel connected to our core on just about every level — spiritual, emotional, physical.  Our Anchor person will often times show up as our favorite loving parent or a long-time neighbor who takes care of the house while we're away.

Our Anchor person can be a good friend, a beloved relative, our spiritual teacher, our pet dog or even someone famous whom we've never met.  (For instance, Larry King and Dan Rather are Anchor Position people for millions — and they're called "news anchors" for a reason.)

Anchor people are people who are grounded and who are always there for us through thick and thin.  They are people we can trust.  Possessions can step into the Anchor role when our primary Anchor Support person isn't around.  For a lot of us, it's our homes, our cars, our clothing, our book collection, our backyard garden.  We can also get anchoring from our church, ashram, professional organizations and neighborhood coffee klatches. These things ground us and make us feel safe.

What I call "The Great Acceleration" is now happening full bore.  Everything is speeding up — karmas, agreements, life circumstances, births, deaths.  It's hard to keep up.

April 2009 was an especially difficult month for most of us and just about everyone I ran into was having a huge, major life crisis — threatened or real job loss, home loss, medical problems, loss of income, loss (by death) of loved ones.

It's been a hard year so far for most of us.  At times like this, our Humor Position people can be helpful in giving us the transcendental experience of laughing.  Our Discipline people can help us get out of bed and out looking for a job.  Our Knowledge people can offer helpful information to get ourselves out of the well of depression.  All of our Support Circle can make us feel better.  In turn, we ourselves act as Support Circle people for others.  It's a nice back-and forth relationship with the Universe.

More about the Anchor Position

Because the economy is in such bad shape and the karmic speedway is going too fast to control, most of us are longing for something to anchor us.  The problem is, our Anchors are moving around and looking for their own Anchors.  It's helpful to know that our Anchors tend to change through the lifetime.  Sometimes it might be one person, then after a few years or decades, someone else will be our Anchor.

We might anchor into our local meditation group that meets once a week, then as people come and go, we'll find new anchoring either there or elsewhere.  All this shifting of our anchor points can be scary and unsettling until we find that our ultimate anchor is ourselves.  Many mystics and saints have realized that this world is never anchored and is never anchoring.  We can never, ever be anchored in this consensus reality simply because its nature is change.

Spiritual maturity means we turn away from fruitless anchoring in outer things and people, and we turn toward fruitful anchoring in our Core Being — that which never changes.  This takes courage and readiness — something that happens when we stop and pay attention to what is real.  Discovering the true Anchor inside is a happy accident that we can't control, but (as my teacher Ngeton once said) we can be ruthlessly self-vigilant to make ourselves more accident-prone.  We can be ready for it when it happens.

In the Mean Time . . . Tips for Coping with Everyday Challenges 

If you're not authentically There yet in your own anchoring, here's how you can soothe your mind and emotions:

  • Find an Anchor, any Anchor:  Conjure up an inner guide who is there for you 24 hours a day.  It can be a famous guru or "The World's Foremost Authority" on your favorite subject, a loving family member, a living image of your own Self in human form (inside your mind) or simply your own faith in something greater than yourself.
  • Sit down with a financial advisor who can help you come up with a plan to save money, no matter what your financial situation.  Suze Orman (Priest role Submission goal, Aggression mode, Realist attitude, Greed dragon) is a current financial Anchor Position person for our entire nation, as is Ben Bernanke (Scholar role, Discrimination goal, Observation mode, Stoic attitude, Self-Deprecation dragon).
  • Anchor with the physical Earth: 
    • Put your feet in the dirt.
    • Walk bare foot in the grass.
    • Walk on the beach.
    • Plant a vegetable garden and some fruit trees.
    • Get away from the city, turn off the news and go for a walk in nature.

    This will soothe your Instinctive Center by reminding you of your many, many past lifetimes.  You'll get a sense of eternal continuity.

  • The US Government, oddly enough, is a huge Anchor Position force right now.  It's bailing out banks, supporting the military, giving unemployment benefits and tax breaks to get the economy jump-started again.
  • Return to the past for comfort by regressing to an earlier chronological age.  Go into a fetal position, eat your favorite ice cream, play tag in the yard with some kids.
  • Hang out with history.  Read history books, rent old movies and movies about people from past centuries.  Find a historical context for what's happening by studying the stock market graph from its own inception long ago.
  • Look at the future with astrology or clairvoyance to see what trends are coming up.  This will put life into a broad context and will let your Instinctive Center know that Yes, there actually will be a future, in spite of how bad things look right now.  Everything always changes.
  • Be flexible. You never know where opportunity will appear.
  • Sit quietly and meditate.  This shows you what is real.  Go from there to Here.  Eventually, the snow in the snow globe will settle down.
  • Explode occasionally to relieve stress: cry, swear, sweat, throw up, get diarrhea, attack a pillow.  Big emotions are an invitation to step outside the bondage of daily illusion.
  • Experience full-on panic.  Move toward fear and feed your demons.  If you're about to lose everything, go ahead and lose everything.  Let the walls dissolve.  The less you own, the fewer burdens you have. Go from freak-out to freedom.
  • Count your blessings. Gratitude changes your whole mindset.  Be grateful that you are alive for the next few minutes and let everything else wait.
  • Set a different worry schedule. Postpone your worry until another day in the future when you have more time to focus on it — and don't let yourself worry until then.  When the day comes, maybe you'll be calmer or maybe you'll postpone your worry again.  Regardless, it will give you some time and perspective for your situation.
  • Know that the economy will — eventually — improve.  I expect this to start happening later in 2010, with a slow climb to normalcy until 2015.  Things will get better.

Copyright © 2009 by Emily Baumbach, CCHT.  (Adapted from Emily’s June 2009 newsletter - used with permission of the author).  Emily is a clinical hypnotherapist, professional astrologer, author and teacher of the personality system we call The Personality Game.  Emily's company, Causalworks, is a publishing and educational company devoted to the study of who we are.  Many of the personality descriptions we have on our famous people pages come from Emily's book, Celebrities.

  Internet Resources

book graphic  Books -  Disclosure: We get a small commission for purchases made via links to Amazon.

world wide web - articles  Articles

Related articles on our website:
    October 2002 - Reducing Stress in the Workplace
    September 2004 - Stress Busters:  Managing Stress in the Workplace
    July 2001 - Balancing Life and Work 
    Support Circle positions (overview)
    Personality Game (overview)
    Other Personality Game / Michael System articles 

smiley graphic  The Lighter Side  

About our resource links:  We do not endorse or agree with all the beliefs in these links.   We do keep an open mind about different viewpoints and respect the ability of our readers to decide for themselves what is useful.

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