Tiny Buddha

Category: Blog

  • How a Creative Hobby Can Boost Your Mental Health

    How a Creative Hobby Can Boost Your Mental Health

    “The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” ~Neil Gaiman

    A few years ago I wrote an article about my personal experience with bulimia. The piece was published by several different media channels, and some time afterward I was interviewed by CNN.

    It was the first time I had publicly and explicitly spoken about that particular part of my journey. But the desire to acknowledge and address the emotional effects of my experience had been present for some time.

    Prior to writing the article, I hadn’t felt ready to lay myself bare in such a direct way. However, I instinctively knew that I needed a means of self-expression that would allow me to speak of what I’d been through without being quite so specific.

    That’s where creativity came in.

    I began using photography as a way of expressing everything I was still too vulnerable to verbalize. It was a beautiful revelation for me to realize that I could share my thoughts and feelings in an abstract way. I could pour my pain into the creation of something new. This was a crucial step in my recovery.

    I’d begun binging and purging as a way to avoid my feelings after the breakdown of my marriage. I had fallen out of love with my husband, and I was carrying a tremendous amount of guilt inside me, constantly feeling as though I’d failed my family and friends by not being able to make my relationship work. I hated myself for walking away from my marriage, for daring to want more.

    I was also dealing with intense pressure at work and financial stress, all of which had left me feeling as though everything was out of control.

    Bulimia had given me the illusion of control, but it was also a way of punishing myself for not being able to stay in a relationship that everyone else expected me to be content with.

    Mental health issues are often accompanied by feelings of shame and guilt. We tell ourselves that we should be able to handle everything, that we shouldn’t be placing a burden on our loved ones. It’s a self-destructive cycle that has the potential to send us spiraling.

    Although creativity doesn’t act as a magic wand, it does give us an opportunity to take a breath and gain a greater understanding of what’s going on internally. We can use creativity as a means of translating ourselves to ourselves.

    Photography became a lifeline for me. I could capture texture and shadow, play around with light and motion. I could convey some of the darkness that was still haunting me, but instead of succumbing to my feelings, I was able to build something from them.

    I also began to use poetry and creative writing as tools to help me channel my emotions. The personal value of this was enormous. In creativity I had a friend, a means of telling my own story in my own way, and a source of strength and support that I could rely upon to be there for me.

    Here’s how a creative hobby can help us cope with mental health issues:

    1. Creativity reminds us that we have the ability to effect change, and it also helps us be more present.

    When we are experiencing mental health challenges, it can be easy to fixate on the fear that there won’t be any light at the end of the tunnel. When I was dealing with bulimia, I would obsessively weigh myself every morning and every night. If I were away from home or in a place where I didn’t have access to a bathroom scale, I would feel a sense of rising panic. I couldn’t imagine a time when I would be free of the need to control my weight.

    Immersing ourselves in creativity can help us believe in our ability to heal, grow, and change because we are actively participating in the production of something new.

    Whether it’s baking, gardening, painting, dancing, sculpting, or any other creative pursuit, we are taking an idea and breathing life into it.

    This not only helps to keep our focus on the present moment, thus alleviating future fears, but it also gives us the additional benefit of shaping and impacting an outcome through our efforts.

    When we create, we are combining imagination and resourcefulness. We are envisaging an end result and then taking action to make it happen. This adds to our personal skill set and emboldens us to have the same courage in other areas of our life.

    Whenever I’m revisited by old demons that threaten to topple me, I create something. Anything. The act of creating helps me to re-center and focus on my abilities, rather than obsess about my perceived shortcomings. It also helps me step outside myself, shift my perspective on my challenges, and remember what’s truly important.

    I recently herniated a disc in my back and was unable to practice yoga with as much ease as usual. As I lay on my mat at home one morning, feeling frustrated at my body for failing me, I began to slip into some old self-talk about not being good enough.

    But then I noticed the pattern that the sunlight was projecting on the wall beside me. I took my phone and snapped a photo. As the light shifted again once more, I was reminded that nothing is static and everything is always changing. My energy automatically lifted.

    Creativity teaches me about trust and impermanence and also expands my sense of awareness. The simple act of witnessing and photographing the moving light was enough for me to remember that each day is full of beauty. I don’t want to miss any of it by wasting my energy on criticizing my body.

    2. Creativity enables us to process some of what we’re feeling without the intensity of putting ourselves under a microscope, and it can also help us meet our needs.

    We’re not always ready to closely examine every experience. We’re not always comfortable talking things through, or wading into the depths of our pain or trauma. But we need to work through these feelings, or else they’ll lie beneath the surface, limiting and controlling us.

    Creativity can offer us a safe space in which we’re able to release some of our emotional weight without over-analyzing. We eliminate the scrutiny but still receive the benefit of self-connection.

    When we’re able to connect with what we’re really feeling—whether it’s anger or regret or disappointment—and then channel that into a creative project, we are less likely to engage in behaviors that are numbing or harmful. Which means we actually work through the feelings instead of just distracting ourselves from them.

    Creativity can also be a compass. It’s a way of identifying an inner need and then permitting ourselves to meet that need.

    Perhaps you are craving more vibrancy or flavor in your life. Being creative might mean choosing bright, bold fabrics to make a clothing item, or being experimental in the kitchen with new cuisine.

    And just as creating something from nothing can help us believe in our ability to create change in other areas of our lives, meeting some of our needs through creativity can empower us to meet other needs—the need for self-care or boundaries, for example.

    When we’re struggling with mental health issues, it’s easy to minimize or neglect our needs, but this only prolongs our healing. Creativity helps us trust our intuition and follow our instincts. It isn’t necessarily a substitute for therapy, but it can play a pivotal role in helping us build confidence and resilience, enabling us to both work through how we’re feeling and take good care of ourselves.

    3. Creativity enables us to connect with others and build community.

    Common mental health issues such as depression or anxiety can lead to social withdrawal and isolation, increasing feelings of loneliness and heightening the body’s stress responses.

    Creativity is a wonderful way to connect with others. Social media platforms provide us with ways to share our creativity and spark conversation with people who have similar interests. When I first began blogging online, I was amazed at how quickly I was able to become part of a supportive community, many of whom I’ve since met in person.

    Most libraries or community centers offer group arts and crafts classes. These are fantastic opportunities to establish local connections and circle with others. I recently attended a free creative sculpture workshop at the New York Public Library. I had no previous experience, and my creation was far from perfect—none of that mattered. It felt amazing to come together with other people and make something.

    We are all creative beings. Experimenting with different mediums can be a wonderful way to find out what sparks joy and brings comfort. You don’t have to be an expert. Remember, perfection is not the goal; you’re simply making your world a little brighter.

    My journey with creativity has given me more than I could ever have anticipated. It may not always change external circumstances, but inwardly there’s a shift every single time. An easier breath. A blank canvas and a fresh start. A reminder that I can begin again and again, as many times as necessary. And sometimes that’s all we need to be okay.

  • How to Make Your Life Matter (Even If It Lacks Purpose and Direction)

    How to Make Your Life Matter (Even If It Lacks Purpose and Direction)

    “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt

    “Calm yourself down. It’s okay. All is well.”

    I clung to the sterile white table while the laboratory was spinning around me.

    “It’s just an anxiety attack. It will be over soon.”

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, forcing my lungs to expand against the tightness in my chest. Cold sweat trickled down my spine as I battled the all-consuming feelings of overwhelm, panic, and disappointment.

    My life was going nowhere.

    How had this happened? I thought I had a plan.

    I had chosen a promising career in science to make a positive contribution. I’d dedicated myself to changing the world, gaining recognition, and creating a legacy. So my life would matter.

    And yet, I felt empty. Aimless. Unhappy.

    I was stuck in a pointless treadmill of work, eat, sleep, repeat. I had no social life, no hobbies or passions. I focused solely on my research, hoping to enrich other people’s lives.

    But instead, I added to pharmaceutical companies’ profits. I made no difference to anybody. And I was way behind in my career compared to other people my age.

    I lay awake at night, disillusioned and frustrated, beating myself up for my miserable failure, drowning in hopelessness, anxiety, and worries.

    What if I died tomorrow without leaving a mark on the world? Vanished without a trace, my insignificant life instantly forgotten?

    What if my existence was meaningless?

    I stood in the middle of the deserted lab, tears streaming down my face. Everybody else had left to enjoy their evening. Their lives had direction, happiness, purpose. They counted.

    What was wrong with me?

    As despair washed over me, I knew I couldn’t go on like this. I had to find my true purpose in life. Before it was too late.

    My Hopeless Search for Purpose and Direction

    After my fateful (and humiliating) breakdown in the lab, I embarked on a quest to find my true purpose, determined to make my life matter.

    I studied countless blog posts, articles, and self-help books. Desperate to discover the secret to filling my life with meaning, I absorbed every piece of information available on the topic.

    Most writers agreed that we have to focus on the things we love, and use them to contribute to society.

    The problem was that I had concentrated all my time and effort on pursuing an academic career. It had seemed a sensible choice at the time, with excellent prospects of achieving purpose and impact. But it had never been my passion.

    And I was now at a dead end, without a clue about what I loved, because my whole life was purpose-driven.

    I never went for a walk in the sun unless I could pick up some shopping on the way. I never spent time in the garden unless I could pull out some weeds at the same time. And I had abandoned my favorite hobbies of jigsaw puzzles and crochet because I thought they were useless activities.

    I felt guilty and lazy when I wasted precious time on them. Time that could be spent doing something productive and significant.

    For months, I obsessed over finding something I loved that also had purpose, but nothing I felt passionate about seemed important enough to lend meaning to my life.

    Growing more anxious, frustrated, and desperate by the day, I prepared myself to settle for an unfulfilling half-life, devoid of purpose, meaning, and direction. Maybe I had no purpose; maybe my life was too irrelevant to matter.

    But then, a thought popped into my mind that changed everything.

    What if the crucial question wasn’t “What’s my purpose in life?” but “Why is having purpose so important to me?”

    My True Motivation for Seeking Purpose in Life

    Having purpose enriches us. Knowing we can use our gifts to improve our community, better society, and enhance people’s lives, we experience joy. A deep feeling of satisfaction, connection, and fulfillment.

    But, as I dug deeper, I discovered that none of this really motivated my relentless search. At least not primarily.

    The truth was that I so desperately sought purpose in my life because, somehow, I believed that I had to justify my existence.

    It was as if I didn’t deserve to live if I didn’t have a purpose. As if I was unworthy of love and happiness until I could offer something useful to the world—until I had important achievements and contributions to show for myself, and was somehow special, somehow more.

    So, the pursuit of purpose became the sole purpose of my life. And my failure to identify what could give my life meaning left me feeling pointless, stressed, and ashamed.

    All because of one devastating misunderstanding.

    The Tragic Reason Why We Obsess About Our Purpose

    I spent my entire life chasing my purpose—desperate to achieve the one important contribution to mankind that would make me special, that would earn me recognition and approval and justify my existence—because, deep down, I believed that I was worthless.

    I considered myself an empty vessel, devoid of value and significance. I assumed that I had to gain worth through my accomplishments, successes, and qualifications. That I needed purpose and a clear direction in order to gain some worth and finally deserve happiness.

    The absence of purpose in my life created a painful worth deficit. I felt inferior to others who made valuable contributions and earned admiration, approval, and status.

    I mattered less. I was irrelevant because I was useless to society.

    It was my perceived lack of worth that made me feel empty and meaningless. And the only cure I could see was to find that extraordinary purpose that would make me worthy.

    So, I searched more and worked harder. I sacrificed every activity that didn’t seem meaningful and important enough to increase my worth, irrespective of how much I loved it.

    Foregoing all joy, I burnt myself out hunting for my purpose. So I could prove that my life mattered. So I could convince the world of my worth—and my right to exist.

    In the process, I missed the purpose of my life altogether.

    The Empowering Secret to Living a Worthy Life

    I thought I would never be useful enough to have worth, which meant my life would never matter, but I was wrong.

    And I realized it on the day I first cradled my newborn daughter. Looking down at the tiny bundle in my arms, there was no doubt in my mind that she was worth. That she deserved all the happiness and love in the world.

    Yet, she had no accomplishments to her name. She’d made no contributions to mankind and society. She had no concept of purpose, goals, or direction.

    Yet she mattered, simply because she existed.

    In this very moment I understood that we cannot have worth. It’s not something we earn, gain, or lose.

    Worth is the essence of our being. An absolute, inherent, unchangeable part of who we are.

    We are worth personified. Every one of us is 100% worth. From the day we are born to the day we die. And beyond.

    Having a purpose, a goal to work toward, can enhance our life, add to our happiness, and enable us to contribute to the world. But it won’t change anything about our worth, which is unconditional, unlimited, and independent of our actions.

    Success, accomplishment, and focused direction won’t increase our worth. And failure cannot diminish it.

    Because we are worth. We are wonderful expressions of life. And as such, we matter.

    Finding a Way Out of Worthlessness

    And so, five years after the day in the lab that started my journey, I abandoned my unhealthy quest for purpose and focused on accepting my true, inner worth instead.

    Countless times a day I affirmed: “I am worth.”

    I reminded myself of my infinite worth every time I felt useless. I repeated the affirmation when I struggled with my meaningless, aimless existence. And I tried to remember the truth whenever I beat myself up for not being important enough.

    At first my mind resisted, stressed by the change of priorities.

    Too many years it had held the belief that I was worthless, and that purpose was a prerequisite for worth and, ultimately, happiness.

    I ignored it as well as I could, stubbornly affirming my worth, over and over again.

    And step by step, day by day, my understanding of my true worth grew, and the compulsive need for purpose weakened.

    Until one day I was liberated. I felt free to explore my passions, enjoy all my unproductive hobbies, and fill my entire house with crochet doilies. Without guilt, without feeling I was wasting my time on idle indulgences.

    I even found joy in my profession as a scientist once the crushing pressure to achieve, outperform, and impress had been lifted. Once I no longer expected it to give me purpose.

    And I could relax. Knowing that, sooner or later, some purpose would reveal itself to me, without having to be forced, simply because I was focusing on the things I loved.

    The Liberating True Purpose of Your Life

    When I was convinced of my inherent worthlessness, I sought purpose as a means to deserve happiness, while I abandoned the things that actually made me happy because they lacked purpose!

    Looking back, the irony makes me cringe.

    I now believe the purpose of life is to be happy. To grow, thrive, and experience life to the full. To worry less about our achievements, productivity, and the meaning of our life and to prioritize the things we enjoy.​ Even if they serve no purpose at all.

    Because the only way to make your life matter is to make it matter to you. To know your true worth and contribute your unique perspective to this world.

    So, be kind and compassionate. Take care of your loved ones, and yourself.

    Help and support others. Not because you have to earn worth, but because you want to improve their lives.

    And do what you love as often as you can. Walk in the sun, sit on the beach, lie in the grass. Just because it feels good.

    Do it without feeling guilty or beating yourself up for the lack of purpose. Without fear over whether you are important enough, useful enough, influential, significant, or deserving enough.

    Because, at the end of the day, purpose can add to your happiness, but it’s not a prerequisite for it. You don’t need a mission, purpose, a direction for your life to be worth living.

    You don’t have to justify your existence or prove your worth. Not to your parents or your family; not to your friends, your boss, or society.

    Not even to yourself.

    Because you are worth personified. You matter. Right here, right now.

    And as long as you enjoy walking your path, no matter how aimlessly, your life has meaning.

  • How I’m Healing the Vulnerable, Rejected Kid Inside Me

    How I’m Healing the Vulnerable, Rejected Kid Inside Me

    “In case no one told you today:
 You’re beautiful. You’re loved. You’re needed. You’re alive for a reason. 
You’re stronger than you think. You’re going to get through this. 
I’m glad you’re alive. Don’t give up.” ~Unknown

    I was fourteen years old and it was a holiday of firsts: my first holiday away from my family with my school and my first holiday abroad, where I had my first real crush.

    For the two weeks I was away, I was caught up in a flirtation with a boy from one of the other schools. I had to pinch myself when he said yes after I’d struck up the courage to ask if he would meet me at the disco on the last night.

    The disco was everything I wanted it to be; we laughed, we danced, and I had my first kiss. If there is such thing as cloud nine, that’s where I woke the next morning. Still in a romantic haze (well, as romantic as a fourteen-year-old can get), I went to wave off the boy I’d begun to think of as my “Prince Charming” for what would be our last goodbye.

    But the fairy tale romance didn’t work out the way it had played out in my fourteen-year-old imagination. As I walked up expecting an embrace, he didn’t even want to make eye contact, then he turned his back on me.

    I’ll never forget the feeling of rejection. It was like my whole being was blocked off and cast aside.

    Still hoping for that dream goodbye, I waited until he got on the bus, thinking maybe I had been mistaken. That’s when it happened: surrounded by his friends, looking through the window, he was pointing at me, pretending to stick his fingers down his throat, implying being sick, and making gestures about my weight.

    “Prince Charming” had actually led me on as a bet, as a joke to his friends. I was the joke. I don’t know how, but somewhere inside I had the strength to keep my tears in, probably because I didn’t want to deal with the humiliation of what had just happened in front of everyone (including my friends).

    Twenty-one years on, and for as long as I can remember, when I recall the experience I feel the exact pain—the feeling of rejection and not feeling good enough—as I did at that very moment.

    That, right there, was the beginning of my low self-esteem, which later manifested into an eating disorder, anxiety, and being in toxic and abusive relationships. I accepted physical, emotional, and sexual abuse because I didn’t want to feel the feeling of rejection again.

    It was only recently, when I retold the story to my therapist, that I realized what a life-defining moment it had actually been, and recognized the narrative I had given myself.

    As I began recalling the experience, I started “When I was fat, ugly, and spotty I had this experience… No wonder he didn’t like me.” There it was: that one life-defining moment had played out a narrative that all my being wasn’t good enough. As a result, I sought acceptance and approval from others, and accepted their opinions of me as my truth.

    As I’ve started to process not only what happened but also the huge impact it’s had on my life, these are the things I have learned and what has helped me to begin to heal:

    1. We are good enough, and what really matters is how we feel about ourselves.

    At first I found it difficult, but I had to start believing that I was lovable, good enough, and that the only opinion of me that really mattered was my own. As I began practicing telling myself “I love you,” my whole body would tense, and I’d feel wrong for saying it. As I kept practicing, I slowly began to realize that I could love myself. I even had a small ceremony sealing my commitment to myself!

    Having struggled with self-love for nearly thirty years, I found it easy to slip into seeking approval from others at times. On the days I felt weak I looked at my commitment ring as a reminder of my love and acceptance for myself. On these days I gave myself the permission to feel whatever emotion I needed to feel.

    I’ve learned that we are each the one person we are guaranteed to wake up with for the rest of our lives, so we need to make ourselves our main priority. Instead of putting others on a pedestal and seeking their approval, we need to instead change our hierarchy of love so that we’re sitting at the top.

    We deserve love, but that love needs to begin within us.

    2. What would your present self like to say to the hurt person from long ago?

    As I sat with the pain of my fourteen-year-old self, I had an overwhelming urge to hold myself tight, providing a force field of safety where no one could hurt me.

    As the tears began to flow, I told myself how beautiful I was compared to the boy who had ridiculed me; any person who feels the need to humiliate a person for a joke is not deserving of my love or respect.

    As I stayed with the moment I felt every emotion I could feel—sadness, fear, anger, and then, just as the feelings flooded through me, the weight of the emotions I had held for so many years began to dissolve.

    Talking to our vulnerable self may seem a bit weird at first, I get it, but it’s worked for me. By going back in our minds and being there for our vulnerable younger self, it’s like having a superhero swoop in to protect us, only even more empowering because we are the superhero, minus the spandex and cape.

    No matter what has happened in our pasts, we have the opportunity to give ourselves the wisdom and words of hope we wish we had heard at the time. If it’s difficult to do this, think about what you would say to a best friend if they had a similar experience. We’re often much more compassionate toward our friends, so try to see yourself in that same loving light.

    3. Where has the need for validation from others come from?

    Having committed to love and accept myself, I knew I owed it to myself to go deeper to work out why I had relied so much on others for approval.

    My reflections led me to think of my upbringing, growing up with parents affected by alcoholism. Following violent outbursts I felt I was to blame for what had happened; I felt that I deserved the abuse. In fear of further violent outbursts I began people-pleasing and seeking approval from others in order to feel safe. At my core I felt unlovable.

    I then realized that when the fourteen-year-old boy had ridiculed me it had only reinforced how I had felt inside, and made me further believe that I was unlovable. I was then able to look at how I had acted and behaved from then onward, reinforcing those core beliefs.

    I realized I had accepted poor behavior and abuse from others because I felt I “deserved it.” I also engaged in self-sabotaging behaviors in the form of an eating disorder and drinking to excess.

    Delving deep inside may not be an easy task, and it may be something that we put off, or don’t do at all. We may be connecting to a part of ourselves that we may have kept hidden for years, even decades, for fear of being rejected. But, when we have the ability to do this important work, we are finally giving that vulnerable part of ourselves a voice and an opportunity to say what it needs to heal and finally get its needs met.

    4. Nourish, nourish, nourish.

    For close to three decades I had hidden that vulnerable part of myself and turned to my eating disorder for comfort, believing that others would reject me for being fat and ugly if I let it go. I now know I need to connect to the part of myself that has been abandoned for so long. I need to nourish it, and give it the love it has deserved all this time.

    While hard at first, when I’ve eaten, I’ve reminded myself how the food will nourish me. When I’ve exercised, I’ve remembered how the exercise is nourishing my body. When I’ve sat in meditation, I’ve reflected on how good it has felt to nourish my soul.

    These small acts of kindness have already had a positive impact. I haven’t found the need to emotionally eat or purge. I have more motivation, as I’m doing things from a compassionate place of self-love. I am also finally able to look in the mirror and utter the words “I am enough” and “I love myself” (and mean it).

    —

    No matter what happened to us in the past, we have the opportunity to rewrite our narrative for our future. We have the opportunity to love and accept ourselves as a whole, including the vulnerable parts that we may have hidden as a way of self-preservation.

    With each day we begin to meet our own physical, emotional, and spiritual needs the layers of self-loathing will be replaced with self-love and acceptance.

    Be kind to yourself. xx

  • How to Take Responsibility for Your Life and Change What Isn’t Working

    How to Take Responsibility for Your Life and Change What Isn’t Working

    “The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely to be the one who dropped it.” ~Lou Holtz

    I spent a devastatingly large part of my life trapped, blaming others for my troubles. I felt like I was bumbling around aimlessly and my life was out of my control.

    I was working a soul-sucking job, with a huge amount of student debt. I was surrounded by fake, unsupportive friends, in a toxic relationship, and had extremely low self-esteem.

    All of this was everyone else’s fault. I didn’t take responsibility for anything in my life that was causing me pain.

    I became a victim, and my sorrowful existence felt like too much to handle.

    So I entered a nightmarish tailspin and turned to food, drugs, and alcohol to escape the suffering.

    I rationalized that nothing about my circumstance was my responsibility and spent years playing the blame game. I was the victim.

    But because I blamed everyone else, I never took any steps to improve my circumstances. This mindset got me nowhere. I was stuck.

    I’ve since realized the only person who can change my life is me. Through mindfulness practice, meditation, and coaching I began to understand that I’d gotten myself into my situation and I was the only one who could get myself out.

    Everything in my life, regardless if I am to blame or not, is my responsibility.

    We all have the power to change our situation. The first step is take responsibility for our lives and make conscious decisions to steer ourselves in a new direction.

    Today I present to you three reflections I’ve had when it comes to taking responsibility for my life.

    I hope these reflections can help you take responsibility for creating the life you want to live, and take action to get there.

    1. No one else is responsible for our thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.

    Accept that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, and no one else can make you think, feel, say, or do anything. No matter what they say or do, you are still responsible for how you respond to them.

    Thoughts happen in your mind, which triggers feelings in your body, which leads to words coming out of your mouth and actions coming from your body.

    What part of this process involves anyone else? None.

    When I was in an abusive relationship, I constantly felt like I was the victim—and I was, in the relationship, but I didn’t have to remain a victim in my life.

    I would mope around the house feeling depressed, and I refused to take responsibility for my choice to stay in the relationship. This mindset rendered me powerless to change things for the better.

    Eventually, I came to realize that although I may not be responsible for my boyfriend’s actions, I was responsible for how I responded to them—and I then decided to take action and leave this relationship. I shifted from out-of-control victim to empowered, resilient, and in control of my life.

    I’m in the driver’s seat now!

    2. Blame only keeps us stuck.

    Blame is a glorious defense mechanism. It can seem much easier to blame someone else than accept responsibility for something that has gone wrong.

    The problem is, blaming keeps you in victim mode. When you blame others, you give up your power to change.

    When you stop playing the blame game and accept responsibility for your role, you shift from fearful victim to supreme victor.

    When stuck in blame mode, I ask myself, what role did I play in the situation? Like the time I acquired thousands of dollars in student debt. I spent years blaming my parents for “forcing” me to go to University when I wasn’t sure of my career aspirations.

    The truth is, though they influenced me, it was my choice to go to school and spend that money, and it is my responsibility to pay the money back. I spent many years angry with my parents, blaming them for my financial troubles. Eventually I understood my role in the situation and I was able to let go of the anger and focus my energy on repaying my debts.

    I became empowered to focus on what was in my control and that enabled me to proactively address the problem.

    3. No one else can make us happy.

    I’ve come to see that happiness is something that comes from within, and it’s not dependent on circumstances, people, or possessions. Our situations can change, our relationships may end, and we’ll likely lose things we own. If we pin our happiness to any of these things, we’ll always be at their mercy.

    No one feels happy all the time, and that’s totally normal. However, we can be happy with our lives on the whole if we make a conscience decision to work on happiness every day.

    The biggest gateway to happiness, for me, at least, is gratitude. When I view the world through the lens of gratitude I notice things in my life to be happy about.

    When I’m low I often ask myself, what is there to be grateful about right now in this moment?

    When I was feeling completely shattered and broken after a recent breakup I had lost all hope in the world and myself. At this time the only thing I could find to be grateful for was breathing.

    That’s totally fine. At least it’s something!

    I also make time to do things that make me feel good, like listening to music, dancing around the house, and expressing my creativity.

    Another thing that helps is my morning self-care routine, which gets me energized and in the right headspace. This involves one hour of time dedicated to activities that nourish the mind, soul, and body—things like exercising, listening to informative podcasts, and meditating.

    And I look for opportunities for random acts of kindness throughout the day because giving to others is a joyful experience.

    Lastly, I try to search for a benefit from my suffering. There is always something to be learned from a situation; it’s just a matter of looking for the lesson.

    Take my abusive relationship as an example. I was completely broken with zero self-esteem, and I was a mess. Constantly crying. I sobbed so hard I threw my back out for weeks! It was intense.

    But that situation is what drove me to discover mindfulness and meditation, and it’s allowed me to understand myself in ways I never thought possible.

    Ironically, it forced me to build myself back up to become a confident, resilient person. Had this relationship never happened, I wouldn’t have written this article and I wouldn’t be here connecting with you today!

    —

    I’ve found taking responsibility to be a transformative experience because it enabled me to change what wasn’t working in my life. If you’re stuck in blame, waiting for someone or something else to make you happy, I am confident it will be helpful for you as well.

  • How to Heal a Broken Heart Using Mindful Self-Compassion

    How to Heal a Broken Heart Using Mindful Self-Compassion

    “It’s not your job to like me—it’s mine.” Byron Katie

    Why are breakups so painful? Whether we are the dumper or the dumpee, the range of emotions we feel is universal: devastation, sadness, and anger. Oh, and there’s the acute pain, as if your heart had been gouged from your chest, stabbed a dozen times with a butter knife, and booted to the curb.

    Am I right?

    Of course I am. I’ve been there. We all have. I intimately experienced a broken heart and its rippling effects when my partner and I ended our seven-year relationship. I admit that I was the architect of the break-up. I was mostly shut off, insecure, and jealous during the tenure of the relationship. Our breakup was sticky. It was messy. It was ugly…downright.

    As if the pain isn’t enough, we can’t sleep, we lose our appetite or eat like a cow, we stop bathing, we look homeless, and we watch YouTube playlists of How to Get Your Ex Back in Thirty days. Sad days.

    You see, a breakup is a loss. It’s a death of a relationship. It’s a death of an identity that was entangled with our ex partner. The stages of a breakup are similar to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It’s no wonder we’re a mess when we split from an ex.

    The good news is that there is an antidote to our hot-messed-up heart: mindful self-compassion.

    What is Mindfulness?

    When I first came across the practice of mindfulness, I had a difficult time grasping it: to be aware on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment. Huh?

    What I found helpful was to understand its opposite: mindlessness.

    In the past I often turned to food to make myself feel better. During the breakup I gorged mindlessly, frequently finishing pints of ice cream and large bags of chips and popcorn without ever being present to the eating.

    For example, one particular day I was listening to music and a song came up that reminded me of my ex. Instantly, I became sad. This prompted me to grab a bag of popcorn and start eating. Next thing I knew the bag was almost empty. Then I muttered to myself, “I’m such a fat cow.”

    When our brain is on autopilot, we are not present in our experience of life. In the case of the popcorn, I had been mentally checked out, lost in my thoughts of my ex, as I nearly finished the bag. Then I chastised myself for it.

    Studies have shown that when our minds wander, we’re unhappy. When I look at my own life, I see that being mindless, not mindful has led to a lot of suffering in the forms of anger, shame, anxiety, and depression.

    The practice of mindfulness, then, is to pay attention, on purpose, to what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling (emotions and bodily sensations), and what is happening in our environment, without judging it.

    In other words, we are an engaged and impartial observer to what we’re experiencing in the present moment. We don’t use labels or preconceptions, and we don’t believe our thoughts or take them personally.

    How Can Mindfulness Mend a Broken Heart?

    A stressful event, such as a breakup, can cause our minds to explode. Often, we’re spinning on our thoughts and we don’t know how to stop it. There may be thoughts and feelings of rejection, regret, shame, and unworthiness, and a host of destructive beliefs.

    After my ex and I split, I had a lot of regret, and my thoughts involved punishing myself for how my actions had led to the undoing of the relationship. I replayed past events over and over in my head. I kept wishing that I could have done things differently.

    I thought I could have been more open, trusting, and loving. And I wished I hadn’t been so scared to share my vulnerability and fears, because if I had, perhaps that would have strengthened the relationship instead of weakened it.

    The breakup was excruciatingly painful, yet I felt it necessary to hurl more insults at myself.

    Fortunately, there are many forms of mindfulness that can help us get over a breakup and our ex. This is what I did to heal myself.

    Mindful Self-Compassion

    Self-criticism is very common. And in the context of a breakup, when we’re in pain, we tend to open the floodgates of self-berating thoughts. We are ruthless, and very good at it.

    We might think:

    • “I’m such a loser.”
    • “I’m fat and ugly.”
    • “I’m such an idiot for screwing things up.”
    • “I’ll never find someone as good as my ex.”
    • “My ex is dating and happy, and I’ll always be alone and miserable.
    • “I deserve to hurt.”

    When we believe these harsh thoughts it exacerbates our suffering.

    According to Kristen Neff, author of Self-Compassion – The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, self-criticism has a strong association with depression and dissatisfaction with life. And underneath our self-attacks are deep insecurities about our own personal worth and value.

    This was true for me. I had often discounted my talents and abilities because I had a core belief that I wasn’t good enough. And my breakup only further triggered my negative self-perception.

    Fortunately, mindful self-compassion can snap us out of our mindless self-judgment, and provide us comfort when we need it most.

    Being compassionate means recognizing that there is suffering, being moved by the suffering, leading us to alleviate it, and understanding that suffering is part of our shared human experience.

    The practice of mindful self-compassion is being aware of the self-critical thoughts that cause us pain, offering kindness and love to ourselves to allay it, and recognizing that we’re not alone—what we’re going through is part of life, and we all have imperfections.

    There are many self-compassion exercises, but this is one of my favorites:

    Self-Compassion Exercise: A Letter to Yourself

    1. Grab your journal or a piece of paper and pen, and write about the thoughts and feelings of inadequacy and insecurity you may have as a result of the breakup. Write about any emotions that arise—shame, regret, anger, or sadness.

    2. Think about a real or imaginary friend who is kind, gentle, compassionate, and unconditionally loving. This friend knows you intimately—what you’re going through, your life history, your strengths, your weaknesses, your thoughts of inadequacies and insecurities.

    3. From the viewpoint of your compassionate friend, write a letter to yourself. Using deep compassion and loving kindness, what would s/he say about your thoughts of inadequacy? How would s/he address the suffering that you’re experiencing as a result of your self-attack? How would s/he point out that you are only human and that we all have strengths and weaknesses?

    4. Once you finish writing the letter, put it down. Do something else like go for a walk or make a cup of tea.

    5. Pick up the letter and read it. Let the words of kindness and compassion penetrate your being. Receive the love, the tenderness, and the acceptance.

    The “aha” moment for me when I first did this exercise, in the context of my breakup, was that I was shocked at how harsh I had been toward myself. How had I allowed the self-attack when I would have considered the same behavior, if inflicted on others, unconscionable?

    As a result of the exercise, I recognized that I was hurting and I gave myself permission to receive kindness and love from myself instead of rebuke.

    The practice of self-compassion allowed me to hold space around my thoughts and feelings, and it created an expanded awareness of who I am—that, even if I’d made mistakes in my relationship, I am lovable, I have wonderful qualities, I am capable of a lot of things, I am resilient, and most importantly, I am enough. Further, it helped me realize that we are all connected through similar experiences, whether good or bad. We are never alone.

    Benefits of Mindful Self-Compassion

    Some of you may be thinking, why bother with this self-compassion thing, when I can just go to my best friend or mom and have a good cry with them and they’ll make me feel better? This is fine as well. It’s important to have a good support system.

    The thing is, when we learn how to be self-compassionate, we become our own source of love and happiness. We stop relying on the external to feel good about ourselves.

    To boot, there is evidence that the practice of self-compassion can make us more resilient, more joyful, more productive, and less depressed. I can attest to this, having come out of my rut happier, stronger, and more at peace. I also learned ways to offer myself love and kindness, which I can apply whenever I feel the slightest of discomfort.

    Some of the ways I give myself care are:

    When we experience a devastating event, we have a choice in how to respond. Some choose to get out of dodge mentally and deny their feelings through unhealthy coping mechanisms. Others take the route of self-punishment for their flaws and inadequacies.

    There is an alternative: mindful self-compassion. If you want to get over a broken heart, this practice should be at the top of your healing arsenal.

  • Knowing When to Let Go of Relationships: 3 Signs It’s Time to Move On

    Knowing When to Let Go of Relationships: 3 Signs It’s Time to Move On

    “Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” ~Deborah Reber

    Thanks to the Internet, our lives are full of people. We’re connected literally all the time.

    And yet, despite our ceaseless connection, we feel disconnected.

    As the pace of life becomes ever more frenetic, we’re like charged atoms, bumping into each other more and more, pinballs in the machine. We come into contact (and conflict), but we don’t commune so much.

    As real relationships of depth and quality become harder-won in this busy new world, their value is more keenly felt. Simply put, in the words of Brené Brown, “Connection is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. It’s why we’re here.”

    As we fight to carve out space for these connections whose value has become so apparent, it’s natural that we cling to them more dearly.

    However, sadly, often the tight clinging to something is the sign that the time has come to let it go. With something as valuable as a relationship, how do we know when that time is? How do we know when it’s time to move on?

    I’ve unintentionally become an expert at moving on. Having lived in perhaps a dozen countries and had jobs with as many as 200 days of travel a year, I am keenly aware of the centrality of relationships. Living out of suitcase and having a rented apartment fully furnished by IKEA, they are all I have. They are my lifeblood. But sadly, I have also become far too practiced at needing to let them go.

    Traveling so much and relocating so often, my life has been enriched by the people I know. So many nights alone in my hotel room, I wasn’t alone. I was writing, speaking, and despite the physical distance, connecting with my dear friends.

    I’d arrange business trips or weekend travel so that I could meet them in some city somewhere in between. It was an effort that I would gladly expend, but I learned to see when that effort was no longer worth it, as difficult as that was to accept.

    Here are the three simple signs that tell me when it’s time to move on:

    1. When you need to plan and strategize how to present yourself

    As life moves forward, we change. Our jobs, our looks, our economic situation, our habits, our interests—everything changes all the time. It’s the one constant in life.

    As two peoples’ lives change simultaneously, gaps inevitably form between them. In a relationship that will stand the test of time, these gaps are bridged with each meeting. It’s the classic case of “We haven’t seen each other for five years, but when we met, it was like no time has passed!”

    However, there are times when, with each meeting, the gaps get wider, and soon they’re more like gulfs. In these cases, we often spend time before the meeting fretting about how to explain, obfuscate, conceal, or excuse. Shame has crept in, and we feel like we can’t be ourselves. We’re either embarrassed of who we’ve become, or we suspect the “new” us somehow will not be acceptable to the other person.

    I’ve put on too much weight—she’ll never like me this way. My career hasn’t taken the same trajectory as his. I got that divorce, while he has the same wife and now three kids. When the joy and anticipation you should feel when reuniting with someone is replaced by anxiety and inadequacy, that’s a really bad sign.

    Of course, it could be all in your head. You don’t give up on the first go. You should make an effort to “be real” and lay it out there that things have changed. You might find it was a lot of worry about nothing. However, if your fears are confirmed and your efforts repeatedly result in awkwardness and shame because the other person rejects this new you, then it’s probably time to move on.

    It’s important to understand that this is not a matter of blame. True love is knowing someone fully. It’s when two people become one but maintain their individual integrity. If you need to be someone else in order to get along, then you cannot be in a truly loving relationship.

    2. When the relationship drains more energy than it gives

    There is almost nothing more nourishing, refreshing, and perhaps even exhilarating than truly connecting with someone. All life is energy, and when someone opens up to you, they share their energy with you, and your share yours with them. Both parties are enriched.

    That laugh you share with your old friend who calls unexpectedly. The warm feeling in your stomach when he smiles at you. The rush you get when she tells you she feels the same way about you. That is all our life force.

    However, some relationships do just the opposite: they drain us. Our interactions with these people do not involve connection, but instead armoring up and deflection, and that requires energy.

    What does this look like? It’s the stressful gaming out of what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it in order to avoid conflict with that person. It’s the unease you feel when you learn that she’s going to be at that party. It’s the constant bickering with your boyfriend into which otherwise joyful occasions degenerate.

    How does this feel? After being with the person, you feel tired, relieved to be away, or annoyed. Beforehand, you may feel nervous, low-energy, or simply like you’re going through the motions or doing your duty.

    Two big caveats:

    First, if this was a relationship that you considered important to begin with, this does not mean you give up on the first bad vibes. Of course you try and try and try again to make things work, but at a certain point the act of pushing the square peg in the round hole becomes too much. It’s just too draining.

    A single negative interaction cannot be enough—in fact, an intense argument shows, if nothing else, that you care about what’s at stake in the relationship.

    Second, this is not a recipe for selfishness. Getting energy does not equate with being the recipient of another person’s affections and generosity. In fact, quite the opposite: anyone who has loved knows how much better it feels to give than to receive; it’s a cliché that happens to be completely true.

    And yet, if over time you are the only one giving, it starts to feel wrong. At some point you realize the person comes to you for help, not to share. A lasting relationship is inevitably one of mutual sharing and generosity. Anything else will start to wear.

    3. When you’re the only one making the effort

    I never thought I would need to face this topic, but today’s world of constant connecting without connection has given rise to a terrible new phenomenon—ghosting.

    Always having access to a connected device, people can easily just switch to some other form of distraction when there is any negativity (or even effort) associated with reaching out or responding to another person. As our reach expands, our time in each other’s physical presence shrinks, and hence it’s now possible to erase people from our digital lives.

    Now, it’s rare to be the recipient of a “hard” ghosting—to literally be blocked. To get to that point would involve a clear and unmistakable rupture in the relationship. However, “soft” ghosting—consistently not responding to messages in a timely manner or not at all, and opting for quick texts over thoughtful outreach and connection—this is something you’ve likely experienced.

    Responses to your outreach become fewer and further between, and at some point you realize that you’re basically out of contact.

    In these cases, the other person has either consciously chosen to focus on other things they deem more important, or they’ve gotten lost in the world of easy connecting. Or, they may simply have decided they no longer care to maintain the relationship and want to avoid the awkwardness of telling you.

    As I began to encounter these painful situations some years back, my first instinct was action and confrontation.

    I made an effort to increase my touchpoints with the person in question, invited him/her to dinners and other meetups if possible. When rebuffed (or more likely ignored), I got to a point where I directly conveyed my distress about where our relationship seemed to be heading and asked if he/she wanted to turn it around and what we could do the change the situation.

    Never once was this route successful. If someone is moving on with his or her life, and there’s no more space for you, no amount of guilting, cajoling, passive aggression, or begging is going to turn it around. That person needs to value your relationship above the alternatives that constantly compete with all our time each second of every day. He or she needs to want to keep you as an important part of his or her life.

    In these cases, the best you can do is reach out, but that outreach needs to taper off—pushing and insisting and pleading will only serve to create negative emotions and likely lead to conflict, or even worse, the person feeling the need to respond to you out of a sense of guilt or obligation. Your relationship lingers on and becomes more stilted and forced and loses its value.

    In fact, in any of these cases—when you feel like you can’t be yourself, the relationship becomes draining, or you’ve been ghosted—it’s difficult not to generate a lot of emotional or actual drama. It’s a sad situation involving someone who at least was once very important in your life. You naturally want to fight for it, and you should, to a point.

    But, like life itself, in relationships you have to learn to trust the flow. You can swim against the current for a little while, steer yourself this way and that, but in the end you cannot control the river. Instead of ratcheting up your response to the situation and effecting an emotional crescendo, do your best to reach out to your friend with honesty and compassion.

    There will come a time when you know it’s not worth it any more. You will feel the negative emotional vibration in the form of resentment, frustration, fear, hopelessness, etc. At that point, however, you risk tainting even the good memories of your time with that person with the bitterness of the breakup. Rather than gratitude for the time you had together, you feel loss. You rob yourself of the relationship you had.

    There is no way of knowing when to act, but in this case you’re not taking action, you’re letting go. The best way to know when to do that is to follow your instinct, and when your time being with and thinking about the person becomes a negative experience, that’s probably a good time.

    The other benefit of letting go rather than fighting is that you allow space for a reckoning if the other person decides to reengage. And though that’s unlikely based on my own experience, it could happen someday.

    After all, you rarely know the exact reasons and motivations for the other person’s behavior. Indeed, they’re often unknown even to the other person, and perhaps unknowable. So, one day you may find your phone ringing, and it’s your friend—people always retain the capacity to surprise you!

    And as hard as it might be to imagine, there may be a good reason for the person’s behavior. You never really know the suffering they’re feeling, but if they’re letting go of a dear friendship, the least you can say is they’re not thinking clearly. Some other suffering is taking hold, and it’s your friend’s loss. Don’t make it a terrible loss for yourself too by creating a drama.

    This is of course easier said than done, but if you stay conscious and draw on your compassion, you can do it.

    Recently, a dear friend of ten years ghosted me. She and I had been through it all: moving countries, marriages, deaths, international travel—all the major life milestones.

    A little over two years ago, she became more and more distant and less responsive. Not surprisingly, this coincided with her becoming much more active on social media and followed a period of tragedy in her life. I reached out repeatedly for about a year, but my efforts eventually led to total silence, and I let go. I haven’t heard from her in a year and a half.

    The moment I knew it was time to let go was when I was tempted to write her something passive-aggressive. At that point I realized I was experiencing the relationship with negativity, which would inevitably come through in my communication with her.

    I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, but more futile efforts would have hurt even more and put a possible future reconciliation at risk. I also needed to have the compassion to understand that she had recently gone through a tragic time, and undoubtedly that had an impact on her thinking, feelings, and behavior. I hope she’s alright and remain open to the possibility that one day she might come knocking on my virtual door.

    But the truth was clear—it was time to let go.

  • The Secret To A Happy Life Is Hidden In Your Daily Habits

    The Secret To A Happy Life Is Hidden In Your Daily Habits

    “The key to being happy is knowing you have the power to choose what to accept and what to let go.” ~Dodinsky

    It hit me as I cruised along at full speed on a busy motorway on my way to a friend’s house.

    Shaking like a leaf, I pulled myself out of the car and stood by the side of the road. I desperately gulped in the fresh air, a frantic attempt at calming myself down.

    This was the ninth day in a row I’d experienced a wave of panic so intense, it felt like I was about to die. It was utterly unbearable.

    I’d been worrying about all the work I had left to do on my Master’s dissertation and berating myself for taking a day off to spend time with friends when I should have been working. All of a sudden, my throat closed up, my chest tightened, and my hands shook so much that I was convinced I would lose control of the car.

    This was the final straw.

    I’d been waiting for a magic solution, a miraculous savior, a quick fix that would snap me out of my near-constant state of worry. I’d been waiting for the universe to wave its wand and finally grant me a normal life. It wasn’t happening.

    I wasn’t willing to face up to the work I needed to do in order to stop indulging in my bleak hypothetical predictions about the future. And more importantly, I didn’t even know what the work was. But that day, I made the decision to find the key to a happy life and to start putting in some serious elbow grease.

    I just couldn’t live like that any longer.

    That was three years ago.

    What You Practice, You Get Good At

    The problem is, for a very long time, I practiced worrying. About everything.

    I worried about what people thought about me. I worried about what might happen to my health. I worried about whether I would have the career I wanted.

    I also practiced managing this worry, and the myriad of unpleasant emotions that accompanied it, with food, alcohol, and sex. I used substances (and other people’s bodies) to make myself feel good, to take my mind somewhere else, and to give myself a moment to relax.

    But underneath, the worry was still there; these “fixes” just masked it. Instead of paying attention to what was actually going on in my head and realizing that my thoughts were creating a reality that didn’t actually exist, I practiced covering up my desperation, hoping that this fix would be the one that actually worked.

    I was constantly feeding habits that gave me short-term satisfaction or relief, that I knew were ultimately destructive. And I know I’m not the only one.

    Many of us spend our days acting mostly out of habit—the foods we eat for breakfast, the route we take to work, even the thoughts we entertain. These become the actions we practice, over and over again.

    And what we practice, we get good at.

    What Do You Practice?

    Here’s a little something to reflect on: What habits are currently running your life? What thoughts do you think every single day? And are these serving you, or not?

    We might not think of habits as a practice, but that’s exactly what they are. Each and every day, we’re practicing being the type of people we want to be, whether we realize it or not.

    My anxiety, despite being a very real (and often terrifying) experience for me, was a habit. I was practicing being the type of person who was constantly stressed out and worried about everything. Nowadays, however, I practice being the type of person who recognizes these thoughts, knows her limits, takes care of herself, and makes a different choice each time her old pal worry comes out to play.

    Think about it:

    • How many times a day do we complain about things not being the way we want them to be?
    • How many times a day do we disengage from connection with others and allow ourselves to be distracted by technology?
    • How many times a day do we worry about things that haven’t even happened yet?

    The answer is likely: a lot.

    We’re experts at this stuff. After all, the key to mastering any skill is repetition; if we repeat a specific action enough, eventually we’ll gain fluency and competency at it.

    This is why the true secret to happiness lies in our daily habits rather than in the “magic fixes” we often think will make us happy.

    Daily Practices for a Happier Life

    So what if we became conscious of the habits that are running our lives and switched them on their head?

    What if we started practicing things we actually wanted to get better at? And what if, instead of making it some huge, life-changing mission, we simply set the intention to live this way, making small steps toward it wherever we could?

    Remember: What we practice, we get good at.

    With this in mind, here are a few suggestions for habits we could start practicing daily in order to live a happier life:

    • Kindness
    • Compassion
    • Generosity
    • Acceptance
    • Non-judgment
    • Presence
    • Listening
    • Forgiveness
    • Relaxation

    The way these look in our lives will be different for everyone, but the intention behind them is the same—to notice our destructive habits and to make a different choice.

    Personally, I’ve found three super effective ways to start bringing new practices into our lives.

    1. Notice your autopilot.

    We have to recognize our habitual autopilot mode in order to do something about it.

    Becoming aware of the way we live our daily life—the choices we make, the people we surround ourselves with, and the stories we tell ourselves—helps us to remember who we really are and what we really want. It also helps us make more conscious decisions about how we act so that we choose our response rather than react out of habit.

    The best way to do this is to first make a list of all the times you already know you tend to slip into autopilot.

    For example, you might recognize that you frequently spend your lunch break scrolling through Facebook, and then you feel bad about yourself after comparing yourself to other people. Or, you might notice you regularly worry about worst-case scenarios when you’re lying in bed at night.

    Once you’re aware of what you’re doing, you can commit to making a different choice the next time you’re in that situation, practicing a habit that doesn’t serve you.

    I have to be honest here. This takes time.

    In the beginning, it was difficult for me to recognize when my “worry” head was on because it felt so natural to me. But once I started paying more attention to my habitual thoughts and behaviors, I found it much easier to switch the script in those moments and instead practice some deep breathing to relax myself.

    Action step: Take a moment to think about the times you already know your habitual autopilot-self takes over. What could you do to in those moments to break that pattern, re-engage with the world, and make a different choice?

    Remember: What we practice, we get good at.

    2. Focus on your physical sensations.

    Another great way to practice new habits is to focus on how they make us feel in our bodies. I like to think of this in terms of openness (expansion) and tightness (contraction). I usually feel pretty open and soft in my heart space when I practice kindness, for example, and tight and tense in my belly when I practice being rude.

    Our sense of expansion or contraction in our body can act as an “mindful shortcut,” giving us an easy way to determine what might be going on in our heads.

    If we focus on how we physically feel in our bodies and the sensations our habits bring up for us, we can really start to distinguish between the ones that currently serve us and the ones that definitely don’t. Since our physical sensations often directly relate to our emotional experience, it’ll also provide us with a little motivation to continue practicing the things that make us feel expanded.

    The issue most of us run into here is that we mostly walk around feeling completely out of touch with our bodies. In fact, it wasn’t until I really started to dive deep into yoga that I realized my body was constantly giving me important signals—and I was totally ignoring them.

    The best way to begin observing your body is to sit in stillness and just notice your bodily experience, even if you start with just a few moments a day. The more you “check in” with your body, the more you’ll be able to tune in to what it’s trying to tell you.

    When I started paying attention to my body, I noticed how different thoughts affected me in completely different ways. My worry made my body feel tight, tense, and achy, for example, whereas calm thoughts made my body feel soft, relaxed, and open. This helped draw my attention to my worrisome thoughts and choose to focus on my breathing in the present moment instead of on my “faux” reality.

    Action step: Start your day by asking yourself one of these questions:

    • “How do I want to feel today?”
    • “What do I want to practice today?”
    • “How do I want to live today?”

    Then check in with yourself regularly throughout the day (setting up a reminder on your phone helps!) to observe how your body’s feeling. Pay particular attention to your heart, solar plexus, and belly areas. Is there a sense of expansion or contraction? Does this align with how you want to feel? What are you currently practicing? And does this align with what you want to practice?

    Remember: What we practice, we get good at.

    3. Set an intention.

    We can also practice new habits by simply affirming to ourselves that it’s our intention to practice them.

    Intentions are perfect because they’re designed to be a guideline rather than a goal. With goals, it’s far too easy to beat ourselves up if we don’t reach them, but with an intention, we can just start over again.

    If we set an intention to be kind, or compassionate, or generous in the morning, we’re also far more likely to jump at opportunities to practice this as we move through our day. It helps us make decisions that are more aligned with the people we want to be, since our intention will still be fresh in our mind.

    For example, I’ve recently been setting an intention to practice forgiveness. I realized that I’d been holding on to so much resentment, anger, and blame toward myself (and others) about my anxiety. I felt so much rage about my past—the years I’d spent constantly trying to please other people at the expense of my own needs; my first boyfriend’s extremely controlling behavior, which left me feeling utterly weak; and the pressure I’d felt growing up to be “perfect.”

    So every morning I listen to a forgiveness meditation, which includes repeating to myself, “I see and feel the pain you’ve caused me, and it’s my intention to forgive you.” Then, as I’m about to go into my day, I remind myself that it’s my intention to continue to practice forgiveness.

    Have I forgiven everyone (or myself) yet? No. But that’s beside the point.

    The point is that every single day, I’m practicing.

    Action step: Decide on at least one new habit you’d like to start practicing. How can you set this intention for yourself each day? How can you remind yourself of this intention when you go off track?

    Remember: What we practice, we get good at.

  • Growing in the Dark: Why “Negative Feelings” Matter

    Growing in the Dark: Why “Negative Feelings” Matter

    “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” ~Pema Chodron

    Pop spirituality and our cultural attitude would have you think it best to banish negativity from your life. Give it the quarantine treatment until it gets better and can rejoin our polite, positive, placative society.

    We are encouraged to cleanse negativity, a blanket descriptor of things that don’t feel good. Push it away with an exhale and inhale positivity. Anger, sadness, and critical thinking can all be forms of “bad vibes” that are sought to be avoided.

    This banishment of negativity is so simplistic. We are humans, capable of such a wonderful range of emotion and experience. Who are we to banish some of the low, dark, hollow notes from our octaves of existence? Too much cleansing makes us dry, brittle, and sterile.

    When joy and exuberance are out for too long, they get stale. When you are always bathing in the light, the light bulb begins to wane and eventually will dim and burn out. A life of constant light is not sustainable. It’s also not possible. Life is much more wonderfully and tragically complicated. Some of the richest parts linger in the shadows or even in the deepest, dark corners of our lives.

    It’s quite easy to sleep through happiness. A good, easy-going life does little to keep us awake and alive. The darker feelings bring us right into the present. The physicality of crying, shaking, with quaky breath and a hot face brings us into our bodies. To our emotional life. To our knees like no other. Darkness is what pops our eyes open to your life. It’s the catalyst for change and renewal.

    At this juncture in my life, I am spending a lot of time in grief and anger. I do not wish to get into all of the intimate details of it, but the gist is that I am going through a divorce. An icky, shattering, tearing asunder of the life I once knew and the dreams I had for the life of my family.

    It’s been tempting to push my feelings aside and pretend I’m okay. But a very small part of me recognizes there is this opportunity for something new. Renewal. Rebirth.

    While I haven’t given birth myself, I have been in the room during a birth. Birth isn’t only the beginning of a delicate, new life. It is deep and wrenching pain. Pain that steals your breath and turns your voice into a howl. It is uncertainty and a dark intensity that knocks at your ability to stand on your feet. It is sitting among blood, sweat, and tears and still finding deep, undisturbed joy.

    I can’t begin the process of rebirth by dimming the less favorable facets of the undertaking. If a rebirth is what I seek, then I am in line for one of the most wholly altering, body-shaking processes in our existence.

    So, here is what I am doing: I am leaning in. I am sitting upon the jagged surfaces of grief and anger, and I am not moving. I am listening to what they have to say.

    I am listening to anger proclaim my sense of self-worth. It rises each time I feel my innate human value has been violated. It reminds me to maintain a protective boundary around my sense of self.

    I am watching grief slice into my heart and reveal its contents. The reason I feel loss is because I have loved and still possess a capacity to love. My grief reminds me of just how much I truly value and hold dear.

    I am engulfed by the ravaging, purifying flames of my anger. I am lying in the center of my dark pool of sorrow.

    I am a human. Delicate and strong. Tender and powerful. I am built for this. I am made to stand in the center of howling storms sent by mother nature and witness devastating wreckage. My skin pummeled by rain. My feet lifted by wind.

    I am also made for watching the storm ease up and transform into calm. I am made for sunlight on my face and the joy of birdsong. The storm isn’t the ending. Neither is the birdsong.

    Your pain matters. Your anger, sadness, discomfort, grief, confusion. All of those dark feelings matter. They matter just as much to your growth as your happiness and gratitude journals. Without fully allowing the dark feelings, the lighter feelings will be kept at bay. When you close off pain, you close off to the full dynamism that is human existence.

    Discarding the hard shell that protects your heart can feel threatening and unsafe. I have been shucked open and shredded by life. I put my wholeness at stake and I am now piecemeal, the shards of my heart spread across the landscape of my experience. This allows my permeability. My walls are down which means I can allow the outer world in and allow my inner world out.

    Things strike me. I am easily moved. I get attached. I cleave and for a time I don’t want to let go—of people, places, moments. The interesting thing is that this piecemeal version of me is actually more whole, more fully alive, more human the the version of me that protected and held it together.

    At the moment, I am gutted. All my sensitive parts are outside of me. I have been opened and torn into with love and cruelty. But, if I can stay with this dark, wounded part of myself, watch the wounds bleed, redden, and pus, then I will also witness the end of the oozing. The healing of the infection. The beginning of scar tissue. A slow, soft mending. An offering to my tender history. A testament to my future strength.

  • 5 Steps to Lower Your Financial Stress When You’re Drowning in Debt

    5 Steps to Lower Your Financial Stress When You’re Drowning in Debt

    “You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” ~Timber Hawkeye

    I never anticipated the stress and pressure that come when you are no longer able to pay your bills on time.

    Knowing that you owe money, and that your current income isn’t going to cover it, is a heavy reality to face.

    I found myself starting to envy low-income, salaried employees. Even though they don’t earn a lot, which I’m sure brings its own challenges, they aren’t eligible to receive huge credit. This protects them from ever finding themselves owing millions.

    My husband and I have recently gone through a time when we found ourselves way overextended. Due to a series of bad beats and various twists of fate, we found ourselves in over our heads. And this is not a good space to be in.

    It’s a sickening feeling that has seemed to overshadow all the other areas of our lives. We’ve felt unable to breathe, knowing that debt is hanging over us. When the phone rings from an unknown number, we’re hesitant to answer it. It could be someone wanting to know when we will pay a bill.

    Small Beginnings

    It didn’t start out like this. Let me backtrack. I grew up on a farm in an average-income-earning household. Although we didn’t lack for anything, we weren’t wealthy.

    My husband and I married early on in life and started out with very little. We set up a small business from home soon after we got married. I was halfway through studies at the time and managed to juggle both. Our expenses were minimal, and even though it felt like hard work, we seemed to prosper.

    Friends would comment and say we had the Midas touch. As the business grew and branched out, money always seemed to be plentiful. We didn’t start out intending to reach a massive bank balance. Our aim had been to reach financial independence sooner than later. Words like “budget” or “frugalness” never seemed to enter our thinking though.

    Over the years, we upgraded our living, our home, our cars. We took overseas holidays and bought properties. As our affordability increased, so did our expenses. In a short space of time, we up-leveled our lifestyle requirements.

    The Storm

    The stress and anxiety of knowing you are unable to catch up on financial commitments is scary. We had some business ventures fail, we bought out a partner, there was a notable economic downturn. We had new competitors enter the market that we could no longer match, as our running costs had become so high.

    Then things came to a boiling point; a perfect storm was in the making. A few clients didn’t pay for larger projects. This meant we had to put out money to complete the work, but nothing was coming in. Our rental property didn’t have a tenant in it for a few months, and major maintenance needed doing. Staff went on strike, and several employees had to get retrenched and paid out.

    The strain on our marriage was palpable. The weightiness of the situation was hard to bear. There wasn’t going to be a quick-fix solution. We had to rally, face this storm head on, and ride it out over the next two years.

    Downsizing

    We took massive action to downscale. It’s very easy to upscale and commit to new financial obligations. Downscaling is hard because it feels like you’re taking a step backward. And in a sense, you are, although you’re going back to go forward.

    The new forward for me looks like being out of debt. The new goal is to have a business buffer of funds available to get through unexpected setbacks. We never want to experience the stranglehold of debt again. No fancy dining or luxury goods are worth the stress and worry of financial pressure.

    And so, we downscaled throughout the business. Everything got cut back down to size. All the unnecessary extras we didn’t need got cut away. We opted to move home. We cut our rental amount by a third.

    I swapped my shiny floors and designer fittings for a modest, old-school, rustic duplex. We no longer have to worry about hiring a gardener or keeping the pool clean. We cut up our credit cards and canceled every debit order we could.

    We Have Everything We Need

    To be honest, we still lived well and had everything we needed. But only just. When our new large screen TV stopped working, a month or so out of warranty, we started to use an old spare one we had in the garage. When winter came around, I took my allocated winter clothes budget and put it toward better use. That year I made do with what I had. Priorities dictated there were more pressing things to spend on.

    My motto became “If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.” Look for cheaper alternatives. This may be obvious to people who earn a set income and aren’t in a position to over-spend. But it seemed I had to re-learn it.

    For a year, my children didn’t get any new toys. In fact, I packed all the old ones away, only took out a few at a time, and tried to think of creative ways we could play with them.

    By the time Christmas rolled around, there was a financial improvement, so we spoiled the children with presents. The funny thing is, the novelty of the new toys wore off quickly. They didn’t seem to play with the new ones any more than they did the old ones. It seemed the more they had, the less they appreciated it.

    If you’re going through something similar—if you’re drowning in debt and need to claw your way out—perhaps my lessons may help.

    5 Steps to Lowering Financial Stress

    1. Know exactly where you stand.

    Get all your financials listed on a spreadsheet. Open communication is key between the role-players involved. List all your debt, liabilities, and expenses, and your income, investments, and assets.

    The starting point is to gain clarity on where you stand. You need to know how far you have fallen behind so you can plan to rectify your situation as soon as possible.

    It’s easy to start blaming or regretting or going around in “if only I had done this” circles. We had made one bad judgment call, and that may have changed everything. In hindsight it seems so obvious, but at the time we did what we thought was best.

    We had to stop hypothesizing and going back over bad decisions. We needed to work as a team, and now more than ever, we had to support each other, and not go back to “we should’ve.”

    2. Make a plan.

    After getting a realistic view on where exactly you stand, you can start working on a plan.

    Although we felt like throwing in the towel, we had to get our mindset right.

    There are usually more options than you think to get things back on track. Under stress we tend to go into survival mode, and this isn’t conducive to creative problem solving.

    Try to take the emotion of the situation away when you start to problem solve. Imagine this scenario is happening to someone else, and you’re there to help figure it out with them. You will need to research various options.

    Try to make a plan, even if your initial plan changes along the way. It’s important to gain back your sense of control.

    Communicate with the role-players. If you owe the bank or your credit providers, call them and meet up to discuss options. Ask for extensions. Get advice from people who have gone through similar experiences.

    3. Live within your means.

    Cut everything back to what is manageable. Yes, you will feel like you have lost some of your status. We moved from a prestigious housing estate to a random lower end suburb. It was a major personal downgrade, but I’ve come to learn that we are so much more adaptable than we realize. We actually need very little to live comfortably.

    We cut back on luxury items and learned the art of patience. Instead of buying on demand, if I wanted something, I would wait until I could afford it. I found that by doing this, it also eliminated impulse purchases. After waiting and giving it more thought, often I decided I didn’t need that item anyway.

    We had to get in touch what is most important. When you have only a limited supply to work with, you have to focus on what’s a priority. You need to weigh up the options and decide where you will get the most value for money.

    We implemented a budget, where we allocated amounts for the month, so we could plan to get through.

    4. Get back to your intrinsic values.

    Both my husband and I have never been particularly materialistic. We love quality products, but we’ve never been into flashy status items, although we’ve certainly grown accustomed to the finer things in life.

    During our financial crisis, we had to come back to our core values and to the intrinsic value of things. I got to a point when I realized, it doesn’t matter if we lose everything; our health and well-being are most important. We can start over again if we have to.

    I stopped fearing the worst and worrying and stressing. Instead I became fascinated by how the whole experience unfolded. I tried to learn and glean from this what I could.

    A few key lessons from my experience:

    • I never want to be in this situation again, so I’ll need to maintain these changes.
    • I only need to get through one day at a time.
    • Laughing through tough times is much better than crying through them.
    • To be a strong team, you can’t have internal conflict.
    • We had to accept the situation and make the best of it.

    A few things we did to get back to our values:

    • We started to value every penny again.
    • We focused on all we did have, not on all we didn’t have.
    • We forgave and moved on.
    • We left karma to deal with our wrongdoers.
    • We tried to cultivate a long-term vision, and this was merely a glitch in the road.

    5. Practice gratitude and generosity.

    Not your typical response when the financial pressure is on. But when you have little, it’s easier to be grateful for the small things in life. If you have a lot, it’s more difficult to be mindful of and value the small things. You tend to develop bigger and better expectations when you have much.

    We stopped expecting and taking things for granted. We started for be more thankful for everyday things.

    I tried to remain generous, if not with monetary resources, with what I could be generous with. A smile, a text message of encouragement to someone. A flower picked out the garden and given with a hand-written note. Or a listening ear might be what someone else needs. Too often we are so caught up in our own drama, we fail to consider what others are going through.

    As we give to those less fortunate, we start to appreciate our great wealth. It puts things back into perspective.

    6. Calm yourself while you get through the storm.

    This experience has definitely taught me that we can’t control life. We can plan and set goals, but ultimately a lot of things are out of our hands. Life happens, and it doesn’t always unfold how we imagined it would.

    During these times you have to find your inner grit. Your character gets tested and refined. You start to move way out your comfort zones and you land up somehow expanding but not breaking.

    And just when you think you can’t take withstand the storm anymore, you look back and notice how far you’ve come. You realize how much you’ve grown, and you’re stronger than ever.

    Things that helped me get through:

    • Find my composure daily through meditating, deep breathing, consciously releasing muscle tensions when I notice it, practicing self-compassion, celebrating small wins, and staying focused on the bigger picture
    • Remember “This too shall pass”
    • Don’t give in to self-pity or start whining to others
    • Take responsibility for my part in getting here
    • Remember that there is always more money to be made
    • Don’t give way to scarcity thinking
    • Sell or offload what I don’t need
    • Think out the box how to re-structure
    • Keep my life simple

    —

    I’m glad to report we are well on our way to righting our finances. I honestly wouldn’t trade this experience or go back in time and change things. It hasn’t been pleasant, but I’ve learned so many valuable lessons that I will take with me going forward.

    As we build up again, we are going to keep our expenses under control. We are going to be a lot more cautious, and never over-extend ourselves again. We will never enter into bad debt again.

    This time has made me respect the beauty and harsh reality of life and tread a little lighter as I move through it.

  • 3 Steps I Took to Reinvent Myself When I Felt Stuck and Unfulfilled

    3 Steps I Took to Reinvent Myself When I Felt Stuck and Unfulfilled

    “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” ~Patrick Rothfuss

    Who am I?

    I believe this is one of the hardest questions we can ever answer.

    I began to ponder this tough question in my early twenties during what I refer to as my “early-life crisis.”

    Man, I was stuck. Stuck working in an unfulfilling job. Stuck in ever-growing debt because of my bad habits of drinking and smoking. Stuck feeling anxious and unconfident. I woke up each day and felt as if I was just going through the motions. Powerless. I was a puppet, and life was a cruel puppeteer.

    Each night, I’d escape into the world of adventure movies and momentarily distract myself from my struggles. My personal favorites were Forest Gump and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I look back, I see that the heroes in these movies taught me an important truth: Our identities are not fixed, and we can, in fact, reinvent ourselves.

    Here are the three steps I took to do just that.

    1. Recognize that I am more than my labels

    My struggles began when I left formal education. After identifying as a student for so many years, I suddenly found myself in the “real world.”

    It felt as if a rug had been pulled from beneath my feet. What now?

    I fell into an office job working as an insurance salesman. My intuition told me the job wasn’t a good fit for me, but I lacked clarity on what my purpose was and who I really was.

    Then one day, I was reminded of a quote I’d heard from Steven Fry. It reads, “We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing—an actor, a writer. I am a person who does things—I write, I act—and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

    It was strangely liberating, and butterflies fluttered in my stomach as I had the realization that I am not a noun.

    My label of “insurance salesman” didn’t have to define me. Neither did any other labels I’d given myself or had been given.

    My doctor had labeled me as “anxious.” I’d labeled myself as “stuck.” But “anxious” and “stuck” were simply feelings and not who I was. From this moment I changed “I am anxious and stuck” to “I feel anxious and stuck,” and in making this change I transformed from identifying as the experience to the experiencer.

    This is who I believe we truly are. The experiencer. We’re not our labels, our thoughts, our feelings, our past, or our life situation; we are the powerful experiencer of it all.

    By recognizing that I was not my labels, it was as if I’d wiped the slate clean and become a blank canvas. A canvas that had previously been packed full of messily scribbled labeling words written in permanent pen. Now this canvas was blank and pure. Anything was possible, and it was time to write. Not more limiting labels but an exciting personal vision for my next chapter of life.

    2. Define my personal vision for life (for now)

    When defining my personal vision, as well as being mindful to avoid labels, I avoided defining from a place of should.

    I already knew how my vision for life should look based on the plan society had devised.

    Study, study some more, get a job, pay the bills, suck up the feelings of unfulfillment and get on with it, work more, save a bit, and then, when you’re old and tired, retire to try to enjoy whatever time you have left.

    Should felt heavy. Should felt a lot like lying to myself about my desires. So when defining my personal vision, I swapped “I should” to “I want and choose.” This felt exciting. Lighter. I felt like a young boy again stood in a sweet shop with a big, shiny coin in his hand.

    I took a lot of time out to be still and silent, listening to what answers my heart had for me when I thought about what I wanted and would choose.

    Inspired by Steven Fry’s quote, I began to think as a verb, defining my personal vision based on how I most wanted to feel and think and what I most wanted to be doing. I was craving feelings of excitement and freedom, and like Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, I wanted an adventure. I didn’t want to feel like a powerless puppet anymore; instead, I yearned to feel I was making progress toward what really mattered to me, and moving forward.

    I took pressure off myself by knowing this personal definition wasn’t final. It wasn’t going to define my life forever. This was temporary, the next chapter. I could, if I wanted to, change the vision at any time and reinvent myself again.

    What I loved most about the character Forest Gump is his reinvention of himself. In the movie, he’s a professional football player, a soldier, a runner, table tennis champion, and a shrimp boat captain. Though I don’t want those specific roles, I want that same freedom to evolve.

    3. Take action toward my personal vision now

    Believing I was my labels had kept me in inaction.

    Telling myself I was stuck only kept me stuck.

    Telling myself I was anxious only made me anxious about feeling anxious!

    Having recognized that I was not my labels and defined a vision for the next chapter, I knew the only thing that would take me from where I was to where I wanted to be was action, and lots of it.

    So I began to make changes.

    One daily habit that really served me was taking long walks every evening.

    It helped me on so many levels.

    It burned off a lot of the anxious energy I felt, it helped me lose some excess weight, which boosted my confidence, and it gave me lots of time to reflect and visualize my personal vision, while giving me a sense of adventure as I discovered new and different parts of my hometown. Plus, it was free! Which was just what I needed given my debts.

    My motto was “progress over perfection.”

    Alongside the daily walks, I focused on consistent, small steps rather than big actions.

    That’s not to say I didn’t make some big moves. Once I’d taken back some control over my debts, I booked a one-way flight to New Zealand. Traveling alone, to the other side of the world, was the adventure I longed for and needed. It would force me to face my anxieties, build my confidence even more, and learn the value of money, and it would also give me time and space to decide what I wanted to do from there.

    I climbed mountains, met many amazing people, and worked several jobs to fund my travels, which gave me more clarity around what I wanted to do professionally, which I pursued when my adventure came to an end.

    After a year in New Zealand, I returned home to England a new man. Calm and confident, having reinvented myself from the stuck person I once thought I was.

    I learned the “perfect time” doesn’t exist. No matter where we are in our lives, we can take action toward our personal vision at any time, even if it’s just a small step.

    I know we can’t all up and leave our lives to travel for a year, but we all have the ability to create a plan that makes sense for us and work toward it, even if just one small step at a time.

    It’s been almost six years since I returned from New Zealand, and I continue to reinvent myself personally and professionally. I know I’m not my labels. I know I’m not a noun. I know I’m not a powerless puppet. I am the experiencer.

    We are the experiencer. We are the main characters in the story of our lives, but we are more than that. We are the writers too. Reinventing who we are begins by dropping our labels and picking up the pen. Happy writing.

  • How to Choose Peace When You’re Under Pressure

    How to Choose Peace When You’re Under Pressure

    “Let us fill our hearts with our own compassion.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    “Mom’s concentrating,” I tell my kids as I clean up after dinner. I suggest a game to keep them occupied. “How many words start with A?”

    As I inspect the crumbs under the kickboard, I pay just enough attention to hear them play along.

    “Mom. L!” (I must have drifted off.)

    “Right. L is for?” And they’re off again. Be more present, be more present, be more present, I think.

    M…N…O…I laugh to myself when we reach P. P is for pressure, that’s what, I think as I remind myself that I really need to print off those tax documents tomorrow. And call the doctor. And send off those emails. And register for that training.

    The fact that I can share this with you today reflects true progress. I’m learning to notice the pressure now, examine it, and reduce it where I can, trusting that I can still address the valid concerns that are within my control.

    But before, pressure just felt normal. Necessary even. I used to tell myself that this is what discipline and motivation looked like, as if I didn’t believe I could do the things that mattered without the stress.

    It’s only in the last few years that I’ve dared to be honest with myself about what goes on in my body and mind.

    Now, I accept that this is pressure, and it isn’t helping. Now, I know that my thinking patterns and actions can either bring more pressure or more peace. And now, I truly believe that I have the power to choose which way it goes even when nothing else is in my control.

    This doesn’t mean I’ve perfected the process. Far from it. But now I have the clear intention to at least try.

    Recognizing the pressure was the easy part. The warning signs were clear enough: headache, tension, irritability, worry, fatigue. This doesn’t always stop me denying it or trying to power through.

    Recognizing that my thoughts and actions might be intensifying it was a little harder.

    There’s always a kernel of truth (or more) in the pressures we feel. Pressure comes from the real, daily things that keep life running smoothly. It also comes from the deeper, scarier problems we face. A serious diagnosis. Unemployment. Divorce. Loss. Trauma. And either way, whether it’s an everyday concern, a traumatic event, or what we’ve learned to label as a “silly” worry, we feel pressure when we care. The pressure we feel tells us so much about our values, priorities, and expectations.

    However, in my experience and maybe yours, there’s a special kind of pressure that’s internally generated, or at least internally magnified. It’s not made up or crazy, but it can become disconnected from reality the longer it goes on.

    That drone of what if this and what will they think and who will I be is my voice in my head. It echoes a lifetime of internalized messages, but now, as an adult living my own adult life, it’s me sending most of those messages.

    Which leads me to the hardest part of choosing a more peaceful way through: the choice.

    I’ve held on to so many pressures in my life, waiting for the day I’ve finally earned the right to let them go. The trouble is, there’s no referee or judge, no one’s keeping score. I’m the only one who can grant myself permission to change, and it’s me who chooses peace or pressure.

    When life feels secure, the peaceful path is easy to see. It’s right in front of you. You’re standing on it! When I’m there, I can tell myself the most beautiful affirmations, “I decide if I live life in fear of the pain or in devotion to the love. I can choose to let go of that which does not serve me. I love and accept myself fully, completely, deeply.”

    But when things get hard or serious, or when something I really care about is on the line, the doubts can creep in.

    Is it safe to let go of my pressure-filled thoughts? 

    What if I need this pressure to succeed?

    Can I really let myself slow down and relax when there’s still so much I need to accomplish?

    Do I deserve to feel good right now? Have I earned it? I’ll have time for myself when this is all over.

    Every day, I grow more aware of this process, and every day, I feel a little braver. Brave enough to find my way back to the peaceful path.

    I can still act so surprised about the pressure, though. After the big doctor’s appointment, after the wedding, after the funeral, after the visit with the in-laws, after the annual review, I’ll have a moment of clarity. I’ll see as if for the first time how much pressure I’d been under by its absence.

    For a moment, before the space is filled in with something new, I feel peace. And every time, for just a moment, I can talk to myself with true understanding and compassion.

    “You were under so much pressure,” I’ll say. “That was really weighing on you. Of course, you felt pressure. It makes sense that you felt confused about that. It makes sense that you felt so stuck. I know, I know. You were scared.”

    Then, when I could assert my willingness to change, that familiar critical voice sneaks back in. But I thought you’d be over this by now.

    Pressure.

    The things we feel pressure about may change on the surface. Move faster, do more, do better. Underneath, they’re always about the same questions:

    Who am I?

    Am I good enough?

    I am worthy of love and connection?

    Can I get through this?

    And even in the attempt to be compassionate with ourselves, we can easily slip into questioning our worth rather than affirming it. We can intensify the pressure to get over it already. Rather than saying, “I see that I’m feeling pressure and I choose to accept and love myself fully through it” it becomes more, “Really? This again?”

    Here, too, I’m learning how to choose the peaceful path through. I’m learning that there’s no purpose in shaming yourself for the pressure, just as there’s no purpose in minimizing it or bottling it up.

    I’m learning that taking the peaceful path means changing the whole process to one of compassion, not criticism. So, I’m practicing answering those questions in a more caring way.

    You don’t need to hurt yourself like this.

    You can decide how you’re going to approach this.

    Even here, you can choose to accept yourself.

    You can choose the most peaceful path through this.

    There will always be pressure. Pressure, pain, stress, tension, friction—they’re a part of living. Life cannot and will not ever be stagnant, and that’s not always comfortable. Still, we can choose a more peaceful path through it.

    Maybe now you’re under the pressure to do more and do it faster. Or the pressure to be certain. Or to be strong or perfect. Or maybe even the pressure to release the pressure. The pressure you experience may be internally generated or a reflection of the people and circumstances surrounding you.

    No matter how much pressure you’re under or where it stems from, you can find a more peaceful way through it with your own compassion.

    Here’s how:

    1. Practice being aware without the judgment.

    Learn your personal early warning signs and start to label that internal experience as pressure. Practice recognizing it before it boils over or paralyzes you, and be honest with yourself about whether it’s really helping. Even if all you’re able to do is notice its absence when it leaves, start there. Notice the feeling of pressure or relief, call it what it is, and recognize how this process impacts your life.

    2. Validate yourself.

    When you’re under pressure, validate your feelings with statements like you’re under pressure right now and this feeling makes sense. And move toward validating your own worth. Even statements like I’m learning to accept myself can be enough to ease the pressure.

    3. Look beneath the surface.

    Once you’ve recognized you’re under pressure and offered yourself validation, you can look beneath the surface at what’s going on. Be honest and compassionate with yourself as you ask the questions that help you understand your situation.

    What feels threatened? Who’s influencing you? Could you be magnifying this? What would help you ease the pressure? What’s one thing within your control? What scares you about finding a peaceful way through?

    4. Practice new thoughts and actions until they’re your new normal.

    Tell yourself the kinds of things you’d tell a dear friend who’s under pressure. Remind yourself of your true priorities, your strengths, and the choices you can make. Tell yourself why you wish to choose a more peaceful path. And do it again and again and again until the words stop sounding foreign.

    Then, practice building the courage to act from that place, even if you don’t quite believe it yet. Belief might have to come after the action.

    Act like it’s safe to be you, safe to be happy, and safe to choose peace. Take one thing off the agenda. Extend a deadline. Tackle something small and savor crossing it off the list. Take a walk and fill yourself with awe. Whatever you do, remember that the bravest thing isn’t always the biggest or the boldest but the most authentic.

    Practice these steps from a place of love and treat every time the pressure returns, because it will, as another moment to renew your commitment to finding the most peaceful way through.

  • How to Stop Wanting to Be Thinner, Even If You’re Ambitious

    How to Stop Wanting to Be Thinner, Even If You’re Ambitious

    “How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say, ‘those illusions are gone.’” ~Alain de Botton

    Are you high functioning at school, college, or in your career, but dysfunctional with food? I was.

    I’ve always been ambitious. I see things, and I wanna do them too, even better!

    It’s a powerful trait, but unruly—like living with a big dog. Sometimes it strains on its leash and pulls you along further than you thought you’d go. And sometimes it knocks you onto the carpet and stands over you, panting, with its balls in your face.

    That’s what happened when I got ambitious about getting thin—it floored me.

    I tried to mold myself into someone who’d look good in leather pants, and became obsessed and depressed around food.

    Leather pants!!!

    Exhale. Part of me—that dog jumping up again—still gets excited about becoming supermodel-skinny. But I have to let it go.

    Because when I was twelve, I tried to lose weight, even though I didn’t need to. Compulsive overeating entered my life, and dominated my teens.

    Up until then, I had a great formula for success: Grades = intelligence + sacrifice.

    For instance, I swore to become top of my class. So I holed myself up in my bedroom and made weekends into homework-ends.

    The more awards I got, the more I believed self-punishment paid off. I worried if I didn’t push myself to extremes, I’d fall short.

    One thing I sacrificed, other than fresh air, was popularity. My ‘A’ grades were social suicide. Other kids found me haughty and tried to bring me down, taunting me about my acne, and my ‘posh’ accent.

    My only friend was the silent type—I suspected she was inwardly laughing at me. I was totally insecure.

    So I relied on adults saying “Well done” to feel okay. Being average wasn’t enough. I had to be impressive; make the bullies sorry.

    I wasn’t overweight, but I was lonely, and I’d started comfort-eating meat pies at lunchtimes. So I already thought “I should eat less.”

    And since I couldn’t make my spots disappear, and friendship confused me, I reached for a ‘doable’ transformation: I thought if I could nail weight loss, that’d be like a fairy godmother’s magic wand.

    So I deliberately poured all my ambition into one extreme goal: “I’m gonna get showstoppingly skinny, so everyone’ll be impressed.”

    My mum was a hippie feminist. She would’ve been horrified. I already secretly ‘borrowed’ my dad’s razor to do my armpits, because she didn’t think women should shave; she didn’t agree with society’s beauty standards! So, what could be more rebellious than worshipping models?

    Leather pants became my benchmark after I saw a particular fashion article, ironically titled “Chocaholic.” The theme was “how to wear brown,” and the model wore a white shirt and brown leather jeans.

    She was blonde (like me), tall (like me), and leggy (not so like me). I was pretty sure if my thighs didn’t touch anymore, I could be her.

    So I made a plan, and not just to stop yomping meat pies. I vowed to skip school lunch completely.

    It made perfect sense in my head: No food, and nobody would know, or stop me. But… I hadn’t factored in my body! I wasn’t prepared for gnawing hunger.

    That first day I tried it, I panicked I wouldn’t get through the day.

    I begged my friend for pennies. She gave me 25p, with a wry smile. I bought chocolate biscuits from a shop near school. She thought they looked cheap and nasty, but I ate the whole packet.

    That was the pattern from the off: I’d create rules and then cave in and eat whatever.

    I found myself binge eating for the next seven years.

    Sometimes I’d make myself sick. But mostly, afterward, I’d just be full to bursting, and feel so guilty I’d want to curl up in a ball.

    Guilty, 24/7. Waking up guilty. Guilty about yesterday’s food, and guilty for wanting breakfast.

    If I ate, I’d failed. And since I hadn’t had experienced much failure before, I took it to heart.

    By the time I was nineteen that sense of failure had spread. I needed constant affirmation from my boyfriend, I hid under my duvet instead of studying for my college exams, I was competitive and jealous of my (luckily forgiving) friends, and I’d become too scared to audition for drama school, which was my dream for afterward.

    I hadn’t stopped being an ambitious person—I still had sky high expectations—but that only made me want to eat more, because while I was putting food in my mouth, I was free from living up to my own standards for a few minutes.

    I’d eat until I had to lie down, and I spent days and days in bed—stuffed, daunted, and depressed. I felt ugly, worthless, ashamed, and like I didn’t deserve love at all.

    Something had to give.

    I had to find a way back to ‘normal’ around food. Normal, which had once been such a boring, unexceptional way to be, now seemed wishful.

    I thought: “I’d give anything, just to be able to enjoy food again, and not feel guilty.”

    I leapt at my new ambition. Got books. Threw myself into the homework. Journaled, examined my beliefs about myself.

    At first, I didn’t give up wanting to lose weight. I just committed myself to my new mission, and that sidelined my desire to get thinner.

    But that was enough.

    If you’d told me one day I’d enjoy eating a few meals and snacks each day, and not really think much about food in between, I’d have said, “Whoa. Steady on!” But here I am, and I’ve set my desire to get skinny aside permanently.

    Sure, I still get that “leather pants thought” occasionally. But I don’t have to jump aboard every train of thought that passes through my head.

    It doesn’t feel like giving up, or admitting defeat. It’s liberating.

    I haven’t stopped wanting to be healthy, but I have stopped asking my body to leap hurdles it can’t handle.

    I respect my biology now, and the powerful survival urges it’ll react with, if I starve it.

    So if you’re struggling with your eating, maybe it’s worth weighing up whether you’re wasting precious energy trying to “be successful” with your body.

    You don’t have to wait until you’re desperate before you get sane around food. Just reset the bar. Make smarter choices about what you pour your ambition into.

    And if you’re thinking, “But I’ve wanted to be thinner most of my life—it’s part of who I am!” I totally get that.

    I’m not saying it’s easy to change your own mind. Sometimes you have to coax yourself.

    So here are four thoughts that help me stop wanting to be thinner. I’m pretty sure they’ll help you too.

    1. I’m becoming my best natural weight.

    So far, when I eat normally and look after my body and my sanity, I’m really happy with where my weight lands. I call this my “best natural weight.” It’s a great place to aim instead of trying to get thinner.

    I don’t concentrate on my body size.

    I have loads else to focus on. Like eating mindfully. And feeling my feelings.

    I can focus on getting strong. That’s fun—I can enjoy movement, without worrying about how many calories I’ve burned.

    I can also focus on thinking positive thoughts like “I really care about my body” so I feel encouraged to look after myself.

    2. I don’t gamble with my natural confidence.

    When I embarked upon my dubious quest to get skinny, it was the impulsive voice of my (over)confidence that urged me to do it.

    But my naïve arrogance also has an upside.

    It has enabled me to move abroad, make several theater shows, have children, and buy a hillside to build a house on. Without really knowing what’s involved, I plunge in and try things!

    Sadly, by my last year of college, when my eating was at its worst, failure with food had destroyed all the optimism that usually goes hand in hand with my confidence.

    We think getting a head-turning body will give us confidence. We don’t realize that for most of us, the quest to get that body will cost us our confidence.

    My confidence is buoyant again now, but I won’t stake it on another body project.

    3. I’m searching for a more meaningful life purpose.

    It was trivial, and vain, and superficial, just aching to be thinner than I was made to be.

    But it didn’t feel like I had a choice: I’d wake up, remember there was something I was depressed about, feel ugly and horrible, and then wonder how to stop myself eating today.

    It didn’t make sense—I’d read feminist writers like Naomi Wolf! Although it was hypocritical, I still wanted to be thinner.

    That’s because it’s impossible to tell yourself to not focus on something; it’s like trying to look away from a spider!

    But the second I had a new focus—getting sane around food—everything changed.

    I threw myself into friendships like never before. Started cooking meals to share. I had fun, and started exercising for fun too.

    I felt like I had energy to start thinking about the world, and even annotated a global politics textbook. Which was taking things a bit far.

    But the point is, for the first time in years I could think about what I wanted to do with my life.

    What would you do with all that energy, if you weren’t dieting?

    4. I think, “This food struggle isn’t a handicap. I’m OVERfunctioning.”

    If you’re doing well in most areas aside from eating, it’s easy to feel like your food struggle is your Achilles’ heel.

    Thinking like this makes you feel like a victim.

    In reality, you don’t have a fatal flaw. You’re not missing a willpower gene. You’re just trying to exert your intelligence, talents, and strengths over something you can’t master—your body.

    But no wonder you try to control it! Think about what’s expected of you at work or school.

    When you work in a goal-oriented, intellectual way, it’s unsurprising you also try to boss your body, by making rules about what you should eat.

    When you’re competitive enough to climb the hierarchy of your career, is it any wonder you compare your appearance to others? Or get tempted to copy your friends’ “you-gotta-try-this-juice-fast” transformations?

    When you’re expected to be businesslike rather than emotional, is it any surprise that you’re skillful at keeping your feelings under wraps, even if it requires using food as a crutch?

    When you work within a meritocracy, it’s easy to think if you’re not being successful with your body, it’s just because you’re not working hard enough. So you try and try again. But the body isn’t a blank canvas for you to make a masterpiece of.

    Your body isn’t a job, either.

    I know it sounds obvious, but we forget that it’s a living thing It has its own wisdom, and a mind-bogglingly complex—miraculous, even—set of chemical processes (including hunger, satiety, digestion, hormones, immunity, for example) that it performs without us handing it any to-do list.

    —

    Your food obsession might not feel like a good thing right now.

    I’m not saying mine was fun either, but my struggle did stop me in my tracks, and it forced me to pay myself attention to myself.

    If it nudges you to weigh up how you define success, create self-worth, and deal with emotional and stressful experiences, maybe that’s a tiny plus.

    And I know it’s hard to let go of being thinner if it’s something you’ve invested years of your life trying to achieve. But when you stop trying to become someone you’re not, it’s easier to trust and believe in yourself.

    That confidence pays off in other places. Who knows? It might translate into asking for a pay rise, sharing your feelings, having deeper relationships, or being brave enough to hit the high notes when you belt out “Let It Go” in your next audition.

    Food and body sanity aren’t a consolation prize for people who can’t ‘make it’ to supermodel status, and have to accept boring old reality.

    It’s a choice, for people who are smart and curious.

    And P.S.: They make leather pants in every imaginable size.

  • You Don’t Suck at Life: How to Stop Believing Your Inner Bully

    You Don’t Suck at Life: How to Stop Believing Your Inner Bully

    “You’re too fat to wear that tight shirt to the gym.”

    “You’re not smart enough to take the lead on that project at work.”

    “You’re definitely going to screw up the vacation plans.”

    “You’re not good enough, cool enough, likable enough.” 

    “You suck.”

    If we talked like this to anyone, it would be considered bullying.

    And yet we talk to ourselves like this all the time.

    We talk to ourselves in a way we would never talk to people we care about. We take these words to heart and believe them as truth.

    We turn these words into our core belief system, holding ourselves back from growth, fulfillment, and happiness.

    We set high expectations for ourselves, and if we don’t meet them it comes out in unfair, untrue, and flat-out mean judgments.

    We say “treat others the way you’d like to be treated” but don’t follow that advice when it comes to how we treat ourselves.

    I certainly didn’t.

    I was a Grade A self-bully for years.

    Every day when I left work, I’d hear this voice in my head telling me, “They’re going to figure out you’re a fraud and don’t know what you’re doing. Anyone can do this job better than you. They’re going to fire you. You’re an embarrassment.”

    I never had many friends, but when the few I had would invite me out somewhere, I’d think, “They just pity me. They’re only inviting me because they feel obligated. I’m not as pretty as they are and don’t fit in. I never know the right thing to say. I’m going to screw this up.”

    I always imagined how disappointed my parents would be in me if they saw how messy my house was, or what they’d think of me leaving a well-paying job to start my own business, or if they knew that I lost that stock certificate and now had to pay a stupid amount of money to get it replaced. I’d think, “They’ll judge me and think that I’ve failed them, and that I’m not as good as they expected me to be.”

    I told myself how unlikeable I was, and that’s why I didn’t have more friends.

    I told myself how I’d never be successful because I never had any good ideas.

    I told myself how ugly I was. How boring I was. How awkward I was.

    I was constantly putting myself down, partly because I was a perfectionist, and partly because I worried way too much about what other people thought of me and never felt I was good enough to meet their standards.

    But that was the old me.

    I’ve come a long way since then. I slip up on occasion, but I’m much better equipped now to course correct using the steps below.

    Changing my relationship with my inner bully took me a few years of studying, training, and practicing.

    If you’ve been bullying yourself for years, it will likely take you time to change your habit, as well. But these six key strategies will make a lot easier to be kind to yourself.

    Step 1: Say hello.

    When we hear that self-bully talk, we tend to instantly believe it without recognizing what’s going on or questioning it. We see it as truth. We fully experience it.

    The first step to quieting your inner bully is to say hello. That is, mindfully recognize that this is self-bully talk happening. Maybe even personify it by giving it a name or even a gender.

    I like to minimize my inner bully by giving her a silly name: Cupcake.

    When I hear inner talk like “Ugh, you suck at this,” I notice this and say, “Oh, hi Cupcake. Welcome to the party.”

    This allows me to step back from the voice. Just like I do when I’m watching a scary movie and I don’t want to get too scared. I step back and recognize that these are actors on a screen, they are reading scripts, there are cameras and lights pointing at them.

    I go from being fully absorbed in the movie, like I’m in it, to noticing that I’m watching a movie. It’s a subtle but profound shift.

    From this place, we can create space, which enables us to make change in the next step.

    Step 2: Change how you experience your bully.

    We experience thoughts as pictures, sounds, or feelings. Most people experience their inner bully thoughts as sound, like hearing a voice telling them “you suck.”

    Here’s a fun trick to change how you experience your inner bully. Change the sound of the “voice.”

    When I hear that voice telling me that I suck, I say, “Hi Cupcake, what do you have to say again?”

    Then I repeat her words in a funny cartoon voice. Now she sounds like Mickey Mouse and I can’t even take her seriously.

    If you’re a visual type and “you suck” comes to you in a picture—perhaps one of you at a time in your life when you felt like you failed—you can try a different tactic (or both even).

    Since I named her “Cupcake,” I can also picture her as such.

    Now I see a cupcake with a Mickey Mouse voice telling me “you suck.” Which, of course, is adorable and hilarious.

    This helps me step further out of that negative mind frame so I can take the next step. 

    Step 3: Find the positive intent.

    Everything we do has a positive intent. Even when we’re being mean to ourselves.

    When I was telling myself that I was no good at my job, my bully was really trying to push me to do better so I wouldn’t get fired, and trying to protect me from being caught off-guard if that happened. She was also trying to tell me where I still had and opportunity to grow and learn.

    When I find myself procrastinating on a project because my bully is telling me that I’m not going to do a good job anyway, I know she’s just trying to protect me from failure.

    She didn’t choose the most helpful method, but she meant well.

    I can now say, “Thanks, Cupcake. I can take it from here.”

    And then I move onto the next step.

    Step 4: Choose a neutral or positive thought instead.

    Sometimes it can feel like a big leap to go from a negative to a positive. Going from “I’m a failure” to “I’m a success” might feel false to you considering the circumstances.

    In this case, try a neutral thought instead. See how it feels to go from “I’m a failure” to “I’m not a failure at everything.”

    In my case, at work I would often think “I can’t do this.” (This was usually when someone asked me to analyze some data, which wasn’t my strong suit.)

    To get myself out of self-bully mode, I would slightly alter the statement “I can’t do this” by adding “yet.”

    “I can’t do this… yet.”

    Sometimes I could even replace it with “I can do this,” just to try it out and see how it felt. More often than not, it actually felt true. I just hadn’t thought of that idea yet.

    And over time I did get better at analyzing data.

    The point is, you can choose what thoughts to think.

    Step 5: Give yourself permission to be imperfect.

    (Note, this step is only applicable if you identify as a human.)

    Our inner bullies come out of the woodwork when we do something that we consider “imperfect.”

    We don’t look perfect. We didn’t execute something perfectly. We didn’t make the perfect choice.

    The phrase “I’m only human” is another way of saying, by nature, I will make mistakes. Mistakes are allowed. Not only allowed but expected.

    Write yourself a permission slip to be imperfect. Just see how it feels.

    “I, Sandy, give myself permission to write a blog post about self-bullying and not write it perfectly.”

    That felt pretty good. 🙂

    Step 6: Know that you are not alone and can ask for help if you need it.

    Over time, negative self-talk becomes a habit, and as we’ve all experienced, habits are hard to form or break.

    If you’re having trouble breaking your self-bullying habit, even using these steps, you don’t have to go it alone, and you shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed to ask for help.

    Working with a supportive therapist or coach, or even just confiding in a friend, can make a huge difference. An unbiased outsider is able to hear our thoughts, what we’re saying and not saying, and reflect those back to us when we don’t notice them.

    They provide us with support and accountability to keep us on track toward our goals and cheer us on along the way. They ask us tough questions, that we wouldn’t think to ask ourselves.

    They also help remind us that we’re not alone in feeling how we feel. That it’s not only common, but people can see improvement, which is incredibly reassuring. Odds are, everyone you’ve ever met has struggled with this too, and still does on occasion.

    Personally, I reached out for help much later in my own journey because I was embarrassed. My inner bully told me that if I went to someone for help, it meant I was weak. And that they would tell me there’s nothing wrong with me and to suck it up (our inner bullies tend to lie to us).

    I don’t have regrets in my life. Every experience has made me who I am today, and I love who I am. I’m sure the tougher path I took made me stronger along the way.

    But I also think I would have reached freedom from my inner-bully more quickly had I put my ego aside and opened up to someone sooner.

    Know that you are not alone. Everyone feels or has felt the way you do, and like you, they struggle with this at times and see progress at others. So try to be good to yourself—and aim for progress, not perfection.

    Much love and light on your journey, my friend.

  • Lessons from Infertility: What’s Helped Me Cope with Disappointment

    Lessons from Infertility: What’s Helped Me Cope with Disappointment

    “When you find no solution to a problem, it’s probably not a problem to be solved, but a truth to be accepted.” ~Unknown

    For the longest time, I swore I’d never get married or have kids.

    Growing up with an alcoholic father, in a domestic violence situation, shattered my young spirit and left me putting the pieces back together for years.

    Since I didn’t see healthy coping skills growing up, it’s no wonder I grappled with my own addictive behaviors. I struggled with self-worth, focusing solely on accomplishments to fill a void inside of myself.

    Externally, people saw a well-adjusted, smart girl who excelled at sports and was a natural leader, with plenty of friends.

    All seemed well.

    It wasn’t.

    Internally, I was dying, and I’d take anything I could get my hands on to escape my reality. I used work, relationships, and substances to make myself feel better for a short while.

    However, self-loathing runs deep and it eventually won the day.

    I wasn’t enough, and there wasn’t anything sustainable that would make me feel okay about myself for any length of time. I didn’t realize it then, but what I really wanted wasn’t to merely the fill the void; I was longing for a connection to my authentic self. But I couldn’t figure out how to create it.

    My emotional suffering was crippling.

    While other people were getting married and having babies, I was surviving the day between emotional highs and lows and barely holding on to any form of functioning.

    Though I had vowed never to get married or have kids, I secretly longed for it. I’d disavowed it only because it didn’t seem possible for me.

    Plus, how would I ever bring a child into this mess of a life?

    I wouldn’t.

    When my self-destruction hit a crossroads of kill myself or live, I chose to heal and get better so that I could be a healthy person for myself right then and perhaps for a partner and child in the future.

    I wanted to be the healthiest version of myself, and thinking about what might be helped me get present to what needed to be healed.

    Part of the journey back to my true self was about learning unconditional self-love. Hearing the paradigm that I’m a spiritual being having a human experience opened up an avenue of self-loving within me that I had never experienced before.

    I focused diligently on having a healthy relationship with myself by engaging a daily self-care practice that included positive affirmations, physical exercise, self-forgiveness, and connecting to something greater than myself.

    By learning to relate to myself in a more positive way, I started to have better relationships with others. And one particular relationship came in that reflected back to me my deep self-love and spiritual growth. This relationship would turn into a life partnership and eventually a marriage.

    Though I never thought I would get married, I did the inner work to transform myself into the partner that I wanted to have in this lifetime.

    My spiritually connected and loving relationship with Richard opened me up to the possibility of having children.

    This was a huge shift from my days as a child and young adult where I vowed never to have significant relationships with anyone.

    But then something I never expected happened. We never got pregnant.

    We tried for many years and mutually decided that if we couldn’t naturally have a child, we wouldn’t have one at all.

    There was tremendous disappointment, anger, and sadness. When something isn’t a possibility for you, it can make you want it more.

    I went from obsessed to defeated.

    Richard and I finally landed on and allowed our grieving.

    It was a process. It still is.

    What’s super special about this journey is that I was able to pull from my recovery toolbox to support myself through this experience.

    I focused on these three powerful steps.

    1. Look for the learning.

    Getting my mind right has been the biggest growth opportunity in my healing process. Before learning about my infertility, I’d studied spiritual psychology at The University of Santa Monica, where I learned the twenty-two principles of spiritual psychology. One of those principles, “life is for learning,” has empowered me to look for my spiritual curriculum instead of staying in victimhood.

    Staying empowered versus going into disempowerment has kept me learning from my life experiences, and helped me avoid growing bitter. Through my infertility, I learned to let go of control. I learned true surrender to the unknown. And I learned to trust something greater than my humanness. I’ve experienced so much grief, resilience, and acceptance. Embracing it all has enriched my life instead of making this a solely painful experience.

    2. Accept what is.

    I found acceptance of what is. I’m not fighting reality, saying it should be different. I don’t know what it should look like, and I accept that this is my spiritual curriculum.

    Ego thinks it knows what the human experience should look like. My spirit knows that this is the experience I’m meant to have. Or at least that’s what I believe—that I was meant to grow through this and love myself no matter what. And I’m doing that!

    I’ve also come to realize that even when life doesn’t turn out how we think it should, it can still be enjoyable if we’re willing to shift our focus and do the best we can with the hand we were dealt. For me, that’s meant committing to being the healthiest human I can be, living a purpose-driven life, and helping other people self-actualize.

    Even if you don’t believe you receive a “spiritual curriculum” for life, or are “meant to have” certain experiences for your growth, it feels incredibly liberating to accept what is and choose to make the best of it. This is how I’ve been able to keep my peace instead of giving it away.

    3. Choose peace.

    I choose peace. It’s an affirmation that has served me well for many years through different life challenges. I can choose to be in resistance and suffer, or I can choose to be in acceptance and have my peace. I choose peace. It doesn’t mean I don’t experience some sadness from time to time, but those moments are few and far between because it’s more valuable to me to accept and have peace than it is to hold onto grievances.

    Life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. I put expectations on life, and life had its own plans.

    My duty is to be with what is and love myself through it.

    Accepting what is has been one of the most freeing experiences of my lifetime because it’s opened me up to new possibilities I wouldn’t have been able to see had I stayed stuck in resistance. Furthermore, I’ve been able to experience motherhood through mothering myself, our four wonderful dogs (Peanut, Ziggy, Tucson, and Bootie), and those I come into contact through my life’s work.

    I can still be a mother—to myself and others. I get to define what that looks like for me.

    When life seems difficult or unfair, focus on the lessons so you can empower yourself instead of victimizing yourself, accept what is, and remind yourself that this is what it means to choose peace. These strategies have offered me continued spiritual growth, supported me in strengthening my relationship with my husband, and empowered me to carry on with co-creating an enjoyable life.

    And if you’re experiencing infertility, like me, know that it doesn’t have to be something that sidelines you. It can not only be a source of tremendous spiritual growth, it can also be the gateway to a different path that could be equally as fulfilling.

  • Travel Tips for the Anxious Spirit

    Travel Tips for the Anxious Spirit

    “Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.” ~Yogi Bhajan

    For years, I avoided travel. Just the thought of leaving home made me anxious. I dreaded the crowds, the confusion, and the sense of disconnection from both my daily routine and my spiritual practice.

    Over time, I came up with some great reasons not to travel, but I always knew those excuses were keeping me from exploring new places, meeting new people, and living my life to the fullest.

    I continued to avoid traveling until family members moved across the country, and then I had no choice. If I wanted to see them, I had to travel. So, I stopped coming up with excuses and started looking for ways to keep a connection to my spirit and sense of well-being, while I traveled through crowded airports, stormy weather, and traffic jams.

    Here are some of the things that work for me. If you don’t like to travel either, I encourage you to try all of them to find the ones that work best for you.

    Before Traveling

    1. Set your intention.

    Begin by reminding yourself why you’re traveling. Are you looking forward to spending time with friends or family? Is this a relaxing vacation, or a journey to explore a new and exciting culture?

    Whatever the reason for your travel, getting clear about why you’re leaving home can add a depth and meaning to your trip and help relieve anxiety about the less pleasant parts of the experience.

    2. Think ahead.

    As you imagine your trip, visualize yourself having a wonderful experience. Picture everything going smoothly for you. See yourself moving safely from place to place, enjoying your surroundings, and feeling confident in your ability to take care of yourself. Imagine all the possibilities for fun and adventure that lie in wait at your destination.

    Of course, this doesn’t guarantee everything will go smoothly, but it will likely ease your mind, which will help you stay calm if anything doesn’t go plan. And let’s face it—things often don’t when we’re traveling!

    3. Change your vocabulary.

    Talking about things differently can change the way you think and feel about them. See what happens when you change:

    “I’m afraid to travel” to “I’m curious to travel.”

    “I hate to travel” to “I’m open to looking at travel differently.”

    “Travel is a nightmare” to “Travel is an adventure.”

    “I’m not a traveler” to “I’m learning how to travel well.”

    “Travel is difficult” to “Travel makes my life richer.”

    4. Take time to learn everything you can about your destination.

    Maybe there’s a local yoga studio or gym that offers a class you might enjoy. Why not call ahead and reserve a spot in that class? Maybe there’s a spa at your hotel where you could book a massage, or a nearby restaurant that offers your favorite seafood. Are there walking trails close by, a museum you’ve always wanted to see?

    I’ve found that looking forward to something fun or relaxing helps me get through the stress of travel.

    5. Get organized.

    For me, getting organized makes everything else about traveling easier because I don’t have to worry about forgetting anything important and can instead just be in the moment. Here are some things that work for me. Try them and see what works for you.

    • Keep all your travel information in one place.
    • Make a checklist of all those last-minute things you need to take care of. Check things off as you get them done.
    • Pack smart. Make a list of all the activities and events you have planned, then pack only the clothes, shoes, and accessories required for each activity. When you can, pack comfortable, wrinkle-proof clothes. List your necessary toiletries and pack them in waterproof pouches or plastic bags.

    6. Make sure you have everything you need to travel in comfort.

    Consider packing some of the following to help you feel cared for and at ease as you travel.

    • A pillow or neck support can help you relax on a long plane ride or car trip.
    • A small blanket or warm shawl will come in handy any time you feel a chill.
    • Tea: I always make sure to pack my own tea. Ginger and mint for digestion, chamomile for relaxation. You can get a cup of hot water in almost any restaurant, hotel room, or on any flight, so you can brew yourself a cup of soothing tea any time you like.
    • Snacks: I travel with nuts and dried fruit. They’re my favorite snack, easy to tuck in my purse, and they keep me from getting the “hangrys.” You can also pack energy bars, pretzels, crackers, cheese, or fruit.
    • A meditation app, or a great playlist to help you feel calm, especially if you’re anxious about flying or riding long distances.
    • Something fun to read. In my case I always have a book with me. I find reading is a wonderful distraction and helps pass the time more quickly.
    • A deck of cards or a game app: Playing is a wonderful way to keep you occupied on the way to your destination.
    • Workout clothes: You may not be able to do your usual yoga practice, or fit in a long morning run, but having the right clothes may encourage you to sneak in a couple of poses or take a quick jog in your new surroundings.
    • An energy token. Bringing a crystal, necklace, or other talisman with you can help keep you grounded.
    • An empty thermos: It’s important to drink enough water. If you don’t want to pay for bottled water (or harm the environment with plastic), why not travel with an empty thermos? You can fill it with water at the airport or any stop along your way.

    While Traveling

     1. Travel with an open heart.

    This is a hard one for me, but when I remember to do it, I find it makes an amazing difference in my experience. When I unplug from technology and engage with the people around me, I get to hear their stories and see the world from a different point of view.

    Over the years I’ve met some incredible people: a doctor on the cutting edge of cancer research, an artist, a woman in the middle of a difficult divorce, the manager of a country club, a mother traveling with two children from Scotland to Texas to start a new life, a woman who’d overcome incredible hardships to get her PhD and run a successful, youth program in an inner city. Not only did we all get to share our stories, the connection made my journey a richer experience.

    2. Reach beyond your own experience to help others.

    Could you help that young woman heft her bag into the overhead bin? Could you share your snack with your seatmate, or buy a cup of coffee for the tired-looking person behind you in line? Maybe you could offer to take a picture of the family posing on the beach, or pay a compliment to your server.

    Sometimes just a smile, sympathetic ear, or kind word is enough to make a real difference in someone else’s life, and in your own.

    3. Breathe and relax.

    When you get anxious, take a deep breath. Put your hand over your heart and let the warmth of your palm sink deep into your chest. Let that warmth bring a sense of peace and ease into your heart, and remind yourself that you’re able and willing to take care of yourself no matter what happens. Feel the inner light of your heart expand until it radiates out of your body and reaches the people around you.

    4. Move.

    It’s important to keep moving throughout your trip, both for your physical health and to release anxious energy. Walk whenever you get a chance. If you have to sit for any length of time, make a commitment to get up and move around at least once an hour. Stretch, wiggle your fingers and toes. Raise and lower your shoulders. Rotate your ankles. Have fun finding as many ways as possible to move in your seat.

    5. Try Qigong.

    I use this powerful Qigong pose on long flights or rides. It comes from The Qigong Workbook for Anxiety by Master Chuen Lam.

    This pose is called “Bubbling Spring,” and increases the circulation of both blood and qi throughout your body.

    Begin by sitting with your back as straight as possible, both feet flat on the floor. As you inhale raise the heel of your right foot, keeping the ball of that foot on the ground. As you exhale, press down firmly onto the ball of your foot. Inhale, and release pressure on the ball of your foot. Then as you exhale lower your foot.

    Repeat with the left foot, and alternate the process eight times. Relax a few seconds, then repeat the sequence twice.

    Once You Reach Your Destination

    Slow down and look around you. Allow yourself to savor every moment of this new experience. Drink in the differences of a new location. Be open to trying new things.

    Treasure your experience. Be grateful for a new perspective on the world and your ability to engage fully in this amazing life.

  • Two Types of Boundaries That Can Help You Take Good Care of Yourself

    Two Types of Boundaries That Can Help You Take Good Care of Yourself

    “Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.” ~Brené Brown

    Do you have the courage to love yourself and set the boundaries you need?

    For years I didn’t, and wondered why my life didn’t work. I didn’t really understand what boundaries were or why I needed them.

    My severe lack of boundaries allowed me to give away my energy, time, power, and love to others, leaving virtually nothing for myself.

    For years I lived in a perpetual state of lack, feeling like I wasn’t enough. Looking back, it makes sense that I didn’t feel like I was enough; I was giving everything I had to everyone else.

    Unsurprisingly, things eventually reached a breaking point, and at the age of thirty-six it all came crashing down on me.

    Living without boundaries, overworking myself to the point of burnout, trying to please everyone, battling with money, having an emergency operation, and leaving a toxic relationship had left me almost broken. I finally surrendered and realized something had to give, before I did completely. My lack of boundaries was costing me too much.

    At the time I didn’t realize that an issue with boundaries was the root cause to the problems I was facing, but I could no longer deny, avoid, or ignore that something had to change. I had spent too long focused on how I could look after and help others, and simply wasn’t taking care of myself.

    Boundaries help us to recognize our own needs. They show us it is perfectly acceptable to have needs and to take care of them. Always.

    Not having healthy boundaries allows you to deny your needs through numbing behavior, such as: addiction, overworking, overspending, overdrinking, procrastination, people-pleasing, and unhealthy relationships. Whatever your personal preference, all of these behaviors allow you to disconnect from who you really are and how you really feel.

    The more you deny your needs, the louder they shout to try and get your attention, so you have to keep numbing away to quiet them down, and that’s no way to live.

    We must establish boundaries to promote and protect our self-care, self-worth, and self-love. It is only from that place that we can look after ourselves, which allows us to truly be there for others.

    Creating healthy boundaries means that you take responsibility for yourself, your time, your feelings, and your energy instead of allowing yourself to be buffeted around by everyone else’s.

    Boundaries allow you to take control rather than allowing others to control you, and conversely allow you to give more to others because you come from a place of abundance rather than lack.

    To create boundaries for yourself you have to tune in to your personal needs and your true feelings.

    In essence, it’s understanding what feels good for you, and what doesn’t. As you work on your boundaries, start to notice where you may be blocking your true feelings. If you are perpetually busy or distracted, leaving no time to connect to yourself and how you really feel, then you need to make time to reflect, recharge, and listen to what your body, mind, and soul are trying to tell you.

    There are two sets of boundaries you need to work on, which I refer to as your internal and external boundaries. Both require you to take notice of yourself, which may be a new experience if you’ve spent a long time focusing on others.

    You can see your internal boundaries as those that you have some control over. They dictate how you treat yourself. Do you sleep to fully recharge your system, eat a healthy diet, think and say kind things to yourself, and make time for the activities that light up your soul?

    During my twenties there were times when I hardly seemed to have slept at all. I was at University and worked in a credit control office, which I loathed, and also did bar shifts most nights. I’d spend the day studying, then go to the office and then straight to the bar, working until late. I had youth on my side and all the fire to keep going, but my energy wasn’t really channelled, I was exhausted a lot of the time, and I missed a lot of experiences because I was always working.

    I needed to set internal boundaries, even though my life was busy, as my choices were a recipe for burnout.

    Life will always get in the way, but do you consistently take care of yourself? If you listen to your heart you’ll know if you don’t. And odds are, you can feel if you don’t.

    If you consistently ignore your health and well-being, believe every negative thought you have about yourself, and treat yourself like you’re not a priority, you likely feel both physically and emotionally drained.

    Make looking after yourself a priority and notice how quickly you start to feel different. Notice how you feel when you allow yourself to sleep enough, eat well, support yourself, care about yourself, and ultimately, love yourself. All the time.

    Looking after your internal boundaries is the foundation for your external boundaries, how other people treat you, and how they and external situations affect you.

    The more you can understand your true feelings and attune to yourself, the easier it becomes to set and maintain your personal boundaries, in any situation,

    Boundaries are a work in progress; they cannot be a one-and-done exercise. Life and the people around you are constantly changing, so you will need to keep managing your boundaries as those changes happen.

    Look at any issue you are facing—perhaps you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, for example—and notice if there is a boundary that has fallen away or may have never even existed. Often when we feel overwhelmed it’s because we haven’t taken the time for self-care so we can be in the best place to find the answers we need.

    Once you’ve developed boundaries for yourself, it’s time to apply that philosophy to everything and everyone else. These are your external boundaries, protecting yourself from the outside forces that can potentially throw you off balance.

    I have found it useful to think of our boundaries with other people as energy exchanges. If there are people in your life who regularly leave you feeling drained, then it’s probably time to look at your boundaries with that person to see what might need to change.

    You don’t have to give your time to people who leave you feeling depleted. If they request more than you can reasonably give, you can say no. If they are vocally unsupportive of your choices, you can choose to speak about other topics when you’re with them. If you don’t like how they speak about other people, or they have values you don’t agree with, you can choose to spend less time with them, if any time at all.

    I found that working on my boundaries made me reassess a lot of friendships and who I trust and want to be in my inner circle.

    If there are people who drain your energy, and you feel worse for being around them, then it may be better for you to remove that person from your life.

    If that’s not possible, you can always alter how you interact with them. If face-to-face time becomes too challenging you can use another method, such as a short call, brief email, or social media.

    Ultimately it’s about finding what works for you and focusing on the people who protect your energy.

    If this is a new concept you can, like I did, feel that boundaries have to be big and solid, like a steel wall, so that nothing can ever get past them.

    When I left a very painful relationship my first thought was that trust was always going to be an issue for me, so it would be near impossible to have another relationship again. So I closed that avenue in my mind and focused elsewhere.

    Maintaining a steel wall like this is exhausting. It shuts out the good as well as the bad, and we risk becoming closed to life. It also means we don’t move forward in life either, as we’re busy using all of our energy to hold up the wall.

    Over time I realized that it was most important that I learned to trust myself again, and could start to build trust with other people at my own pace.

    As I continued to work on my boundaries I realized that I didn’t need to use so much energy to keep everything out. I just needed to focus on living my life, how I wanted, and to move away, in whatever way I needed to, from what didn’t serve me. Like water.

    For example, when a discussion became an argument that I could never win, going round and round in circles, I realized I could just remove myself from the debate. I didn’t have to prove my point to someone who didn’t want a resolution and was only looking to create drama, I could simply go and do something else.

    “Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle of softness overcoming hardness.” ~Lao Tzu

    My boundaries didn’t need to be fixed and rigid to work. They, and I, could be like water simply moving through life. Flowing with ease this way and that, toward what served me and away from anything that didn’t. No apology.

    This approach kept me open and moving instead of shut-off and stuck, able to adapt to all of life around me.

    Even when you are really attuned to yourself and have set healthy boundaries, they can still falter. You can still find yourself giving too much of your time, energy, and power, trying to please everyone else, and losing sight of what you need for yourself.

    If you find yourself falling back into old habits, recognize that it happened and start to take care of yourself to recover, in a way that works for you.

    When you’ve centered yourself, look for the lesson. There is no failing, only learning. Stay like water and choose to be light rather than becoming heavy and weighed down by the situation.

    Recognize your humanity and don’t forget your humility as well. Just as there is something to learn, there will be always be a reason to laugh, which helps you let go and move forward.

  • Fellow Dreamers: If You Feel Like a Fool, You’re on the Right Track

    Fellow Dreamers: If You Feel Like a Fool, You’re on the Right Track

    “Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” ~Brian Tracy

    I’m a fool.

    Well, it’s more accurate to say I’ve been a fool often, and I’m ashamed.

    My life, no different from many, has had some successes but also many setbacks and outright failures. I suppose this is just another way of saying I’ve lived.

    The problem is that I’ve allowed my mistakes, errors, and failures to hold me back.

    We’ve all felt like a fool before, but when has doing so made it more difficult to be the you you’ve always wanted to be? To try the things you’ve wanted to try? To live the life you’ve wanted to live?

    I’ve never mentioned this to anyone before. Not my mother, brother, best friends, my girlfriend, or even a random person I’ve met in another country who would never see me again nor remember my name. Why? Because I was a fool and I’m ashamed.

    I’m ashamed, not because I’ve made a fool of myself, but because I allowed it to rob me of what could have been.

    In college, which now seems like forever ago, I decided I would finally act on my musical impulse. I had long loved music, and nearly anything that could be played on a guitar. I had finally decided I would take one step to learning how to play.

    So, with one of my elective credits, I enrolled in a Guitar 100 class. I didn’t rent a guitar, just in case I didn’t like it. I’ve always been in the habit of just jumping into things, perhaps a little too recklessly. I get excited! I just bought the guitar, a big ole case, a box of picks, then rolled into class, wide eyed, dreaming of the day when I would play my favorite songs, or better yet, write and play my first hit.

    It was a night class, and it was the first one, so the class was packed. It was in a large room, there must have been sixty or more people. Everyone had a guitar in hand.

    The instructor showed us a few basics, such as where to position our fingers. Then, he said to the class, let’s do the fun part; let’s strum.

    The room all at once came alive with the joyous and playful sounds of sixty strumming guitar hopefuls. Everyone was into it. We were strumming, and strumming, and strumming. People were having a blast, you could see it on their faces. There was an electricity in the air. We were all making music, but then it stopped.

    Well, everyone but me.

    I was so excited, off in my own world of acoustic joy, that I missed the instructor’s signal to stop. The result was fifty-nine other silent guitars, and me strum, strum, strumming away.

    Once I noticed I was the only one jamming, I quickly stopped, but the class laughed.

    They weren’t being mean. In fact, it was funny. Years removed I could see, as if it were part of a movie scene, how funny it would be to have a guy in Guitar 100 jamming with his eyes closed as if he was on the verge of becoming the next Clapton, while everyone else was awaiting their next lesson.

    But at the time, it felt devastating. I’d made a fool of myself, and they all saw it. I thought to myself, I can’t go back to this class. I’m a rookie, bound to make more mistakes, bigger mistakes, even more embarrassing mistakes. I couldn’t sit next to the same people again, and wonder what they were thinking.

    So, I quit.

    I never played the guitar again. My new guitar went straight into storage. I finished the class that night, but never went back. When friends or family asked me why I stopped, I would say, well, my fingers hurt. I have soft hands, and I didn’t have time anyway. That was true, but it wasn’t the truth.

    I’ve never been so ashamed. Not for making a fool of myself, but for quitting over something so ridiculous. What would life have been like if I’d learned how to play?

    I let the cascading rumination and fears and insecurity rob me of what could have been. I used a simple mistake as an excuse to quit and took my shame and ran away.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the guitar recently because I’m now trying to do something that matters again.

    Very soon I’ll submit my new podcast to iTunes, and soon after that, I’ll launch.

    It almost didn’t happen. The process wasn’t easy. In fact, I’ve looked like a fool a few times. I’ve been considering a podcast for a couple years. In fact, I’ve had the URL for Next Creator Up for over a year. I even conducted one of my interviews six months ago.

    I’ve nearly quit, multiple times. I’ve had a lot of excuses, some truer than others. There are nearly a million podcasts, why would someone listen to mine? It’s not unique enough; it won’t stand out. I’m not an expert. I’m not funny, successful, interesting, I’m not “fill in the blank.”

    I’ve wanted to be a host since high school. I grew up listening to sportscasters and watching The Tonight Show. They got to discuss cool ideas, interact with inspiring guests, and tell fun stories.

    That has been me without a mic. I love talking with people, listening to their stories, and learning from their experiences.

    But just loving something and wanting to be something are not enough. You’ve got to be willing to push past feeling like a fool.

    My first guest had to listen to me “ah” and “um” myself into incoherent statements, followed by ridiculous questions. Thankfully you can edit a podcast.

    Another guest saw that I didn’t press record, after my illustrious introduction. Rookie mistake.

    But every time I’ve interviewed a creative professional who has put themselves out there—put their ideas, thoughts, and feelings on the line—I’ve been inspired. I’ve learned something from each guest I’ve interviewed so far, but more than that, they’ve kept me going.

    I was once working on a screenplay where the mentor character said to the protagonist, “If you’re afraid to bomb, you’ll never blow up.”

    I never realized until recently that that was meant for me. Also, it should come as no shock that because that script was so personal, I was afraid to finish it. And, yes, the main character played the guitar.

    More than anything in life I’ve been afraid to put myself out there. To be vulnerable publically. I could talk to anyone, but not with a mic. I could make a crowd laugh, but not on cue. I could act, but not on camera. When it mattered, I didn’t show up.

    I would always tell myself that the next time, I would do it. I would make it happen. There was always a next time. I let myself of the hook.

    I suspect I’m not the only one who’s done this. No one wants to feel exposed or open themselves up to judgment. No one wants to show how much they care—to put their heart and their passion on the line—and then fail, publicly.

    So we hide. We hold off. We wait for a better time. The perfect time. As if that’s really a thing.

    We sit clutching our creative scars—the harsh words from unsupportive people, the bad experiences, the false starts and failures, all the times we’ve felt foolish—and we use it all as an excuse to hold ourselves back.

    We don’t want to feel those uncomfortable emotions again. But those emotions are the gateway to beauty, innovation, and fulfillment. Not just fulfillment for us, but for all the people who’ll be inspired by what we have to share. People whose lives could be changed for the better because of us, if only we pushed through our initial discomfort.

    I want to push through that discomfort. I want to show my passion, because everything beautiful in this world came from someone who cared more than they feared. Or at least acted like they did.

    Next Creator Up is the living embodiment of what I hope to be and whom I’ve been running from. It’s a call to arms. The path of most resistance that I’ve been resisting. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I’m doing it.

    It’s April Fools’ Day, and we are bound to hear of or be a part of a fun, practical joke or zany gotcha, or be party to or even the victim of a prank. And it’s all in good fun.

    But for the rest of the year, if you feel like a fool, I hope you know you’re not alone, and I hope you don’t give up. I hope you play your music, make your art, and explore your passions and talents.

    So today, let’s agree to be okay with feeling or looking a little foolish.

    Instead of being ashamed for strumming a little too long, or tripping over our words, or doing whatever we do imperfectly, let’s see it as a sign we’re on the right track, because we’re showing up and putting ourselves out there. We’re pushing through our fear, knowing it’s the only way to be the people we want to be and do the things we want to do.

    We all have something to say and something to give. We all have a passion and a gift. So let’s stop hiding and share them.

  • 5 Things to Stop Doing When You’re Struggling and Feeling Drained

    5 Things to Stop Doing When You’re Struggling and Feeling Drained

    “There is nothing in nature that blooms all year long, so don’t expect yourself to do so either.” ~Unknown

    Recently I’ve been spread incredibly thin, and, at times, I’ve felt stressed to the max.

    In addition to being at the tail end of a high-risk pregnancy, with complications, I’ve been working toward various new projects—not just for fulfillment but also because I’ve allowed the business side of running this site to slide for years. And I have a baby coming soon. It’s crucial that I revive what I’ve allowed to deflate because I’ll have a whole new life to provide for.

    There’s a lot I need to do over the next six weeks, before my scheduled C-section, and a lot I’ve failed to do over the previous weeks, largely because I’ve had many days when I’ve felt physically and emotionally incapable of rising to the challenge.

    To be fair, there’s also been a lot to enjoy and appreciate, and I know I am incredibly fortunate to be pregnant at all, and to have the opportunity to do so much professionally. But life has felt somewhat pressure-filled as of late, and along with many small wins have come many hours and days when I’ve felt drained and defeated.

    I recently realized that my best days all have certain things in common—little things I choose to do for my well-being, and a number of unhelpful habits I resist the urge to indulge. If you’re also struggling, personally or professionally, and feeling drained, perhaps my lessons will be helpful to you too.

    5 Things to Stop Doing When You’re Struggling and Feeling Drained

    1. Stop comparing your struggle to anyone else’s.

    Over a year ago an old friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s the same age as I am, and she’s someone I’ve long admired, even though we’ve fallen out of touch beyond occasional interactions on social media.

    She’s left unfulfilling jobs, despite the financial risk involved; walked away from relationships that weren’t right for her, even while engaged, when it would have been easier to stay; and jumped out of more than 100 planes, each leap representative of the courage that guides her every inspiring, bold life choice.

    She’s faced cancer with the type of bravery I’ve come to expect from her, coupled with an honesty and vulnerability about her fears that, to me, displays even more strength. But still, I know it’s been grueling.

    As I sit here in my own very fortunate circumstances—at the same as age as her—I often tell myself I have no reason to be struggling. My current experience couldn’t even be termed a struggle compared to what she’s been through. I should just suck it up when I’m having a hard day and push myself through any tiredness or discomfort. Because I’m lucky.

    But the reality is, I still have hard days. I am still going through a high-risk pregnancy, juggling a lot, and dealing with a host of fears and physical symptoms that require my compassion.

    I wouldn’t compare my hard days to her devastating year—there’s clearly no comparison—but the point is, I don’t have to.

    I’m allowed to experience the feelings and struggles associated with my current life circumstances even if someone else’s are far more tragic. And so are you.

    Many may have it “worse,” but why compare and judge? If it helps alleviate self-pity so you can find the perspective and strength you need to keep going, then by all means, make comparisons. But if it only serves to minimize your feelings and needs, try to remember that two people can have completely different situations, and both can need and deserve compassion equally.

    2. Stop focusing on things that aren’t priorities.

    When we’re going through a tough time, we need to get extra-discriminating about what truly matters and what doesn’t. If we exhaust ourselves with the non-essential, we’ll have little energy for the things that can actually move the dial in the areas of our life that most need our attention.

    I remember when I had surgery to remove uterine fibroids seven years back. I knew I needed to take it easy or else I’d prolong my healing, but I also felt the overwhelming urge to maintain order in my environment. I’m a control freak. It’s what I do.

    I remember there was a pair of shoes next to the door, where shoes didn’t usually go, and not only that, they were askew. The horror!

    I was one day out of surgery, my lower stomach stitched together after being sliced across the middle, yet I still felt the need to slowly lower myself so I could put those shoes in the closet—even though it was painful to do so. My mother, who was visiting to help me, pointed out the insanity, and I knew she was right.

    I now think of those shoes whenever I am struggling physically or emotionally, and I ask myself, what else really doesn’t need to be immediately done, or do I not actually have to do myself?

    Can the dishes wait till the morning? Or can I get someone else to do them? Does every email in my inbox need a response—and immediately? Can I say no to some requests? Can I simplify my daily routine? What do I really need to do for myself, physically, emotionally, and professionally? And what do I just want to do because I think I should, to feel ahead of the curve, or on top of things, or good about how much I’m checking off my to-do list?

    Scaling back can feel like failure, especially if you’re Type A, like me, but sometimes we have to prioritize so we can use the limited energy we have wisely. If we don’t, we risk busting open our “stitches,” whether that means physical burnout or an emotional breakdown, and then we set ourselves back even further.

    3. Stop expecting yourself to do what you could do before.

    Maybe you were far more physically active or productive before (I know I was). Or you were the person anyone could call any time, any day, whenever they needed an ear or a hand. Or you were everyone’s go-to person for a night out when they needed to blow off some steam.

    It’s easy to cling to our sense of identity when we feel it slipping away. Not only do we mourn who we used to be, fearing this change may be permanent, we worry other people may not like this new version of ourselves—this person who’s far less fun or far more needy.

    But the thing is, we’re not who we were before. We’re in a new chapter, facing new circumstances and challenges, and our evolving needs won’t go away just because we ignore or neglect them.

    I’m not going to sugar coat this: It just plain sucks when you can’t do the things you once enjoyed. My boyfriend has had multiple knee surgeries and ongoing knee problems, and my heart breaks for him knowing he may never be able to do certain things he loves again, like playing basketball.

    But he’s accepted his limitations and found new things to do that check off some of the same boxes. He works out on an elliptical to stay in shape and rehab his knee. He throws himself into fantasy football to scratch his competitive itch. And he sweats it out in the sauna to help blow off some steam.

    As for me, I’m not going to yoga classes at the moment because I don’t have the time or energy, and I’m also not getting as much done as I once did on a daily basis. But I count my lucky stars that I’ll someday be able to do these things again, even if not for a while after the baby comes.

    It’s natural to grieve losses, temporary or permanent, big or small, but eventually we need to accept reality and then ask ourselves, “How can I work with the way things are instead of resisting them?” Otherwise, we cause ourselves a lot of unnecessary stress—and it doesn’t help or change anything.

    4. Stop pushing yourself when you need to take it easy.

    We all do it, or at least I suspect we do: We minimize our physical and emotional needs because we judge ourselves for having them. We think we should be able to do more. Maybe because other people in similar situations are doing more. Or because we just plain expect a lot from ourselves.

    But the thing is, telling yourself you shouldn’t be exhausted doesn’t make you better able to function through your tiredness. Demeaning yourself for needing a break doesn’t make you any more productive or effective. And belittling yourself for feeling whatever you feel doesn’t immediately transform your emotions.

    If you’re tired, you need rest. If you’re drained, you need a break. If you’re hurting, you need your own compassion. And nothing will change for the better until you give yourself what you need.

    I get that we can’t always instantly drop everything to take good care of ourselves, especially when other people are depending on us. But we can usually create small pockets of time for self-care by alleviating our self-imposed pressure and prioritizing our needs.

    Recently I’ve been embracing the idea of mini-self-care practices. It’s not easy for me, because I have a tendency to be very all-or-nothing. But sometimes, small things can make a big difference.

    I might not have time for an hour nap, but I can rest my eyes for fifteen minutes. I might not be able to clock in 10,000 steps, but I can take a walk around the block. I may not have the time to journal about my feelings for an hour, but I can jot down three worries and three potential solutions to help calm my mind.

    And sometimes, I just need to find a way to do more for my own well-being, whether that means cancelling a commitment or asking someone for help.

    It’s tempting to push ourselves, especially if this has been our pattern. But some days aren’t for moving forward. They’re just for honoring where we are.

    5. Stop reminding yourself of how you’re “falling behind.”

    I think it all boils down to this. When we minimize our struggle, try to do too much, and push ourselves despite our desperate need for self-care, it’s generally because we’re afraid we’re somehow falling behind.

    We think about everything we want to accomplish, everything we believe we need to do in order to become who we think we should be, and we panic at the thought of losing momentum.

    Most of us are accustomed to living life like a race to some point in the future when we imagine we’ll be good enough—and our lives will be good enough. Any threat to our sense of progress can feel like a threat to our self-esteem and hope.

    We also live in this constant bubble of comparison, as if we need to keep up with everyone else in order to make the most of our lives.

    But none of this is true. While we may want growth and change, we don’t need it in order to be worthy or happy, and certainly not on a pre-determined timeline. We also don’t need to keep up with anyone else because we’re never behind; we’re simply on our own path.

    What’s more, wherever we are right now, this is a valid piece of our life experience, and perhaps even a valuable part. We don’t need to rush through it to catch up to everyone else or to where we thought we’d be.

    Most people would agree that some of their most immense growth came from their greatest challenges, and in some cases, even their sense of purpose.

    I would never have guessed, during the ten-plus years I struggled with depression and bulimia, that that period of my life would be the catalyst for this site.

    I could never have imagined how profoundly my pain would shape the trajectory of my life, and how this chapter would lead to new chapters that were equally as exciting and fulfilling.

    Wherever you are right now, be there fully. Accept it. Open up to it. It’s only when we accept the lows that we’re able to grow through them and rise to the highs.

    —

    Yesterday was a tough day for me. I was tired. I hurt. I did little, got down on myself, and cried. But today was better. Today I was kind to myself, I did what I could, and I gave myself what I needed.

    Whatever you’re going through, I wish the same for you: self-compassion to help alleviate your pain, permission to do only what you reasonably can, and space to take good care of yourself.

  • 3 Ways to Stop Obsessing and Start Enjoying More of Your Life

    3 Ways to Stop Obsessing and Start Enjoying More of Your Life

    “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” ~Marcus Aurelius

    I’ve come to realize that worrying and obsessing don’t help or change anything.

    Hold up. Wait a minute!

    Let me rephrase that, because worrying and obsessing do change things. They make your life worse. I think pretty much everyone in the world knows this, but how hard do we try to stop doing these things?

    What If?

    Every day you wake up and you think and obsess and wonder, “What if?”

    What if I lose my job? What if he leaves me? What if I lose everything and end up homeless?

    Day after day your mind spins out of control contemplating all the things that could go wrong with your relationship or your life. On and on and on it goes, and where it stops nobody knows.

    Aren’t you getting tired of thinking all the time? Isn’t obsessing about possibilities wearing you out? At what point do you decide you should stop getting caught up in your thinking, but then actually make a change?

    I’m tired, and I know relentless thinking wears me out. Just to let you know that I understand, I’ll give you an example.

    Honestly, I have the best boyfriend ever (for me anyway) because he doesn’t let a lot of things get him down. I mean, the guy is genuinely happy and content 99% of the time. Me, not so much. He has been through multiple deployments, many of them combat, and still he never lets stuff get to him.

    But, how does this happen? Where can I get some of what he has? This, I have been contemplating.

    I’ve come to realize he feels happy more than I do because he doesn’t overanalyze life, question everything, and obsess about the future. And he probably also doesn’t obsess about how happy he is and how he can be happier!

    Here’s how it goes:

    Me: “Does he even love me? Is he ever going to totally integrate me into his life? Am I too boring for him? I really need to get some hobbies. Am I settling, or do I expect too much? I’m so fussy sometimes and I don’t know how he handles it. Where are we going to move? When is he going to deploy? Where is he going to go? Is he going to leave me here all alone?”

    I look over at him longingly, wondering what’s going through his mind, because it must be something serious and important, and he must be contemplating the fate of our relationship or the existence of the Universe, right?

    He knows when I look at him with that longing look I want to know what he’s thinking about. So, I say, “Tell me, I must know!”

    Him: “I need some new pants.” Or he’ll utter, “I want a key-less ignition for my bike.” Or, the earth-shattering statement, “My feet really stink.”

    It’s possible he’s just not telling me what he’s really thinking, but if he is obsessing like I do, it doesn’t show in how he lives his life.

    The more time I spend with him, the more I realize I’m wasting my life away obsessing about what might be or what could be or what isn’t instead of simply enjoying the moment and living in gratitude for what I have.

    My guy gets all happy and excited about the little things, and for some reason I don’t. I try. So far, I have failed. But, I vow that going forward I will not fail. I will stop obsessing all the time and I will be a lot happier as a result.

    Do you know why you obsess? Is it serving a purpose anymore? If not, you can change it. Here’s how.

    1. You have to want it.

    Are you at the point where you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired yet? If not, keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe obsessing still works for you in some way and you aren’t yet ready to change. That’s okay. We all change when we’re ready, and we get to different points at different times.

    Wanting to change starts with a conscious choice you have to make. At some point you decide that you want to take control of your life instead of letting your life, your history, and your mind control you.

    Think long and hard. Do you truly, really, honestly want to be happier? I believe that I have struggled with this notion for a long time. In my head I want to be happy, but in my heart there’s a seed of doubt.

    Happiness is something I had briefly when I was a small child, but it was shattered by abusive adults. What if I get it back and it gets taken away again? As an adult I know that isn’t logically possible because no one can take away my happiness, but it’s still a lingering fear.

    Do you feel something similar?

    Despite this fear I’ve decided that I want to be happier. I’m running out of time. We’re all running out of time. Your life is ticking away every day, and you never know when it will end.

    Decide you want to enjoy more of your life. Decide you deserve to enjoy more of your life. Decide you will do something to change, and then you will.

    2. You have to rewire your brain.

    This is the hard part. Your mind has been wired a certain way, possibly due to traumatic events, abuse, or neglect. There’s a roadmap that takes you from Point A to Point B, without fail. Before you know it, an innocuous thought like, “Does he really care about me?” has turned into you remembering every instance he showed you he didn’t care (or at least that’s how you interpreted those events), and you have now convinced yourself you should break up.

    See how this works? Often, it isn’t logical, and it isn’t factual. You’re creating stories in your head because your mind is trying to contain and assuage your fears, put them in a box, and allow you to function with the ever-scary “not knowing.”

    The fact of the matter is, you don’t know. You don’t know if your partner will leave you (they might die or cheat or break up with you—or they might stay forever). You don’t know if you’ll die tomorrow. You don’t know if you’ll lose your job or have financial struggles or end up winning the lottery.

    Recognize when you’re obsessing, then decide to accept what you don’t know and stop getting caught up in your thoughts. Do it once. Do it twice. Do it over and over and over until you have a little peace. If meditation helps, then do that. If sitting at the beach or reading a book helps, then do that. Do whatever will help you bring a little peace to your mind.

    Once you’ve created a little space in your head, you have to start believing. When you realize you’ve been wondering, “Does she really care about me?” remind yourself, “She shows she cares about me.” Start believing the good instead of the bad.

    It took me about a year to convince myself that my boyfriend really cared, even though his actions showed he did. He kept showing up and didn’t run away, but still, I had to get over my fear that no man would ever really care about me and they’d only want to use me.

    If your partner doesn’t show they care, then that’s something you need to actively address. Obsessing about something can’t change it. Only action can.

    3. You have to learn to love the little things.

    I know this is hard sometimes. If you feel apathetic or tired or depressed it’s hard to see the good in anything. But every day there are usually little things that happen that could bring you joy, even if for a few minutes.

    Yesterday I went to the beach for a few hours. Being in the sun, feeling the wind, and hearing the ocean brings peace to my soul. I try to do this as often as possible because it reminds me to appreciate being alive.

    Watching him cook breakfast makes me happy. I had to learn to sit back and let someone do something (anything) for me, and now I smile a little every time he whips up some eggs and bacon.

    They have a baby hippo at the zoo. He weighs five hundred pounds, but he bobbles around like a fat, happy, little apple in the water, and watching him makes me happy.

    I decided to buy some flowers to put in our bedroom so I can look at the sunny little yellow bunch every day.

    And I’m thinking we need a dog so I have something else to focus on.

    I’m trying to find simple things to make me happy instead of waiting for some big, giant event or some magical time when life suddenly changes and becomes more fulfilling, because that won’t ever happen. You create your reality, and if you keep waiting for life to happen, it will slowly pass you by.

    What about you? What makes you happy? There must be something you’re grateful for, and if not, find or create something. Do you paint or write? Maybe you like animals and want to volunteer at a shelter. Maybe you need to get out in nature every day even if only for an hour.

    Think of those little things that bring you joy and make sure you do them as often as possible. Try to focus on what’s good in your life, because we can spend all day focusing on what’s wrong or what isn’t working or what could be better, but honestly that doesn’t get us anywhere but into a negative spiral.

    Most importantly, don’t give up if you fall backward. Don’t let the outside world make you feel like you aren’t enough if you aren’t perfect and happy and smiling all the time like everyone else on Instagram. A picture isn’t life, and social media can make you feel like a failure if you let it.

    It’s okay to struggle. You don’t have to be perfect. You’re enough just the way you are, and as long as you keep moving forward and make peace with your journey, you are doing all you can and you should be proud of yourself.

    So, get out there. Stop letting obsessive thoughts control you and start living your life for today!

  • How to Embrace Your Sensitive Superpower and Stop Feeling Overwhelmed

    How to Embrace Your Sensitive Superpower and Stop Feeling Overwhelmed

    “With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.” – Dalai Lama

    Sensitivity can feel like a gift or a burden, depending on our relationship to it.

    If you often feel completely overwhelmed by an overload of stimulation, then your sensitivity probably doesn’t feel like an asset. Maybe more like a liability. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

    As an introvert and sensitive person, I’ve navigated these waters my whole life, and I’ve come to realize that sensitivity is more than a gift—it’s a superpower! But first we need to understand what sensitivity is and what it’s not.

    What is Sensitivity (the Superpower)?

    To keep it fairly simple, sensitivity is essentially the ability to feel. The more sensitive we are, the more we feel.

    Sensitivity allows us to be more aware of what’s happening around us—people, conversations, traffic, nature, how a place feels. It also makes us more aware of and in touch with what’s happening inside us—our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and how we react to external things.

    I see sensitivity as a foundation for self-awareness. Without the ability to feel, we could never discern what’s really happening and break through the limits of our personality and fears.

    Sensitivity is also an aspect of empathy. Because we can feel what others are feeling, it allows us to understand them and connect with them more deeply. Without some degree of sensitivity, we’d be disconnected from people.

    On the other side, it can be extremely overwhelming. Too much sensory information coming in all at once can leave us feeling agitated, overwhelmed, and drained. When sensitivity becomes overwhelming, we often pull away from people and retreat to time on our own—a typical trait of an introvert or HSP.

    When I was young, wherever my parents took me, I’d be very aware of the spaces around me and how they made me feel. I either liked a place because I felt good there, or I didn’t like it because I felt uncomfortable.

    At that time, I didn’t comprehend much more than that—I didn’t know how to—and it’s very clear to me now that I didn’t have a context for it back then. There was too much sensory information passing through me, so when a place felt unpleasant it was just an overwhelming sense of feeling unsettled and unsafe.

    I was also very sensitive to people. I would instantly have a sense of the state, or mood, of them as soon as I met them, or even just saw them. When I was young, I didn’t understand what they were feeling, but whatever it was, I’d feel it in myself. Depending on their emotion, this could be very uncomfortable.

    I’d find myself feeling frustrated and emotional for no reason when around certain people, but it wasn’t my emotion. Again, at that time, I couldn’t tell the difference because I’d feel it in me and assume it was me, but I didn’t understand why I felt like that. Very confusing.

    Later I learned to know the difference between my own emotions and someone else’s, as I was much clearer on what was happening inside me.

    This is when I started recognizing the gift, or superpower, that sensitivity brought into my life. In sensing what others were feeling, I experienced a sense of connection to them, which helped me understand them.

    This awakened a sense of caring in me. I could feel when people were upset, sad, or hurt, and I found myself wanting to help. If someone was angry, I started to feel beyond the anger and to understand why they felt that way. Diffusing an argument or conflict was easy because I could feel where they were coming from.

    It’s so easy to judge people, retaliate, or disconnect when we don’t understand them. The moment we understand, there is opening, heart, and compassion.

    Sensitivity, our ability to feel, is a superpower that allows us to understand, connect, and have deep insights about ourselves and the nature of humanity. And the world needs more of this.

    What’s Not a Superpower

    If we say someone is emotionally sensitive, it could mean they’re sensitive to their own emotions, or it could mean they react emotionally to others’ words, actions, and emotions.

    Being sensitive to what’s happening inside ourselves is the basis for self-awareness, and an essential ingredient if we want to grow. A superpower.

    If someone says something and we’re hurt by it, we might call it being sensitive, but it’s more an emotional reaction than a superpower. Yes, we may feel the intention behind their words, but feeling it and being hurt by it are not the same thing. If their words have triggered something in us, then it’s more about the stability of our sense of self.

    Another example: You’re in a crowded room and you become overwhelmed and drained by the noise and stimulation.

    Here your sensitivity gives you the ability to feel everything that’s happening around you. I think this is an amazing gift. It may be a lot of stimulation, but I’d still call this a superpower.

    However, when we feel overwhelmed or drained, it’s not solely because we’re sensitive. It’s because we don’t feel grounded or stable internally, as I mentioned in my previous post about how I preserve my energy in groups as an introvert. The good news is, we can proactively foster internal stability.

    When we feel overwhelmed and drained in crowds, we often just want to remove ourselves from the situation and be alone. There’s no right or wrong, what we should or shouldn’t do, but when we acknowledge what’s happening inside us, then we have a choice.

    Learning Not to Let Sensitivity Control Us

    When I was young my sensitivity was too much for me. I would feel the good, the bad, and everything in between. It felt like the world around me was not around me but passing through me; and because I didn’t have a context for what was happening, the world felt unsafe, so the only way for me to function was to shut down.

    It wasn’t something I did consciously, as I didn’t understand what was happening. It was something I did on a subconscious level.

    It wasn’t until many years later, after doing a lot of work on myself, that I was able to realize what I’d done. I’m now able to reconnect with my sensitivity and wield it while feeling safe.

    Sensitivity is a gift, but if we don’t have a stable center within us, then our ability to feel becomes stressful and overwhelming, and ultimately begins to control us. In a sense, we become a victim to the power of our own sensitivity, as if it’s wielding us.

    To embrace our superpower—to be able to feel for and connect with others deeply without feeling overwhelmed or easily hurt and reacting emotionally—we need to find stillness inside ourselves. A stable center.

    If we can’t find stillness and quiet amidst the noise of our own mind, we’ll never be able to find peace and quiet amidst the noise of the world.

    Our thoughts amplify how we react to the overstimulation of our sensitivity. We pick up on what’s happening around us, it creates a space inside us—a landscape of emotions and feelings—and this triggers thoughts. The thoughts then reinforce the emotions, anchoring them further. The emotions continue triggering more thoughts, in a vicious cycle that goes on and on.

    For example, if we’re in a loud, crowded room we may feel anxious as a result of all the sensory input—the noise, people’s energy, and the energy of the place. We may start thinking thoughts like “Why did I come here? I knew this would be a bad idea.” Then we start feeling trapped and overwhelmed, triggering more thoughts of perhaps how you blame your friend for inviting you, or “How am I going to just disappear?” This all amplifies the anxiety.

    Or, if someone says something that triggers us emotionally, we may feel insecure, then start thinking about how we always say the wrong things, and then feel more insecure.

    After starting a meditation practice, I realized that when I’m more still and quiet inside myself, I react less and less to external stimulation. I’m no longer at the mercy of my superpower. In fact, the stiller I become, the more I feel, but without it becoming chaotic or overwhelming.

    The Problem Isn’t Our Sensitivity; It’s Our Lack of Stability

    I still value time on my own. I always have and always will. But I now have a more stable center, so I’m able to use my sensitivity as a superpower.

    You can do the same by prioritizing activities that help you create a sense of internal stability, such as:

    After meditation, I particularly like spending time in nature. We can walk outside and let our mind run, and there will still be a calming effect. But when we consciously tune into our surroundings as we walk—using the superpower of our sensitivity to feel nature’s stillness—our own stillness becomes more tangible and stable.

    When we feel stable inside ourselves, we have a solid foundation to feel deeply, so the outside world has less power to control us. The stillness inside is unwavering, regardless of what’s happening outside of us.

    —

    Our sensitivity is a gift in that it opens the door to a more connected world, but we need to proactively foster internal stability so we’re not at the mercy of the chaos around us. The more we embrace our superpower and live in it from a space of stillness and stability, the more at peace we will be inside ourselves—creating a greater capacity to help others, and in turn creating a more connected humanity.

    Find stillness. Find your superpower.