It seems fast flows are muddying streams across the land – and so many of our personal lives as well. And that’s okay. Periodic peak flows are to be expected on any river. They are in fact essential for the river’s well-being.

While the same may be said for our psyches, it is also true that a fragile river — inner OR outer — may begin to unravel during floods. Here are 4 tips for ensuring that you benefit from your personal flood without destabilizing:

River Runoff Recommendations

1. Utilize a huge floodplain. Allow lots of extra space and helpers (plants, animals, spiritual practices… hey, even people!) to help you spread out, slow down, and absorb excess, murky energy. Click here to see Sassy’s stunning example.

2. Alternately, you can be more independent and self-sufficient, as long as you have a rock solid foundation — and by that I mean you are accustomed to freeing your mind on a regular basis. Of course you can still reconnect with a lush floodplain full of other living things a bit further downstream. Click here to see how the Big Horn makes just such a transition in fewer miles than I drive when I cross it to get to the airport (and back… on those days when I miss the actual airplane)

3. When you feel not only clouded with fine sediment but also as if your foundation, your boundaries, indeed your very world is made of shifting sands, that’s also completely okay. Just  remember that when a stream is dealing with the small stuff, it MUST have luxuriant barbed-wire boundaries. Click here for more information – but only if you’re not too scared of cows.

4. If you run into truly extreme turbulence – a personal waterfall episode – then yipee! When a stream gets going super fast, it can change the actual physical “phase” or “state” of water – creating little bubbles of vapor (spirit) right inside the work-a-day liquid (psyche). Click here to learn how the rock-solid Niagara River uses this process to stay dynamic.

You see, even the most stable river is not static. It will shift — in a way that still allows the river to accomplish its life’s work and maintain its own particular character, albeit in a slightly different place and with the extra nourishment that can be provided only by the spring inundation. Rest assured that this is The Way of things, and that our own psychic floods and shifts are just as rewarding.

“The supreme good is like water,

which nourishes all things without trying to.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching #8, translated by Stephen Mitchell