I came across a reel that caught my eye from Rainn Wilson—as the seasons change we all need a little reminder on how to recognize and cope with mental health struggles.  He sat in front of a algae filled, broken fountain and talked about the metaphor involved.  “How many times have you felt like a broken fountain?  It is life giving, it is resurrecting, it is nourishing, it represents God’s bounty.  It is cleansing.  When in mental health struggles we are a broken fountain.  The water (source) becomes dingy and green.  What do you do to begin giving forth that precious water of life?” Rainn Wilson.  When we are struggling with emotion or other things that make us feel out of control, we put a choke hold on life and create the stagnancy, the algae, the suffocating feeling of not being able to move.  We stop the flow of our abundance and life into our being because we are saying we need to be a certain way in order to make the fountain work.  When we feel broken and weak, we need to get close to the fountain again.  We need to make sure the fountain isn’t clogged. 

What struck me about this post is that the fountain is also indicative of flow in general—not just as it relates to our mental health, but to our overall health and how we live on a daily basis.  When we sit still we tend to stagnate.  We feel frustration and anger and disappointment and restlessness, and all of those things alone can lead to mental health struggles.  When we are not promoting the right environment for our overall well-being, it all suffers.  This can start with little things like spending too much time behind our desks doing things we don’t love, and then spread into settling, then into agreeing to do things we don’t love—and soon we are living our lives on someone else’s terms.  When we can’t move, when we aren’t actively in source, we become heavy with unnecessary muck and gunk and that adds to the mental health struggles.  Learning to recognize when we need to unclog, when we need to move is the epitome of seeing happiness in the ugliness—it’s how we take our power and use it, it’s keeping perspective and knowing we aren’t alone.  We need to remember that what makes us unique can (and should) be used for the good and that is where the real living is. 

We’ve spoken of mindset and flow and the natural rhythm of things over the last few days in particular, and this is another indicator that we need to be in a state of flow because as soon as we block ourselves, we suffocate the truth inside of us, the feelings we have for our passions.  The path becomes cloudy and murky and we lose the wind in our sails.  Sometimes we aren’t even aware that we are creating our own fog and confusion, that we’ve muddied the waters with our constant churning and trying to move, when all we had to do was settle for a minute so the waters cleared and we can see which way we need to go.  Life isn’t easy as we face the constant pressures of needing to do and prove and tying our value to things and productivity.  That’s where we get stuck: when we aren’t living up to society’s idea of what we should be doing or what makes us successful.  We feel disappointment in ourselves and our lives.  When we connect with source that’s a big dose of perspective and reality.  Clear the blockage whether it is emotional or physical, and reconnect with what keeps us in a state of connected flow.  Give what we are able to and turn that energy all the way on, allow the fountain of life to flow completely and that fountain, that source will never stop again.