Resistance vs. Surrender

Wisdom for PMDD from the wind

Brett Buchert · April 2, 2025

It's Earth Day, and today I'm thinking about the wind.

I'm not typically the biggest fan. I'm sensitive. I run cold. I like quiet and I don't like my hair blowing around and getting in my mouth and eyes. When the wind blows too strong, I brace. I resist. I grow obsessed with rearranging my hair and clothes. I lament the noise and wish I brought more layers to protect myself from the unpredictable discomfort of its gusts.

I don't think I'm alone in this, especially amongst cycle-sensitive folk who tend to have some sensory sensitivity too.

My friend, Gabby, a somatic therapist, agreed, explaining that she finds the wind 'very dysregulating.

Yes. Dysregulating. That's it!

And yet last week as I climbed in the canyon outside of town on another typical windy day, I wondered what might happen if I didn't resist.

What if I let myself flow with the wind?

What if I let it move me?

What if I planted my feet and knew that I would not blow away?

What if I let myself fully feel its power?

Maybe the sense that I constantly need to resist this power is actually what troubles me…

Because yes, it's highly adaptive to be sensitive to the wind so that it doesn't blow you off the mountain. It can also signal storms on the horizon, carrying a message to get to safety.

But somewhere along the way this ability to listen to the wind, to hear its call and feel it's power, becomes twisted into annoyance or fear, and instead of allowing ourselves to fully experience the sensations of the wind, we resist.

But we don't have to.

There is always another choice: surrender.

And so I did just that. I closed my eyes and felt the wind blow across my face. I heard it's whoosh in the evergreens high above me and down the canyon below. It felt like it's power didn't clash upon my skin this time, but went through it, merging with my own flow of energy. And while the energy of my little human life and the wind are different in form, I believe they come from the same place, more alike than they are different.

It made me think of PMDD, too.

Of how we often brace against the inner winds.

The emotions, the anxiety, the fatigue, the rage, the grief.

The power. The deep, wild, unsettling force of the cycle.

But what if it's not something to resist, but to reverently respond to?

What if healing isn’t about silencing the storm, but letting it move through us, reminding us that we belong to the Earth just as much as the wind does?

We are not separate from nature. We are nature.

And today, on Earth Day, I’m honoring that.