Welcome home. I'm Dr. Tamah, a minister, licensed psychologist, and sacred artist.

And this is Homecoming, a podcast to facilitate your journey home to yourself.

While I will provide weekly inspiration and mental health tips, this podcast is not the same as personalized therapy.

I'm so excited you're on the journey. If you want to request specific topics or to submit a poem for me to read on the podcast, email me at HomecomingPodcast at gmail.com.

Also to build our community, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Let's begin.

Welcome home co-journers. I'm glad you're here for another episode, and I'm excited we have a poem submission for this week, and the poem comes from Maria Garcia.

The piece is entitled The Year of the Horse. In my wildness, I was unencumbered by the bonds of love, commitment, I was free, or so I thought.

I didn't realize I was corralled by fear, bridled by loneliness, I ran and ran and ran for miles, unaware I was running in circles, confined and safe, until I found the gate opened.

I ran with abandon, ate sweet grass, and reveled in the fresh air, awed by the endless horizon.

Beautiful Maria. Beautiful. It is so important as we come home to ourselves that we realize the ways in which we are often running in circles, running in place, trying to keep ourselves safe.

When we really want to live an abundant life, of a filled life, when we are seeking freedom and liberation on the inside, but fear can keep us confined from that which is our possibility.

And so I am so grateful for you sharing your poem with us, and I would encourage all of you if you write poems or vows to yourself that you like me to share on the podcast, please send it to me at homecomingpodcast at gmail.com.

For today, our topic is coping with feeling overwhelmed, coping with feeling overwhelmed. There is so much that we are facing, so much that is on your plate.

And for some of us, we enter into seasons where it is beyond stress, where you literally feel like you are on the edge, that you are breaking, that you cannot carry it anymore, that it is just too much.

You have the desire for everything to not only slow down, but for it to stop, that there was a building of pressure, and then it gets to a tipping point where it is affecting your mental health, your physical health, when you are overwhelmed, you may be irritated, when you are overwhelmed, you may feel exhausted.

When you are overwhelmed, it may show up with insomnia and loss of appetite. When you are overwhelmed, you may be resentful or angry. And most of all, you are fatigued, that kind of bone-tired, soul-tired, that a single nap will not fix.

And so for those who are overwhelmed, I hope this space for you in this moment, to know that I see you and that you are not alone, that there are so many of us that have been stretched thin, that are carrying so much, and we want to give ourselves compassion, but also we need some concrete strategies.

In order to not only cope with the feeling of being overwhelmed, but actually shift our lives so that we are not living from that place perpetually.

And this is particularly challenging in the midst of a pandemic, and for many of us, this feeling of overwhelmed that not start in this season, for some of us it is something we return to many times, that it is seasonal for some, and then for others, you may have crafted your life in such a way,

where you are perpetually overwhelmed and stretched thin, and sometimes it is not by your own doing, but by life circumstance.

And so I know some of you as you're listening are saying, I didn't sign up for all of this, this is my life, these are the cards I was dealt, this is the circumstance of my birth or my employment or my family life or my finance,

or the political environment in which I live, the culture in which I was born, that this is the body in which I dwell, and with that comes demands on my labor, demands and expectations that are heavy.

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