Tiny Buddha

Category: letting go

  • The Secret to Letting Go (And Why It’s Okay if You Can’t Right Now)

    The Secret to Letting Go (And Why It’s Okay if You Can’t Right Now)

    “It’s not a matter of letting go—you would if you could. Instead of ‘Let it go,’ we should probably say ‘Let it be.’” ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

    When I was in my twenties, I went to see an acupuncturist because I’d been through a bad breakup and felt uncertain about my life path and purpose. “Went” is a kind way of saying it; I was dragged. I didn’t want to go, but my family was going and thought it might be supportive with all that I was going through.

    I was dealing with a lot of rough emotions and felt like I was on a daily roller coaster of lows. The ride took me from anger, to sadness, back to regret, and to general disappointment in myself and life. I felt so angry that life had taken me down that path and that I hadn’t seen the breakup coming.

    I continued repeating this mental narrative for months, and my biggest trigger was thinking about the mistakes I’d made—starting with choosing a relationship that looked good on paper because I’d been hurt in the past when I’d followed my heart. 

    It was a whirlwind of an unhealthy relationship, and when I looked back, I wasn’t sure how it happened, but I knew that I was untrue to myself and to others.

    It felt like my boyfriend wanted me to change and didn’t accept me. When I started the relationship, I felt confident in myself and shared my opinions and ideas openly. Over time, I got quiet and began to take on his opinion of how I should be. Whether it was my style of clothing, weight, or even sense of humor, I felt so afraid that I would lose him that I tried to change myself to please him.

    I now realize that his controlling and manipulative behavior stemmed from his own insecurities and fears of losing me, but at the time I had no idea. I thought it was my fault and that there was something wrong with me.

    About a year later, when I went to the acupuncturist for the first time, I was surprised when she wanted to talk to me about letting go. I told her I didn’t know how, and she put a bottle she was holding in my hand and told me to let go. This, of course, led to the bottle dropping on the floor.

    I needed to let go of all the emotions and thoughts of the past and how things didn’t work out the way I wanted. I’ve realized that, contrary to what the acupuncturist suggested, letting go is easy to say and hard to do. Letting go isn’t a one-time thing. It takes time.

    Looking back, I see that there were many layers in letting go, including: seeing the situation from a different perspective (realizing we all want love, so it makes sense we sometimes stay in unhappy relationships), forgiving myself and others (because we’re all doing our best), taking space from the world and spending time alone, and directly working at releasing my feelings through movement.

    There were a lot of emotions to process, and it helped to talk about it with others, write unsent letters to say what I needed to say, and eventually, dream up a healthier future so I could experience a new present.  

    However, none of these actions provided instantaneous relief. It wasn’t the same as opening my hand and dropping the bottle. It was more like shedding layers and discovering new ones as the old ones disappeared. It was like seeing myself through new eyes and discovering more about my heart and soul.

    Letting go wasn’t about getting over it or feeling nothing at all. It was about learning more about myself and pulling at the seams, which took time. It wasn’t about not caring anymore because some pain never fully goes away, but it does evolve.

    I see now that this is true for many of life’s painful experiences and learnings. They often repeat themselves, and each time I get disappointed that I am in the same space or frustrated that I haven’t let go of something that hurt, I remind myself that evolution, growth, and expansion aren’t one-time things—they’re constant.

    If there’s something important for me to learn, it’s likely to take time and include many elements.

    If you, like me, have a hard time letting go and want to move forward, remember that many streams lead to the sea. And remove the thought that there’s an end point or that letting go is instantaneous so that you can embrace your learnings and move on from the past naturally, one tiny step at a time.

  • Nothing You Do Will Be Enough If the Relationship Isn’t Right

    Nothing You Do Will Be Enough If the Relationship Isn’t Right

    “Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it’s better to leave them broken than hurt yourself trying to put them back together.” ~Unknown

    A couple of months ago my dear friend and I were chatting over coffee.

    The subject turned into past relationships and the reasons why they didn’t work. My friend shared a story about her ex-fiancé—one of those “this clearly isn’t going to work, but I sure will try my hardest since I don’t give up” ones. Yeah, that kind.

    It’s the kind of story that, telling it now, with hindsight and time on our sides, seems absurd. It’s the kind of story you think only happens to other people—the kind you never want to admit is a part of you. The details may be different, but most of us are familiar with the story’s main plot.

    Maybe it involves someone lying, someone leaving, or someone cheating. Maybe it involves a dramatic climax like someone crashing your car, jumping out of your moving car, or disappearing for days (yes, all these happened).

    It’s the time when someone went too far and then maybe tried to backtrack. It’s the moment when you feel like you are having an out-of-body experience because you don’t recognize yourself or the person in front of you.

    They all end the same, those stories. The grand finale involves your heart being shattered into fragments so small that you think you will never heal, but eventually you do.

    This particular story ended with my friend telling me, “You know, it’s never enough when the person’s not the one.”

    I made her stop and repeat that.

    It’s such a simple, sensible, and yes, obvious idea, but for some reason when you are in the midst of a relationship that clearly isn’t going to work out, it can be so hard to see this, know it, accept it, and end it.

    We reflected how in the past we buckled up and stayed on, committed to a fault, trying everything in our power to make the doomed relationship work.

    Loyalty prevailed over logic. Lines blurred and things appeared acceptable, even though they were far from it. Giving up wasn’t an option, yet somehow crying, begging, yelling, excusing, and rationalizing seemed completely reasonable.

    Instead of just gracefully letting the relationship go and moving on, we stayed until finally, we hit our breaking points. (Coincidentally, our breaking points involved a lot of crying, hiccupped breathing, and being huddled on the floor—not pretty, but hey, it’s the truth.)

    How much trouble, anxiety, worry, stress, and time would we have saved had we listened to what our intuition had been telling us all along—or at least way before the floor became our friend?

    “It’s never enough when the person’s not the one.”

    Do relationships take work? Absolutely. But there’s a difference between doing the work needed and working yourself to the ground. There’s a difference between giving what’s necessary and giving your whole self away.

    Sometimes it may feel like things are falling into place or transforming for the better, but eventually it turns bad again. Because ultimately, when the person is not the one, no amount of trying, praying, begging, wishing, or hoping can change that. And that is a blessing in disguise—even if you can’t see it right away.

    When I think of the best relationships I have had—friendships, romances, colleagues, mentors—they all have one thing in common. They came easily, naturally, and without the drama of crying, cursing, screaming, hair pulling, and intervention from my loved ones.

    Was every moment picture perfect and the stuff movies are made of? Of course not. But always, the laughter and smiles outweighed the frustrations and tears.

    I will say this, though. That was then; this is now.

    It may have taken me a while to learn the lesson that relationships aren’t meant to be so difficult—at least not all the time—but now that I have learned it, I hope to never forget it.

    I believe I’ve become better at acknowledging what falls in the normal boundaries of a healthy relationship and what crosses the border into that dark, stormy place that is difficult—but not impossible—to navigate out of.

    It’s something I have to remind myself of and something I work on, but today I listen more to my intuition, pay closer attention to signals of warning, and trust myself more. Whenever possible, I choose peace over chaos, happiness over distress. Above all, I choose love—love for myself and love for others.

    It turns out it’s just a lot easier that way.

    Because the floor? It’s a hard, cold, uncomfortable place to be. I prefer to be standing on solid ground with my head high and my soul smiling.

  • How I Learned the Power of Letting Go After My Father Developed Dementia

    How I Learned the Power of Letting Go After My Father Developed Dementia

    “There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.” ~Helen Keller

    When I was eleven years old, I would force myself to stay awake until the wee hours of the morning.

    I was severely anorexic at a time when eating disorders were considered an “inconvenience” you brought on yourself. Anorexia was dismissed as a rich, white girl’s disease (although we were certainly not rich)—a disease that was easily curable with a prescription for a chocolate cake.

    Although my emaciated body was a dead giveaway of my condition, it was school that noticed the change in me first. My once stellar grades began to slip, and I was falling behind in the advanced academic and art program I was a part of.

    “Just eat already,” my teachers would tell me, and when I tossed my lunch into the garbage, I’d be sent to the nurse’s office to watch The Best Little Girl in the World. Again.

    At home, grape-flavored bubble gum and bouillon cubes were my foods of choice. I did toe-touches, crunches, and jogged at least four times a day, passed out some mornings, and hid my body under layers of flannel shirts on the hottest August days. But even as my disease raged, home was still my refuge, a place where my eating disorder could take its hair down and run wild.

    Thankfully, both my parents worked full-time and often through dinner, so mealtimes weren’t much of a struggle. And when we did eat together, I became as much of a master at hiding my food as I was at hiding my body.

    I was also smart. Or maybe conniving is a better word. A weekly trip to Friendly’s for ice cream (the irony of that name!) fooled my overworked parents into believing that I was fine.

    Puberty had simply shaved off any “baby fat” I had, they reasoned. What they didn’t know was that puberty never had a chance with me. No sooner did my period appear, I starved it away.

    But even with the ice cream trips and their growing awareness, I still felt fairly safe at home.

    Until that one moment that changed everything.

    On a sunny, unremarkable fall day (Isn’t that what Joan Didion tells us? We are most surprised by those tragedies and traumas that happen on “normal” and “beautiful” days…?), my father surprised me by picking me up early from school.

    Hurrying to the office for dismissal, there was a tiny, naive part of my eleven-year-old self that thought maybe he was surprising me with a trip to Disney World.

    That’s what happened to my friend, Mary, the previous year. When she returned from her impromptu trip, she was sporting tanned skin and a perpetual grin. She then spent most of our fifth-grade year with mouse ears glued to the top of her head.

    But there was no Magic Kingdom for me. Instead, without so much as an inkling as to where we were going, my father hustled me into his car, and we drove away. Sitting next to my father, a man who held all the power over me, my stomach ached as I wondered what was about to happen.

    My weak heart pounded in my chest, and as we drove, I prayed it wouldn’t give out. Catching a glimpse of my ashen skin and white, cracked lips in the rearview, I knew that I was nothing more than a stray dog in a shelter, ripped from my cage by a complete stranger, wondering if I was about to be put down, thrown into a fight, or worse.

    Finally, we arrived at our destination, a medical center in a strip mall. As soon as we walked through the front door, I gagged on the thick scent of medicine and grape lollipops that hung in the air. Without a second to catch my breath, I was whisked into a doctor’s office and onto a scale.

    Looking down her nose at me, the doctor snapped, “You’re too skinny. You need to gain weight.” While I stood there on the scale, she turned to my father and diagnosed anorexia nervosa.

    Then she looked at me. “If you don’t eat,” she warned in a sharp tone, “we’ll have you put in a place for ‘girls like you’.” She then informed me that once I was locked in that wretched prison of force-feedings and shackles (as I imagined it), I wouldn’t see my family again until I was “fixed.”

    When we returned to the car, my father spoke the first words he had said to me all day: “So? Will you gain weight?”

    “Yes,” I answered, too frightened to fight. Too scared to advocate for myself. Too terrified to tell him that this wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t choosing to starve myself; I was sick.

    But even if I had spoken, he wouldn’t have understood. No one did.

    From that moment on, I knew that I was completely alone. That’s when I began to stay up way past midnight, quietly jogging in place. I’d stop only to press an ear to the door, straining to hear what my parents were saying. Would they send me away? To that place?

    “I’ll never let it happen,” I assured myself. I would die before I’d go to a place where I was literally stripped of myself.

    For the next few years, the games continued, and although there were always doctors and threats, I kept myself just alive enough to stay out of that particular treatment center.

    ****

    Flash-forward almost forty years, and today, my father is an old man with dementia.

    As the Universe sometimes works in strange ways, I am now one of his primary caretakers. Although our relationship was strained for many years and I missed out on the experience of having a strong male figure in my life that I could trust, he did walk me down the aisle, and I am here for him now that he needs help.

    My father doesn’t remember that day that will forever be burned into my brain. He doesn’t remember the hell I went through the years that followed—the fear, the insecurities, the isolation, and the self-inflicted bruises I sported because I hated myself so very much. More than anything, he was, and is, clueless of the real battle scars—the ones that lay deep inside.

    He doesn’t know that that one “unremarkable fall day” when he pulled me from school started a negative spiral in my life, a time when I began aligning with damaging beliefs and inflicting self-harm.

    All he knows now is what his dementia allows him to—if the sun is out, if the squirrels ate the peanuts he tossed to them, and whether or not I am there to help him; to deliver his groceries, to take him out on drives, and to care for him.

    Yes, this could easily be the ultimate story of revenge, but years of teaching and practicing yoga have brought me down a different path.

    The path I have chosen is the path of letting go.

    Truthfully, my father’s dementia has left me no choice but to let go, at least of some parts of my life. I’ve needed to let go of expectations, of attachments to the outcome, and even, sometimes, like in those moments when he calls me “Sally,” my own name and identity.

    But in letting go, I have found that his disease has brought some gifts as well. I’ve learned to slow down and appreciate the daisy he wants to admire, the flock of chickadees darting in and out of a bush he’s watching, and the feel of the cool fall air on my face as I help him to and from a doctor’s appointment.

    Letting go has allowed me to experience all those things that I was previously too busy to appreciate. As Helen Keller said, “There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.”

    But letting go because of his dementia wasn’t enough.

    I had to let go for me, too.

    To let go of the toxic weight from the past, I released that moment when everything changed, all those years ago.

    How? By simply deciding to put the weight down—and not just with regard to that event, but in all aspects of my life.

    Was it easy? No. But it was doable.

    In letting go, I didn’t worry about forgiving (although it is an important step for healing), or seeing someone else’s perspective. I simply unhanded my tight grip on all the “wrongs” I had endured and still carried with me, as well as all those things for which I blamed myself.

    Every one of us will live through events, some that we consider positive, and others, not. The only control we have is in how we deal with the circumstances we’ve been given.

    We can choose not to shoulder the burden, and to unpack those weights we’ve been carrying. We can close our eyes, breathe deeply, and tell ourselves, “I will put that weight down.”

    That’s where our true power lies.

    Have I forgotten my past? Of course not. But I have let it go, and in letting go, I have reclaimed an important relationship with my father, and more importantly, with myself.

    By letting go, I have released my suffocating grip on life, and reclaimed my personal power.

  • 7 False Beliefs That Will Keep You Trapped in Your Head Forever

    7 False Beliefs That Will Keep You Trapped in Your Head Forever

    “There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” ~Anthony de Mello

    When people come to me suffering from anxiety, fear, anger, self-judgment etc., there are five things they invariably believe to be true.

    Let’s take anxiety as an example. Most (if not all) people with anxiety believe that:

    1. It’s bad or wrong to feel anxious.
    2. It shouldn’t be there.
    3. There’s something wrong with me (for being anxious).
    4. My mind should be peaceful.
    5. I can’t experience peace until my anxiety is gone.

    Pretty much everyone nods in agreement as I take them through this list.

    Few people, if any, would question the truth of these statements.

    They are, as the spiritual teacher Anthony de Mello says:

    “Beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”

    And I’d say that these beliefs alone produce 98% (if not more) of the unnecessary suffering that most people experience.

    Maybe you’ve heard the expression “pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice”?

    Experiencing anxiety is unpleasant. There’s no denying it’s a painful experience.

    But it’s our beliefs and mental commentary about anxiety that cause most of the suffering.

    “Anxiety is awful. I hate it. I can’t go on like this. What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I’m so screwed up. I’ll never be happy again.”

    The mind’s commentary about the anxiety adds fuel to the fire and turns a painful experience into full-blown suffering.

    Lasting peace can never be found on the level of thinking. The mind is restless by nature. It’s not wrong. It’s simply how the mind is.

    To end suffering, we need to change the way we relate to the mind.

    And to do this, we need to see through the false beliefs that hold us captive.

    As long as you believe that certain thoughts are bad or wrong, that they shouldn’t be there, and that there’s something wrong with you for having them, you will continue to suffer… not so much from the thoughts themselves but because of your beliefs about them.

    The solution is so simple that most people overlook it completely.

    Getting to Know the Mind Better

    There’s a quote from Abraham Lincoln I like to use:

     “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

    Exactly the same logic applies to your anxiety, depression, fear, or critical inner voice.

    If you don’t like your anxious thoughts, resisting them won’t help.

    The answer is to get to know them better.

    The Two Approaches to Becoming Free of the Mind

    There are two approaches we can take to find more inner peace.

    The first is to try to fix or change our thoughts through “working on ourselves.”

    I tried this approach for years and discovered that change comes painfully slowly… if at all.

    After years of effort, I had very little to show for it.

    Then I had a breakthrough.

    On a six-month meditation retreat, I stumbled upon a completely different approach to dealing with the mind—a way that was much easier, much more effective, and far quicker, immediate in fact.

    Through getting to know my thoughts (and feelings and emotions) better, I came to a completely different understanding about myself, my mind… and the path to peace.

    I saw that:

    It’s not your thoughts, feelings, or emotions that cause you to suffer. Suffering is self-created through the way you relate to them.

    See through the false beliefs that hold you captive, and your troublesome thoughts will no longer have the same power to affect your peace.

    Since then, I’ve outlined 7 false beliefs that keep most people trapped in their heads for life.

    The 7 False Beliefs That Will Keep You Trapped in Your Head Forever

    “Demand is born out of duality: ‘I am unhappy and I must be happy.’ In the very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness.”  ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

    The beautiful thing about beliefs is that the moment you see through them, they lose their grip on you. You become liberated in the seeing alone. It requires no time.

    False Belief #1: The mind should be quiet and peaceful; otherwise, there’s something wrong.

    I love the following quote from the Indian spiritual teacher Nisargadatta:

    “There is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind means disturbance; restlessness itself is mind.”

    Restlessness is the nature of the mind. Expecting it to be quiet and peaceful is like expecting water to be dry or expecting the grass to be pink.

    It’s not the restless nature of the mind that disturbs your peace. It’s the belief that there’s something wrong and that it should be different.

    You don’t suffer because the mind is restless. You suffer because you believe it shouldn’t be.

    Expect the mind to be messed up, crazy, confused, and anxious. Don’t be surprised. There’s nothing ‘wrong.’ It’s called being human.

    False Belief #2: Suffering is caused by negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

    What if it were possible to feel down, sad, concerned, anxious even—and to remain perfectly at peace throughout?

    Negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions, although unpleasant, are not the primary cause of suffering. We suffer because we reject them, think there’s something wrong, and believe they shouldn’t be there.

    If you don’t mind feeling sad, don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, and don’t think the feeling needs to go for you to be okay, you can be sad and peaceful at the same time.

    Most people confuse peace with feeling good. It’s not the same.

    Our thoughts and emotions are like clouds passing across the sky. It’s inevitable that there will be dark ones as well as light ones.

    The key to ongoing peace is to embrace them all. Even if they don’t feel good.

    And anyway, what makes a thought negative? Another thought that says so.

    False Belief #3: It’s bad/wrong to be anxious, down, and depressed, or feel unworthy.

    This belief definitely falls under the category of “beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that nobody thinks to question them.”

    Most of us enjoy warm sunny days more than dark cloudy ones.

    But it doesn’t make cloudy days bad or wrong—less pleasant perhaps, but not wrong.

    In the same way, the challenging thoughts and emotions that cloud our inner sky are not inherently good or bad, right or wrong. Like the weather, they are neutral events—part of the human condition.

    The real problem (or only problem, in fact) is the notion that unpleasant = wrong.

    And this belief, in turn, triggers the mental commentary: “It shouldn’t be there, there’s something wrong with me that needs fixing, I’m unacceptable as I am, I can’t be happy until it’s gone,” etc.—in other words, suffering.

    False Belief #4: I can’t experience peace until this/that pattern is resolved.

    I talk to many people who have been waiting for twenty years for their anxiety to be healed so they can start living again.

    And I’ve seen lifelong anxiety sufferers experience deep peace within a minute or two through seeing through certain beliefs.

    I call it the path of understanding, as opposed to the path of self-improvement.

    Peace is your nature. And it’s ever-present, no matter what is going on in the mind.

    People wait, often for years, for the dark clouds of anxiety, sadness, or self-doubt to move on, before they can get back to living life to the full.

    There’s a powerful meditation called the “Noticing Exercise” that I like to share with people who believe they can’t experience peace just as they are.

    Without going into too much detail here, I ask people to bring a difficulty to mind, and then, through directing their attention to what’s happening right here, right now, I guide them to become fully present in the moment.

    When I ask them afterwards how their experience was, they usually use words like “peaceful,” “still,” or “expansive.”

    And when I then ask what happened to their difficulty during the exercise, people invariably say, “Oh, I totally forgot about it.” More evidence that you don’t have to wait for your issues to be healed before you can live fully.

    Peace is available right here, right now—no matter what is going on in your mind or in your life.

    False Belief #5: Engaging with the mind is mandatory.

    If you had told me years ago, when I was a chronic overthinker struggling to find any peace at all, that engaging with the mind is not mandatory, I would have said you were nuts.

    When thinking is unconscious and running on autopilot, as is the case with most people, it feels like it’s something that’s happening to you—as if you are an innocent victim being bombarded by an unrelenting torrent of thoughts, and that you have no choice but to listen.

    You’re not so much thinking as being thunk!

    But here’s the truth. You are the one in charge, and the mind only has as much power as you give it. It may not seem this way, but it’s true.

    As we saw previously in the “Noticing Exercise,” you are free to withdraw your attention from the mind in any moment. Thinking is a choice. It’s not mandatory.

    Mooji, a teacher I like a lot, says that we suffer because we are open for business. If you choose to close up shop, the mind becomes powerless to affect your peace.

    When you learn to step back and watch the mind objectively, you can choose whether to get involved or not. Overthinking is an unconscious habit you can learn to let go of.

    False Belief #6: I’m responsible for the thoughts in my head.

    Try closing your eyes for a moment and, like a cat intently watching a mouse hole, watch to see what your next thought will be.

    You’ll discover that you have no idea what’s going to appear.

    Thoughts are self-arising. You play no part in their appearance.

    Thinking is a different matter.

    For years, I used to judge myself harshly for the thoughts that appeared in my head. I used to think there was something wrong with me for having angry thoughts, jealous thoughts, sad thoughts, etc.

    The mind is a lot like a computer. It spits out thoughts in accordance with your programming—the cultural impressions you picked up as a child and through your unique life experiences.

    Your thoughts are not who you are.

    Which brings us to the final false belief:

    False Belief #7: I am my thoughts.

    For much of my life, I was compulsively preoccupied with the content of my mind. My thoughts were like a tight ski mask glued to my face, and they pretty much filled up my entire inner space.

    Through meditation, I was gradually able to create more and more space between myself and the thoughts and learn to observe them objectively and non-judgmentally—to see the thoughts, not be the thoughts.

    I discovered that there was another dimension of my being that was untouched and unaffected by the passing traffic of thoughts.

    The analogy of the sky and the clouds is often used in meditation practice.

    All types of cloud pass across the sky—dark ones, light ones, big ones, small ones, fast moving clouds, slow moving clouds—but the sky has no preference and always remains the same.

    I discovered that thoughts are not “me” and that, through learning to remain as the witnessing presence, they lost their power to affect my peace.

    When you leave the mind in peace to do its thing, it will leave you in peace to do yours.

    Peace is your nature; not the peace that comes and goes as passing clouds, interspersed with restless thoughts, but the unchanging peace of your true nature.

    You are not your thoughts. And knowing this is real peace.

  • Mindful Forgiveness: 4 Steps to Unlock the Healing Power of Your Mind

    Mindful Forgiveness: 4 Steps to Unlock the Healing Power of Your Mind

    “The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.” ~Steve Maraboli

    The key to healing is learning to let go of negative thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness will allow you to be aware of your thoughts and feelings; forgiveness will help in letting them go.

    Simple as it is in theory, putting it into practice may be harder.

    Mindfulness, being aware of your thoughts and feelings in the present moment, is not that difficult. But the trick is to do it amidst the chaos of our modern way of living.

    Forgiveness is even harder. Our mind sees the events of the past as lessons that are beneficial for our survival and wants to hold on to painful and irritating memories.

    But in the modern world, we rarely need this primal safety mechanism, and the grudges we hold hurt us more than they do good.

    What’s worse, the things we have done, or others have done to us, often make us angry. Anger can be a severely damaging mental condition; not only damaging to our minds but also to our bodies.

    However, taking the time to consciously combine mindfulness with forgiveness will open the way to profound emotional and physical healing, and will eventually lead to a joyful and healthy life.

    Being mindful of your thoughts and feelings will allow you to confront them instead of repressing them. Once confronted, the events that cause those thoughts and feelings can be examined and forgiven.

    I learned this the hard way, but now I want to share what I know so that you can skip the painful part.

    Pain is Often a Prompt to Grow

    Just a few years ago, I thought I had life figured out. I had done everything ‘right,’ succeeded in achieving my goals, and therefore, I expected to be happy.

    After years of rigorous studying, I landed a job at a corporate bank. It was everything I had ever dreamed of. I could finally afford a fancy car. I was surrounded by amazing people. I went to parties, traveled, and had fun. Life was (supposed to be) pretty sweet.

    As fun as it was, it was not healthy in any way. My health started to deteriorate quickly. I gained over thirty pounds, started to have pains in my back and legs, and was always tired.

    What’s worse is that no matter what I did, I could not be happy. I was constantly irritated or anxious and had no idea what was causing these feelings.

    Then one day a realization hit me: I was completely miserable.

    Why was I not feeling any joy in life? I could not understand what the matter was. There was no reason for me to feel how I did. I was doing everything that I had learned was supposed to bring me happiness, yet I still wasn’t happy.

    So there I was: a young man in my mid-thirties, gaining weight, feeling miserable, and losing my mental and physical health in the process.

    I had no idea how to deal with any of this. How was I supposed to deal with my anxious and angry mind when I had never learned to deal with my emotions, let alone express them in a healthy way? The only solution for me was to not confront my feelings at all.

    Before long, I developed a heart arrhythmia, which felt really uncomfortable, especially when trying to sleep. My pulse rate went up to 120 bpm and did not come down no matter how I tried to relax. Sometimes it felt like my heart would stop beating for brief periods of time.

    So I went to a hospital, but the doctor who examined me told me that he couldn’t determine the cause. Physically I was fine, and my EKG was perfect. Like taken from the pages of an anatomy textbook.

    This was, of course, very puzzling. How could my heart seem to be healthy when I was clearly suffering from arrhythmias?

    Lying there in the hospital bed, I had time to think deeply about life. And after some pondering, the answer became obvious.

    Illness Is Created First in the Mind

    My condition was psychosomatic. I understood that my inability to deal with my emotions was piling up negative thoughts and beliefs in my mind, which caused my body to react in a negative way. I had refused to be mindful of my thoughts and feelings, thus being unable to let go of them.

    Only when I was forced to stop and listen to how I truly felt could I find this answer. It was a hard and mandatory lesson in mindfulness, one that still sticks with me today.

    So I decided to confront my negative thoughts and emotions. The process was simple: Stop and take a deep breath. Be still and focus on breathing in and out slowly. Then tune in to how I feel. What are these feelings? Why am I feeling them? What are they trying to tell me?

    I noticed that under the surface, my most dominant feeling was anger.

    I was angry with myself. Why was I not able to deal with my emotions? Why hadn’t I listened to how I felt and tried to repress my emotions instead? Why did I let the situation get so bad?

    I was angry with my parents and teachers. Why didn’t they show me how to express emotions in a healthy way? All I was ever told was “crying is weakness,” and “being angry is not okay; go to your room until you calm down.” Sometimes it was not even okay to show love or affection. So I learned to repress my emotions.

    I was also angry with society. I felt that the only thing I had ever heard about how to be happy was wrong. I did not find happiness by achieving goals or getting material wealth, as is so often taught by society (and everyone else around us for that matter). I had the education, the career, the money, the car, and so on. Yet I was miserable.

    But I knew that it was not necessary to be angry with myself or others. I was only doing what I had learned was right. Likewise, what others had taught me about life, feelings, and happiness was what they had learned themselves. They did not know any better, and their intentions were good.

    So I decided to start forgiving. I used mindfulness meditation to connect to my thoughts and feelings.

    And when I was deeply immersed in my mindfulness meditation and focused on a feeling, often a memory popped into my mind. It was something that someone had said or done that had made me feel angry or afraid.

    I then “healed the memory” through an exercise where I forgave the people involved.

    And wouldn’t you know it, when I started to forgive the things that I or others had done in the past, I healed almost instantly.

    I got rid of all the pain in my mind and body, and there was no sign of arrhythmia anymore. I almost couldn’t believe it. With this simple combination of mindfully identifying thoughts and feelings, then forgiving the people that caused them, I healed my body in two days.

    Two days. That’s all it took to heal over ten years of neglect.

    I also found my mental well-being improving by leaps and bounds. I felt peaceful and happy. I started to see the joy in everyday moments, which I hadn’t for years. I realized that the opportunity to feel joyful was always there, but I’d been so occupied with the past and the future that I was unable to see it.

    The 4 Levels of Forgiveness

    This is what I did, and you can try this too.

    1. Forgive yourself for what you did to yourself.
    2. Forgive yourself for what you did to someone else.
    3. Forgive others for what they did to you.
    4. Forgive others for everything they have done.

    Start with level one and work your way through the levels. With this exercise, you will start to feel better in a matter of days.

    For levels one and two, forgiving yourself, try this simple exercise:

    Think about something you regret. Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eyes, and say, “I forgive you. You did the best you could at the moment. You didn’t know any better.” Repeat this in your mind, or even better, say it out loud. Do it at least five times. After you are done, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax.

    This might be the hardest one of the exercises. For some reason, we tend to hold a grudge against our past selves. But it doesn’t do any good to be unforgiving. For a long time, I was guilty of thinking, “I’ll never forgive myself for what I did!” But as I started to do this exercise just once a day, I quickly started to feel like a weight was being lifted off my shoulders.

    For levels three and four, forgiving others, try this quick meditation:

    Close your eyes and relax. Breathe in and out slowly three times. Think about a memory that’s bothering you. Imagine the situation as vividly as possible and pay close attention to the person that’s the cause of your negative feeling.

    Then, imagine the scene you are in starts to fill with bright, warm light. Like the midday sun on a beautiful summer day. Imagine yourself approaching the person that’s causing the suffering and saying to them, “I forgive you. You did the best you could at the moment. You didn’t know any better.” Then imagine giving them a warm, loving, forgiving hug.

    If you feel like you need help with this, you can imagine anyone you want, even multiple people, there with you to give their support. If you so choose, you may even bring to the scene a higher power to help you.

    Done! Open your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax. You may already feel a little lighter, but don’t worry if this takes several tries. It may not be instantaneous or easy, but it’s definitely worth it.

    Everyone Is Doing Their Best (Including You)

    Forgive yourself for not knowing any better at the time. Forgive others for acting the only way they knew how. You acted the way you had learned, and so did everyone else. Please don’t blame yourself and try to forgive others for their behavior. By holding on to fear, anger, or hate, you will ultimately hurt yourself.

    Forgiveness will give you peace of mind. It will allow you to live mindfully and enjoy the moment, which you now understand as a perfect opportunity to express who you are. You will be able to let go of the past and stop worrying about the future, and your life will start to fill with peace and joy.

  • How I Reframed Letting Go So I Could Move on from My Painful Past

    How I Reframed Letting Go So I Could Move on from My Painful Past

    We are truly free when we let go of the thought that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard.

    The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of the thought that the past should have been different. We have been through hell, experienced things most people don’t know about, and it initially feels so devastating to think of just letting it go like it never happened. Where is the justice in that?

    I know; I have been there. Honestly, I still have moments where I pick up this thought and carry it around for a while because it just feels like the right thing to do. To honor myself and my experiences, I have to stay connected to the injustice of the choices that others have made—choices that dramatically impacted my life and created immense amounts of pain.

    After almost nineteen years of marriage, my husband, my high school sweetheart, told me that he was gay and had never been attracted to me.

    I promise; I know pain. I spent weeks wrestling with myself, trying to think of all the things that could have happened, or maybe should have happened, to avoid the situation that was causing me so much pain.

    Things like wishing I had paid attention to the red flags when we were dating, listening to my therapists over the years when they tried to get me to work on the issues between my husband and me, wishing I had never met him or he had been honest with me (which would have been the best for both of us, as I’m sure the lying hurt him as well). So many things I wish I could change. It seemed insurmountable at times.

    For months I didn’t even want to consider accepting my reality. This felt like the most invalidating thing I could do. The rejection I experienced over the course of my marriage is not something I would wish on anyone.

    Was I surprised when my ex-husband told me he was gay? This is hard to answer. I knew something was wrong. I knew I felt crazy and invisible and ugly. The number of nights I went to bed in tears over being invisible to the man I married was too many to count.

    Now that I finally get to live in truth, how do I move forward? There is a twenty-year mountain of grief I am stuck carrying. I personally find this reality the worst: other people’s choices can cut us to the core. Others can hurt us, and the only way to live a healthy, fulfilling life is to be connected to other people.

    I can’t tell you the countless nights this reality has kept me awake. I want more than anything to live on an island all by myself. For years I convinced myself I could be fully self-sufficient. I will earn my own money and take care of my own needs. I don’t want anything to do with being close enough to people for them to lie, cheat, and hurt me again. I wish this worked. I wish there were a way, but I am here to tell you there is not.

    You can go that route; believe me, I have tried. It only brings more emptiness and pain. The truth is, we are hardwired for connection. We are mammals. We have to have others to survive. Those who are thriving have deep, meaningful, loving relationships. They feel the greatest highs and the pain of the deepest lows when someone breaks trust. This is the human experience. Unfortunately, some of us have experienced deeper levels of pain, but what I know for sure is that we are all capable of healing.

    I have had to reframe what letting go means. It will never mean that my ex-husband’s choices were okay. I will never say the pain was worth it or not that bad. Living in a catfished relationship for twenty years will never be okay. There will always be days I feel the pain and grieve the past. Thankfully, those days are getting further apart, but they definitely still happen.

    Letting go is feeling the grief of my reality so I can accept what I cannot change. I cannot change his lies. I cannot change my choices to believe them. I cannot change that I abandoned myself and my needs for the sake of him and our kids. I cannot change any of that.

    I can feel the deep, tormenting pain and grieve that pain until it stops tormenting me. When I allow myself to feel, to sit in those feelings for as long as I need to, I validate myself. I am not waiting on the day when he or anyone else validates my experience.

    No one will ever know the true depth of our pain. The days we sat in our closets and wept or cried ourselves quietly to sleep. We can validate that for ourselves, though. We can share our stories so others know they are not alone in their pain.

    I know many of you reading this know my pain. Your story might be different, but your pain is not. If you feel stuck in moving forward, please know that the greatest gift you can give yourself is to fully feel all your feelings. “Go there,” as they say.

    You don’t need to do it alone. Allow a therapist, mentor, or trusted friend to sit with you while you feel the depths of all your feelings. There is freedom on the other side. I promise. It is not perfect; my grief is not forever gone, but I am free. I am free of his choices, and I am free to create a life I didn’t know I could dream for myself while I was still tied in his web.

    The work is scary, hard, and only for the courageous and brave. There are so many people who are here to cheer you on and stand beside you while you do the work. Be brave and start the journey of letting go. You are worth it.

    —

    I recently heard someone say that compassion is the intersection of love and suffering. I feel like I carried suffering around for so long, and I know that my ex has too. My ability to truly let go and be free came when I was able to also see my ex’s suffering and lovingly let him go.

    I met him with compassion. It wasn’t easy. Compassion didn’t come quickly, and some days it is still hard. We were both raised in a culture that valued being good and loyal over happy and seen.

    Our tragic story is the product of valuing rules and goodness over love, happiness, and self expression. I know we are not the first generation to suffer from this mindset, but I pray we are the last.

  • 4 Things I Needed to Accept to Let Go and Heal After Trauma

    4 Things I Needed to Accept to Let Go and Heal After Trauma

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post references sexual abuse and may be triggered to some people.

    “The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.” ~Steve Maraboli

    My family immigrated to the U.S. from India when I was sixteen. Being Indian, my traditional family expected me to have an arranged marriage.

    At twenty-two, as a graduate music student, I fell in love with an American man. When my family found out about our secret relationship, they took me back to India and put me under house arrest. For a year.

    That year of imprisonment and isolation was severely traumatizing. I shut down from my acute distress and pain. I dissociated from myself, my truth, my power, my body, my heart, and my sexuality.

    Two years after they let me out, I escaped to the US but was emotionally imprisoned by my past. I lived dissociated, afraid, and ashamed for eighteen years. Eventually, I broke free from an abusive marriage and my family.

    Since then, I have been on a path of healing and empowerment.

    Beginning my healing journey was like walking through a long, dark tunnel. I was and felt like a victim but was determined to heal.

    To heal from dissociation, I needed to feel again. I felt the bottomless grief, loss, and heartbreak of all that I didn’t get to experience and enjoy.

    I faced and began to address my childhood history of sexual abuse.

    I set boundaries with my family. I started therapy and studied psychology. I learned my mother is a narcissist and my father an enabler.

    Coming from a traditional patriarchal, colonial culture, I had grown up with codes of obedience, sacrifice, and duty. I questioned and challenged my deep internalized beliefs of who I am, what I can do, and what is possible for me as a person of color.

    I learned about my rights. Growing up in India, I had a very different understanding of my rights than those born in Western countries.

    Therapy helped me reconnect with my body, with my needs, wants, and desires. I learned to identify and feel my sensations and emotions. I learned to discern who and what was safe and what wasn’t safe.

    I learned to listen to and trust myself and become more embodied through my dance practice. This allowed me to dance out my rage, shame, grief, and everything I had disconnected from and suppressed. I came alive and opened to pleasure and passion.

    I’ve struggled with low self-worth, people-pleasing, caretaking, perfectionism, fear, shame, guilt, and codependency. One of my most painful realizations was that my inner critic had become as severe as those who abused me. I continue to practice being kind and gentle to myself, loving myself and my inner child and encouraging my artistic self.

    In relationships, it has been hard for me to discern whom to trust and not trust. I had an emotionally abusive marriage and have given my power away in relationships. In romantic relationships, I projected my goodness and integrity and supported my partners’ dreams instead of my own.

    I have finally learned that I can choose myself and honor my needs, wants, desires, dreams, and goals. I continue to shed other people’s projections that I internalized. I am realizing that I am worthy of and can have, dream, aspire for, and achieve what white women can. And finally, I believe in my goodness, of others, and of life.

    Having emerged from the long, dark tunnel of healing, every day is a triumph for my freedom and a priceless gift. Every day I have the opportunity to be true to myself, face a fear, shift a perspective, and love, encourage, and enjoy myself.

    Acceptance

    There are so many steps and milestones on the journey of healing. Of the five stages of grief, acceptance is the final one.

    Acceptance is a choice and a practice. Acceptance is letting go, forgiving yourself and others, and honoring, claiming, and loving every twist and turn of your journey. Acceptance is treasuring all you have learned from your experience no matter how painful it was and how meaningless it seemed.

    Here are some things I have learned to accept.

    Accept the deep impact of trauma

    Coming from a family and culture that valued perfectionism and purity, I wasn’t aware of and wanted to gloss over and hide my trauma, shadow, and coping behaviors. Because I could live a life that seemed relatively high-functioning, I was ashamed to admit and address my childhood sexual trauma to myself for years. I was afraid and ashamed to share my trauma with others because I didn’t want to be seen as broken, damaged, or crazy.

    Once I acknowledged and faced my sexual trauma, I began my healing journey. Healing and acceptance mean seeing, claiming, and loving each and every part of ourselves, however broken or ashamed we feel. As we do that, we liberate ourselves from believing we needed to fit into other people’s ideas to be loved and accepted.

    When we don’t admit and accept our traumas, we can cycle through life alive but not living, succeeding but not fulfilled, and live according to programs we’ve inherited but not from our truths. As a result, joy, pleasure, passion, and true power escape us.

    Accepting that I didn’t get to have the life and dreams I expected

    As a victim, I was stuck in grief, loss, anger, denial, disillusionment, blame, and resentment. Life seemed unfair.

    These feelings are natural after trauma, especially extended severe trauma. But despite years of therapy and healing, I continued to cycle and swim in them and didn’t know how to not have those feelings.

    I was fighting to accept what I had lost. I kept ruminating on who I might have been and what my life would have been like had it not been interrupted or derailed. It was how my subconscious mind tried to control and “correct” the past to have the outcome I desired and stay connected to my past dreams.

    I was tightly holding on to what I had lost—to who I was then and my dreams. I was terrified that if I let go of what was most precious, I would be left with nothing.

    But the reverse happened. When I decided to let go of my past dreams, regrets, and lost opportunities, I stepped into the river of life anew, afresh, and in the now. I opened to who I am now and what is possible now.

    We don’t let go of trauma because, on a deep level, we believe we will condone what happened, and forget or lose what was so precious.

    Not letting go keeps us stuck like a monkey clutching peanuts in a narrow-mouthed jar. We don’t want to let go of what we had then for fear that we will be left with nothing at all. It keeps us stuck in blame and resentment. It keeps us from joy, pleasure, and possibility.

    But to live and breathe and come alive again, we need to unclench our past. By no means is this forgetting, or condoning, but allowing, receiving, and welcoming new, fresh beginnings, possibilities, and life.

    Accepting the character, mental illness, and wounds of my abusers

    Though my family had been brutal, my inner child wanted to believe in their goodness. I couldn’t accept that people I loved, who were supposed to love, care for, and protect me, could treat me that way.

    I was in a trauma bond and in denial. I had to come to terms with and accept that my mother is a narcissist and my father an enabler. And that the rest of my family only looked the other way.

    I had to let go of my illusion of my family, see through the fog of gaslighting, and accept the truth of who they are.

    Acceptance is learning to see our abusers with clear eyes beyond our expectations, illusions, and stories of what we needed and desired from them, and who we want them to be.

    No matter what was done to or happened to me, I am responsible for my life.

    Staying stuck in a cycle of blame, resentment, and anger told me I wasn’t taking responsibility for myself.

    After severe trauma, it’s painful and challenging to look at ourselves and realize that we played a part in it. Trauma is something that happens to us, but we are the ones who make conclusions about ourselves, others, and life because of it. My beliefs and perspectives about myself, especially about my self-worth, self-esteem, body, and sexuality, drastically changed after the trauma.

    I had to take responsibility for creating my beliefs. I needed to accept every time I didn’t choose, value, and honor myself and my gifts. I realized that just as I had adopted others’ projections of myself, creating a negative self-perception, I could shift to regard myself in a positive light.

    Accepting my part in my trauma set me free from blame and resentment. And it set me free from the power my abusers had over me and my connection to them.

    Acknowledge what I don’t have control over

    My inner child and I wanted to believe in the goodness, love, and protectiveness of my family and partners. But I have no control over who my parents, family, and culture are, or their mental health, values, and behaviors. I had no control over my culture’s beliefs and attitudes toward women and sexuality.

    Because of deep shame from childhood abuse, I felt bad at my core and had a low sense of self-worth. Subconsciously, I tried to control how I was seen. I lived a life acceptable to my family and culture and followed what the world defined as successful, believing it would make me feel good about myself and be accepted and loved.

    But my happiness, freedom, and success lie in my own truth. I learned to honor and follow that. I learned to mother and father myself. I learned about mental illness and mental health and reached out for support from therapists and friends.

    As I let go of trying to please others, pursuing my own needs, talents, and interests, I found myself, my joy, and my purpose.

    Forgive myself

    Looking back, I see so many roads I could have taken but didn’t. I see many ways I could have taken help but didn’t. I was filled with regret for past choices and decisions. I was angry with and judged myself.

    We can be our own harshest critics. I needed to forgive myself.

    I learned to see and be compassionate with my inner child and younger self, steeped as she was in family binds and cultural beliefs. I learned to hold her with tenderness and love for all the ways she didn’t know how to protect and choose herself. And for all she wanted but didn’t know how to reach for and have, for what she wanted to say and do but couldn’t or didn’t.

    As I held my younger selves with understanding, compassion, and love, and forgave them, they began to trust me and offer their gifts, which allowed me to open to joy, innocence, freedom, and play again.

  • How Releasing Control Opened Me Up to a Limitless Life

    How Releasing Control Opened Me Up to a Limitless Life

    “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” ~Richard Bach

    I have always wanted to create a family.

    As a child, I lovingly cared for my dolls and fell head over heels for my college boyfriend. Kneeling before me with a ring, he said, “I want you to be the mother of our children.” I swooned as we walked down the aisle at the tender age of twenty-two, convinced I was set for life. I had the husband, and I would have the family.

    I entered into our marriage with the expectation and security of certainty. We had vowed to be together for life, so I believed that was the truth.

    But I had another love besides my husband.

    I was in love with performing.

    After a childhood of classes in the arts, I was accepted into the BFA Musical Theater Program’s inaugural year at Penn State University. I soaked every minute up and graduated with summer work already booked and the plan to move to New York City with my new husband and dive into my career.

    Creating a family could wait. Broadway was calling.

    Except I found myself hitting a ceiling. Despite working consistently as a professional, Broadway eluded me. With the exception of two Broadway shows that closed before I would have joined them, I would choke when I was invited back for a second or third audition, and never make it any further.

    I was a true triple threat, strong in my singing, dancing, and acting, but I didn’t know how to deal with the loud and critical voice in my head. When I needed to deliver my best at these big moments, the critic would become deafening and my voice would crack or I would spontaneously “forget” which leg to step forward on while I was dancing. In those moments, it was as if all my training went out the window.

    Over time I was losing confidence. I literally worked at every level except Broadway. I worked off-Broadway, regionally, did national tours and commercials, and kept auditioning in hopes my break would come.

    And then I found myself at the age of thirty-seven staring into my husband’s eyes as he told me, “I don’t think I love you anymore. I don’t think I want to be married anymore. I don’t think I want to have children.”

    The security and certainty I had clung to in my twenties evaporated in smoke. I lost my marriage and the ability to create the family I had desired for the last fifteen years.

    In the face of my divorce, I felt a great urgency arise. It fueled me to heal emotionally, spiritually, and mentally from my heartbreak and to seek the right support to guide me as a single woman. I worked with love coaches and therapists and joined women’s groups to help me make sense of how to find a life partner.

    And then four and a half years later, I went on a first date with a kind blue-eyed man who took me to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and gently opened an umbrella over my head as rain began to fall. In all the dates I had been on, I had never felt like this before, and we quickly fell in love.

    Before I became exclusive with him, I asked how he felt about creating a family and was thrilled when he shared that was his biggest desire as well. We were married a year and a half later and began to try naturally to get pregnant.

    Creating a family was now. There was no more waiting. I had the husband and the security. Certainty had returned to my life again.

    Except after a year of trying, nothing had happened. So, we entered into IVF as I had frozen my eggs after my divorce for this very reason. We followed all the steps, and I was convinced this was going to work. With the number of fertilized eggs, I imagined we had two tries and I was completely open to twins. But on the day of the transfer, only one egg was ready, and the other three became unusable.

    The pressure was unmanageable. I was experiencing migraine headaches from the synthetic hormones and was terrified it wouldn’t work. Which it didn’t.

    I vowed I was done with the drugs and our family was either going to happen through natural causes or through adoption.

    A year later, I found myself staring at a positive pregnancy test.

    My husband and I were giddy beyond belief, and began to read children stories to the growing life inside me.

    Creating a family was now. There was no more waiting.

    Except just before my eleventh week, I stared at an ultrasound with no heartbeat. The white light that had fluttered with such ferocity at seven weeks was now a static white dot.

    While we went back to trying, my heart was broken. Nothing was happening, so we entered into the process of adoption.

    Within two months we were matched with a birth mother, and I wept when we got the call. The birth mother had just entered her second trimester, so we had several months to wait.

    Now we could prepare! I dived into podcasts, books, and workshops, learning everything I could about adoption, about being a trauma-informed parent, and what products felt most aligned with our values. I created a registry, and we both planned to take time off work.

    Everything was set.

    Creating our family was now. There was no more waiting.

    And then a month before the baby’s due date, the birth mother changed her mind. In adoption, they call this a disruption, and that is exactly how it felt.

    I found myself reliving every pillar of my journey. Choosing Broadway over family. The divorce. The failed IVF. The miscarriage. And now the disruption. I wasn’t just mourning the recent loss; I was mourning decades of a desire that had burned in my womb.

    I thought it was the end of the world. End of certainty.

    I found myself feeling completely disoriented. I had planned maternity leave from my business and set up an elaborate schedule for my approaching book launch all around the adoption. I had a nursery filled with a stroller, changing table, clothes, and a glider. I had thought of everything.

    I had planned it all out, because I wanted to believe it was going to happen. I wanted to believe there was no more waiting. I wanted to believe in certainty.

    I pulled an Oracle card from Alana Fairchild that read, “This comes with special guidance for you. More love is rushing towards you like a great cosmic tsunami. You will struggle with this blessing to the extent that you will attempt to hold onto what has been. So don’t. Let go. You’ll perhaps get some water up your nose, but nothing will come to you that you cannot handle. Instead, you’ll have no idea what is going on. Oh, how the tsunami will deliver you into your divine destiny!”

    So I did something new. I surrendered. I surrendered all my plans.

    I started coaching my clients again. We went back to being active again with the adoption agency. I started my book marketing tasks again.

    But none of this had any certainty or definitive timeline. After decades of knowing the exact day and time things were going to happen, I embraced not knowing.

    I embraced waiting. Because it seemed there was nothing else to do.

    It felt like a part of me was dying, the part that had planned my family with such ferocity and certainty.

    In my grief, I turned to the Oracle deck’s guidebook and saw Robert Brach’s quote. As soon as I read it, I began to weep in resonance.

    How I had strived to stay the caterpillar.

    The caterpillar of certainty. The caterpillar of timelines. The caterpillar of planning.

    But the caterpillar couldn’t transform with these values. It needed to be washed up on the waves of love, and finally enter the cocoon to grow into a sacred butterfly.

    Robert’s words speak to that profound moment when we recognize that the way we’ve been living our life doesn’t work anymore. If we want to grow, we have to let go of our clinging, specifically our clinging to certainty.

    Because the truth is, our greatest power comes in the acceptance of not knowing.

    If you “don’t know” then you are actually opening yourself to a limitless life, one that is led by divine timing, instead of what your ego wants to believe is “right.”

    What if experiencing the same thing over and over is actually a divine tap on the shoulder to try something new?

    What if being disoriented and not knowing when your desire will arrive is the softly spun silk surrounding your most vital soul?

    For me, the tsunami washed me up on the shore with sacred wisdom. No longer holding onto a timeline was actually a deep relief. Going through the cycle of trying to control every aspect of creating my family had been so taxing and exhausting.

    I had formed a castle of certainty with bricks and stones, only to discover it was actually made of sand. And when the waves crashed through, I saw it was never meant to last. It was always meant to wash away.

    Now I’m opening to something far more powerful than certainty. I’m opening to trust.

    I don’t know when my family will come. I have no idea how my desire is going to manifest. Perhaps my life has actually been working out beautifully, creating a divine path I may not have “planned” but one that has sparked a vital inner transformation.

    One that has opened me to the possibility of my life unfolding in a new direction. And with that, I can let go of crawling on the ground in vain as the caterpillar. Now I can just open my wings and fly.

    Now I can simply receive.

  • How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small

    How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small

    “The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness, not to stop your progress.” ~Steve Maraboli

    I used to hate my fear because it scared me. It terrified me that when fear arose, it often felt like it was driving me at full speed toward the edge of a cliff.

    And if I were driven off a cliff, I would lose all control, all function, perhaps I would collapse, perhaps I would shatter into a million pieces. I was never totally clear on the details of what would happen if I let the fear get out of control. That’s because I spent most of my life trying to control it.

    It’s why, when things don’t go according to plan, when I am running late or things change at the last minute, I can get snappy and sound angry. I feel rage when people come along and do things that seem to amplify my fear—like my husband using the bathroom three minutes before the train is leaving, or not locking the front door at night with all its three locks.

    Oh, I had so much judgment around this fear. I hated it, but I hated even more that I seemed to be an overly fearful person. I felt disgusted and full of shame for not wanting to do things that other people seemed to find easy, like flying, or for freaking out when I was sick, thinking I was dying.

    I carried the shame of fear around with me, hoping I didn’t have to reveal it, and if I did, if I had to show people how terrified life made me, I would be horribly self-deprecating.

    Because I had this sense that I shouldn’t be like this. It wasn’t normal. So I blamed it on myself as a character default.

    That’s why I wouldn’t want to walk toward scary things. That’s why I avoided things that brought up the fear because if I didn’t, it would have driven me off the cliff so freaking quickly, and I’d think, how stupid could I have been to allow it?

    I see now that my fear lived at such a low-level frequency in my body that I didn’t notice it was there. It was on a low buzz all the time, like a refrigerator noise—not really in my awareness but controlling how I made decisions.

    I know this because, when I was really paying attention, I realized I was always trying to pick the least scary option. But when I kept choosing the least scary option, the least challenging to me, my life got smaller and smaller.

    I was not even really aware that I was doing this. It just felt like I was being sensible.

    But sometimes I would get this glimmer of another world where I did the most interesting and exciting things, like exploring alone somewhere new or taking a belly dancing class. Where I lived unleashed and unbounded by fear. I said what I meant, I did what I wanted, and I didn’t worry all the time about terrible things happening to my loved ones.

    Living a life immersed in fear felt like being bound with invisible rope that no one could see. And because people couldn’t see this rope, they would ask me to do things that I couldn’t possibly say yes to.

    Things started to change when I didn’t just ask how I could get the fear to stop, but I started to learn why there was so much fear in my body, where it came from, and how it was affecting how I experience life. So much of my fear came from a lack of emotional safety, and sometimes physical safety, as a child and young woman.

    When I learned to start being curious about the fear that confined me and not judge it as a character defect, I started unraveling it. This, along with some powerful emotional processing and nervous system regulation, transformed how I now experienced fear in my life.

    Here’s the thing: We don’t intentionally create bodies that can’t handle emotions like fear. We don’t intentionally create nervous systems that are jumpy and hyper-vigilant. We don’t create sensations of immense doom for pleasure.

    How we were taught to be with emotions, how we were taught to allow or not allow them, how we were cared for when we were in the midst of emotions—this all informs how we now deal with fear.

    It makes sense that fear feels too much for our bodies to handle when we have lived with too much fear; when we haven’t had enough emotional support of someone helping us hold that fear; when we’ve had experiences that have terrified us down to our very bones, that have stayed trapped in our bodies; when our lives have been rocked by tragedy; when sudden life-changing events shake any sense of stability from us; when fear has just been too much for too long.

    We need to learn how to provide deep emotional support, a sense of safety, love, empathy, and validation, to our bodies that have held so much pain and discomfort. We need to learn how to tend to and meet our needs.

    Emotions need to be seen, felt, and heard. When we haven’t learned how to do that, how to hold emotions and really be with them, we get pushed into a part of our brains where things feel deeply overwhelming and urgent—our survival reactions.

    It’s a part of our brain that uses primal methods for dealing with emotion—meant to be utilized in emergencies and when our survival is under threat, but too commonly used to discharge uncomfortable emotions. And none of these survival reactions feel good.

    When we are in our survival reactivity, we can feel doomed and trapped; we can feel like there are no options; we can feel the red mists of rage or a deep-freezing panic. We can go into overdrive doing too much, or sometimes we just slow down and shut off. Everything feels like too much.

    That’s why we feel we could go over the edge. That’s why we don’t feel safe. That’s why we desperately try to stay in control. Because we have this sense of an unknown, dark, and terrifying force in our bodies that feels like something beyond what we can handle.

    We don’t know how to deal with this part of our brain, these survival reactions, so we spend our lives attempting to control our fear, hoping that it won’t rear up and push us over the cliff edge.

    But there is another way. And it’s not by feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I couldn’t dislike that piece of advice more because of how wildly misunderstood it is. You can only feel the fear and do it anyway if you have a comfortable relationship with fear and it doesn’t push your nervous system into overwhelm and survival reactivity—where you feel like you are actually fearing for your life.

    If you are in survival mode, you don’t want to be pushing through anything.

    In fact, quite the opposite.

    You want to be doing everything to reassure yourself that you are physically safe, that there is no emergency, that all is well.

    And that is step number one. That’s the first place I go to when I feel the escalating sensations of fear.

    It’s learning to look after yourself and meet your needs in ways that maybe you have never done before. You learn to build your own safety, and to repair all the damage that has been done to that solid feeling of protection that others seem to have but you sense you deeply lack.

    There are several things you can do for this..

    1. Stop the overwhelm.

    My first suggestion is an exercise you can do when you feel you have entered that survival mode of things feeling like way too much—when you are overwhelmed, feeling doomed or trapped. This is an exercise called regulating breath. The aim is to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is where you are “resting and digesting.”

    It’s super simple—short, quick inhale, long exhale. Then repeat this until you are moving away from that deep overwhelm. It’s a signal to the brain that you aren’t unsafe; this isn’t an emergency; you are safe to move out of survival mode and back into your body. I use this breath daily to keep my nervous system regulated and feel a sense of physical safety.

    2. Be curious about why the fear is here.

    The fear didn’t just show up unannounced today. If the fear feels like too much, there is definitely a history that you can trace back. And when you know your history, it can help you drop a lot of the judgment that you feel about it.

    Ask your fear: Where have you been showing up in my life, and how far does this go back?

    3. Ask your fear what it needs.

    Uncomfortable emotions like fear are expressions of needs that have been unmet perhaps for all of your life. Needs like clarity, structure, peace, or consistency. When you can learn to really connect with your emotions and hear what they have to tell you, you can then start meeting those needs.

    I love to talk to my fear. I ask it questions on a regular basis. I ask my fear: What do you need? Why are you here? What are you trying to tell me?

    When I am able to really sit with the fear and hold it in my body, it will tell me things like: I’m just trying to keep you safe. I just want you to be protected. I don’t want you to do unsafe things!

    When I know that the fear just wants to keep me safe, I can then reassure it, and myself, that I can provide the safety that I need. That I know how to make good choices; I know, as an adult, how to look after myself.

    4. Offer empathy and validation.

    Give yourself the deeply nourishing support of validation and empathy. Fear is a normal emotion that manifests as physical reactions in the body because of how we’ve learned to be with emotion, or due to the limited support we have received around big, challenging experiences.

    When you recognize this, you can start to not judge your reactions. You can say to yourself: It makes sense that you feel like this. It’s okay, I’ll stay with you. I will support you through this. 

    You can give yourself the tender validation and empathy you would offer to someone you deeply love—your child, a friend, your partner. You can treat yourself as someone deserving of being wrapped in beautiful, loving empathy.

    When you do things like double-check the locks at night or keep checking your phone to see if your teenager has messaged, when you are asked to take a trip to a place you haven’t been to before, instead of getting lost in the fear or loading yourself down with shame about it, offer empathy and validation instead.

    “You know what? This is bringing up a lot of fear. And it’s understandable that I have fear around this; it’s completely okay. So I am going to support myself through this feeling. I am going to tend to my needs around this feeling. And I am only going to do what feels best for me. What feels right for my body right now.”

    By meeting the needs your emotions are expressing we start to change our relationship with the emotions we find most uncomfortable. When we try to white-knuckle through, we often end up more rattled, more exhausted, more overwhelmed, and sometimes with more trauma than if we had actually taken tender, gentle care of ourselves.

    And by taking loving care of ourselves, by showing up and giving our feelings—and our sense of overwhelm—attention, we can end up naturally starting to want to do those things that maybe we were too scared to do before.

    By giving ourselves the empathy that our emotions so yearn for, we create a much deeper, more loving and trusting connection with ourselves. When we know how to emotionally support ourselves then we can learn how to emotionally support other people.

    My relationship with fear is a work in progress. Sometimes it slips out of my grasp and escalates before I have the chance to process it. But I know now that I can always bring myself back from that edge. I can always bring my nervous system back into regulation, even when it feels a bit messy.

    When we know that we can handle any emotion that comes our way, we have so much more freedom in our lives to make the choices we want to make instead of just choosing the least scary thing.

    Fear is a normal part of life. It’s there to help us stay safe and protected and make good choices. But sometimes, when we have had experiences that have intensified our fear, we can end up keeping ourselves small. Changing how we take care of ourselves to support ourselves in these big emotions is a great first step to living a more exciting, fulfilling life. I hope these tips have been helpful.

  • Coping with the Grief of a Layoff: 5 Tips If You’re Looking for a Job

    Coping with the Grief of a Layoff: 5 Tips If You’re Looking for a Job

    “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” ~Seneca

    We are in such a hard season of the economy, and the implications of people getting laid off are so real and unfortunately painful.

    No matter how competent or qualified you are, the job search process is hard. And even when you know your layoff was due to reasons completely outside your control, it still hurts.

    The fear, instability, and uncertainty about what your next job will be or when it will come to fruition are emotionally unsettling, and our collective toxic positivity conditioning isn’t always helpful.

    Yes, it’s true that most of us have more to be grateful for than we can feel in the moment, but our hard feelings are valid and need space to be felt.

    I was recently let go from a role that felt like a dream job when I signed my offer letter, and yes, I have healed from that pain, but I had to feel my way through all of it versus simply “thinking positive.”

    I had multiple layers of emotions even before I was let go. First, there was the disappointment that the job wasn’t what I thought it would be, then there was the grief over a chapter of my life ending without knowing why and the lack of closure.

    Despite our difficult feelings, we have the capacity to heal, reconnect with ourselves, and rediscover what needs to come alive during these often-painful seasons of transition. But we have to give ourselves permission to be real—to be honest with ourselves more than anybody else—and we also need tremendous amounts of self-trust and self-belief in a season that feels rife with self-doubt.

    Here are some thoughts that may be helpful if you were let go and are looking for a new job.

    1. Acknowledge what you are feeling.

    You have full permission to feel whatever you’re feeling right now. Feeling your feelings doesn’t make you weak; it makes you brave. And there is a difference between giving yourself permission to feel and move through them versus getting stuck. I am advocating for the former.

    Maybe you had a vacation planned that will now need to be canceled and you’re feeling disappointed, or you may be the sole breadwinner of your family and you’re feeling scared. Maybe you never had a chance to say goodbye to your coworkers, and you’re grieving the loss of those daily connections. Maybe you had the world’s best manager, and you are heartbroken to no longer be working for that person. All of your feelings are valid.

    2. Take care of yourself.

    It can be very tempting to spend every waking minute tweaking your resume, applying to jobs, or doing informational interviews. Prioritizing a few simple self-care basics can go a long way to sustaining your momentum. A thirty-minute walk, some mindfulness practice, and coffee with a friend in real life are all simple but powerful ways to help you stay grounded in what truly is a hard season.

    This can feel obvious, but during our hardest times especially, with uncertainty in the environment, it can be easy to go into a narrative of “I don’t deserve rest” or “I haven’t earned a break.” But here is the truth: Rest, downtime, joy, fun, and play are your birthrights. You don’t have to earn them, and they can actually be effective components of your achievement strategy since they all help you feel and be your best.

    3. Audit your learnings.

    Being a bit distant from the day-to-day work grind can be a good time to reflect on your learnings, who you are as a person, employee, and leader, and what’s truly next for you versus what you think you should be doing next.

    There is a difference, and even if you can’t go for the former, there is power in naming what you want so that you can find components of the “want” even in your “shoulds” and potentially build toward something that will be even more fulfilling.

    Take a moment and think about your peak moments of aliveness in your journey and how can you bring more of them where you go next. What skills do you most enjoy using? What contribution would you feel most proud to make? What are the environments and who are the leaders that bring out the best in you?

    As for me, I had long wanted to work for myself and start my own small business. Being laid off meant I could take something that I had been doing on the side and turn up the dial to do more of it full-time.

    4. Build a solid strategy.

    Once you have a sense of what you want for your future, create a routine and strategy to give your day structure and ensure you’re putting your energy in the right direction.

    There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. It all depends on your field, aspirations, personality, the season of your career, and more. There are lots of areas where you can invest your time—job fairs, informational interviews, cover letters, job applications, resumes, networking events, and more, so make sure you have a plan while also leaving room for some serendipitous wins so you can prepare for any new opportunities that come your way.

    The important thing is to be proactive instead of reactive. It’s easy to let your fear-based brain run the show, as you scroll through social media and see what other people are doing. Focus on your goals, create a solid plan to work toward them, and stay patient and committed. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, so be intentional, have a plan, and stay focused so you don’t get discouraged or burnt out.

    5. Invite support.

    And finally, my favorite, invite support, not because you are weak and can’t do it alone but because we all do better in community and connection. Find a friend in a similar situation so you can support each other and hold each other accountable. Or hire a career coach or a therapist if you can or join an online support group. Surround yourself with other humans who want to lift you up and are skilled at bringing out the best in you.

    I hope you know that you are not alone on your journey. There are so many humans across the globe navigating this uncertainty every day, unsure of when our economy will recover, when they will find a job, or how long they will be able to hold onto the job that they have at hand. Know that you are doing real hard work with everything happening in our world and the collective grief and trauma we have all experienced as a human species over the last two-plus years.

    I hope you can see your own brilliance, talent, and wisdom and build up the courage to share it bravely with the world.

  • Take Your Power Back: 15 Things You Don’t Have to Do Anymore

    Take Your Power Back: 15 Things You Don’t Have to Do Anymore

    There’s little more frustrating than feeling stuck or trapped—like you have to accept things that aren’t good for you and can’t do the things you need to do to feel and be your best.

    I think we all feel this way at times, and sometimes we do have to accept things that aren’t ideal, at least in the short term while we figure out a plan to make things better. Until we address our health issues, or find a less stressful job, or slowly unravel layers of grief or trauma to find some modicum of peace and healing.

    But when life feels stressful, it’s often because we don’t recognize all the things that are within our power.

    As I sit exhausted in sweats, trying to focus during a short break from caring for two young kids, I know I need to accept the limitations of early parenthood, without a ‘village’ close by for regular support.

    But I don’t have to worry I’m not being a good enough parent when I know I’m doing my best. I don’t have to feel bad about asking for help so I can take a much-needed break. And I don’t have to feel guilty or weak for crying sometimes when it all feels like too much.

    I don’t know about you, but I find the words “You don’t have to…” incredibly comforting, especially when those words enable me to do more of what I need to do for myself.

    If you’re feeling powerless in any area of your life right now, today’s post is for you. If you’re at the end of your rope and tired of waiting for change, this post is for you.

    If you think you don’t have any options, this post might be the nudge you need to look a little deeper and discern what’s actually within your power. Odds are, it’s more than you think.

    If you’d like to print this list to hang or save for future reference, you can download a printable version here, along with a two-page worksheet to help you create change in any area of your life. (You’ll also find four other helpful printables that I created as companions to my upcoming Inner Strength Journal.)

    15 Things You Don’t Have to Do Anymore

    1. You don’t have to wait for change. If you’re not happy with the way things are, you can do something, no matter how small, to transform your life—starting now.

    2. You don’t have to accept anything you’re not comfortable with in your relationships. The people in your life might never change, but you can change how you engage with them.

    3. You don’t have to ask for permission to do what’s best for you. At any time, you can decide to prioritize your dreams and needs without having to defend yourself or justify your choices.

    4. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s advice or rule book. You can decide for yourself what you value most and what it means and looks like to honor it.

    5. You don’t have to be afraid of failing. Failing means you’re trying new things, which is essential if you want to learn, grow, and live a life of purpose and adventure.

    6. You don’t have to be the same as you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. Every morning you can start anew and show up in the world as the person you want to be.

    7. You don’t have to continue doing anything that no longer feels right for you. It’s okay to change directions at any time, and as many times as you need to.

    8. You don’t have to feel guilty about saying no or accomplishing less. Your peace and well-being are just as important as other people’s requests and more valuable than anything you could add to your to-do list.

    9. You don’t have to ignore or suppress your feelings and instincts. They are your compass toward the best possible decisions for you. Hear them. Trust them. Learn from them.

    10. You don’t have to hide your pain to make other people feel comfortable. Not everyone will be able to hold space for you, but some will—you just have to open up to find them.

    11. You don’t have to go it alone. There’s no shame in asking for help. It doesn’t mean you’re weak or incompetent. It means you love yourself enough to accept love from other people.

    12. You don’t have to fix anyone else or make them happy. And you can’t no matter how hard you try. Your job is to focus on taking care of yourself and love them while they learn to do the same.

    13. You don’t have to be ashamed of your past. You did the best you could, given what you’ve been through and what you knew at the time, and it helped you become the person you are today.

    14. You don’t have to worry about what’s coming in the future. You will anyways because you’re human. But when you catch yourself, remind yourself that whatever it is, you’re strong enough to handle it.

    15. You don’t have to stress about doing something big to change the world. You can do something big if you want, but even your smallest acts of kindness can make a massive difference.

    —

    I hope these reminders help you find the strength and courage to change the things you can, even if you start with just one small step. Sometimes even the tiniest move in the right direction can completely change the trajectory of your life.

    You can access the printable version of this list and the companion worksheet here.

    Also, just a reminder: For a limited time, you can get a free 318-page eBook—Tiny Buddha’s Guide to Overcoming Hard Times—when you preorder Tiny Buddha’s Inner Strength Journal through one of the vendors listed here.

  • 7 Tips to Help Soothe Your Separation Anxiety

    7 Tips to Help Soothe Your Separation Anxiety

    “A little space, time, and distance can often be just what a relationship needs to bloom at its best.” ~Karen Salmansohn 

    If you feel insecure in your relationships, there are many scenarios that can activate your anxious attachment; however, there is one trigger that can throw you abruptly into a state of despair and sheer panic.

    That is the experience or threat of separation from the person you are currently attached to.

    That lingering uncertainty when you don’t know when you will see your love interest next, when your partner tells you they have booked a weekend away, or when you receive the dreaded text that they need to postpone your date.

    You’re suddenly flooded with images of them meeting someone new (someone “better” than you), thoughts that they don’t care about seeing you, worries that they are mad at you, feelings of being left out and not important to them, and deep concern that you will be left alone.

    It happens without warning; a day that was going seemingly well takes a turn that hits you so hard you are unable to function or focus.

    I know for me, there have been times when I didn’t recognize myself in these moments. It felt like I had left my body. I could no longer engage in conversation or think about the task at hand.

    In hindsight, I see clearly that I was highjacked by fear of what this separation meant about me and/or the relationship. The goal in those moments was to feel okay again, and the only way that was going to happen was if I could establish contact and “save” myself from the possibility of history repeating itself and being left. It’s almost like I didn’t care about anything else.

    Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this is the inner conflict that happens. Despite the negative predictions about your relationship, there is a part of you, deep down, that knows you are okay and that this is not the end of the world.

    This is especially true if you have dedicated time to “the work” and healing. Despite this knowing, when your anxiety is activated, getting a hold of yourself feels nearly impossible; your relationship stress outweighs any logic.

    In a sense, it feels like you have “lost” yourself.

    Before I was aware of my insecurity and anxious attachment style, I would act out in ways that later left me feeling full of embarrassment, guilt, and shame.

    Sometimes I would find any reason to text (and over-text). There were times when I would start a fight or try to seduce them, other times I would withdraw and give the silent treatment, and there have been times when I would check my phone constantly in the hope it would magically lead to them reaching out.

    I was trying to establish that same contact, without directly saying what I needed or desired. These behaviors are common for the anxiously attached and are known as “protest behaviors.”

    A sudden change of plans can be a significant trigger for separation anxiety to kick in. I remember any time my ex-partner would text to say he was coming home later, or that he was going for spontaneous drinks, I would immediately become upset. We would wind up in a familiar argument, them unable to understand the problem and me unable to explain (unless you count the accusation that they didn’t care about me or our relationship).

    Another challenge is when your partner announces they are going away. You become convinced they will cheat and meet someone new. For me, I would deal with this in two ways: one, constantly seek reassurance from my partner and ask non-stop questions, or two, be full of dread and upset until the time came for the event in question.

    Finally, another common scenario is during the early stages of dating when you don’t know if or when you are seeing your date again. Your mind is in constant overdrive and the fun is being sucked out of dating. You are in full detective mode—looking for red flags, seeking advice, questioning their motives, stalking the girl in their latest social media post, wondering how they are spending their weekend, and asking why they haven’t asked you out again.

    While I have listed some examples of how the threat of separation can activate your anxious attachment, I know there are many more, and I deeply understand how out of control it can feel, no matter what self-soothing techniques you have picked up along the way.

    As someone who continues to work on healing my anxious attachment, I have seen a huge, positive change in how I respond to these triggers, so I am confident change is possible.

    It is the greatest feeling when I can share my partner’s joy about the exciting plans they have that do not include me.

    I am going to give some useful tips that can soothe separation anxiety. These are strategies I use to this day:

    1. Know that separation is a common trigger and name it.

    Knowing separation is a huge factor that influences anxious attachment supports you in remembering you are not alone, and you are not “crazy.” When you are in the moment and feeling triggered, take a moment to acknowledge that separation could be a contributing factor.  The act of naming and identifying what is happening can release a fraction of the tension and create some space for you to think a little more clearly and feel a little lighter.

    2. Resist the urge to believe, justify, or figure out your thoughts when activated. 

    Once you have recognized that separation is part of the concern, I encourage you to repeatedly tell yourself that right now your thoughts and mental images are most likely unreliable and products of the past.

    You can make a pact with yourself that no matter how convincing your thoughts are, you will not judge the other person or make decisions while you are activated. You can trust that when you are regulated again, you will be more in touch with your intuition to decide how you really feel and what steps you should take.

    3. Keep in mind that time will pass, and this won’t always be a problem. 

    Part of the issue is that time can be distorted when your anxious attachment is activated. Three hours can feel like three days or three seconds. It’s important to re-build your relationship with time. This situation is going to play out and time will pass with or without your intervention.

    When you experience a sense of urgency and find yourself speeding up, this is a time to slow down by taking deep breaths. When you feel numb and dissociated, this is a time to speed up by becoming physically active. Both options are giving you a better chance of returning to your body and the present moment.

    4. Befriend your physical sensations. 

    Whether it be shallow breathing, nausea, shaking, thumping heart, or overwhelming lethargy, your physical reaction is sending a message that this is serious, and you are in need. To be with these sensations, without judgment, is healing. You can then change your conditions (breathing, temperature, activity) to reduce your physical symptoms, create more ease, and take back some control. This is a case of going inward to self-regulate before you go outward to co-regulate.

    5. Co-regulate when you have the space to express yourself without demand.

    You may have questions and desire some reassurance. It is okay to seek support from others, including your attachment figure. Many people will deny themselves this strategy for fear of being needy or too much, so remember, it is reasonable to have a voice. It is best to communicate from a space where you can express yourself without demand or expectations. Therefore, it is recommended to self-regulate before you co-regulate.

    6. Imagine how you’d like to feel in your relationship.

    Allow yourself to explore how you would love for you and your partner to feel in your relationship. Imagine how good it could feel if your relationship was a safe and supportive place for both people. Imagine how space allows you to miss each other and grow a healthier bond. Cultivate that feeling and revel in it; you will then be more likely to call on your imagination and this feeling when activated—again, giving you a bit more space to move from away from the reactive state.

    7. Regularly visualize greeting and separating. 

    In relationships it is normal to regularly say hello and goodbye; however, the goodbye can bring up “stuck” energy for the anxious attached. Parting ways can cultivate lots of fear, memories, and concerns. It is useful to “train” yourself to feel more okay about the flow of separating and parting ways. One way to do this is to regularly imagine yourself greeting and saying goodbye to an attachment figure or someone you love.

    —

    Above is a partial list of tips to feel more secure with separation. It can be overwhelming to know where to start, so pick the one that speaks to your heart and start there. You do not have to change everything at once.

    I acknowledge that these tips do not stop negative predictions from coming true; however, they do hugely ease separation anxiety so you can experience more security and joy in the right relationships.

    I want to leave you with the knowledge that there was a time where I thought I was broken and self-soothing just didn’t work for me. That wasn’t the case at all. It’s just change didn’t happen at the fast pace I wanted it to. Maybe you can relate? The thing with anxious attachment is that we need to slow down despite everything in us feeling like it needs to go fast.

  • Dealing with a Big Disappointment: How to Soften the Blow and Move On

    Dealing with a Big Disappointment: How to Soften the Blow and Move On

    “New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” ~Lao Tzu

    In the middle of a storm, it is difficult to see any way out. But on the other side, we usually can recognize a silver lining—something we gained from the experience that enhanced our lives in some way.

    When my husband unexpectedly died and left me a single mother to three young children, I could not conceptualize anything good coming out of it.

    Yet, years later, I am here to tell you that the gutting, heart-wrenching experience taught me invaluable lessons that have helped me to not just survive but actually thrive, finding more happiness when I never thought I would again. Although I wish that experience never happened, I also would never trade the person I am today. Life is funny in that way.

    There have been many setbacks and impending feelings of disappointment. Losing loved ones, the end of relationships, professional rejections and mishaps, parenting flops, general life blunders. All of it.

    Each time I survive a setback, I learn something new and I get better. I become wiser when I seek to understand the lesson and reflect on the experience. I realize that these moments of disappointment have a lot to offer me in personal growth.

    However, in order to get to this place, you must take care of your disappointment. It helps to study human nature and the common responses during these emotions, so you can recognize the pitfalls and be proactive about responding to your disappointment in a nurturing, positive way.

    Most recently, when a relationship ended, I knew immediately that I had to make sure my disappointment didn’t turn into something bigger and darker. I learned from previous experiences what not to do.

    Disappointment—what happens when your expectations are not aligned with reality—can be emotionally and physically painful. But when it turns into devastation, it becomes destructive and crushing, potentially putting you in danger.

    Disappointment is a little hole you can jump over or fill in with some effort. Devastation is a deep trench that is difficult to escape and will require monumental effort. The trick is to take care of it before it becomes insurmountable.

    After my husband passed away, it felt like my wings had been clipped. In a second, I lost my best friend, partner, colleague, and source of unfaltering support. I suddenly found myself having to stand on my own two feet with nobody to root me on, and I felt unconfident and unworthy.

    It took me a while to consider dating. When I did meet someone, I had high hopes for that first relationship. I wanted so badly to experience the security of a stable relationship with a committed partner, the kind I had with my husband. I overlooked the fact that not everyone shared those expectations.

    Unfortunately, this person wasn’t the right one. It was disappointing to feel like I’d wasted my time on someone with whom the stars did not align. I was not prepared to deal with the letdown.

    I felt wronged by the universe for being in a predicament that I thought shouldn’t have happened in the first place. If only my husband hadn’t passed away, I wouldn’t be in this ridiculous, embarrassing situation of trying to re-enter the dating field as a single mother in the early years of her middle age.

    I spiraled into self-pity, wondering why me and why not other people. It was triggering to see others in relationships and wonder why they didn’t have to suffer the way I felt our family had. It can feel isolating and lonely when nobody in your social circles is in the same boat.

    That’s the thing about disappointment. We take it so personally. In reality, everyone has their own share of it; we just aren’t privy to seeing all of the ways it manifests in other people’s lives. We have tunnel vision with the realities we spin in our minds.

    That relationship riddled me with self-doubt, which felt embarrassing because I knew I had already experienced more serious loss than that. Still, I wanted to dissect all of the details and ruminate over what happened, what could have happened, and what might have happened.

    I let it linger too long instead of severing ties when I should have. I let the experience reinforce negative thoughts, like the ones where I told myself that I would never find anyone, that I wasn’t good enough, or that I didn’t deserve another chapter.

    This was a classic case of me not taking care of my disappointment. I let my expectations go wild and I took the disappointment as a crushing blow to my ego. I internalized the pain and let it grow, feeding it irrational thoughts and reactions to perpetuate the negative emotions.

    There is a better approach.

    Disappointment is inevitable and natural, but there are ways we can soften the blow to help ourselves heal and move through the feelings instead of getting stuck in them. When we learn to not hold on so tight and let go, seek joy, and imagine the road ahead, we help ourselves dilute the disappointment until it no longer hurts us.

    Letting Go

    First and foremost, learn to accept what you can control and what you can not. This is paramount to taking care of your disappointment. Holding on to a reality that does not exist only makes your wounds fester.

    I keep a journal, and it serves as an outlet for me to dump my thoughts into. I can go back to previous entries, and it is usually then that I make connections and realize that the grass was not always greener. I did this recently with a breakup, and I read, in my own words, about the red flags that I didn’t heed, which helped give me perspective as I processed what happened.

    When we feel disappointed, our levels of neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine) go down. We experience emotional and sometimes physical pain as a result. The first night after my most recent breakup, my chest felt heavy, making it difficult to breathe as I struggled to fall asleep that night.

    Even though I knew on an intellectual level that it was absolutely for the best, I couldn’t get over the feeling that I had done something wrong and, even worse, that I had wasted my time again. I find myself defaulting to toxic habits: lashing out, looking for ways to hold on, giving the situation too much benefit of the doubt, and trying to rescue something that was not there anymore. In a disappointed state, we tend to fall into irrational thinking and unsavory reactions in an effort to make the pain stop.

    We have to learn to wrap our minds around the impermanence of disappointment—it won’t hurt this bad forever—and let it go, instead of desperately digging in our heels. At this stage, there’s nothing more important than acknowledging how you feel, but then moving on and adjusting your expectations.

    Find Varied Sources of Joy

    The old adage “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket” applies here. The person that got away, the job you lost, or whatever happened to cause your disappointment was not the only source of your joy. Or at least it shouldn’t have been. You are a person with many interests, and you are going to find your dopamine and serotonin elsewhere.

    If you don’t have any hobbies, now is the time to explore and perhaps learn something new. This will help redirect your attention away from the disappointment and also make you feel good. It’s always a good idea to fill your happiness bucket, and now is the perfect time.

    Some questions to consider:

    • What did you used to do in the past that made you happy?
    • What have you always wanted to do?
    • What can you do now that you couldn’t do before?

    For me, I decided I wanted to finish some projects I had kept on the backburner when I was busy in a relationship, and I decided to learn pickleball to meet new people and go back to pilates, which I had stopped pre-pandemic and never resumed.

    Conceptualize the Road Ahead

    Disappointment is not the end of your road. You are not stuck in a dead end. You simply encountered a bump in the road and there is a way out.

    First, figure out what you want in your life in terms of priorities and values. I spend a lot of time doing this, but when I encounter disappointment, I still find myself swerving off the path and bombarding myself with negative thoughts. I have to consciously separate the disappointment from my identity, and keep reminding myself that I am not what I lost.

    I remind myself of the goals I have, ones that still exist even in the face of loss. Sometimes we need to adjust these goals and find other plans or even go in new directions, but you are still a person with aspirations, hopes, and dreams that belong to you. Disappointment doesn’t get to take that away from you.

    It helps me to create lists of the small action steps I need to take to achieve these goals. I call them “bite-size” actions. Teeny, tiny steps.

    For example, I made a “glow” list after my most recent breakup, with all of the things I wanted to do to enhance and better my life. It included tasks as small as getting my nails done and as big as setting up an investment account. Check items off your list and build your grit and perseverance as you prove to yourself how strong you are.

    Also, embrace an abundance mindset. There are more fish in the ocean. There will be job opportunities you can’t even conceptualize right now. Trust they are out there and be open to these possibilities. Seek them out.

    When I get a writing rejection, I try to reframe it as a learning opportunity, trusting that there will be more opportunities to submit my work and I will get better with practice. You don’t get one shot and you’re done. There are an infinite amount of opportunities still waiting for you to explore.

    Bottom line: Disappointment is an opportunity to grow your emotional resilience. It’s a chance to get stronger and intentional about your life, evolving into a better version of who you were yesterday.

    One way to approach your disappointment is to remember seven-year-old you. How would you talk to that child? What advice would you tell seven-year-old you?

    Treating yourself with compassion and patience, while firmly steering yourself back into a positive direction, will help you overcome the many forms of disappointment you will inevitably encounter.

    I’m human, so disappointment still stings even with all of the work I have done. But utilizing these tools have helped me navigate through negative feelings, enabling me to heal more quickly and move on toward new sources of joy.

    I like this quote by Peter Marshall. He said, “When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.”

    Never forget that you are a diamond, nothing less.

  • How I Lighten My Mood by Making a Bargain with the Universe

    How I Lighten My Mood by Making a Bargain with the Universe

    “Pain is what the world does to you; suffering is what you do yourself.” ~Gautama Buddha

    I don’t expect things to be a steady state of bliss.

    In fact, I agree with the Buddha that suffering is pretty much part of the human condition. Our expectations just get in the way of our experiences. I’m talking about your garden-variety suffering here, not the kind that comes with traumatic events that take you out at the knees or devastating clinical depression.

    I see the now-and-then emergence of lethargy or melancholy as part of the whole emotional spectrum. And, like stepping in water in your stocking feet, bound to happen from time to time for most of us. Plus, for me anyway, I think recognizing the difficult days enables me to better savor the wonderful and even the tremendously ordinary ones.

    Still, knowing that the spinning wheel is going to land on grey sometimes does not mean those days aren’t tough. For me, that greyness means my mood, my gait, even my ability to recognize the full bounty that is mine just feels heavier and more arduous. Sort of like moving through muck that slows your pace and clings to your boots.

    Just as I think those emotions are due to sometimes arrive, I also know they will leave—I just want to accelerate that departure. And I’ve found a way that works for me. I make a deal with the Universe.

    I speak this pact out loud—“I’ll try if you try.”

    I commit to trying to pull my boot out the mud by first focusing on my senses.

    Under the header of controlling what I can control, I might actively focus on taking in the smell of fresh coffee—holding the cup in my hands, without expectation, and just experiencing it. The rich smell, the playful bubbles, the warm solace held in a favorite mug. I try to let that singular moment envelope me, seeking nothing specific in return.

    Or I might stand at a window until I can feel the sun’s warmth on my face. I will then imagine my breath carrying that warmth down my neck to my collar bones, down to my fingers and into my belly. I’m not looking to be instantly “fixed,” just to prime the pump to receive and interpret information differently by bringing my senses and my nervous system into the equation.

    The Yoga Sutras, a text from perhaps as early as 500 BCE that codified yogic theory and practice (yoga with  “big Y,” way more than just the poses) reinforce the role of the nervous system in expanded consciousness. We take what we experience to be the truth, but as the theory goes, if you change what you feel/believe you experience, your conception of the truth changes.

    It’s like the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant—you build your definitions of what is based on what you experience. My rationale proceeds then that if I alter my perceived inputs, the narrative that my nervous system spits out can also be altered.

    So that’s my part of the bargain—to widen the sense aperture and find a better experience. For the Universe’s part, I imagine it sending little gifts in return for my efforts—a great parking spot, the wave and smile of a colleague down the hall, a new local tour date for a favorite band.

    I don’t actually think the Universe is moving cars or colleagues or tour schedules to accommodate me. It’s simply me noticing. That doesn’t keep me from imagining a sort of an equal and opposite reaction in play that generates goodness in response to my attempts to notice goodness.

    I think of this noticing as a reframing of the “Toyota principle.” Long ago when my husband and I got a real car, we got a Toyota. Once we had the Toyota, we suddenly noticed all the other Toyotas on the road and wondered where they’d come from. They hadn’t suddenly flooded the market. It was more about moving the metaphorical antenna to recalibrate the signal—ah, I see things now.

    Actively being open to the light and marveling at its forms still doesn’t serve up a twenty-minute fix. It does remind me of all the good standing in wait for me and reinforces that “this too shall pass.” In fact, someone wise once told me “If you want to change something, you’ve got to change something.” These are my somethings.

    And so I commit to engaging my senses and being open to the beauty and love in my cup (even if my experience meter feels set to “low”). I believe that if I can do my part, I’ll again come into alignment faster with a Universe that offers no promises, but provides plenty of opportunity and wonder.

  • The Childhood Wounds We All Carry and How to Heal Our Pain

    The Childhood Wounds We All Carry and How to Heal Our Pain

    “As traumatized children, we always dreamed that someone would come and save us. We never dreamed that it would, in fact, be ourselves as adults.” ~Alice Little

    Like most people, I used to run away from my pain.

    I did it in lots of different and creative ways.

    I would starve myself and only focus on what I could and couldn’t eat based on calories.

    I would make bad choices for myself and then struggle with the consequences, not realizing that I had made any choice at all. It all just seemed like bad luck. Really bad luck.

    Or I would stay in unhealthy relationships of any kind and endure the stress that was causing. Again, I didn’t see what I was contributing or how I was not only keeping my pain going but actually adding to it.

    These are just a few examples of the many ways I ran away from my pain. The real pain. The one below it all. The one that started it all. The core wound.

    The wound of unworthiness and unlovability.

    The wound that stems from my childhood.

    And my parents’ childhoods.

    And their parents’ childhoods.

    But this is not a piece on how it all got started or who is to blame.

    No. This is about me wanting to share how I got rid of my pain.

    Because discovering how to do that changed my life in ways I never thought possible.

    It is something I would love for you to experience too because life can be beautiful no matter what has happened in the past. I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity. Especially because I know it is possible for you too.

    Hands on the table, I am a psychotherapist and I have been for almost ten years. I also train and supervise other psychotherapists, so I should know what I’m talking about.

    But, let me fill you in on this: There are plenty of professionals who haven’t done ‘the work’ on themselves. I know, I’ve met them.

    And I have met hundreds of people who don’t have any qualifications, but they have done the work on themselves. I know, I’ve felt them.

    Doing the work, in the shortest possible summary, is all about facing your pain. It’s when you stop—or when you’re forced to stop, which is so often the case—and you’re done with running away from it.

    It’s when you finally give up.

    Sounds like a bad thing, right? But it isn’t.

    To heal, you have to see the pain.

    We all think we see it or feel it or know it, but we don’t.

    We know what it feels like to run away from it and the pain and stress that causes. The constant anxiety, the pressure, the breathlessness, the numbness. That’s what we know.

    But that’s not the pain, not the pain of the core wound. Those are the symptoms of not dealing with the wound, of not healing it because you’re too afraid to even look.

    It’s fear that stops us from healing.

    It’s not the process of healing itself that scares us; it’s what we imagine healing means. And it usually is nothing like we imagine it to be!

    Healing just means facing the pain.

    Let me try to make it more practical:

    Do you remember a time when you were very little, maybe three or five, or maybe a little older?

    Do you remember, in your body, how it felt to be misunderstood? How to want something and then not get it? How to be punished for something you didn’t do? How to be shouted at for no reason at all just because someone else was stressed out and couldn’t control themselves?

    Do you remember how that felt?

    I do.

    That’s the origin. All those little incidents when we were too young to understand what was going on, but we made it mean something negative about ourselves.

    Because what was reflected back to us by the world, by the people we loved the most, was that something was wrong with us, that in some way we were flawed, wrong, or bad.

    Our brains were too young to take a different perspective, to defend ourselves from unfair judgments and punishments, and so we took it all in.

    And believing something horrible about yourself that isn’t true hurts. Believing that you’re not good enough hurts. Believing that you’re unlovable hurts.

    It also scares us, and so we no longer feel safe.

    Safe to be ourselves. Safe to love. Safe to be loved.

    We start to hide from ourselves and our pain. We start to hide our truth and inhibit the great humans that we actually are.

    Because in those moments, those moments of misunderstanding, we receive the wrong message—that we are not worthy of being heard, trusted, held, or loved.

    We are pushed away, through being ignored, threatened, or punished.

    And then we start doing that to ourselves.

    We want or need something—just like we needed it then when it was inconvenient to a parent who shouted at us and invalidated what we wanted or needed—and we deny it or minimize it.

    We want to say “enough” and set a boundary with someone—just like we wanted to when we were little but were told we didn’t know what was good for us—but we don’t do it.

    We want to choose what we like or are excited by—just like we tried to when we were young but were told we were being stupid, childish, or silly—but then go for the boring, reasonable option instead.

    We carry the pain on.

    We don’t stop to ask ourselves whether that’s actually what we should be doing.

    We try to avoid re-experiencing the pain from our childhood by treating ourselves in exactly the same ways as we were treated back then.

    We don’t realize that we’re keeping that usually unconscious pattern going.

    The most obvious example I can give you from my life is that I didn’t grow up surrounded by emotionally available adults. So obviously I didn’t become one either. I wasn’t emotionally available to myself, and I didn’t choose emotionally available partners in my relationships.

    As a result, I got to relive my childhood experiences over and over again while not understanding why I kept feeling so depressed, unloved, and worthless.

    I kept the pain going by being closed off to how I was feeling and by choosing partners who would shame, reject, or ignore me and my feelings the same way my parents had.

    But I broke that cycle.

    I broke it when I faced my pain.

    I broke it when I stayed within myself when I felt something, no matter what it was.

    When I felt disappointed that I didn’t get the grade I wanted on an important university assignment, I stayed with that disappointment.

    I didn’t talk myself out of it. I didn’t talk down to myself and tell myself what a useless waste of space I was. I didn’t pity myself or blame my lecturer. I didn’t numb myself by binge-watching Netflix and eating chocolate.

    No, I stayed with the disappointment.

    It was like I was sitting opposite my disappointed three-year-old self, and I stayed with her.

    I didn’t shout, mock her, invalidate her, leave her, or make her wrong for feeling how she was feeling.

    I stayed with her. I saw her disappointment. I saw her pain. I knew what she was making it mean and I stayed with her.

    I didn’t push her away. I didn’t push the pain away.

    And guess what happened?

    It started to speak to me! And it made sense!

    It wasn’t scary or weird or awkward or crazy! It made complete sense.

    And it needed me to hear it, to understand it, and to parent it.

    Just like I parent my children.

    “Of course, you feel disappointed. You have put so much work into this, and you didn’t get the result you wanted. I get it. I’m here to listen to you. I want to understand you.”

    Do you know what that does? It calms you down. Truly.

    It calms you down. It’s such a relief!

    Finally, someone wants to listen! Finally, someone doesn’t turn away from me like I am the biggest threat they have ever encountered. Finally, someone looks at me with understanding and compassion.

    This is what I do with all of my feelings.

    If there is jealousy, I am there for it. I’m not shaming it, not judging it—I’m just here to listen, to soothe, to understand, and to act on it if it feels like that’s what it needs.

    So I turn toward the pain, the feeling; I try to understand what it’s all about and see if there is anything it needs from me, something more practical.

    Does my disappointment need me to ask my lecturer for feedback to improve my work for the next assessment?

    Does my jealousy need me to remind myself how worthy and lovable I am? Or does it need me to choose something beautiful for me to wear because I’ve not really paid that much attention to my appearance recently? Or does it need to speak to my partner because he’s much friendlier with other women than he is with me?

    A lot of the time the pain tries to alert us to doing something we need to do for ourselves.

    By not facing the pain, by not tending to it, we can’t know what it is that it needs us to do—and it’s always something that’s good for us.

    And so we go without what we want and need, and the pain only grows bigger and louder like the tantruming toddler that is only trying to express herself in an attempt to be heard, held, soothed, and taken care of by their parent.

    It’s time to stop doing that to ourselves.

    I did many years ago, and I feel like a different person. The way I live my life is different. The way I feel about myself is different. I no longer go without what I want and need.

    That can’t happen as long as you use up all your energy to run away from the pain.

    The pain is your invitation to do the healing work. It invites you to stay and listen, to find out what’s really going on below all distractions and symptoms.

    What is the feeling that needs to be felt?

    What is the pain that needs to be witnessed and understood?

    And what does it need you to do for it so the core wound can finally heal?

    You have the power to heal it. You are the only one you need to heal it. But you have got to stay and learn to be there for it, learn to be there for yourself.

    That’s it.

    Unlike other people, you don’t walk away. You don’t say no to yourself. You don’t go against yourself and make yourself wrong.

    You stay. You feel it. You give it what it needs.

    And that’s when it heals.

  • My Dad Died From Depression: This Is How I Coped with His Suicide

    My Dad Died From Depression: This Is How I Coped with His Suicide

    “Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” ~Jamie Anderson

    When I was seventeen, my dad died from depression. This is now almost twenty-two years ago.

    The first fifteen years after his death, however, I’d say he died from a disease—which is true, I just didn’t want to say it was a psychological disease. Cancer, people probably assumed.

    I didn’t want to know anything about his “disease.” I ran away from anything that even remotely smelled like mental health issues.

    Instead, I placed him on a pedestal. He was my fallen angel that would stay with me my whole life. It wasn’t his fault he left me. It was the disease’s fault.

    The Great Wall of Jessica

    But no, my dad died by suicide. He chose to leave this life behind. He chose to leave me behind. At least, that’s what I felt whenever the anger took over.

    And boy, was I angry. Sometimes, I’d take a towel, wrap it up in my hands, and just towel-whip the shit out of everything in my room.

    But how can you be angry with a man who is a victim himself? You can’t. So I got angry at the world instead and built a wall ten stories high. I don’t think I let anyone truly inside, even the people closest to me.

    How could I? I didn’t even know what “inside” was. For a long time, my inside was just a deep, dark hole.

    Sure, I was still Jessica. A girl that loved rainbows and glitter. A girl that just wanted to feel joyful.

    And I was. Whenever I was out in nature. I didn’t realize it at the time, but whenever I was on the beach, in a forest, or even in a park, I’d be content and calm.

    Whenever I was inside between four walls, however, I felt restless, lonely, and agitated. This lasted for a very long time. I’d say for about twenty years—which, according to some therapists, is a pretty “normal” timespan for some people to really make peace with the traumatic death of a parent.

    But during that time, alcohol and partying were my only coping mechanisms. I partied my bum off for a few years. I’d drink all night until I puked, and then continue drinking. Couldn’t remember half of the time how I got home or what happened that night.

    Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

    Unfortunately, all that alcohol came with a price. I had the world’s worst hangovers—not only physically but also mentally. At twenty-one, hungover and alone at home, I had my first panic attack. Many more followed, and I developed a panic disorder.

    I became afraid of being afraid. I didn’t tell anyone, because I was scared they would think I was crazy.

    Those periods of anxiety never lasted longer than a few months. But they were usually followed by a sort of winter depression. In my worst moments, I felt like the one and only person that understood me was gone. I felt like nobody loved me, not as much as my dad did. And I did think about death myself. Not that I actually wanted to die, but at times, it seemed like a nice “break” from all the pain.

    Acceptance and Spiritual Healing

    Finally, in my mid-twenties, I went to see a therapist. She helped me tremendously and made me realize that the panic attacks were nothing more than a physical reaction to stress. Yet, it wasn’t until I did a yoga teacher training a few years later that I finally learned how to stop those panic attacks for good.

    Wanting to know more about the mechanisms of the body and mind, I dove into mental and physical well-being, and started researching and writing about mental health.

    I understand now that self-love, or at least self-acceptance, and a solid self-esteem are crucial for our mental health. And I know that people with mental health issues find it so, so hard to ask for help. Their lack of self-love makes them think they are a burden.

    I understand that, at that moment, my dad didn’t see any other solution for his suffering than stepping out of this life. It did not mean that he didn’t love me or my family.

    The pain from losing my dad actually opened the door for me to spiritual healing. It brought me to where I am now. It taught me to live life to the fullest.

    It taught me to follow my heart because life is too precious to be stuck anywhere and feel like crap. And it made me want to help others by sharing my story.

    I have accepted myself as I am now. I know that I’m enough. I’ve learned what stability feels like, and how to stay relaxed, even though my body is wired to stress out about the smallest things due to childhood trauma.

    Let’s Share Our Demons and Kill Them Together

    But honestly, the pain from losing him will stay with me for the rest of my life. And sometimes it’s as present as it was twenty years ago. I don’t feel like covering that up with some positive, “unicorny” endnote.

    I feel like being raw, honest, and open instead. Depression and suicide f@cking suck. What I do want to do, however, is to help open up the conversation about this topic. I want to make it normal to talk about our mental health, as normal as it is to talk about our physical health.

    There are way too many people living in the dark, due to stigmatization and fear. Life is cruel sometimes. And every single human on this planet has to deal with shit. It would be so good if we could be real about it and share our stories so other people can relate and find solace.

    I do hope that my story helps in some way.

  • How to Enjoy Life Without Buying Lots of Stuff

    How to Enjoy Life Without Buying Lots of Stuff

    “Minimalism isn’t about removing the things you love. It’s about removing the things that distract you from the things you love.” ~Joshua Becker

    Over the recent few years of being a digital nomad, I got a chance to live in Spain, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and Canada for a month or longer. As I didn’t have a home base and only had one medium-sized suitcase with me (still do), I couldn’t really afford to buy new things.

    I mean, I would need to put them somewhere, and my suitcase is already over forty-five pounds while most airlines only allow up to fifty.

    Even when I had to go back to my home country and stay there for almost a year because of the pandemic, I knew I’d be on the road again as soon as possible. So I continued to not buy anything other than essential things.

    I was never a shopaholic before, but I still felt miserable wearing the same few-year-old clothes and watching my friends (not even mentioning social media influencers I follow) regularly enjoy new things.

    I didn’t realize that more often than not we only buy things to fill a void or to relieve stress, not necessarily because we actually need or even want them. As soon as I figured that out, I started looking for alternative ways to fill my days with joy that didn’t involve buying new stuff.

    Today I want to share four things that I’m buying now when I want to feel better, which don’t occupy any space in my suitcase!

    1. Online courses

    Maybe it’s just me, but courses that teach me new skills are my favorite things ever! Even my husband knows that giving me a course as a gift will always make me happy.

    I have a ton of hobbies and things that I’m interested in, and each of them could become a full-time thing if I wanted it to. So there is no lack of information to keep learning.

    For example, last year I was into photography and took a bunch of courses on the subject. I learned mobile photography, then normal photography, and even some videography. I studied lots of related things including photo and video editing and even dipped my toes into stock photography.

    This year I’m learning digital illustration. YouTube and Skillshare are my two best friends right now and would probably be the most visited websites in my free time if I were to track my web activity. It just makes me so happy to ace a new thing I couldn’t imagine creating before!

    Honestly, I could never understand people who get bored staying alone at home and don’t know what to do. I wish I had another twenty-four hours in my day just to fit in all the things I want to learn!

    Besides, investing in yourself is never a bad idea. You never know where your new skills might appear useful on your life journey.

    2. Experiences

    You might say that it’s easy to find new experiences when you are traveling, and that’s true. I often go on walking tours, participate in cooking classes, and find other interesting things that my next country has to offer.

    But if you think I didn’t invest in experiences when I wasn’t a nomad, you are wrong.

    My favorite kind was always visiting an escape room. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s a quest where you go into a room full of hints and puzzles, solving which leads you to the next one, and so on until the final thing gives you a key or something to escape the room. Usually, there is a specific theme for the room, you have one hour to escape, and there can be more than one actual room involved.

    Over the years, with my friends and coworkers, I went to almost every room that existed in my city at the time (which is a lot). Some were very easy; some were so hard that we didn’t get out on time. I remember the one which was absolutely dark and another one where they put chains around your ankles and wrists at the beginning, which you have to get out of.

    The feeling of nailing another quest room can hardly compare to anything else; it’s like actually being in an adventurous book for an hour. If you happen to be a nerd and avid reader like me, you know what I mean.

    Meaningful experiences strengthen your relationships and create memories for years to come. Do you remember every shirt you buy or reminisce about it with friends? I doubt that!

    3. Little gifts for friends

    This one is a bit of a cheat, as you might actually get to buy a physical thing.

    But, instead of it piling up in your closet, you give it away and feel good about it. Your friend is happy, you are happy, and your home doesn’t get cluttered. Not bad, huh?

    Just make sure to only buy things your loved ones actually want so they don’t start hating you for cluttering their home. Especially if your friend happens to be a minimalist.

    Wanna know my approach to always giving really good gifts? I swear by wishlists!

    I have had one for many years, and I made each of my friends and family members make one. Not everyone likes the idea at first, but I promise you, everyone loves getting specific things they want as presents! And don’t worry, it can still be a surprise, especially if their wishlist is long enough.

    To support the idea of having less stuff, encourage your friends to add items to their wishlists that aren’t physical things. About two-thirds of my own wishlist consists of specific online courses I’d love to take, new experiences I wish to try one day, and gift cards for fun things like massages and yoga classes.

    When it comes to hobbies and lifestyle choices, people usually know exactly what they want, and you can never go wrong with a wishlist. Without it, unless you know for sure all the details, it’s easy to gift someone a book they already have or a course that is too beginner-oriented (or too advanced) for their level. If you have doubts, better buy them a gift card to their favorite store or learning platform, so they can choose a specific item themselves.

    If you think you need to wait for a holiday or a birthday to give someone a gift, think again!

    The best presents are unexpected ones. Try surprising your friend with something they want for no particular reason, and just see how excited they get! They will feel loved and valued, which is something we can all benefit from.

    And as for you, the process of finding a perfect gift and seeing your friend genuinely enjoying it releases dopamine and endorphins, which basically make you feel happier. Win-win!

    4. eBooks

    The last thing on the list of things I still buy is eBooks.

    I am the person who used to read 100+ books per year and had a full bookcase at home. Now I travel with my tiny Kindle and am more mindful about what I’m reading.

    With that said, I still love the smell of real books and the feeling of actually turning pages! I still have a few of my favorite bookmarks. But I only buy digital books as it would be impossible to travel with “real” ones. I wish I had Hermione’s handbag with an extension charm on it, but sadly I don’t.

    I know many people these days don’t read books. With so many kinds of easily digestible visual content options we have online now, books became something of an old era. However, the process of reading still has a ton of health benefits: from improving your concentration skills and vocabulary to releasing stress and anxiety that is a constant problem in most of our lives.

    Nothing else can take your mind off your routines and worries quite as an interesting book can. It may only weigh a few kilobytes, but it has a whole world inside.

    —

    These were my four things to buy that won’t ever clutter your life! They might, however, make a big impact on your self-development, make you smarter, improve your skills and mental health, and make you happier. Not a bad deal, is it? Especially for things that don’t take up any space.

    I hope you can agree with me now that it’s possible to live happily without buying new stuff all the time. I am not exactly a minimalist, but I like the idea of surrounding yourself with things that bring you joy instead of cluttering your life with things that only bring you instant gratification and then get forgotten.

    Try to fill your days with fun experiences and learning new skills, as your memories and abilities are things you can always take with you, wherever you go.

  • The Surprising Lesson I Learned About Why People Leave Us

    The Surprising Lesson I Learned About Why People Leave Us

    “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” ~Lao Tzu

    While this Lao Tzu quote may sound familiar, I recently learned there is a second portion of that quote that often gets omitted.

    “When the student is truly ready…the teacher will disappear.”

    The first part of this quote was a healing anchor for me as I went through what I call a thirteen, or a divine storm.

    In one year’s time, I went through a devastating divorce, was robbed, got in two car accidents, and lost a dear friend to a heart attack. I felt like I was watching everything in my life burn to ash, including my deepest desire of having a family, and found myself on my knees doing something I had never done before: asking for help.

    I realized the way I had been living my life wasn’t working anymore and I needed to learn, so I became the student and opened my palms to the sky asking for guidance.

    So many teachers came. I found a therapist who helped me heal from my divorce, I found spiritual guidance after being lost, I met other divorcees, and found meditation, which was a loving balm to my broken heart. I was ready, so the teachers appeared.

    Each teacher that came forward instilled in me the importance and effectiveness of the right support, and as I faced all the challenges of building a new life, I continued to seek help. What I learned allowed me to find my life partner, one who desired creating a family as much as I did.

    As my life transformed and I opened my heart to love again, I thought the first part of this quote was the full lesson.

    Until recently, when I encountered the second part on a quote website.

    Staring at the words on my screen, my whole body stopped. Tears fell down my face as I realized all these years I’ve spoken about the teachers that arrived in the face of my divorce, but hadn’t really spoken about the teachers that left.

    Specifically, the biggest teacher, my ex. For the purpose of this post, we will call him Jon.

    When Jon dropped the bomb on Thanksgiving Day of 2012, and said he didn’t love me anymore, I honestly thought I could stop it. I thought I could save the marriage. But nothing worked. Not couple’s counseling, not locking myself in the bedroom and refusing to eat, or crawling under the hide-a-bed he was sleeping on in the living room, pleading for him to stay.

    Jon’s refusal to work on the marriage left me with something I hadn’t spent real time with in my thirty-seven years. His refusal left me with myself.

    And the truth was, I had been lying to everyone around me for years. I had been in an on and off again affair and swayed violently between immense shame for my actions and complete confusion as to why I kept going back to a man I didn’t really love.

    I didn’t understand what I was doing or why.

    I would cover up the shame and confusion with overdrinking, lots of TV, and listening to constant music. I would cry in the shower, so afraid I would be found out. I was convinced my friends and family would all stop loving me.

    But something had been alive for a long time. In fact, it was alive when Jon and I were engaged in college.

    I was a musical theater major, and in my last year of school, when I was planning my wedding, I threw myself at two men I was in shows with. Nothing happened with the first guy, but with the second, we kissed, and I immediately felt ashamed and appalled. What was I doing?

    So I told Jon, and he asked me a powerful question, “Do you want to postpone the wedding?” I told him no. I told him I loved him. I apologized and promised this would never happen again.

    So the wedding went forward, except a week before I walked down the aisle, I felt scared again and asked my mom if this was a good idea. She thought it was just nerves and talked me back into getting married.

    Our first year of marriage was both exciting and tumultuous. We were both actors, and very passionate, and many times would have escalating fights filling our small Queens apartment with our voices. My parents came to visit, and my mother pulled me aside, concerned about how we were speaking to each other.

    I told her this was what actual communication was like, not just staying silent like she did with my father.

    So the yelling continued, as did all the excitement of our careers, and we spent a lot of time apart as we worked at different theaters. Even though I thought we were on the same page about having a family eventually, the years went on and on.

    Until my thirty-sixth birthday, when I finally got off the pill. I was terrified. I never thought I would wait this long to have a family, and as the months went on and my period continued to come, I heard again and again how scared Jon was too. Nothing I said would make any difference, and the fights were getting uglier and uglier.

    I felt so alone.

    And a panic was rising in me. A panic that he didn’t want to have a family. That I was married to a man who didn’t want to be a father.

    Then he kneeled in front of me a year later and confirmed my panic. Turns out, everything I felt was actually true.

    “When the student is truly ready…the teacher disappears.”

    Jon was my teacher for nineteen years. I met him when I was eighteen, wide eyed and madly in love. But now it was time. Time for me to learn what it looked and felt like to be with a partner who shared my deepest desire.

    Time to learn what a healthy relationship is, and what healthy and loving communication sounds like.

    Time to learn how to honor my instincts and process strong emotions, and especially my anger at being in my late thirties with no children.

    He didn’t need to be there anymore, because I was finally waking up and ready to learn the lesson he was in my life to teach me.

    He could leave, and actually had to leave in order for me to grow.

    Lao Tzu was speaking to one of the most profound teachings we have, that change is constant. People come in and out of our lives for different purposes, and our deepest suffering arises when we try to control every outcome. We try to control our relationships, our friendships, and the people we believe have to always be there.

    But what if each teacher is here for the time needed, and when they leave, it’s actually a reflection of what you are ready for?

    What if people leaving, relationships ending, is actually a reflection of your readiness for transformation?

    What if your heartbreak of any kind, romantic or personal, is a moment of sacred alchemy?

    Take a moment today to honor the teachers who have left. Perhaps write in your journal around this question: What did you learn when they were gone?

    For me, I sat down on the floor and cried. I felt a great wave of relief recognizing Jon left because I was ready.

    And I would not have known otherwise.

    You are so much stronger than you know, and your greatest learning comes when you claim the wisdom of those teachers who have left.

  • The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Our Worth and How I’ve Let Them Go

    The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Our Worth and How I’ve Let Them Go

    “You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside and hustle for your worthiness.” Brene Brown

    I was shaking and sweating with fear as I stood in front of my graduate professor for the final test of the semester. I was twenty-two years old at the time and felt like a fish out of water in my graduate program. I dreamed of being a professor, studying, and writing, but deep down I thought, “I’m not smart enough. I don’t fit in here.  No one likes me.”

    When my religion professor announced that the final wasn’t a sit-down, bubble-in quiz, but a one-on-one translation, and I’d need to answer questions aloud, I knew I’d fail it epically, and I did. To add oil to the fire, I ran out of the room in tears.

    I failed it before I even started because my fear was so great. My hands were shaking, and soon my teacher would know the truth: I didn’t belong there.

    My professor was incredibly intelligent, and I was intimidated from our first meeting. The way I thought he spoke down to others, probably because his tone, diction, and vocabulary were academic (whether intentional or not), triggered a deep wound.

    Since childhood I had developed a limiting belief: “I am not intelligent.” This followed me wherever I went.

    In school, at work, and in relationships, I constantly trusted others to make decisions and discounted my own opinion. I looked to others for the answers and then compared myself to them. This left me feeling insecure and dependent on others. Not at all the leader I envisioned for myself.

    It was the root of the shame I felt, and I allowed it to mean that I was stupid, I wasn’t worthy, and I would never succeed. My inner critic was loud and eager to prove to me why I was less-than.

    There are a few memories I have from childhood that I can recognize as the start of this limiting belief.

    I remember my first-grade teacher passing back a math worksheet. I received a zero at the top in red letters. I still remember that red marker, the questions, and feeling unworthy. I didn’t understand the questions or why my classmates got ten out of ten, and I was too shy to ask or listen to the answer.

    This happened throughout my schooling. It took me more time than my classmates to understand concepts. I wanted to ask questions but was afraid I would look stupid or that I still wouldn’t understand, so I just avoided traditional learning all together.

    I always looked around and thought, “If they understand it, so should I.” In other words, there is something wrong with me.

    Growing up in the nineties, I was teased for being blonde and ditzy. I was friendly, silly, and loved to laugh, so I was labeled as a stereotype blonde airhead. It hurt my feelings more than I ever let on.

    Even when the teasing was lighthearted and done by friends who loved me, it reinforced my belief that I wasn’t smart or good enough. This belief made me feel small and kept me locked in a cage because no matter what I achieved and how much love I received, I still felt like a failure.

    This limiting belief even made its way into my friendships because I held this insecurity about myself and felt that I could not be my truest self in front of others. I wanted to please my friends by listening, supporting, and championing their dreams rather than risk showing my leadership abilities and the intellectual pursuits I yearned for deep within me.

    Looking back now, I see that I was capable of excelling at school and in relationships, but due to my misconceptions about my worth, it felt safer not to stand out. Drawing attention to myself was too dangerous for my nervous system, which was always in survival mode.

    I preferred to fly under the radar and pass classes without anyone noticing me. I preferred to focus on my friends’ problems and dreams because it felt safer than vulnerably sharing my own.

    I never attended my graduate school graduation, nor did I complete all my finals. I still passed, but I didn’t celebrate my accomplishment.

    In fact, I wanted to write a thesis, but my guidance counselor (a different professor) discouraged me. She told me how much work it would be and that it wasn’t necessary to pass instead of motivating me to challenge myself. Since writing was always important to me, I actually wanted to do it but never spoke up or believed in myself enough to tell her.

    I have heard from many people like me and know that I am one of many sensitive souls that have been discouraged by a teacher. I mistakenly thought my differences made me less capable than others, but I am happy to say that none of these experiences stopped me from moving forward.

    With time and building awareness I took steps to heal these wounds and to change my limiting beliefs about myself.

    Learning about shame is the biggest step you can take to change this for yourself. Whether the shame you carry is from childhood, a traumatic event, struggles with addiction, coming out with your sexuality, or anything else, there is healing to be done here, and you are not alone.

    At the present moment, I don’t allow this feeling of shame to run my life. I am aware of it when it arises and no longer value its protection. I have done the inner work to heal.

    The first step I took was talking to someone about it. Letting it out. Shining a light down upon it. If we want to heal or change anything in our lives, we have to be honest about what we want and what we’re afraid of.

    Once I did that I realized many other people had the same fear and that it wasn’t true.

    It wasn’t true that I wasn’t smart enough. I had evidence that proved this. I’d been accepted to programs; I’d passed classes; I understood challenging ideas. I liked research and writing and was open to feedback in order to improve. I even had a graduate degree.

    I was able to learn new skills in environments that felt safe and supportive to me and my sensitive nervous system. I realized I did better in small groups and with one-on-one support.

    Knowing that didn’t mean the wound was no longer triggered, but it meant that I had the awareness to soothe myself when it was.

    It meant that it hurt, but I didn’t allow it to stop me from moving forward. Instead, I let myself feel the pain while supporting myself and reminding myself of the truth: that I am unlimited and worthy of love, acceptance, and approval.

    Whenever we believe a lie about ourselves it creates major internal pain for us. That pain is an invitation to dig deeper, expose the lie, challenge it, and adopt a new belief that makes us feel proud instead of ashamed.

    The person that I most longed for approval from was myself. I had to be the one that finally accepted my differences without labeling myself as unworthy. I had to love myself even if I felt unsafe or unsure. Once I did that, it was reflected back to me tenfold.

    We all have fears and limiting beliefs and carry the burden of shame within us. These are human qualities, meaning this is a natural challenge shared by all healthy people.

    Instead of hiding them, numbing them, and burying them deep within, share them in a safe space, shine a light on them so the truth can emerge, and take your power back by feeling the emotions while knowing the truth: No matter what lies you’ve told yourself, you are good enough and worthy of love.

  • 5 Questions I Ask Myself Nightly Since My Father’s Sudden Death

    5 Questions I Ask Myself Nightly Since My Father’s Sudden Death

    “Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.” ~Langston Hughes

    Nine years ago, I was sitting mindlessly in my office cubicle in Omaha, Nebraska, when the receptionist called to inform me that my dad was in the lobby.

    I walked out to greet him: He was happy, smiling, and donning one of his favorite double-breasted suits. He was there because he needed my signature on some tax preparation forms before he handed them over to his accountant. My dad always took care of things like that.

    It was a Friday in February, late morning. We briefly discussed getting lunch but ultimately decided not to in the interest of time. We would see each other over the weekend, anyway. After all, we were planning a trip.

    A week prior, my dad told me he wanted to take me to Vegas for my thirtieth birthday. I’d never been to Vegas. There were things to discuss, hotel rooms to book, concert tickets to buy.

    I signed the tax forms, thanked my dad, and walked back to my cubicle. I don’t remember anything else about this day. It was, in fact, just like any other day. It was ordinary. Humdrum, you might say.

    But the next day…

    The next day is forever seared into the pathways of my hippocampus, every detail a tattoo on my mind’s eye.

    Because the next day…

    That’s the day my dad died.

    I remember the morning phone call I got from my sister.

    9:38 a.m.

    I remember running to my car, half a block up Howard Street, and then another block down 12th. I remember the whipping wind and the stinging cold. I remember the saplings lining the streets of downtown, their branches brittle and bare, scratching the ether like an old lady’s fingers.

    I remember the seventeen-minute drive to the hospital.

    I remember the hospital, the stairs, the front desk, the waiting room, the faces, the hugs, the tears, the complete and utter shock.

    I remember that my mom wasn’t there.

    Three times we called. Where is she? Why isn’t she answering? Who’s going to tell her?

    It seems like our lives are defined by days, even moments, like these—the most joyous or the most unbearably tragic.

    I miss my dad.

    I miss his ridiculously big heart, which we were told was the thing that killed him.

    I miss the lingering scent of his cologne, a sort of woodsy, leathery blend that comes in a classic green bottle. I miss his laugh, which could range from a barely discernible chuckle to a jolly, high-pitched guffaw. I miss seeing him in my clothes—the shirts and shoes and jeans that I wanted to throw away because they were clearly going out of style.

    I miss the things I never thought I’d miss, the quirks and ticks and peccadillos that drove me crazy—like the way he’d crunch his ice cubes or noisily suck on a piece of hard candy in an otherwise quiet movie theater.

    I wonder if I chose to write this today instead of tomorrow because writing it tomorrow could prove too difficult. Or if I chose to write this after nine years instead of ten years because ten years is one of those nice, round numbers we use for milestone birthdays and anniversaries and other such occasions we’re supposed to celebrate. Or maybe because ten years is a whole decade and a whole goddamn decade without my dad just seems too strange to fathom.

    When I think of the last time I spoke with my dad, I can’t help but also think of that Benjamin Franklin quote—the one about how nothing is certain except death and taxes.

    But only one of those things comes with any sort of predictability.

    Studies have shown that our brains are wired to prevent us from thinking about our own mortality. Our brains shield us from the existential thought of death and view it as something that happens to others but not ourselves.

    So, most of us, perhaps because of our biological wiring, rarely even think about the unfortunate truth that we’re going to die, and we have no idea how or when.

    On the other hand, some of our greatest ancient philosophers actually practiced reflecting on the impermanence of life—otherwise known as Memento Mori, which literally translates to Remember you must die.

    “You could leave life right now,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations. “Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

    Personally, I don’t think about my own demise a whole hell of a lot.

    But there’s a reason I decided to pack up my things and move to a new city six years ago.

    There’s a reason I decided to make a career pivot five years ago.

    There’s a reason I decided to quit my day job at almost forty years old and start working for myself two years ago.

    Because nine years ago, death did a number on me. I had one of those unbearably tragic days that seems to define our lives.

    And now, before I go to bed each night, I ask myself:

    Was I a decent person today?

    Did I challenge myself today?

    Did I have any fun today?

    What am I grateful for today?

    If I were on my deathbed, would I have regrets?

    Asking myself these things helps me live a more fulfilling life—the kind of life that I want to live. And I’m proud of what I’m doing here, right now. I think—at least I hope—my dad would be too.

    I still haven’t been to Vegas, though.