Storm Shelter is one of 12 artifacts from autumn season of Labyrinth Library.

The Question — how do I create a safe holding space to support me during stormy weather?

Listen to Storm Shelter (10 min)

storm shelter - final.mp3

Practice

<aside>

Creating a Storm Shelter Practice

Arrival: How do you land and open the door to your storm shelter?
- Ambiance and atmosphere: How do you create the mood of your storm shelter through music or scent or sounds or space or texture?
- Threshold: What signals that you're crossing the boundary from storm to shelter?
- Grounding: How do you receive yourself and acknowledge that you're in this space?
Stay: What do you do in the storm shelter?
- Containing: What is the practice that holds you for the duration of this ritual?
Departure: How do you exit?
- How do you re-enter the world and signal to yourself that you're closing this space? </aside>

Text Transcript

<aside>

Intro

I'm really excited to share Storm Shelter on the cusp of Libra and Scorpio season. I see this artifact as containing the power of both: Libra holding spaciousness in the eye of the storm with lightness and grace, as well as the power of Scorpio—being able to weather the intensity of the storm by going through it and becoming the storm itself.

I'm particularly excited about this artifact because, as a Scorpio stellium, I feel like I've needed a metaphorical storm shelter my entire life without ever being able to articulate the need for this specific container. I've had a lot of experience allowing myself to be caught up in the storm, swirling around the tornado, the tsunami, and letting it transform me through disintegration and rebirth. But the purpose of a storm shelter is really about endurance—creating a space that will allow you to wait for the storm to pass with a sort of gentleness and tenderness and a safe kind of distance.

In this artifact, I will explore the storm shelter with you and invite you to create your own storm shelter as a ritual container space for holding yourself during instability or chaos.

A Story

When I was 21, I hiked a mountain in Hong Kong. I remember it was my first time doing something like this. I slept in a half-enclosed shelter at the peak of the mountain on a yoga mat, led there by a friend. There were worms inside. There was rain that seeped in. There were bugs. It was cold. It was deeply uncomfortable. Around dawn, someone came and shined a flashlight in our faces, and it made me feel like we were homeless people.

But I felt so alive. We had made it to the top of the mountain. We were in the midst of an adventure. And we were safe.

The storm shelter—the mountain shelter in this case—held us through the night, protected us from rain and wind. It was not luxurious. It was not even comfortable. But it provided a baseline sufficiency that allowed us to endure bad weather and a period of darkness. And that is the purpose of a storm shelter.

What Is a Storm Shelter?

It could be above ground. It could be underground, like a bunker. It could be something people build next to their homes if they live in tornado zones. Or it could be something you stumble into while you're hiking a mountain or inside your labyrinth.

I see a storm shelter as having a few key purposes:

Creating agency inside of unpredictable chaos. In the midst of motion outside—the wild, the bad weather, external circumstances that you can't control—having a storm shelter allows you to have a place where you can access calm and stillness, even for just a moment or an hour. It can stop the buzzing of the voices in your mind that are all about survival panic. The voices that ask, "Will I survive this? Will I survive this situation?" The storm shelter helps you regulate and access the baseline trust of, "Yes, I will survive this." Once we get that question out of the way, even if it's an unconscious questioning, it removes this overtone of panic, of buzzing noise in our heads and creates a sense of spaciousness which leaves us with options, choices, agency, and possibility.
Containment and enclosure. Having a storm shelter makes a divide between the shelter and the storm. There's an inside-outside relationship. When you have distance from the circumstances, you're able to stop seeing yourself as a victim to the weather—whether the weather is your own body or life or business or things happening. Crossing this threshold can help you re-evaluate what kind of motion or stillness you're in. Are you feeling frenetic and incessantly moving because you think that's what you have to do? Or are you paralyzed in place, huddled under a tree in the middle of a thunderstorm because you don't know where to go? A storm shelter is about providing baseline security to allow yourself to resource. In that sense, it's an emergency container which you can access even when there is no emergency, even when you just want to soothe yourself.
Accessibility. There's a preparation that goes into having a storm shelter. Sometimes I ask myself, how much overwhelm could I save myself if I were to have a sort of kit or a place ready on hand for situations that I live again and again? For example, traveling, or the beginning of my menstrual cycle, or getting into a fight with my partner. What if I created a landing space that can hold me in each of these situations? To be prepared can feel boring or like trying too hard to predict every possible outcome. But I think the purpose of having a storm shelter or thinking about these specific containers is not in terms of what situation am I preparing myself for, but what energy or mood or emotional inner state am I creating spaciousness and resources for. It's not unlike having an emergency snack in your bag for moments when you're out in the world and feeling hungry and in danger of getting hangry.

Your Storm Shelter Ritual

For this week, I would like to invite you to create your own storm shelter ritual. Before I walk you through a simple process, I want to remind you that a storm shelter as a metaphorical container is accessible to you in every single moment. When you're feeling like you're swirling with thoughts and to-do lists and anxiety and uncertainty and pain and tenderness, imagine that there is a storm shelter in your mind, in your body, in your being that you hold, and you can access it through different doorways.

You can access it through body-based practices like a body scan or just sensing. You can access it through meditation, deep listening, a simple inhale and exhale, or tuning into the sound in your environment and listening inwards to what you feel and sense. Entering your storm shelter could take even just one moment or 30 seconds.

If you'd like to create a longer ritual, there are two ways I'd invite you to think about it.

The Basic Three-Part Practice

Arrival: How do you land and open the door to your storm shelter?
Stay: What do you do in the storm shelter?
Departure: How do you exit?

Deepening the Practice

If you'd like to deepen this three-part practice, you can think about:

Ambiance and atmosphere: How do you create the mood of your storm shelter through music or scent or sounds or space or texture?
Threshold: What signals that you're crossing the boundary from storm to shelter?
Grounding: How do you receive yourself and acknowledge that you're in this space?
Containing: What is the practice that holds you for the duration of this ritual?
Departure: How do you re-enter the world and signal to yourself that you're closing this space?

A Simple Example

Arriving and entering: Play some instrumental cello music, light a candle, and take three deep breaths.

Duration: Open my sketchbook and draw for 15 minutes without any goal or aim, while still listening to the music.

Departing: Take three deep breaths and one moment of cultivating a feeling of gratitude to my practice and to this storm shelter.

Final Thoughts

The storm shelter practice is something that you can expand or contract based on how much time you have. I'd invite you to think about how you can access it in 30 minutes or 10 minutes or 3 minutes.

If you explore this artifact, I'd love to see your reflections. You can share them in the comments, in your journals, or in the community log.

Until next time, speak soon.

</aside>