Soapbox #5
Keep your cup full, but your bucket empty.
You know the cup metaphor, but do you know the other body-as-a-vessel analogy?
Here it is: Your body is a bucket, and each time you encounter food or environmental stressors—things like poor nutrition, pesticides and herbicides, illness, poor sleep, stress, etc.—water is added to the bucket. The bucket also has a drain, which represents your body’s ability to cope with these stressors. If water is added to the bucket faster than it drains, the bucket overflows, and that is when you start experiencing unpleasant symptoms—things like skin irritation, GI issues, pain, headaches, and other ailments.
To prevent overflow, you can decrease the water coming in—by reducing food and environmental stressors—and/or you can increase the water draining out—by supporting your body’s natural healing abilities with things like a healthy diet, exercise, sleep, breathwork or meditation, and social connection.
Everyone’s bucket is different—buckets are different sizes, they drain at different rates, and different stressors add different amounts of water for different people. This can be a helpful framework for understanding a “sensitive” individual—maybe their bucket is small, maybe it doesn’t drain very well, or maybe a certain exposure floods their bucket with water while others only receive a few drops.
This simple analogy helped me make sense of my son’s reactions when he was a baby.
We cannot avoid every little source of water. But we can eliminate some easy sources of water within our control so that when we inevitably get hit with water outside of our control, we’re better positioned to handle it. For example, we can choose good food and good products in our homes so that our buckets are fairly empty when we head out and about. And we can be more intentional about the things we allow to fill our buckets.
So grab the low-hanging fruit. Swap out your laundry detergent. Toss your scented candle. Skip the winter lawn fertilizer or quarterly pesticide application.
This holiday season, fill your bucket with a slice of pie, not your hand soap.
Peace,
Jen
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