Tiny Buddha

Category: Blog

  • Why I Won’t Let the Fear of Failure Hold Me Back

    Why I Won’t Let the Fear of Failure Hold Me Back

    “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.” ~Winston Churchill

    I am scared of sharks. Often when I’m floating in the ocean on my surfboard, amazed at the vastness before me and my relative smallness in the world, my mind drifts toward what may be lurking below.

    I know that I am more likely to get injured during the car ride to the beach or get struck by lightning when I get there than be attacked by a shark. I also know that, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and the International Shark Attack File, there are more injuries every year from unfortunate encounters with buckets and toilets than sharks (no lie).

    Although at times, I can feel the fear run through my entire body, I have never let that fear drive me from the water. Logically, I know it’s an unfounded fear caused by dark tales, media sensationalism, and the movie Jaws (thanks a lot, Mr. Spielberg). If only it were that easy to talk myself down from my worst fear: failure.

    Sharks I can handle. Failure? Well, that’s something entirely different.

    Fear of failure keeps me up at night and causes anxiety that can lead to chronic pain and depression. I once had a “lump” in my throat for a year. I went to the doctor convinced that I had some sort of mass growing, but no. It turns out it was an anxiety symptom (and a rather common one at that) brought on by my attempts to grow my abstract painting and essay writing business.

    That doctor’s visit was a huge wake up call for me. I mean, working on my art was supposed to be liberating and elating. Instead, I found myself bound up internally, unable to maneuver freely through this new life that I was creating for myself. I was jumpy, irritable, and terrified.

    At first, it was hard for me to identify where all this fear was coming from. I spent months writing about my anxiety and little by little, came to the conclusion that failure is my monster hiding under my bed.

    Self-Induced Pressure is My Worst Enemy

    I put a lot of pressure on myself to be a good mom, a caring and supportive wife, to contribute financially to our household, to be a “success.” I have always felt that I don’t do enough.

    Even though I would wake up early to paint or write, go to my day job, pick up my daughter from school afterward and take her to her extracurricular activities, go home and bake cookies for little league bake sales, cook a nutritious dinner for my family, read to my kiddo before bed time and spend time with my husband after she’s all tucked in… I never felt that I was doing enough.

    When I began focusing on my business full-time, I would get up to write and submit articles and press releases to various media outlets. I would paint daily and document the process for my social media feeds. I applied and was accepted to various art shows. I took online marketing and PR courses. I maintained a blog, built a website, created an art pop up shop, and developed various revenue streams.

    Guess what happened? Not much financially, but I totally exhausted myself, felt like I was getting nowhere, and wondered why I fail at everything I do.

    I realized that the anxiety that I have felt the majority of my life had nothing to do with my circumstances. I’ve struggled with anxiety because I’ve always chased “success” without defining specific goals, and without specified goals, there was no way to measure successes. No matter what I did, it was never good enough.

    I would make a beautiful meal and apologize if it was overcooked just a little. I would sell a painting but be irritated that I didn’t sell three. I would attempt a new painting technique and would determine that it was no good because 200 people didn’t like the photo on social media.

    It became clear to me that no matter what I did, I was going to struggle with this fear of failure, so I knew I had some redefining to do.

    There was absolutely no reason to pursue my art and writing if it was going to turn me into even a larger stress case than I already was. Working for other people was stressful enough, but at least it came with a steady paycheck. So, I made a decision: I had to let go of this incessant thought that nothing I do is ever good enough.

    Learning to Have Faith That I Am Doing the Right Thing

    In the past I’ve questioned whether I’m doing the right things, and this has only fueled my anxiety and fear of failure—because failing would just prove that I should have been doing something else.

    Now, I choose to believe that I am doing what I what I was put on earth to do. That I was given the gift of art and creativity, and it would be irresponsible for me to not pursue it.

    For one thing, I wouldn’t be happy, and I believe that being happy is our first priority as humans. Without happiness, I would likely live a frustrated, unfulfilled life, and that would have a negative effect not only on me but also on the people around me.

    I may not meet my own high standards through my current path, but I must have faith that by paying attention to my gifts and attempting to learn more about them every day, I am always making progress.

    If I am consistently working on the very thing that I was created to do, then there is no failure. In fact, the only way I can fail is to ignore my gift. In becoming an adventurer and diving deeper into myself and my creative life, I have already succeeded. Really, the only way I can fail is if I abandon my creativity.

    Failure Is Part of the Path to Success

    It’s tempting to avoid any decision that might result in failure. But the only way to ascertain what works is to try different things. That means facing uncertainty and risking that things might pay off and they might not.

    You know the saying “When in doubt, don’t”? This may be applicable when thinking about paddling out into fifteen-foot waves or buying a $300 pair of boots, but not in implementing a new marketing tactic or trying a new painting technique. I might fail when I try new things, but if I don’t take chances, I’ll definitely never succeed.

    “Failure” Is Just Another Word for “Learning”

    Earlier, I mentioned that I had created a pop up shop on my website. I thought that if I repurposed my art for throw pillows, tote bags, and canvas prints I would create a brand-new revenue stream, at affordable prices, therefore making my art accessible to more people. Sounds like a good idea, right?

    Well, not only did it not make money, it took valuable time away from my painting and writing, and I learned that creating new manufactured goods is not in alignment with my vision of bringing awareness to ocean cleanups and coastal environmental health.

    At first I was completely bummed. My new idea had failed. But did it really? By creating the shop, I actually learned a lot.

    For one, I learned that my love for the ocean and my care for the environment trump my desire to manufacture products. That’s huge! Sure, I felt embarrassed for all of the live videos that I had posted trying to sell my goods. But whatever! I learned an important lesson about what I don’t want to do with my art.

    I have realized that by even attempting to make a living from my art, I am taking a chance. I may have to get another day job in the future, but I also just may rent out the house and use that income to get in the surf van and take my “artventure” on the road. There are no right or wrong decisions here except the one where I’m constantly beating myself up. I’m getting off that crazy train right here, right now.

    We all have moments where we are paralyzed by the possibility of failure. But by choosing to look at failure as just another way to see deeper into ourselves, we can diffuse that fear.

    My fear of failure will always have one hand on my shoulder, trying to pull me back from the cliff’s edge, telling me that there is no possible way I can leap that far. But the truth is, unless the cliff in front of you is a literal cliff with a fifty-foot drop, falling might not be the worst thing in the world. In fact, the only way to truly fail sometimes is to not take the leap at all.

    I don’t let the unreasonable fear of that great white shark encounter keep me out the water, so why should I let failure keep me from doing what I love to do?

    From this point on, I choose to thank my fear of failure for looking out for me in the past and trying to protect me from the sharks. However, it’s time for me to dive into the unknown with awareness that there will be some stumbling and most likely some falling. But in this infinite journey of art and growth, failure is just a scary shadow lurking beneath me that might turn out to be nothing at all.

    Lighting, buckets, and toilets? Well, that’s another story…

  • How Micro Habits Can Help You Reach Big Goals

    How Micro Habits Can Help You Reach Big Goals

    “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ~Lao Tzu

    Many of us have big, grand goals for our lives.

    These goals can be tied to our work, or maybe starting a family, or ideals for a new home with that family, or travel to an exotic location we’ve long dreamed about, or pretty much anything else. Oftentimes these goals can seem a very long way from where we are presently in our lives. In fact, sometimes they can seem so far away that they appear to be totally out of reach.

    As a consequence, too many of us give up even trying to make these things happen. And that’s a real shame, because sometimes all that is required to make them so is putting one foot in front of the other in their general direction.

    The Pressure of Big Steps and Overnight Success

    Part of the reason we give up is that we put ourselves under pressure to make things happen quickly. We try to make grand, sweeping changes in our lives and expect overnight change. If this doesn’t happen, we can quickly become discouraged and quit. We lose sight of any and all progress we may be making toward our goals.

    Perhaps we try to uproot and change all our habits at once, and it doesn’t happen. These habits may have been part of us for a very long time, yet we expect to change them swiftly.

    This cycle can repeat again and again. It can be really disheartening. We try so hard but get nowhere fast.

    What I’ve found, in making significant positive changes stick in my own life, is that often the small steps and habits that underpin them do not get enough attention. In fact, I believe there is an untapped magic in these seemingly small habits. They can support even the largest of goals.

    From a Writer Who Didn’t Write to One Who Writes Lots

    While writing doesn’t pay all my bills, I am most definitely a writer. I think a part of me always has been on some level. It’s something I am incredibly passionate about. It’s something I spend much time and energy on.

    I meet lots of writers and want-to-be writers in my travels who talk of writing their first book or starting their own blogs. Truth be told, I think most of us think there’s a book in us that we will write someday.

    When I dig a little deeper, it never ceases to amaze me how many of these same people haven’t yet developed a regular writing habit. It’s like wanting to run a marathon with their only preparation being walking 800 yards to the shops on a daily basis. The odds of it happening are slim, very slim.

    That’s a shame, as writing a first book, or starting a blog, is a pretty amazing milestone for anyone who has a passion for the written word and sharing their ideas.

    I shouldn’t be surprised this is the case, though. You see, I was one of these people for too many years. I promised to write more than I actually wrote. I thought about the books I was going to write without writing a word. I thought about ideas for articles without committing a single word to the page.

    Thankfully, this has changed in the last several years. In fact, it’s changed to the tune of seven books and counting and hundreds of articles written for my own blog and other blogs. I’ve even been lucky enough to share several articles here with the wonderful Tiny Buddha community (thank you, Lori!).  My words have now been read across the planet in many countries. My books have been purchased from most corners of the world.

    I share this not to brag but to let you know that I have skin in this writing game, and any ideas that follow have been hard won and tested. Most importantly, none of this would have been possible if I had continued to stay in the self-imposed blocks I had put myself in.

    Breaking the Big Goal Down into Smaller Steps (Write One Line)

    When I was starting my writing journey, almost everything I read in terms of advice for the writer included some form of “write so many (500, 1000, etc.) words a day.” Well, this never really worked well for me. I tried it, and I failed regularly.

    With full-time commitments elsewhere (an unrelated job, friends, hobbies, a relationship), the pressure of trying to hit a certain word count just did not fit for me. So, after many failed attempts to force it, I finally gave myself permission to try another route. I broke this down into an even tinier habit. I decided to commit to writing just one line a day.

    Some days that one line turned into many pages of ideas, sometimes it was just one line. That’s okay; the habit and practice proved to be the important part of this process. It was something that worked for me, and I could stick with. It was something that pulled me out of my writing inertia and got me moving in a positive direction.

    Why This Works

    If we make the entry point low enough, we avoid the excuses not to do something. However, if we also make the entry point meaningful, we ingrain a habit that supports regular practical steps to get to done.

    Five hundred words a day may be a more meaningful target for other writers, and it’s a target that is often shared by writers of note. Some writers commit to “two crappy pages a day.” Personally, I like to make the point of entry even lower at one line.

    What I’ve found is that, more often than not, one line turns into many, and just getting started creates momentum. It also allows me to be liberal with how I use my time. I don’t feel pressure to have one big writing block per day; I can find time for multiple opportunities to write instead (a little and often approach sprinkled through the day). For those of us that also have external responsibilities and unrelated jobs, this approach can be especially useful.

    One line is also a low enough entry point that I don’t feel bad if I miss a day completely. And sometimes I do have days where I won’t write a word. Not the trendy advice of the day perhaps, but it works just fine for me. I feel no guilt about missing a day but often find I’m twice as productive the day after a day missed and will get lots of ideas down.

    A seemingly small habit has been the catalyst for much positive change in terms of my writing.

    How We Can Apply This to Other Goals

    My example includes my writing because this is something I’m passionate about. Writing may not be your thing, but the good news is, it doesn’t have to be. This approach travels and works for all sorts of goals. I know because I utilize it regularly for lots of personal goals.

    What I’ve also found is that what appears to be a small habit change and new behavior can start to have a compound effect. We create positive momentum. We set ourselves up for success.

    Tiny steps in the direction of a goal are still steps in that direction. There is a real magic to be found in linking steps together consistently. Big goals are fine as a guiding star, but they need to be supported with smaller steps. Developing these tiny, positive habits can support even the largest of goals. Wishful thinking will not.

    Want to write a book? Get started by developing a regular writing habit. Maybe try my example of one line a day to get that done or try something else that will work for you.

    Want to run a marathon? Commit to packing your kit for the morning as one micro habit. Then link this with other micro habits that support your goal, like committing to increasing your mileage gradually week by week. Don’t expect to run that marathon tomorrow unless you’ve already put lots of work in to get there.

    Whatever your goal is, develop a regular practice to help get you closer to it. Set up simple habits that support this happening and that keep you accountable, while still being achievable. Commit to this, and amazing things can happen.

    Micro Habits—Simple, Not Easy

    This micro habit approach is incredibly simple, and that’s exactly where the power of it is. There are no tricks, hacks, or ninja secrets to concern ourselves with. No sales copy or complex points of entry to worry about. We can set our own rules or have no rules. It’s so simple it can, and will, work for us if we commit to it.

    Simple doesn’t mean easy; this approach still takes work. And that’s a good thing, as our goals will be all the sweeter if we’ve applied ourselves along the way.

    The larger the goal, the longer this process may take and the more habits we may need to stack together. We can, however, commit to embracing the process and journey for its own end, rather than being focused purely on the destination (the where we want to get to).

    Give the micro habits approach a try in earnest. You may be surprised by where it takes you.

  • The Shy Person’s Guide to Making Your Dreams a Reality

    The Shy Person’s Guide to Making Your Dreams a Reality

    “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” ~Marianne Williamson

    Light poured into the studio. We sat in a circle on the hardwood floor. We did some deep breathing and then the facilitator asked us to think about what we really wanted and didn’t have yet. She instructed us to speak it out loud in the present tense, as if it were already happening.

    I was at a co-working space in downtown Toronto, and this was the daily opening where we set our intentions for the day and sometimes did reflective exercises like this one.

    She started, “I own a yoga studio on the beach in Hawaii.” The next woman went. And then it was my turn.

    As I saw my turn was coming, my breath got short. Anxiety coursed through my body. I didn’t feel ready. “Ummmm…. this is really scary,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

    For a long time I’ve had difficulty saying what I want. When I was a teenager, I wouldn’t tell anyone when I had a crush on someone. I remember my younger sister would tell anyone who would listen that she had a crush on the boy in the McDonald’s commercial, and I was jealous of her boldness, but still wouldn’t tell a soul about my crushes.

    My best friend in elementary school always had a boyfriend, and I never did. I didn’t date in high school either. I felt ashamed. I thought there was something wrong with me and that nobody liked me.

    I thought that if I told my friends about my crush and then the person didn’t like me back, I would be seen as a failure. So it was better to keep my mouth shut.

    And now, fifteen years later, I’m still scared to ask for what I want.

    I’m thirty-one years old. And this was an incredibly safe space. I was surrounded by sensitive and supportive women, but I was terrified.

    I put my face in my hands and made some high-pitched noise that I’m not even sure how to describe.

    I sat up and looked at everyone. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to try to say one sentence about what I want.” The butterflies in my stomach started going nuts.

    “Why is this so hard??”

    “Okay, breathe,” I said, then took a deep breath. “I want to have a big life.” I took another breath. “I want to impact a lot of people.”

    The facilitator gently coaxed me, “Can you rephrase that to the present?”

    “I have a big life. I’m impacting a lot of people,” I said, “I’m a healer.” And then I really felt like I was going to vomit.

    Even in a circle of kind quiet women like me, it was incredibly difficult for me to claim my truth.

    When I was growing up I was sensitive and shy, and to be totally honest I still am. When I was twenty-three years old, I landed my dream job working with marginalized youth. And when I was twenty-four, I burnt out from that job.

    I understand what it feels like to want to make the world a better place but to get totally exhausted trying to do it. I want to help other sensitive souls realize it’s okay to rest, and to support them to heal, find their voices, and share their gifts.

    But I had no idea that talking about what I wanted would be so hard. I’ve done a lot of work on myself: years of therapy and I’ve even spoken at conferences in front of large groups of people. And yet, somehow, saying these three sentences in front of six other kind, sensitive women seemed more difficult than everything else.

    And honestly, if the question had been about my darkness, my cruelty, the part of me that hates, I would have no problem going into it. I can speak about my darkness with relative ease.

    But my light? My gifts? Please bring me a trashcan to throw up in first.

    Best selling author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson really hit the nail on the head with her quote “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

    This is me, 110%.

    And although it’s difficult, I also know how incredibly effective it is to claim what you really want. It wasn’t until I went very public about what kind of qualities I wanted in a partner that I met the sweet and passionate guy I’m dating now.

    I was sick of online dating so I actually made an entire webpage about the qualities I wanted in a partner. I posted it on Facebook and asked my friends to help me find the right person—and it took some time but eventually it worked.

    I now know that if I’m not able to speak openly about my goals in life, I’ll never be able to fully go for them. And the same is true for you.

    The good news is, if you’re shy like me and are having a hard time asking for what you really want, there are small steps you can take to start to go for it.

    Here’s the Shy Person’s Guide to Making Your Dreams a Reality:

    1. Notice who you envy, and why.

    Sometimes when we’re shy we don’t even know what we want, because we may have felt too insecure to establish and set goals for ourselves. So the first step to going for what you want is figuring out exactly what that is.

    And, surprisingly, envy can actually be really helpful for this.

    Which famous people do you envy? Which of your friends? Is it your sister? A colleague? A cousin?

    Once you have a list of a few people, ask yourself what you admire about their lives. Is it where they live? Their partner? Their job? Their confidence?

    Now, it’s important to remember that just because you envy someone’s life, that doesn’t mean you want exactly what they have.

    You might envy your friend who works online because she’s her own boss, but if you’re someone who’s happiest being surrounded by people, that lifestyle might not make sense for you. Perhaps in that case what you really envy is freedom—so the question you’d need to answer for yourself is: How can I create more freedom for myself? What choice would best align with my personality and values?

    It’s also important to look beyond the surface when identifying people you envy. Sometimes we envy people who seem to garner a lot of respect and admiration—celebrities, for example. But as Kate Spade’s recent suicide showed, fame and success don’t guarantee happiness.

    The point is to get clear on what might fulfill you, and why. So make notes and start to notice the common themes in those people you envy. As you do this, you’ll start to see the kind of life you really want.

    2. Allow yourself to daydream.

    Now that you have some clues about what you want, allow yourself to dream about it. If you have a journal, write about it. If you’re more visual, make a collage or do a drawing. Or, alternatively, go for a walk and let your mind daydream about it.

    This might sounds totally silly, but I actually made a PowerPoint about what I wanted my business to look like years ago. It wasn’t a public presentation and I only shared it with two or three close friends. But I stumbled upon it the other day and was amazed by how much of what I envisioned had come through.

    So use whatever medium works best for you to envision your dream life!

    3. Talk about your dreams.

    Once you’ve gotten clearer about what they are, tell a good friend or your partner about your dreams. I like to start these kinds of conversations by saying something like, “I’m nervous to tell you about this, and I’m not ready to have any feedback on it yet, but what I really want is…”

    Start small. Just tell one tiny part of your dream. See how it feels. See how your friend reacts. If it feels good, tell them a little bit more.

    The last thing you want when you’re nurturing a new dream is for someone to stomp all over it. So if the friend doesn’t react in a supportive way, don’t say anything else. Find someone else who will be gentle and supportive of your dream.

    Once you’ve practiced talking about it and got some support from friends or family members, it’s time to take it to the next level. Start to bring it up more often.

    I know for us shy-types this can be really difficult, but take it one step, one person, one conversation at a time. And remember, there’s nothing more inspiring at a lunch with friends or family event than to hear about what someone’s really passionate about.

    As you begin to talk about these things more, it will help you to take small steps toward making your dream a reality. You’ll begin to build your confidence and you might even make connections that’ll help you to get there.

    4. Talk about your strengths.

    What are you really good at? What do people always ask you for help with? If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to talk about your darkness, your procrastination, your bad habits, but it’s probably hard for you to talk about what you’re good at.

    So start by journaling about this and then practice telling close friends or family members.

    Does it make you want to vomit? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

    I’ve started doing this recently, and one thing that really helps me is to tell the person that I’m practicing talking about my strengths. I start by saying something like, “I’m really good at talking about my challenges and have realized that I’m really bad at talking about my strengths. I want to practice, so I’m going to practice saying one good thing about me. Are you okay with that?”

    Once I have my friend’s support, it becomes much easier to say something. And even if I fumble with my words—which, believe me, I do—they’re usually really supportive because they know I’m doing something that’s difficult for me.

    And I promise it’ll get easier with practice. So start by saying one strength to one friend and build from there.

    5. Don’t just talk—take action!

    As you tell people about your goals and strengths, they might introduce you to people who can help you, offer their support, or share helpful resources.

    And even if they don’t, there are small actions you can begin to take. If your dream is to be a painter, buy some paints and do your first painting. If your dream is to live by the beach, book a weekend getaway to one of the beach towns you’re considering and check it out.

    Whatever your dream is, you can take a baby step toward making it a reality, and those steps will lead you to where you want to go.

    And yes, it’ll sometimes be terrifying. I know that it’s not easy to do. So take one small risk at a time and slowly, step-by-step, you’ll move in a new direction.

    The more you’re able to share about your dreams and strengths, the easier it’s going to be for you to get what you want. And even if you don’t get exactly what you think you want, you’ll probably be far more fulfilled just by being on a path that excites you.

    Even as a shy person, you deserve to have a full and beautiful life. So start taking small steps today to get you there.

  • When You Reframe Your Breakup as an Opportunity, Everything Changes

    When You Reframe Your Breakup as an Opportunity, Everything Changes

    “Sometimes the most uncomfortable learning is the most powerful.” ~Brené Brown

    Seems impossible, doesn’t it?

    How can you look at your breakup as an opportunity when it feels like someone cut your right arm off and ripped out your heart?

    Breakups can be rough. When you open yourself up to another person, love them unconditionally, and compromise your own needs for the “betterment of the relationship,” you put yourself all-in. It’s no surprise that you feel lost, confused, and unwilling to move on when that connection is torn away from you. You gave everything to your relationship and now it’s gone. Forever.

    Breakups have taught me something that I never learned in school: I’ve learned that losing love is hard. Brutally hard. I experienced more pain after the toughest breakup of my life than completing an engineering degree, doing standup comedy for the first time, and walking 400 kilometers in two weeks with 50 pounds on my back. When I lost my soul mate, I didn’t know how I was going to move on.

    At first, I didn’t. I did everything I could do to escape, suppress, and avoid my feelings. I wasn’t nice to my body. I cried in the shower. I hid in the park close to my apartment since I was still living with my ex for a month after the breakup.

    It was my “grieving period.” We all need one after a breakup. But although we all need different lengths of time to grieve, it’s important to put a time limit on it. Since I knew I was going to be living with my ex until we got our arrangements sorted out, I decided that I was going to give myself that month to grieve. And grieve, I did! I was a drunk, unproductive puddle of sadness.

    Eventually I said goodbye to my ex, my cat, and my apartment. I cried on the metro on the way to my buddy’s condo. That first night away from the place I’d called home for years was brutal. But I knew my grieving period was over in the morning. And the next day, I got to work.

    The road to recovery wasn’t easy. There were many ups and downs. But I stayed focused on letting go and moving on in the healthiest way I could.

    That was two years ago, and I’m proud to say that I did let go and move on from the toughest breakup of my life. I’m a better version of myself today than I’ve ever been and I’m still a work in progress. We all are.

    When I was recovering from my breakup, I did a lot of “reframing.” I tried looking at things through new perspectives so I could develop more understanding and empathy, for my ex and for myself. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, I can put my finger on an idea, or reframe, that helped me start moving on faster:

    Breakups are an end, but they are also an opportunity for a fresh start.

    First, a breakup is the end. Accept it. If you’re reading this and thinking, “Maybe I can still get my ex back if I just do this…” then you’re reading the wrong article. Because if your mind is set on getting your ex back, this is not your new beginning. At best it’s a rerun of the same show that’s been playing for too long.

    Because guess what? When a breakup happens and people get back together, usually they break up again. And again. And again. The chances that you’ll get back with your ex and everything will improve and they’ll change into the perfect partner is as likely as me playing first base for the Yankees.

    But just because you accept this as the end of your relationship doesn’t make it a negative experience. Most things come to an end in our lives—jobs, friendships, lives, your favorite Netflix series, the tub of cookie dough ice cream in your freezer (okay, in my freezer).

    When one door closes another opens. You just have to have the guts to lock the old door behind you and walk through the new one.

    I realized that my breakup was my opportunity to:

    • Do things I’d wanted to do for a long time but hadn’t because I had a partner to consider in every decision I made.
    • Peel back the layers and look within myself to see where I was going wrong in my romantic relationships, and most importantly, how I could improve so that I would be better in my next relationship.
    • Reconnect with friends and family who had been relegated to the sidelines for five years because my relationship consumed a lot of time and energy.
    • Meet new people and get excited about a fresh chance at love.
    • Inspire other people to get over their breakups without the typical clichés and bad advice.

    Let’s face it, you’re here on Tiny Buddha because you’re interested in self-improvement and self-growth. You’re on a journey toward becoming a better version of yourself. That’s why if you’re struggling to let go and move on after a breakup, you need to reframe it right now so you can continue on your journey.

    You need to tell yourself this is your opportunity to become better. This is your chance to fix things that went wrong in your past relationship so next time you don’t end up with a partner who isn’t right for you.

    Remember, relationships end for a reason.

    You and your ex had your problems. Sure, you had love and a deep connection, but did you also have rock-solid communication, clear boundaries, and unwavering honesty? Did you share the same core values?

    I’ll say it again: relationships end for a reason. And when it happens, it’s okay. Your ex wasn’t the only person on the planet who is capable of loving you. On the contrary, if you use your breakup as an opportunity to improve things about yourself, you will attract a partner with whom you’ll find so much more love and connection that you’ll wonder how you lasted as long as you did in your past relationship.

    That’s what life is all about. None of us get things right on the first go. Finding a soul mate is no different than learning a new language or getting in shape. You have to practice. Look at your ex and breakup as a practice round. Because of that relationship, you’re stronger, smarter, and more prepared for the next one.

    This is your time. It’s your opportunity to sort through your past relationship issues and figure out how to be better.

    Because no matter what, we all play a role in our breakups. Even if you were lied to, cheated on, duped, or betrayed, you still played a role. That might be hard to hear, but it’s true. My mom always said, “It takes two to tango.” And my mom ain’t no fool.

    I had to get comfortable with my role in my breakup, too. I was no angel.

    I had to accept that I hadn’t been true to my core values. I wanted children, my ex didn’t. Still, I put that to the side because we were in love. I also realized I had a lingering fear of commitment. I was still battling with jealousy and insecurity issues even though I thought I’d left them behind in an earlier long-term relationship. It wasn’t easy accepting those things about myself, but when I did I knew exactly where the nuts and bolts needed to be tightened. And I got to work.

    For you, perhaps there were co-dependency issues or a need for validation. Maybe you stayed for the sake of the children, the dog, or the mortgage. Who knows. But I do know that you played a role and you need to accept that before you can move on.

    Looking in the mirror and accepting the not-so-good things about ourselves is difficult. People resist peeling back the layers of their personality because it means leaving themselves vulnerable and exposed.

    But you’re different. You understand the importance and power of vulnerability. And your breakup is the best chance you might ever have to rebuild yourself in the image that makes you feel like the confident champion you dream of being.

    I know your breakup sucks. I know you miss your ex and still have love for them. I know it’s hard looking to the future and wondering if you’ll ever meet your true soul mate.

    Remember: the greatest opportunities for growth in our lives come when we’re the most uncomfortable. And a tough breakup takes us way outside our comfort zones.

    That discomfort is your opportunity. Accept it, embrace it, and cherish it. Big breakups don’t come around often. This is an exciting time! You’ve proven to yourself that you’re brave enough to take a risk on love. Just because the relationship is over doesn’t take away that bravery. Now it’s time to be courageous in the face of adversity.

    And guess what? If you can shake off your breakup in a productive, healthy way, it’ll build new skills and resilience for the next time a difficult, unexpected life event happens. Jobs will be lost. Friends will drift away. People will die. Change is inevitable in your life. Now is your opportunity to prepare yourself for those times that will come whether you like it or not.

    A breakup is your opportunity to show everyone around you—friends, family, colleagues—how gritty you can be. It’s going to be hard work. It’s never easy coming to terms with our limiting beliefs, fears, and ghost in our closets.

    You have an important choice to make:

    You can choose to sit in your basement waiting for “time to heal” and hoping that by some miracle you’ll get better.

    Or you can choose to look at your breakup as an opportunity to improve the way you show up in your relationships so you can attract the right type of person into your life.

    You will let go and you will move on. But you have to start, today. The last thing you want is to look back on this moment and realize you waited too long to accept this as your opportunity. Time is too precious to waste feeling stuck.

  • What to Do If You Feel Trapped by Your Circumstances

    What to Do If You Feel Trapped by Your Circumstances

    “As long as we know we’re trapped, we still have a chance to escape.” ~Sara Grant

    Talking to someone last week who had to ‘volunteer’ to return to their country of birth, a country defined by the United Nations as one of the least developed in the world in terms of its economic conditions, was humbling.

    While I often find myself feeling trapped by the longevity, monotony, and intensity involved in child rearing, I wasn’t sure what I could say that might help someone who had been the victim of identity theft and, through lack of resources, had no option but to leave their family and the country they considered home.

    Hearing how anxious, depressed, and lonely she felt, I wondered what I could say that might make a difference. Then, as I relaxed, I realized that our situations might not be entirely different after all.

    I won’t deny that my quality of life in terms of living conditions and freedom to move around is fabulous. And I cannot deny, having lived this way, to have that taken away would feel dreadful. But I knew my sympathy would do nothing to change her circumstances.

    Instead, I took a different approach and, after the conversation that followed, I realized that what was being said applied as much to me as it did to her, and pretty much universally to anyone feeling trapped. While one person’s circumstances could be judged harsher than another’s, and there would likely be little debate about that, everything is relative, and we can all feel pain and entrapment in equal measure.

    The question is what to do about it that is helpful right now?

    Well, the overall aim is to feel your inner power, rather than a sense of hopelessness—no one can be free when they feel they are in chains. Regardless of our circumstances, how we think and feel about them is always within our control and our best hope of changing them.

    Here are the aspects we talked through:

    Surrender

    It’s our struggle with ‘what is’ that causes pain. The longer we try to resist the pain, the more it persists. Yet the worst has already happened; our circumstances are what they are.

    On an emotional level perhaps you’ve sunk to the depths of despair, which sits in a pit of hopelessness. Understand that depression is healthier than despair, and anger and frustration are healthier still. So when you are feeling emotions like anger, you have begun to take back your power, to acknowledge your right to have your freedom of choice, and you are going in the right direction.

    Do everything you feel inspired to do from a practical perspective to move in the direction you want to go. It’s also a good idea to sense check this with someone who can be objective about your situation and perhaps even offer other suggestions.

    The key here, though, is inspiration. If something you are doing, or others suggest, feels like a lead weight around your heart, that is your intuition shouting “other way.” In that case, keep to the bare minimum of what you feel duty bound to in this moment.

    I can remember back to trying to conceive and, after four failed pregnancies (my children are pregnancies five and six), there were a number of years when I couldn’t even get pregnant again. The well meaning advice was always “forget about it and it will just happen.”

    That kind of advice infuriated me. I’d think, “How am I supposed to forget something that dispatches a monthly reminder?” My partner and I did everything we could think of that felt right and, in the end, had to leave it to fate. It was at that point I became pregnant with our first child.

    Once you have done everything you feel inspired to do, let it go.

    While we ultimately all want to experience joy and love, as that is our natural state, ease and neutrality are a good goal at this point.

    I remember a scene in Nashville, one of my favorite TV dramas, where one character literally takes another who is wallowing in grief and anger and drops him in the middle of the woods. He was furious. It was actually a beautiful sunny day, but his only choice was to walk for miles. As he walked you could see him physically become unbound and relax more.

    Meditation and getting out into nature are great ways to bring ourselves back into balance, especially if we can do them regularly. This advice should never be underestimated. Our natural world is an amazing companion in the face of feeling trapped.

    Change the Narrative

    In order to feel our power and create change in our lives, we need to stop seeing ourselves as victims. You are in fact the hero of your story, and it’s likely the best parts have yet to unfold.

    You have to stop saying (even to yourself), “I don’t want to be here” because you are making yourself feel worse. That doesn’t mean you can or should start to think, “I love being here,” because you know that is not your truth. It is more about trying to focus on anything and everything that makes you feel better about being where you are.

    For me that’s easy, as child-rearing is fairly paradoxical and, as energy-sapping as it can be at times, it’s just about the most inspiring, enlightening, and fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. For that person I was talking to, while she is currently trapped in a third world country, it is one of the most beautiful countries in our world and there is an abundance of opportunities to help others.

    Take Your Power Back

    Rather than worrying about how to break out of this hole, bring light into it and life will, in its right timing, show you the way.

    In the meantime, look for other ways to find power and be purposeful. I have a friend who was feeling trapped by the need to make money, yet yearned for more meaning in her life. She took a job helping children with special needs, which—while not her calling—holds purpose for her, and she feels like she’s making a difference.

    You must look for ways in which you can be free/ Your thoughts are key, as how you view your situation can make all the difference.

    A powerful way to change your perspective is to consider that, while you may feel trapped right now, life-changing events can happen at any time—but you have to be open to notice them. If you look back on the amazing things that have happened in your life, you’ll start to see the importance of little unpredictable moments: chance meetings, something you happened to read or watch, or something someone said.

    If you can imagine that the new circumstances you dream of require some of these serendipities to line up, and you have an important contribution to make or an important lesson to learn in the process, it may help you feel better about your present circumstances. Think of it as a journey paved with stones that you can only see when you are looking for the best in where you are right now, and then jump from one to the next as inspiration arises; these are your lifeline.

    As you get used to feeling your freedom and power again in the smallest of ways, life will start to respond.

    Fill Your Cup

    To get there we have to focus on anything other than those aspects of our circumstances causing us to suffer. Do things, big or small, that distract you and make you feel better. Read, watch, and listen to whatever fills your cup.

    Again, make it a priority to get out among nature. It sounds cliché, but our natural world is like a strong, steady heartbeat, and it really helps you to gain perspective while holding you in a nurturing space.

    Write down all the things you are thankful for. I used to write out “I am grateful for…” but found it more personal and powerful to say “Thank you for…”

    If you struggle to get started on this, start with things that mostly everyone takes for granted, like the sun coming up each day. Despite our circumstances, there are usually people, places, knowledge, experiences, and other things—aspects of our selves—we are thankful to have had or currently have in our life.

    Reach out and help others in ways that are meaningful to you. Your experiences can help people, which will help you to reconnect with the love within you. It is harder to be lonely when you allow this broader part of you to take its place in the light.

    Trust

    Circumstances change; this is not forever. You have to trust that, in time, solutions will present themselves and you will be inspired to act in ways that lead you where you want to go.

    Here is a practice I learned from Anthony William to rebuild trust. Each evening as the sun is setting, take time just to notice it. This small act, done regularly, helps us to reconnect at a primordial level with the rhythm of life. Just as we can trust that the sun will rise and set each day, as we reengage with that our basic trust in life to support us also restores.

    I believe there are no accidents in this life. This means there is something about your situation that will help you (and likely others) in the long run. While you might not feel it right now, you are powerful, and you are here to make a difference. Do not give up on yourself, this world needs you.

    I also believe you’ve been called to this point for a reason, and you are not ever given anything you can’t handle. You can get through this and even find the best parts of it.

    In the meantime, be strong, be kind to yourself, and know that you are enough and you are worthy.

  • What If You Were Suddenly Forgiven?

    What If You Were Suddenly Forgiven?

    “Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.” ~Marianne Williamson

    Twenty-seven years ago I made a terrible mistake that led to losing the friendship of someone important to me. I was twelve and I very vividly remember that I was at her front door, asking for her forgiveness and she was telling me she couldn’t do this.

    Friendship is one of those areas of my life that I have always felt I need to work on. I used to believe I had to do work in this area because I was uprooted every six months to three years in my childhood. I believed that my trust in friendships was shaky because my history suggested to me that eventually one of us would leave.

    And then the unimaginable happened.

    I was faced with the truth, my unforgivable moment. The girl, who is now a woman, showed up at an impromptu reunion and I sat across from the mistake I had made twenty-seven years ago.

    She and I were best friends. We spent the night at each other’s houses and shaved our legs for the first time together. She taught me all the big vocabulary words, I taught her all the swear words. We were inseparable.

    And then her mom got sick. Shortly thereafter, she died.

    I grew up in an unconventional family where my parents were married at nineteen and had kids by twenty-one. They were boundless young adults with children and stalwart opinions, lacking in education. My dad’s dad had also died when he was young, and instead of creating empathy and compassion in him, my dad was left with the notion that when you die, you’re just dead—get over it.

    My friend’s mom was the first person most of us kids actually knew to have died. I felt the tears and remember the sadness, but like any twelve-year-old, I was ready for our friendship to resume as normal seconds after her mom passed away. Naturally, that was not the case. Thus occurred the twelve-year-old “fight” over the conditions of our friendship.

    My parents told me she was just using her mom’s death as a reason to be difficult and that she just needed to get over it. I remember my mom hissing those heartless words at my best friend. And I remember echoing a similar sentiment myself, without conviction or the wisdom of experience, thus destroying our friendship forever.

    Over the years after that, I would try to regain access to her, to our friendship, with apologies and attempts at conversation. All efforts were met with a firm “No,” or “I’m not ready.” The words not only marred and destroyed our friendship but rippled through all of our mutual friends, ending many other friendships for me. I was devastated, alone, and unforgiven. I was twelve.

    Now imagine you are forgiven twenty-seven years later.

    As I was meditating this morning, I was brought to tears thinking of my daughter and how careful I have been to express and teach empathy to her, how I have given her the pieces that I was lacking.

    And as I meditated, I realized this is where my fear in friendship lives. This is where it all stemmed from. The moving and uprooting didn’t help my trust levels. But imagine you were never forgiven for a mistake you didn’t understand, for words that weren’t yours, in a time of grief you didn’t understand. Imagine you were left behind by all you had loved and trusted because you regurgitated your parents’ problematic view of grief and death to your friend.

    Never in a million years would I ever do anything to intentionally hurt anyone, let alone my best friend. And knowing what I know today, I cannot even fathom how badly she hurt from the loss of her mother. Her mom! The one person who is meant to care for us and help us with our periods, talk to us about dating, and hold us when we cry. Her mom died. And I said the unthinkable. The unforgivable.

    Last week I woke up thinking, “What if the unforgivable thing that has played a role in all of my relationships was forgiven? What if I was forgiven? How does that fit in? How does it transform itself in my life, in my body?”

    I would breathe in a room of strangers, trust a little deeper in the friendships I currently host. I would be able to unwrap and unbutton my tightly wound guard that has protected me all these years. I could stop worrying about whether or not people would like me if they knew who I really was, and instead trust that I am worthy of love and simply good enough… finally.

    We all have an un-forgiveness story buried deep inside. We don’t have to wait years for the relief of receiving someone else’s forgiveness, if it ever comes at all. We can choose to forgive ourselves now, whether they do or not, and free ourselves from the weight of our shame and self-judgment. Take these three steps to do just that:

    1. Think about the day your un-forgiveness was born. Relax and allow yourself to repeat it one last time.

    Close and eyes and remember: What was the context in which the story happened? Who was with you? What have you done? What happened after that?

    2. Now imagine if you forgave yourself, and if there is another person(s) in the party, feel their forgiveness as well.

    How would that feel in your body? How would that transform the beliefs you formed about friendships, partnerships, business, and life? What would you do differently if you knew you were forgiven and released the shame of your experience?

    3. Give yourself and the others involved forgiveness, as we all do our best with the information and understanding we have based on our upbringing and out time in the world.

    And as Maya Angelou wrote, once we know better, we can do better. We always have the opportunity to get wiser. Forgiveness is compassion and wisdom.

    Forgiveness in ourselves and others is one of life’s great lessons. We are often held hostage by our inability to forgive and therefore so is our potential to achieve our life’s purpose.

    A big powerful thank you to my friend who forgave me after twenty-seven years. I am honored and working to spread the love you showed me.

  • The Importance of Finding and Standing in Our Truth

    The Importance of Finding and Standing in Our Truth

    “What I know for sure is that you feel real joy in direct proportion to how connected you are to living your truth.” ~Oprah Winfrey

    If we cannot live in and from our truth, then we cannot be authentic. The process of self- actualization is not striving to become the person we are supposed to be. It is removing what is not true for or about us so that we can be the person that we already are.

    The hardest part of living in my truth was coming to understand and accept that it didn’t matter how anyone else experienced my childhood and my life but myself. That includes my father, mother, and three siblings. It also didn’t matter how others were affected or not. For our recovery only our truth matters

    Why is standing in our truth so important? It is impossible to build a solid life on a foundation of untruths, lies, denial, fabrications, and misinterpretations.

    Many of us have built our lives according to what we were taught and what we gleaned from a childhood spent in dysfunctional homes. We were asked to play a role that served our dysfunctional family system and not ourselves. We learned not to question the status quo, to follow unwritten rules, to live in denial and fantasy.

    Growing up I thought my family was fine; everyone else was messed up. I thought everyone’s mother drank themselves into a stupor on a daily basis and everyone’s father had become a ghost. Neither of my parents was available for support or counsel.

    I was no good, according to my father’s constant criticism, and would never amount to anything. I was a good football player and I would come off the field feeling I’d played a good game. That was until I reached my father and all he wanted to do was to talk about the block I missed or the tackle I didn’t make.

    Slowly, I stopped to try to impress my father, and eventually I stopped trying anything at all. Then I found drugs and alcohol during the summer between ninth and tenth grade. 

    I fell in love with partying and cared little for anything else. I quit football immediately and later quit school altogether. I was a sixteen-year-old boy making life decisions by himself due to his parents’ dysfunction.

    Little did I know that no one looks favorably at partying skills, and they get you nowhere in life. It took me thirteen years to figure that out, after which I went to rehab and have been clean ever since.

    I don’t think that I lost myself; it’s more like I never had myself. I was just pieces of those around me. I had tried so hard to be who everyone wanted me to be that I left myself behind.

    “…human beings universally abandon themselves for five major reasons: for someone’s love, for someone’s acceptance and approval, to keep the peace, to maintain balance, or to stay in the state of harmony. When we abandon ourselves for someone’s love, pretending to be other than who we are in order to get someone’s love, acceptance, or approval, it is a form of self-abandonment.”  Angeles Arrien Ph.D., The Four-Fold Way 

    I had spent my life being who others wanted me to be—who I had to be to get by, to be safe, to fit in, to not make waves. I no longer knew who I was, who I wanted to be, what I liked, and what I believed. I had been a chameleon for so long and had shape-shifted so many times that I didn’t know who I was.

    This never hit me as hard as when I was a new member of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic therapy group. One of the older members confronted me during our check-ins. He said, “I don’t care what your sponsor or father thinks or what anyone else thinks; I want to know what you think.”

    In working with that statement I came to realize that I didn’t have many original thoughts or beliefs. That I had let other people and events decide who I was for me.

    “What you live with you learn, what you learn you practice, what you practice you become, and what you become has consequences.” ~Earnie Larson, a pioneer in the field of recovery from addictive behaviors 

    It is devastating when you realize that you are inauthentic. That in some ways who you are and what you present to the people and the world around you is a lie. On the other hand, this awareness is also a blessing, because without awareness there can be no change.

    I realized that I would not be able to find my truth while being subjected to the influence of my family. That I had to spend time away from them to do the work needed. That doesn’t mean that I had nothing to do with them. I just kept my time with family members short and superficial.

    I also began to spend time with myself contemplating and writing in my journal. I began to question my beliefs, understandings, and positions.

    John Bradshaw talks about coming to realize that the thoughts we are thinking aren’t our own. That it is someone else’s voice in our head and we need to determine whose. For me, I came to realize that so much of the self-critical thoughts were actually criticisms my father had of me that I had chosen to own.

    In recovery, we say that “everything that we know is up for revision, especially what we know to be true.” In my own search I was so confused and uncertain of my truth that I had to start with discarding what I knew was not true—the things my father had told me, for example. The things that I was unsure of, I had to try on and drive around the block for a while.

    Today I am aware that my search for the truth is a spiritual endeavor, which includes prayer, meditation, and contemplation. My hope and prayers are that all who read this will strive to find and live in and from their truth.

  • Everyone’s Doing The Best That They Can

    Everyone’s Doing The Best That They Can

    “All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.” ~Brené Brown

    My favorite principle is this simple truth: Everyone is doing the best that they can with the resources they have. Adopting this belief has radically changed my relationship to myself and to others.

    This idea has been explored by a constellation of religious, spiritual, and wellness practitioners. As Deepak Chopra said, “People are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.”

    At first, it’s a hard concept for us to swallow. In a culture that constantly urges us to do more, to be better, and to excel,  “I’m doing the best that I can” sounds like complacency—like an excuse. But what if we took a step back from our culture’s infinite growth paradigm and considered, “What if, right now, there is a limit to what I can achieve? Can I be okay with that?”

    I first stumbled across this principle a few weeks after I quit drinking in 2016. It was a challenging time for me. In the absence of alcohol, I watched my anxiety soar.

    I stayed away from bars and clubs to avoid temptation, but then felt guilty and “boring” for spending Saturday nights at home. When I met up with friends who’d previously been drinking buddies, our interactions felt stilted. I knew sobriety was the healthiest choice for me, but I couldn’t accept the way it impacted my ability to be social. I felt like I wasn’t trying hard enough.

    I spent weeks in a frustrated mind space until I stumbled across that precious idea: “I’m doing the best I can with the resources at my disposal.”

    At first, I recoiled. The high achiever in me—the climber, the pusher—scoffed at the suggestion that I was doing my best. “But other people have healthy relationships with alcohol. Other people maintain active, thriving social lives.”

    But in that moment, I realized that my negative self-talk was an exercise in futility. It never boosted my inspiration or activated me toward progress. It just sparked a shame spiral that sunk me deeper into inaction and guilt.

    So over time, I began to internalize this idea as my own. And as I did, I felt like a blanket of comfort had been draped over me. For the first time in weeks, I could sit back on my couch and watch Vampire Diaries without hating myself. It enabled me to find peace in the present moment and accept—not even accept, but celebrate—that I was doing the absolute best that I could.

    I’ve found that this principle has been easiest for me to internalize when I’ve been going through deep stuff.

    After a painful breakup last August, it took all of my energy to drag myself from bed in the morning. My intense emotions were riding shotgun, which sometimes meant canceling plans last minute, postponing work calls, or calling a friend to cry it out.

    Because I was so obviously using all of my inner resources to get through each day, it was easy for me to accept that I was doing the best that I could. Throughout those months, I gave myself total permission not to do more, not to be “better.” For that very reason, those painful months were also some of the most peaceful months of my life.

    Here’s the thing, though: We don’t have to hit rock bottom in order to show ourselves compassion.

    We don’t need to be heartbroken, shattered, or at wit’s end. Maybe we’re just having a rough day. Maybe we’re feeling anxious. See, our abilities in any given moment depend entirely on our inner resources, and our inner resources are constantly in a state of flux depending on our emotions (pain, stress, anxiety, fear), our physicality (sickness, ailments, how much sleep we got), our histories (the habits we’ve adopted, the trauma we’ve experienced, the socialization we’ve internalized), and so much more.

    When we consider everything that affects our capacity to show up as we’d like to be, we realize how narrow-minded our negative self-talk is. We also begin to understand that everyone comes from a wildly complex, diverse array of experiences, and that comparisons among us are useless.

    Consider how this idea can be applied in some more challenging situations:

    The Friend Who Is Stuck In A Cycle of Stagnancy

    This goes for anyone who complains about a monotonous cycle in their life but can’t seem to break it: the friend who hates their job but doesn’t leave it, or the friend who complains about their partner but won’t end their relationship.

    Those of us on the receiving end of our friend’s complaints may get tired of hearing the same story every day. But our advice to “just leave your job” or “just break up” will fall on deaf ears because it’s not that simple. They are doing the best that they can in that moment because their current need for familiarity and security outweighs their desire for exploration.

    They are experiencing a tension within their desires, but don’t yet have the ability to act on that tension. The limitations of their emotional (or sometimes, financial) resources make it difficult for them to move on.

    By accepting that we’re doing the best we can, we give ourselves the gift of self-acceptance and self-love. Only from this place can positive, sustainable changes to actions or behaviors be made

    The Parents Who Hurt Us When We Were Kids

    It can be especially challenging to apply this principle to those who have wounded us most deeply. But oftentimes, those are the folks most deserving of our compassion.

    Parents have a responsibility to their children, and parents who hurt, neglect, shame, or otherwise harm their children are not doing their job as parents. But sometimes, our parents can’t do their jobs well because they don’t have the resources at their disposal. And even then, they are doing the best that they can.

    More than likely, our parents didn’t learn the necessary parenting skills from their own parents. Maybe they never got therapy to heal old wounds or never developed the coping skills necessary to handle intense emotions. This principle can be very challenging, yet very healing, when applied to parents and other family members.

    The Binge Eater (Or Other Addict)

    This used to be me, and it took me years to accept that even when I was in the thick of my eating disorders, I was doing the best that I could.

    From the outside, the solution seems simple: “Put down the cake.” “Don’t have a third serving.” But for folks with addiction issues—food, alcohol, sex, drugs, you name it—the anxiety or emptiness of not engaging with the addiction can be insurmountable.

    Resisting the impulse to fill an inner void requires extensive resources, including self-love, self-empowerment, and oftentimes, a web of support from friends and family. Folks in the throes of addiction are caught in a painful cycle of indulgence, shame, and self-judgment, which makes it all the more difficult to develop the emotional resources necessary to resist the tug of the addiction.

    But by accepting that they’re doing the best they can, they give themselves the gift of self-acceptance and self-love. Only from this place can we make positive, sustainable changes to our actions or behaviors.

    It’s worth noting: Our actions have consequences, and when we harm others, we should be held accountable. But simultaneously, we can acknowledge that we are doing the best that we can, even when we “fall short” in others’ eyes. Forgiving ourselves (and others) is an emotional experience that transcends logic or justice. We can make the conscious choice not to hold ourselves to a constant standard of absolute perfection.

    Believing that we are all doing the best that we can opens our hearts to kindness and compassion. It allows us to see one another as humans, flaws and all. Next time you feel frustrated with yourself, stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, you’re doing the best that you can.

    Sit down with a piece of paper and divide it in half. On one side, write down the voices of your inner gremlins. What exactly are they saying? Are they calling you lazy, selfish, mean? On the second side, consider what inner and external factors affected your actions or decisions. Consider the emotional, physical, historical, and financial obstacles you face.

    As you review your list of obstacles in contrast with your negative self-talk, summon compassion and kindness for your inner self. If she is struggling, you can ease her burden by quieting the self-judgment and replacing those negative messages with an honest truth: That you’re doing the best you can with the resources at your disposal.

  • How I’m Freeing Myself from the Trap of Stuff I Don’t Need

    How I’m Freeing Myself from the Trap of Stuff I Don’t Need

    “In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume instead of the freedom to find our place in the world.” ~Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish

    I come from a time where passbook savings accounts were the norm.

    I can recall skipping along to the bank, aged eight, with one pudgy hand enveloped in my dad’s and the other clutching a little booklet.

    I’d wait my turn in line with butterflies in my belly. The teller was always so far away. But once I got to her, it was magical. She’d open a hidden drawer, extract the exact notes, and scribble the remaining balance into my passbook. Et voilà—cash in hand!

    Everything about this performance was concrete and transparent: Whenever I withdrew money, I immediately saw my bank balance decline. And without the risk of it nosediving into overdraft, it’s how I understood money was a finite entity. It’s how my parents taught me to not spend beyond my means, to only buy stuff I needed or had saved up for.

    Having a passbook savings account in my childhood and adolescence protected me from buying stuff carelessly.

    Fast-forward to 2018, now living in Australia—which equates to residing in opulence for those living in developing nations—I’m not only thirty-six years apart from my eight-year-old self, but also thirty-six worlds away. In this world my eight-year-old self would throw a tantrum if she didn’t get the Barbie doll she wanted. I blame credit cards for that.

    What also saw me come out on top all those years ago was the absence of the advertising glut that now penetrates an eight-year-old’s sphere.

    In 1982 Fiji, TV did not exist. I played outside. I read Enid Blyton. I didn’t read the newspaper. And I can’t bring to mind any specific billboards of that time, even though I’m sure there were a few in the city, where I did not live.

    Today, at forty-four years of age living in the era of affluenza and having a disposable income, advertisers know my attention is priceless. Yet, they get it on the cheap. This is despite my creating an anti-advertising bubble to cushion me: In 2014, I deleted my Facebook account. In 2017, my Twitter account. While I have Instagram, I do not use it. And I rarely watch commercial TV.

    The ads for stuff don’t just infiltrate this bubble—they gush in. Into my inbox, even when I didn’t sign up for the next celebrity’s latest self-help book because I am something to be fixed. On my phone, when I receive a text promoting a sale of 15% off TVs all day today (and today only!). On trams, trains, buses, buildings, freeways…

    The humble bus shelter does not escape from being turned into a billboard either. When I walk my dogs, I pass one that is currently telling me I can “drive away in a Polo Urban for only $16,990.” (Do I need a new car? After all my current one is nine years old, although it is running smoothly. Hmmm…) The posters on this shelter change weekly. It does not allow me the grace to become immune.

    Even if I could construct an impenetrable bubble, it’d be pointless. The Internet and its cookies would see to that.

    These cookies know—and remember with unfailing memory—what I desire (printed yoga leggings!). And they flaunt my desires by dangling carrots in front of me, whether I’m reading an online article, watching a video on YouTube, or searching on Google.

    And if the Internet tempts with its cookies, then it decidedly seduces with its availability. I can now stare at the blue light on my ever-ready smartphone and make decisions to buy yoga leggings whenever I want.

    The perfect time to do just that is before I flop into bed, after a long day’s hard work, cooking dinner, washing dishes, and watching an episode or two of my favorite show on Netflix. I should feel elated when I hit the buy button, but I find myself getting into bed not only with my husband, but also with guilt and a larger credit card debt.

    The grab for my attention and time under the guise of convenience and a better life is, however, simply the tip of the iceberg. What no one can see is that I am waging a war against myself—with the monkey-mind chatter that jumps from one justifying thought to another, convincing me that something is a need not a want. This is an example of what the Buddhists call suffering.

    About two years ago, my husband and I moved into the new house we built. It’s much bigger than one we’ve ever lived in. And as we prepared to move into it months beforehand, the justifications began:

    We need new furniture to match the modern feel of the house. (Danish style, as we had been subconsciously brainwashed by Instagram with everything that was hip in interior design.) And we need a bigger TV for the bigger living space. A new fridge because our old one won’t neatly slide into its allocated spot of the spacious kitchen. And more paintings, since we now have more walls…

    Not only did we ‘need’ all this stuff, but we also had to choose stuff that was ‘us.’ And it all had to look ‘just so’ when put together. So we researched online. Visited furniture, home, and electrical stores each weekend. Read reviews. Let the cookies take our minds into a rabbit hole of stuff we didn’t realize we needed.

    Just thinking about all the time, money, and energy we invested to get it ‘right’ sets my heart aflutter and raises a sweat. It was gruelling—the number of choices, the number of decisions (Did you know that an eight-year-old now has hundreds of different Barbie dolls to choose from?). Luckily my husband and I have similar tastes; otherwise, I’m afraid, adding a number of arguments into the mix might have broken us entirely.

    The evidence continues to pile up in favor of stuff even after the purchases have been made. After decking out our new house, I soon learned that not only did I possess things, but they also possessed me.

    I worried about scuffing the freshly painted walls, staining the white kitchen benchtop with turmeric while making a curry, and my nephews scratching the wooden dining table by racing their toy cars on it. (What’s that saying? Is it “Stuff is meant to be used and people loved”?)

    If I didn’t feel the compulsion to fill in the space, to make everything perfect, simply because the world presents me with the choices and pressures to do so, what would—what could—I do with all that extra time and energy, not to mention money? Read, write, hang out with my mum? See another part of the world? And, more importantly, who would I be? A happier, more relaxed person? The irony.

    So, with the odds stacked completely against me, how do I even stand a chance of coming out on top of all this stuff? (How does anyone?)

    I don’t believe the answer is to cut up my credit cards and get a passbook savings account, or to become a Luddite. The answer lies in cultivating awareness. By becoming aware of my thoughts and feelings, I can regain my power. Asking questions is paramount:

    Will it give my life meaning? Make my life easier, better? Why do I really want it? Is it only because I am chasing a feeling? Or because I want to squelch one? What would happen if I didn’t buy it?

    Failing this, I can always remind myself that almost everything material is optional.

  • This Weekend I Fell Apart, and That’s Okay

    This Weekend I Fell Apart, and That’s Okay

    “Look for something positive each day, even if some days you have to look a little harder.” ~Unknown

    This weekend I hurt more than I have in a very long time.

    It all started on Friday, when my boyfriend and I headed out to spend the weekend with friends—two couples, both with babies in tow.

    I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant since the start of the year, yet I didn’t anticipate that it would be emotionally taxing for me to be around two little families. I was just excited to see our friends, who live in the Bay Area, hours away from our home near LA.

    A little backstory: I’m less than three weeks away from my thirty-ninth birthday, which means I’m now in the category of “high-risk pregnancy,” if I’m even able to get pregnant at all.

    My boyfriend and I first discussed having a baby five years ago, but we kept pushing it off because our families live on opposite coasts, and neither of us was able to agree to live on the other’s coast full-time for the long term.

    We finally decided, at the beginning of this year, that I would be the one to visit my family—as often as I feel I need to, with our kid(s), for the foreseeable future—and we’d commit to staying in LA, which makes sense since we’re working toward a career in film.

    But biology doesn’t just fall in line because you finally get over your fears and decide to make a compromise. We’re both open to the idea of adoption, but there are other personal issues—that my fiercely private boyfriend would not want disclosed—that have complicated matters.

    So there I was on Friday with our friends and their adorable babies—one actually a toddler, since he recently turned two.

    We toasted our get-together around 5:00 with our first glass of wine, and the wine continued flowing throughout dinner. After, we all moved to the deck to partake in an at-home wine tasting.

    The ladies and I discussed my road to pregnancy, and though I was discouraged, for the most part I was fine—until I wasn’t.

    Having lost track of the amount of wine I was drinking, I eventually hit that emotional place I remember from my younger years, when alcohol eventually led to histrionics and tears. It is literally a depressant, after all, and generally not great to imbibe when you’re already feeling fragile.

    I don’t remember all the details of that night, but I know I cried about my fears about not being able to have a family (which, as I mentioned, is an issue complicated by many factors).

    I woke up at 4:00 in the morning and picked a fight with my boyfriend about our relationship. Then I woke at 8:00 with two things: a hangover and a shame-over. I was absolutely mortified.

    I’d gotten drunk, turned a fun night with friends into something heavy and emotional, and had caused my boyfriend a lot of pain and embarrassment. It gave me a little comfort to realize everyone had drunk too much. But I still felt deeply ashamed of having lost control.

    Ironically, I received an email that morning that I’d been waiting on for almost a month. My film mentor had just read the second draft of my first feature screenplay, and she said she was blown away by the massive improvement from the first draft.

    I had never in my life simultaneously felt immense pride and deep shame, but I did right then.

    Fortunately, the friend I cried to was extremely kind and empathetic. And no one judged me or put me down, as good friends never do.

    But that day was pretty rough for me, physically and emotionally. And the next day, it got worse.

    That night I noticed that a few people had commented on a meme I’d shared on Friday, using clipart with a hyper-sexualized female silhouette. They mentioned that it was demeaning to women to use what essentially appeared to be Barbie to represent the female form. One person called it “offensive.”

    Though there were only a few critical comments, juxtaposed against 12,000 shares, I immediately realized I agreed with them. As someone who once struggled with an eating disorder, I’d like to represent women as more than a busty, high-ponytailed caricature.

    This didn’t fully or accurately represent my values or the message I’d like to convey. And I didn’t like the idea of young girls seeing it and concluding, as I may have as an adolescent, that this was what a woman is supposed to look like, even if some women actually look like this. So I decided to take it down.

    With a mind still foggy I decided to write something on Facebook, as I wanted the community to know I felt I’d made an error in judgment. I didn’t want to just delete it. I want to make it clear I don’t agree with a society that puts pressure on women to be femme bots and suggests that our sexuality is our most valuable contribution.

    I mentioned in my post that some people had pointed out that the image was offensive, and I agreed that it was triggering—and the backlash was swift and harsh.

    In retrospect, I don’t think I accurately communicated why I decided to remove this image, since I didn’t address the cultural issue of how women are portrayed in the media and the fact that I’d like to be part of the solution, not the problem. But I’m not sure it would have mattered if I did, since I’d used the word “offensive.”

    I forgot that people often get offended by other people getting offended.

    Over the next day, hundreds of comments came in, many attacking me on a personal level.

    People called me spineless for catering to “snowflakes.” People said they lost respect for me and questioned my aptitude for even doing the work I do, since I clearly have no sense of conviction or belief in my own decisions. Even more alarming, many people mocked the idea of being “triggered,” and essentially belittled anyone with emotional or mental health issues.

    I felt misunderstood, judged, and condescended.

    I hid or deleted many of the worst comments and resisted the urge to defend myself, deciding instead to leave one clarifying comment a couple hours in. But I’m not going to lie; this affected me deeply.

    While on the one hand, I reminded myself that my power was in my response, and publicly, I only responded in one calm, clear comment, I also obsessively monitored the feed.

    By this time my boyfriend and I were at his parents’ house in Nevada, where we planned to stay for a few days, and I wasn’t even close to present. I didn’t want to delete this new post, since I believed I’d done the right thing, but it pained me to see so much vitriol in a space that I hold sacred.

    Then came another blow: I’d noticed a while back that since the start of the year, someone had been sharing every single challenge from my book Tiny Buddha’s 365 Tiny Love Challenges on Facebook. Though this person tagged my page, none of the posts included the book’s title or a link—and some people actually assumed she was writing these posts or getting them from my Facebook page.

    I’d emailed my publisher a few weeks back to ask their thoughts on this, and they told me they could send an email asking her to stop. At the time, this seemed warranted.

    Her Facebook friends didn’t see it that way. After she posted the letter from my publisher’s legal department, tagging my page, once again, the comments turned nasty.

    F— you, Tiny Buddha.

    You suck, Tiny Buddha.

    More like “Greedy Buddha.”

    Unbelievable! She should thank you for the free marketing!

    For a while, I felt completely numb. And I knew I was doing the “wrong” things by obsessively monitoring my phone and letting these comments get to me.

    I knew it wasn’t serving me to dwell in my self-righteousness and how wrong I believed it was for this woman, who enjoyed my work enough to share it, to like comments that attacked me on a personal level. But I did it anyways.

    I was angry with the people who were angry. I was triggered by the people who were triggered.

    And then something occurred to me: This whole weekend was an opportunity. It was a chance to practice some of the lessons that are much easier to practice when everything is going well.

    This weekend was a chance to remember that:

    I need compassion most when I think I deserve it the least.

    Initially, I beat myself up over several things this weekend: drinking to excess, exploding emotionally, hurting my boyfriend, choosing clipart that I wished I hadn’t chosen, letting my publisher speak for me instead of reaching out to the woman personally, and obsessing over the various challenges I was facing instead of being present.

    I told myself I shouldn’t have made any of those mistakes. I should have been beyond this. I was a fraud.

    Then I realized something: I was being as mean to myself as the people online. And not a single blow of self-flagellation was helping me move on. In fact, each self-judgmental thought cemented me further into the hole. Because telling myself I was sucking at life made it awfully hard to find the strength to do better.

    Every time I criticized myself, I weakened myself, and a weakened person is far less equipped to reframe difficult circumstances and respond wisely.

    The only way out was to cut myself some slack. I needed to stop fighting with myself and let go, as if melting into a hug from someone who had finally forgiven me. I needed my own love and compassion.

    So I drank too much and cried. I was hurting. It’s been a long journey toward starting a family, and it’s been hard. It’s okay to hurt.

    So I made mistakes in my work—who hasn’t? I owned them and publicly admitted them. What matters isn’t the fact that I messed up but that I acknowledged it and committed to doing better.

    I don’t have to be perfect. Sometimes I will make mistakes, some public, and sometimes I’ll make many that compound. The only way to stop the cycle is to stop obsessing about having done things wrong. The only way to move into the future is to fully accept the past. Once I did this, I felt freer and better able to be present.

    The approval that matters most is my own.

    It bothered me that people believed I removed the image because I needed approval from the “complainers,” as opposed to having made a decision based on my own beliefs and values.

    But ironically, once the flood of negative comments came in, I did start feeling a need for approval. I wanted people to understand and honor my positive intentions.

    It took me a day, but I was finally able to accept that some people were simply committed to judging me, and this wasn’t something to change; it was something to accept.

    It didn’t matter if some people derided me or questioned me if I felt in my heart I’d done the right thing.

    I eventually deleted the second post because I wanted to put an end to the negativity. There’s far too much of that on Facebook already. But I’m proud I waited and resisted the urge to remove all criticism immediately. For a recovering approval addict, allowing a public character assassination requires immense strength. And I give myself a lot of credit for that.

    It’s rarely personal.

    Intellectually, I knew this when people were insulting me in both places on Facebook.

    I knew that the people who were angry with me for catering to “snowflakes” were really projecting their feelings about what they perceive to be an oversensitive culture. It wasn’t just about this one image. It was about every time someone’s ever said they were offended and their complex feelings about what that means to them.

    I also knew that the people defending the woman who’d been sharing my book online were acting from a place of allegiance to their friend. They were more pro-her than anti-me. Many didn’t even have all the information—they didn’t realize she’d been sharing from a book. So really, I couldn’t take that personally either.

    This wasn’t immediately comforting to me because the attacks were so public, but when I was able to fully absorb this, it did give me some peace.

    Not everyone will see my side, and that’s okay.

    I believe one of our deepest desires is to feel understood—to know that other people get where we’re coming from and that they may even have done the same thing if they were in our shoes.

    I didn’t feel that way when people judged me personally based on the letter from my publisher’s legal department.

    I left a few comments on that post, trying my best to respond from a place of calm, but I know there are some people who will forever think I am greedy and soulless because I didn’t want my book’s content republished online.

    I’ve decided that this is okay. Not everyone has to get me, understand me, support me, be considerate of me, or treat me kindly—so long as I do those things for myself.

    Pain can be useful if you share it to help someone else.

    I decided to share this post for two reasons:

    First, I thought it would be cathartic for me. I felt ashamed for a lot of this weekend, and I wanted to be able to reframe this experience in a way that felt empowering. As I said when I first launched this site, when we recycle our pain into something useful for others, we’re able to turn shame into pride.

    And that brings me to the second reason: I thought it might be helpful for someone else to realize that even someone who runs a site like Tiny Buddha can fall into so many self-destructive traps.

    If you’ve ever drank too much and fallen apart emotionally, know that you’re not alone.

    If you’ve ever obsessed over comments online and allowed something as trivial as a Facebook feud to get the better of you, know that you’re not alone.

    If you’ve ever failed to apply what you know and regressed to the least evolved version of yourself, know that you’re not alone.

    And know that all of these things are okay. They don’t mean anything about you as a person. They don’t define you. And they certainly don’t have to dictate the future.

    This is what I needed to hear this weekend when I was despondent and numb, so today it’s my gift to you. I hope someone benefits from something in my experience, but I suppose no matter what, someone has—me.

  • When Life Hurts: 3 Tips for Hard Times

    When Life Hurts: 3 Tips for Hard Times

    “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

    Life is an unpredictable experience filled with peaks and plateaus. One thing is certain, at some point on this wild ride you will find yourself in hard times. Not everyone experiences the same kind, but life does offer each person struggle in some way. When you find yourself in this situation be gentle with yourself.

    There is no true way to ever be fully prepared for hard times. Similar to a hurricane, you can have an understanding that they will happen, but until you live through the experience of the storm and the aftermath there is no way to truly know how these events will impact you and your life.

    I have experienced many hard times, but my father’s death in January was absolutely devastating to me. My relationship with him had ebbs and flows just like any relationship does. He had been sick and when I moved closer to home three years ago we used to spend our Fridays together.

    We would go on drives through the country, looking at the scenery from the car windows. He would tell me stories about his friends when they were younger, living in California during the sixties, the things he had been reading about, and his newfound interest in going back to church after fifty years since being an altar boy.

    These drives were so special to me. I think I miss them the most.

    I knew that death was inevitable, but I didn’t know when it would happen. Preparation for this situation was impossible. There were overwhelming feelings of grief as I was pushed into basic survival mode.

    By slowing down, I found some ways to help process this situation so I could eventually feel my feet on the ground again. Hopefully you will be able to pull some ideas from here to help you process as well.

    Take a step back.

    When faced with life changing events it’s okay to take a step back from things. One step, two steps, as many steps as you think you might need. Our lives are always in constant movement. Families, jobs, and social events are just a few things that fill up and demand our time. At any given moment, there is always something to be taken care of.

    During hard times you may benefit from taking a step back from all of these heavy demands of life to focus on basic survival. Even the most mundane task may seem overwhelming when your body and mind are processing a situation. Be mindful of how you feel and begin to focus on your own healing.

    My father died in January. He went into the hospital the day after Christmas, died six days into the New Year, and was gone twelve days before his sixty-ninth birthday. He was sick and we knew we would eventually lose him, but we didn’t know when, and it was earth shattering when he left us. This year turned into a time of grieving and a transitional period.

    When someone leaves you are left to rebuild a new life without them in it. At the same time, I was going through a job transition. I was leaving a job, taking two weeks of training and moving into a different job. I had the dates planned out perfectly for this life change. The loss of my father was so great that I became physically, emotionally, and mentally drained. I stopped going to work, was unable to execute new ideas from the training, and had to move into my new job at a snail’s pace.

    During this period of time I had to do whatever I could to keep my feet on the ground and find my focus. While being constantly pulled in so many directions there were still bills to be paid. Know there is only so much energy to go around, my energy was focused on what I needed to do to get by. I was not climbing mountains and reaching peaks at this point in my life. I was walking plateaus as best I could.

    Evaluating what was most important to me at this time helped me keep focus on where my energy needed to be. It was very clear to me what I needed to do and what I needed to take a step back from.

    I spent as many minutes with him at the end of his life as I could. I spent as much time with my family as I could. I also continued showing up to teach yoga classes on the day he died as well as on the day of his services to be able to meet basic needs. Determining my focus helped me realize where my energy needed to be. I was able to take a step back so I was able to take a step forward with best intentions.

    I had to slow down to process. I took a step back from it all. Even to this day, I am still processing and I know I will again step forward but I am simply not ready at this point. At this point, I survive.

    All hands on deck.

    Surround yourself with loving and supportive people during hard times. These are your people, they will be the ones to help you through this difficult period and help you find yourself back in the world again.  They will be there for you as you navigate your way through this period into your new self and new life. They are your people.

    Allow these people to be there for you. They want to be there for you. They want to show up for you. Allow them in. It may be hard when you want to isolate into pain, but connection is so important to healing.

    Connecting with others may mean watching movies together, sending texts when you feel alone or meeting for coffee and talking about anything and everything. These people love you so much. They want you to feel it.

    For me, a Facebook post began an outpouring of love and support. I am grateful for each person who liked, commented, messaged, called, texted, showed up, cooked me dinner, let me shower at their house and simply lay on the couch.

    They were there for everything. They were the wall to hold me up and a soft place to land at the same time. They wanted to be there for me. They had no idea what I needed and had no idea what to say, but they showed up and I got through it. Allow people to show up for you, lean on them, they will support you.

    All hands on deck can mean people who you have known forever or people you are just inviting into your life. The feelings we experience are universal. You might be feeling something and the stranger sitting next to you might be experiencing the same feeling.

    Sometimes finding connection with someone can be a difficult struggle. When feeling such deep emotions it can be hard to figure out who to turn to for support during these times.

    There are so many routes to go—people we know, support groups, community forums, counselors, doctors, religious environments, blogs to read, or social media are just a few places to find support systems to help you through hard times.

    Even reading books about topics similar to what you are going through can offer some clarity. Try out different things and see what works best for you. You may find someone going through the same thing in the most unusual place. Keep yourself open to it.

    Take all the time you need.

    Hard times guarantee a change in life’s rhythm. Great changes are happening as one part of life ends and another begins. Hearts and minds are evolving from this experience and that is transforming how we see the world around us.

    During this period of time, be gentle with yourself. Give yourself all the time you need. Listen to others’ stories, but know that you are in your own story and you know what’s best for you. If you need sleep, then sleep. If you need to cry, then pour. Listen to your body and give yourself what you need. There is no rule book or time limit for healing.

    Right after my father’s death, I thought I would go back to being myself and fall back into my regular rhythm in no time. I didn’t realize these hard times would shake me up and change who I was and the way I saw life, but they did.

    Walking in the woods, watching movies, and reading in bed are just some ways that I have been taking my time to absorb this situation. I have cried everyday and I’m not sure if that is going to ever stop. I just keep giving myself more time.

    Each day I fall back into the rhythm of this wonderful life that I live. Then some days I fall back out. It is a process that I am fiercely trying to honor. I am trying to be gentle, to be in it, to always keep moving forward.

    When you find yourself experiencing hard times, soften into these sharp edges in life. Step back from the pressures of the everyday, feel the love and support around you, and take all the time you need. You will come to trust in the magic of life again.

  • What It Means to Live Life with Open Palms and How This Sets Us Free

    What It Means to Live Life with Open Palms and How This Sets Us Free

    “Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    Roughly one year ago, I was having the time of my life.

    Everything seemed to be going well. My stress levels were at an all-time low. I was enjoying myself in a new city. Work was engaging. My meditations were deep and fulfilling.

    And when I looked back on things one year later, I was kind of, well, frustrated.

    Because things haven’t been going that smoothly lately. Don’t get me wrong; they haven’t been terrible. I’m in a loving relationship, and I’ve achieved a couple of significant milestones this year, but some aspects of life have been challenging.

    A couple of months ago I was talking to a meditation teacher who I occasionally consult when I’m having issues with my practice. I was honest about my situation, and my frustration with it.

    So I asked her what I was genuinely thinking; why doesn’t it feel like things are as good as they were twelve months ago?

    And what she told me stunned me. I mean, it really left me thinking.

    “You need to start living life with open palms. You tried to grasp onto the good times you had, and the experience has gone. But any challenges you have now will also go, you just need to hold onto them softly, with open palms.”

    The metaphor was so poignant. It made complete sense. I could feel myself grasping onto the idea of the old scenario and making dozens of assumptions about the new one.

    And those words stuck with me. They truly resonated. In fact, echoed might be a better description, because since then, whenever I’ve started to stress and hold onto my problems too tightly, the image of two open palms would arise and drift around the back of my mind, calling me to pay attention to it.

    There’s a reason why this metaphor is so accurate—the left cerebral hemisphere, which we use for focused attention, is also responsible for the grabbing motion our hand makes. The right hemisphere on the other hand (pun absolutely intended) is used for both open-minded thinking and open exploratory motions. So when someone tells you to hold on or to let go, they’re telling you what to do with your mind, not just your hands.

    So over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to reflect on what this means from a practical perspective, and while teachings like this take years to really digest, I’ve come up with a few ways in which you can start to live life with open palms, right now.

    Appreciate things momentarily.

    At first, I didn’t really understand why this was important. To only appreciate things for a split second seemed to be to under-appreciate or even neglect them. But I soon realized that when I was trying too hard to enjoy something, I ended up quickly telling myself a story about how good it was—and soon enough I wasn’t actually experiencing the object anymore, I was enjoying the idea of it.

    By making a conscious attempt to appreciate things momentarily, I’ve been able to achieve two things. Firstly, I get used to short-term experiences so when pleasure leaves, it’s okay because I know something else will come soon. And secondly, I’m able to focus on the direct experience and not get lost in my judgments about it.

    Remind myself about the transience of things.

    This is relevant to letting the momentary experiences go.

    Whenever I see a pleasure arise, whether it’s a nicely cooked meal, a Netflix show, a hot shower, or just sitting down after a long day, I try to remind myself that it will soon pass and something else will replace is.

    When I’m experiencing less pleasurable states, like physical discomfort, boredom, tiredness, or even pain, I similarly try to watch it come and watch it go, not getting too attached either way.

    Identify with my experience over my narrative.

    Though relatively simple, this idea is incredibly profound.

    My worry over whether or not I was better off than twelve months prior was largely rooted in the story I was telling myself. The story, once I had told it enough times, quickly became my experience.

    If however, I had just been focusing on the sensations I was having in each moment, there would have been no ruminating on the past, and a lot of the problems I was creating for myself simply would’ve ceased to exist.

    Don’t shy away from pleasure.

    One of the ways we protect ourselves from subtle feelings such as a fear of loss or feelings of not being worthy is by not allowing ourselves to fully appreciate positive experiences when we have them. It takes a certain kind of vulnerability to give ourselves over to pleasure, and oftentimes there is an unconscious shield between us and our experience that may manifest itself in slight muscular tension or distracting thoughts.

    I’ve made a conscious effort to focus on getting the most out of joyful moments when they come up and not holding back from completely enjoying them.

    Question my relationship to time.

    A lot of the suffering that comes from our experience arises because we can’t help but compare it to another moment in time. In my own case, it was because I was arbitrarily using the marker of a year to make judgments about how I should’ve been feeling.

    I felt that this year should be as good as or better than last year. Not only is it pointless to make the comparison, but it’s impossible to do so accurately. When we’re told to be present and not focus too heavily on the past or the future, it’s not only practical advice, it’s rational advice; our ideas about time are incredibly skewed and often dictated in large part by our emotional state in that moment.

    The ways by which I’ve been trying to live life with open palms are nothing groundbreaking. They’re tried and tested ideas that most of us have already had some exposure to. What is difficult, however, is our ability to remember these in any given moment, when they should be most useful.

    We can do this by anchoring ourselves to the ideas, whether through a mantra, a memorable metaphor, or simply just repeated exposure, as you’re doing right now reading this article.

    How have you tried to live life with open palms? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

  • Swipe Right on Mindfulness: My Apprehensive Journey into Meditation

    Swipe Right on Mindfulness: My Apprehensive Journey into Meditation

    “You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.” ~Amy Poehler

    I sat there and listened, pretending to be interested.

    Did he really just say he meditates every morning? Don’t roll your eyes. At least he’s really attractive. You can just ignore the hippy meditation stuff. 

    But c’mon. Meditate every morning at 6am? Who does that? How ridiculous.

    So I did ignore his hippy meditation stuff; he eventually ignored me.

    I have an endless supply of ill-fated dating-by-way-of-phone-app tales. Most of them end in a relatively similar fashion, but that’s for another blog or a cabernet-supported whine-fest with a good friend. This dating experience in particular was quite a bit different.

    Although this was the last time I dated a beautiful actor-slash-model-slash-writer, it happened to be the start of something else. Something much bigger than the initial lesson I learned—that sliding my finger across a cracked iPhone screen while waiting in the grocery line behind an adorable elderly lady writing a check for donuts was, sadly, not going to lead me to my soulmate.

    However, it would guide me to a discovery far more powerful and impactful.

    Not until years later would I look back on this casual swipe right on my handheld device as one of the most profound decisions I had made in my adult life. To say it changed the trajectory of where I was headed wouldn’t be an overstatement.

    Thanks, Tinder. I really should go back and award you those four stars. Remind me later.

    But back to this awkward date.

    Shortly before this guy began to “forget” to respond to my texts, before the “new phone, who’s this?” kick-to-the-gut, before the inevitable self-doubt blame game, there was a brief, almost forgettable moment during this date that I now fondly look back upon.

    The Start of Something New

    I was super insecure at the time.

    How does my hair look? Why did I wear this old sweater? God, he’s a GQ cover model and I look like a rejected 1999 Old Navy performance fleece ad fused with the ‘before’ Proactiv infomercial image that airs at 2am.

    My mind never stopped. I was the king of insults, and I was my favorite target.

    But somehow, amidst the relentless inner dialogue and self-destructive thought patterns, I noticed a striking presence from this guy. When he spoke, he was so focused. When he listened, he did so intently.

    Also, he was so nice. Plain and simple nice.

    I suspected he wasn’t worried about what his hair looked like. (Note: It looked perfect. Whatever.) And it seemed like he wasn’t thinking ahead about what to say next, or regretting what he had said prior. He was present. So much so, it made me very uncomfortable.

    As for myself, I had a checklist of things in my head to say as well as some predetermined witty lines that I was proud of—for real, some of them were funny. I even prepared some self-deprecating jokes about being a late-twenties directionless bartender, so I could at least claim to insult myself first if that subject came up.

    It was exhausting.

    Spoiler alert: This dating experience with Perfect Hair was short lived. But I beat myself up about it for a while.

    What did I say? Why didn’t I get my haircut? Why didn’t I get a spray tan!? I went on and on. These questions were endless and unnecessary. Except maybe the tanning one. I really should have bronzed up a bit— a little color never hurt a pale person, as my mom always says. But I didn’t. And so there I was, annoyed, bitter, single—and yes, pasty.

    At the time, it didn’t make any sense to me. I was bummed. I chalked it up to my continual bad luck and blamed the world for being out to get me. Ya know, the usual.

    Little did I know that this one date would be such a turning point in my life.

    A Seed Was Planted

    My mind was a messy field of weeds and cobwebs, but somewhere among them was perfectly conditioned soil that could harbor some new kind of life. Something about this guy stuck in my mind. And that something grew. I would continue to insult myself for the foreseeable future, but I took a brief respite from the witty yet destructive banter in my head to explore that “silly hippy meditation stuff.”

    “I meditate every morning,” I remember him saying.

    I still thought this was a ridiculous admission, but I decided to look into it. Maybe for just five minutes. What did I have to lose?

    So instead of spending further time mindlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed and wondering how I know so many people with flawless beauty who are perpetually on breathtaking vacations, I pulled up Google.

    In addition to a roll of my eyes, the word “meditation” used to elicit a visual of an un-showered, bearded hippy sitting cross-legged, surrounded by a cloud of suffocating incense smoke, chanting unintelligible words.

    It’s partly because the term carries with it some dated, preconceived ideas, sure. But I also grew up in a very conservative town a few miles down the road from the not-so-conservative Woodstock, NY, where a drive through would be a sightseeing tour of extreme body hygiene practices of “hippies” with a side of snide judgmental comments.

    That was my introduction to this world. That was my initial—and only—understanding of people who participated in silly hippy meditation stuff.

    But hold up: Meditation really just means sitting quietly and focusing on what’s going on in the moment? And breathing? That’s basically it? Is it really that simple?

    Yah, man, it’s that simple.

    There is obviously much more to it than that, of course. There are books upon books, courses and classes upon websites and blogs on meditation. But at its core, it really is so simple: Sitting and breathing.

    Why the hell didn’t someone tell me that it wasn’t this weird, silly, far-left liberal belief system? That it didn’t require a robe, facial hair, and skipping a bunch of showers. I don’t have to chant? What about sitting cross-legged? Incense and a beard? No, no, and no?

    WHAT. THE. HELL.

    It sounded so easy and was also a huge relief, because I look terrible with a beard and I’m not at all flexible.

    I had no reason not to give it a try.

    I was finally in the perfect place, mentally and physically (no beard!), for my exploration of this topic to begin.

    So I started reading. Book after book after book. With an apprehensive perspective and holed up in a coffee shop with my hand covering the title so no one could see what I was reading (Uh, It’s Game Of Thrones, bro,) I immersed myself in this stuff.

    I also realize in hindsight that telling someone I’m reading Game Of Thrones is not any “cooler” than revealing I’m exploring meditation. It’s basically a dorky tie.

    I started by seeking out authors who had the same skeptical approach that I initially had, as it helped me tread cautiously into something that could scare me away if I dove in too deep, too fast.

    Initially, I thought it was a bunch of ridiculousness. I gave up once. Twice. Five times.

    But I pushed through. I kept remembering that fleeting moment from that cringe-worthy date. How relaxed, how present, how kind he was.

    He meditated every day.

    If it worked for Head & Shoulders Model, it would work for me. I should put that on a hat.

    Ever so slowly, in the subtlest ways, I began to notice a difference. It was minimal. It was almost unnoticeable.

    I just felt… better. Lighter. Happier? Maybe. I couldn’t really pinpoint it, but it was something.

    And it was exciting.

    Everything Happens—Yes, You Guessed It—For a Reason

    At this point, my perception of this ill-fated date started to shift. Maybe, just maybe, there was a purpose of this encounter. Maybe, just maybe, it was exactly what I needed at exactly that time in my life.

    The phrase “everything happens for a reason” used to drive me crazy. Mostly because I find it’s something people usually say in lieu of giving actual advice. It’s a cop-out, really. If I tell you I was ghosted by awkward Prius guy, I don’t want you to tell me everything happens for a reason. I want you to confirm my beliefs that Prius drivers are obviously the worst and that it definitely had nothing to do with me.

    But I now believe that everything really does happen for a reason. Even the existence of the Prius, though for reasons I have yet to understand.

    And yes—even uncomfortable, no-good, very-bad dates.

    Sometimes it just takes a little surrender and hindsight to come to this realization. For me, it also took a lot of cheap red wine and years of reflecting on past decisions—and eventually immersing myself in some mindfulness practices—to confidently say I understand this clichéd phrase. There’s always a lesson to be learned.

    One of those lessons is that boxed wine gives me a bad headache.

    Everything had happened as it should—to bring me to this moment, to this blog post, to this glass of wine (from a bottle), to this place in my life where I can reflect and appreciate. And what a liberating and exhilarating feeling it is to say, “Yup, that happened. Here I am. What’s next?”

    I’ve spent most of my life under the impression that I made every wrong decision possible. That had I just gotten one thing right along the way, just one, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.

    I would be married to the perfect person. I’d have a perfect career. A perfect kid. A perfect house. A perfectly filtered Instagram feed. A perfect chicken dinner, because clearly my inability to cook a simple meal stems from some bad decision I made somewhere along the way. Everything would be perfect and my chicken wouldn’t be rubbery.

    But it’s not.

    Or is it? Maybe this is perfection. (Not my chicken, though—I still overcook it every time!)

    I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

    It’s such a freeing feeling to let go of the past, to trust in where I am, to understand that everything I have experienced, whether I can understand it now or will come to a realization at some point down the road, has been leading me to where I am meant to be. My only job is to go with it.

    Because, yes, everything is happening as it should, for a reason. Even the dates that don’t turn into what I had initially hoped they would.

    Adopting this way of thinking has led to a much more relaxed, stress-free day-to-day life. Instead of wondering why something happened, I look for what I can take from the experience. Dating has led to endless discoveries about myself, other people, the world, and perspectives I was previously unfamiliar with.

    Some monumental, some minimal.

    Some dating experiences are so profound they lead you to stumble down a path to mindfulness and meditation, while others have more minor impacts, like several years of free HBO because a certain someone forgot to change his cable password after he abruptly and inexplicably stopped talking to you. (Thanks man! Hope you’re well!)

    I’d say a more positive, mindful outlook and free weekly dates with VEEP’s President Selena Meyer are both steps in the right direction as well as perfectly fine reasons that these experiences occurred.

    I believe all moments in life—big or small, happy or sad—always provide a takeaway. Of course, the harder the journey and the tougher the struggles, the more difficult it may be to find the reason. Maybe the reason will never be apparent. Perhaps we just have to trust that our path took us into—and through—these situations for a reason.

    Not much has changed for me these days in terms of circumstances. I still go on the occasional bad date, have unexpected bummer days, and periodically find myself in inexplicable bad moods. But instead of dwelling on these moments or trying to find the reason behind them, I accept them. I trust that what seems “bad” on the surface may be beneficial in some unapparent way.

    Plus, if I always tried to find a reason, I would drive myself mad and I would have less time for my aforementioned Instagram scrolling—by the way, I need to do more sit-ups. Oh and for real, am I the only one from my graduating class who isn’t #married?

    Eyes closed, deep breath.

    It would be misleading and simply unrealistic to say that meditation can lead to a smooth life filled with endless happiness. I don’t believe that to be true, and I think that would be missing the point.

    I’m also not officially a psychiatrist—or psychologist? I confuse the two. But whichever one would be professionally informed on this subject, I am not that. Or the other one, for that matter. So I could be totally wrong about everything that I’ve just written.

    But for me, this mindfulness exploration has helped me clear out ugly thoughts and acknowledge patterns of behavior that aren’t healthy. I feel like a better person today than I was just a few years ago. I’m not nicer because I just want to be nice, but also because it’s easier.

    It’s easier to be patient, kind, understanding, and humble. It takes so much energy to be mad, hold grudges, and judge. Forgiving and letting go is freeing. Holding on to anger? Exhausting and it gives me pimples.

    A New(ish) Me

    My biggest concern with this new journey was that I would lose my edge. I’m generally a sarcastic wise-ass. I didn’t want to become soft. And I’m not talking about physically soft, because this new journey has not yet made me less vain, as I still care far too much about my physical appearance.

    But baby steps, right?

    By soft I mean I didn’t want to become an emotionally mushy pushover. I roll my eyes at those people.

    Yes, I know, I roll my eyes a lot. Again, one step at a time.

    I’m far from perfect and still have many strides to make. I’m finding the careful balance of being a mindful, better person while not changing who I am at heart.

    I still unnecessarily curse at traffic despite my most valiant efforts.

    If I realize someone isn’t going to acknowledge me holding a door open, I’ll sometimes maybe probably prematurely let it go so it gently bumps them.

    I am ridiculously impatient with people who stand on escalators. They aren’t lazy stairs, walk!

    And I firmly believe that Arbonne is basically the Crossfit of skincare and I’m not at all interested but I’m certain you’ll breathlessly tell me about it anyway.

    I am a work in progress. I’m learning every day.

    I’m single. I’m happy. I’m present. And sometimes, every once in a while, yes, I’m still a jerk.

    But a mindful jerk at that. And for this, I am grateful.

    And I owe it all to a little dating app with the cute cartoon flame.

  • Healing Chronic Pain Is an Inside Job

    Healing Chronic Pain Is an Inside Job

    “Time is not a cure for chronic pain, but it can be crucial for improvement. It takes time to change, to recover, and to make progress.” ~Mel Pohl

    Let’s face it, living with any kind of physical pain is a challenge. I understand that completely. In the fall of 2007, I contracted an extremely painful and debilitating condition, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, a structural collapse that compresses the muscles, nerves, and arteries that run between the collarbones and first ribs.

    Yet, as most of us do, I believed my condition would, naturally, clear up soon and the pain would leave. That’s what happens most of the time for most of our physical ailments. Pain arises because of an illness or injury and disappears as we heal over the following days or weeks. We might lay low for a while, take some medications to ease the discomfort, and then we’re back into the swing of things. No problem.

    Except when it doesn’t work that way.

    What happens when pain becomes a fixture in our lives and no amount of medication or treatment or therapy can eradicate it? What do we do then?

    Our usual response is to fight. We put on our battle armor and spend every day in an effort to overcome pain so it won’t take over any more of our lives. We search for the right therapies and the right medications, trying one approach after another, with the attitude of defeating a mortal enemy.

    If nothing works, we eventually exhaust ourselves. We wake up one morning with our anti-pain armor in a heap on the floor and find we have no more reserves to fight, so we leave it there. We just don’t have the energy to go into battle anymore.

    So, we swing to the other end of the spectrum, deciding that the best thing to do now is to ignore the pain we’re living with. This is just the way it is right now, we say to ourselves. These are the cards I’ve been dealt and I’m going to have to live with the situation. We put on our best face and try to function despite the pain, doing our best to ignore its insistent cries for attention.

    We may even decide the doctor is right if s/he tells us that the reason we’re still in pain isn’t because our condition won’t heal, but because our brain is misfiring. Okay then, I’ll put the blame on my brain and pretend the pain doesn’t exist, we say.

    But the pain stays and stays and stays.

    Neither of these extremes usually works very well for chronic pain. Fighting pain is exhausting. It creates stress and tension not conducive to healing. Fighting causes us to tighten and contract in the body, also not great for healing. Acquiescing, on the other hand, can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness over time. If pain isn’t improving, one day we might find ourselves looking up from the bottom of a dark well, filled with despair.

    Are these really our only choices? Isn’t there a middle path that might offer something less fatiguing than constant battle and less hopeless than acquiescence or denial?

    What do we do? What can we do?

    I spent years swinging back and forth between the two poles, finally settling into a kind of stoic silence until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just couldn’t face a life sentence of living in unremitting pain. I decided there had to be a different way to live, to find more ease and grace even in the midst of pain.

    So, I decided to turn my belief about what pain is and how I was dealing with it on its head. I changed the way I perceived pain and the way I responded to it. I found ways to shift my relationship with pain into a more positive, constructive one and, after many years of having no perceptible change, began to finally experience some relief.

    Here are three important ways I shifted my relationship with pain and thereby began to experience more healing in my body.

    Making Friends with Pain

    It helped me a great deal to understand that pain is not an enemy but a signal and a message that tells us that the body is trying to heal. Pain is a voice from within that announces that something is out of harmony and is trying to put itself right. Instead of experiencing pain as torture, I began to understand that it was a natural communication from my body. In a way, it was me talking to me. A part of me was hurting and asking for attention.

    Since fighting pain only seemed to make things worse, I asked myself, what if I imagined that pain wasn’t an adversary, but had a positive purpose? What if pain wasn’t trying to put me through hell, but was simply trying to get my attention? How could I make friends with it instead of opposing it?

    I began to ask pain what it needed, what it was asking for, what I could give it and do for it to help my body heal. I understood that it was asking me to slow down, both on the outside and on the inside. Pain needed me to be with it just as it was, to stop pushing against it, and to listen to it.

    What I learned from pain was that, instead of offering it my anger, denial, or hate, it required a very different kind of attention. The pain, the signal from my body, was asking for a different approach to healing, a softer approach.

    I understood it to be asking for the kind of compassion and understanding you would offer a small child who is hurting. I found that when I turned a more loving ear toward it in an effort to listen to it, respect it, and offer it kindness, my whole body relaxed, my breathing shifted, my stress lifted, and my pain began to decrease.

    Finding Positive Ways to Express Pain

    I began to journal about living with pain, which helped me see it differently. I wrote about my emotional responses to living with pain. I wrote about the loss and the loneliness, the shame and the frustration. Then I read what I wrote out loud to pain, and to myself. We both listened. Something shifted. We both relaxed. Pain started to move.

    I then went a step further and found someone I could trust to hear my pain story. I asked them to please not offer any advice, to not try and fix me, but just to listen with an open heart and mind. I told them about the sadness and the terrors, the loneliness and the shame. I told them things I had never told anyone because I was simply trying to hold it all together from one day to the next.

    Having someone simply witness me in my pain without asking me to be any different, but allowing me to be in the pain I was in and really seeing it and acknowledging it was hugely healing. And pain relaxed a little more.

    Allowing Pain the Time it Needs

    I also discovered that pain was asking for time. Healing simply wasn’t going to be rushed. My body didn’t respond well to being hurried or pushed, and healing could not be approached as another goal to be achieved. Pain kept its own timetable.

    Allowing pain to take the time it would take rather than trying to hurry it out of my body allowed for a healthier emotional and physiological response that was far more conducive to healing. My body became more relaxed around the pain and I began to release stress, tension, and contraction. I breathed more freely, moved more slowly, approached everything in a more relaxed manner, and stopped obsessing as much about my healing.

    I stopped pushing against the pain and pushing against the situation and began to trust the healing process. Paradoxically, when I allowed pain all the time it needed to heal, it began to release. When I demanded that it leave immediately, it dug in its heels, but when I related to it soothingly and with patience and love, I felt relief more rapidly.

    —

    I have found over my years of living with chronic pain, that these approaches are fundamental to creating more ease and grace on a daily basis, to releasing stress and tension in the body, and to relieving long term pain. None of them are guarantees of becoming pain free overnight, but all can offer relief, hope, and positive shifts almost immediately and, as those of us who have been living with pain for a long time know, any movement toward relieving pain is cause for major celebration.

    I’ve gained valuable insights from my journey with pain as well. I’ve learned to find a place deep within myself, a clear place at my core that is resilient and eternal, a place I can draw on for strength and comfort in any situation. I’ve learned how to be kinder to myself and to others. I’ve learned how to find new appreciation and satisfaction in simple things and to celebrate the small joys in life.

    Pain, then, has become something of a spiritual mentor over time. It has, in the end, taught me how to live more deeply, more authentically, and more wisely. Living with pain has not only helped me understand what really matters most to me in life, but how much I matter to myself.

  • Why We All Need Time Unplugged

    Why We All Need Time Unplugged

    “Life is what happens while we’re busy worrying about everything we need to change or accomplish. Slow down, get mindful, and try to enjoy the moment. This moment is your life.” ~Lori Deschene

    Technology is everywhere today, integrated into our lives from the moment we wake up and check our email to the twenty minutes we spend checking our Twitter feed before falling asleep.

    From smartphones and tablets to Fitbits and multi-display work computers, it’s hard to use technology mindfully, and most of us spend a great deal of time throughout the day looking at screens.

    Choosing to unplug, disconnect, and put down our devices is a deliberate decision. For me, the decision to unplug came as I was preparing to set off for a year and a half of traveling around New Zealand.

    The Problem

    I had just left a job where I spent most of my day emailing, updating social media, and scouring the Internet for websites that would be useful contacts for my company. I would get home from the office and eat something while simultaneously scrolling through my personal Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and email accounts. The barrage of information was endless. I would often end the day red-eyed and battling a headache.

    I realized I didn’t actually know how to relax and unplug, and I also realized I didn’t know what a huge toll the excessive screen time was taking on me until I stopped the flow. It took a few weeks, but slowly the constant need to check feeds and update statuses faded, and I spent a great deal more time actually, well, doing things in the world—without posting about it.

    Deciding to Unplug

    Since I was embarking on a new chapter in my life, it seemed like a good time to try something new and try to not let technology take over my life. I was afraid of missing out on the experiences I would have while traveling because I was too busy trying to take the perfect photo or craft the perfect post instead of just being there and enjoying the moment.

    I sold my smartphone, cancelled my cell phone service, deleted my social media accounts, and asked all my friends and family for their mailing addresses so I could send postcards and letters instead of emails and tweets. I went cold turkey and all-in.

    While resistant at first, most people close to me were supportive of this change in the long run, although I did get the occasional, “How will I ever contact you if you’re not on Facebook?!” I figured the people who mattered would find a way to stay in touch, Facebook or no Facebook.

    My partner and I decided that while traveling, we would share one iPad mini we’d use to post monthly blog posts about our travels, and all other devices would stay at home. No phones, no nothing.

    Technology’s Impact on Behavior

    The effects of technology on our thought patterns and behaviors aren’t great. The presence of technology seems to give us a free pass to be rude and unmindful in group situations (i.e. texting during dinner), or to flake out on our friends. It also changes the way we interact with others, including our children, when doing an activity together, like reading.

    “Electronic readers seem to change the types of conversations that parents and children have over a story,” according to KinderCare Learning Centers. “With e-readers, we adults tend to be more prescriptive when talking—push this, swipe that—and less conversational…”

    For all the talk about technology connecting people around the world, it certainly does its share of creating disconnection, too. I strongly believe we would all be happier if we spent more time face-to-face and less time face-to-screen.

    Together but Apart

    I recently moved into a new house, and it took a few weeks for my Internet to get hooked up. There was a very noticeable shift in my behavior and that of my roommates once we were online.

    Before the Internet, we all interacted with each other when we were in common spaces, playing games and talking about our days. With the Internet, we were more likely to be in our own rooms, procrastinating and wasting time.

    Of course we still interacted and still have frequent game nights together, but often the presence of a smartphone or laptop changes the entire vibe of an evening. I long for the days when we were unplugged and connecting more deeply.

    Physical Reasons to Unplug

    In addition to emotional and behavioral patterns, the physical costs of excessive screen time are great. Vision and eye problems like dry eye syndrome can be exacerbated by too much screen time, while headaches and back problems are common among people who sit in front of computers all day. Lack of exercise due to too much sitting in front of computers directly leads to obesity and other health issues.

    Somehow, these ailments don’t seem to stop us. We’d rather end up at rehab camps for tech addicts than set down our devices. Do we really want to be chained to the Internet and at the beck and call of each notification that lights up our smartphone?

    A Different Way

    It’s unrealistic to banish technology from our lives completely. But we can take steps to unplug from certain networks or devices, or to designate a no-tech period in the day that’s screen-free. For me, finding that balance is key.

    Once I returned home from my travels, I found myself wanting to connect to all the social media networks I had abandoned. I wanted to share travel photos and stories and see what friends had been doing while I was gone. I felt torn between this urge to scroll and post and the desire to stick to my commitment of trying to be a more mindful user of technology.

    So I made some compromises. I waited a year before getting back on Facebook (and have since found it significantly less interesting) and I use a flip phone (I know, I know—living in the Stone Age) instead of a smartphone. I know I have to make it easy for myself to not get sucked into the social media/internet vortex.

    One technique I also like to use is list-making. Have you ever gotten online to do one simple thing and then found yourself staring blankly at your computer an hour later, having no idea what you set out to do in the first place? I like to make a specific list of what I need to accomplish online and stick it in front of my laptop where I can see it. That way I’m reminded of my goal and purpose for opening my computer.

    Finding individual solutions is the key to success, whether you need to get outside and completely away from technology, or you simply need some productivity tools to keep you on task so you can be done with your work sooner. Either way, everyone can benefit from unplugging from time to time. Our health depends on it.

  • The Key to Happiness: Compare Less, Be More

    The Key to Happiness: Compare Less, Be More

    “Happiness is found when you stop comparing yourself to other people.” ~Unknown

    Stepping off the bus I was in shock.

    This tiny thing? With no doors in the doorways and no glass in the windows?

    This little place? With walls that looked like they were lone survivors of war?

    I would’ve been sure it was abandoned if it wasn’t for the hundreds of little footprints on trampled soil making up the floor of the school. A giant field with two erect logs on either side served as goals for what was supposed to be a gym. I always thought these types of experiences were supposed to make you feel grateful for what you have. Yet what happened that day made me feel poor.

    Today we were painting a school in northern Costa Rica. As the second bus pulled up, children flooded the campus. Brushes in hand and paint cans open wide, the workday began. Even though none of our group spoke Spanish, communication flowed effortlessly.

    Stroke after stroke, the diligence and level of attention of these kids was inspiring. Yet what struck me the most was how happy they were. It was as if they were not even aware their school didn’t have a floor. I couldn’t understand where this abundance of happiness was coming from until I met Luis.

    Somewhere between his broken English and my broken Spanish we bridged an understanding. I asked him about his life and he asked bout mine. I was stunned when he had no idea what New York was. How could he not know New York? I tried to explain, but our language barrier made it hard to paint a picture. Moving from words to gestures, back to words, I was like a mime trying to act out a song. These kids were truly happy in a way that I never saw kids in the states be.

    Then it hit me.

    What his family lacked in their bank accounts, they made up for in happiness.

    These people did not check their Instagram feeds, spending hours a day comparing their lives to people they never met across the world. Everyone around them was relatively on the same economic level.

    These kids prioritized relationships and time outside, not their cell phones or game consoles. Their expectations were low and enthusiasm for life high. They were rich in every way I wasn’t. They were happiness millionaires with no credit limits on their joy.

    Taking it With Me

    Life isn’t made up of many big decisions, but the compounding of thousands of small ones. When looking at our credit card bills, these decisions are easy to see, but most of life doesn’t come with such a transcript.

    I couldn’t reprogram my mind instantly, short of hitting myself over the head and hoping to forget the world I knew. I wondered what small, compounding changes I could make in my life to be more like Luis. If I could identify the moments in the day where I compare myself to others and minimize that, could my happiness level rise?

    I decided to run the experiment.

    After spending three days being hyper aware of all my actions I found, on average, thirty-seven instances a day where I compared myself to someone else.  Here was the breakdown where these moments occurred:

    58%: While on social media

    33%: In the world (going to work, from work, shopping, etc.)

    10%: During a conversation with another person

    Seeing things broken out like this was eye opening. This task went from overwhelming and impossible, to actionable and realistic.

    My Results and Action Plan

    Social Media

    Even though this made up a huge percentage, I was never one to be on social media for hours a day. However, I noticed that in just one session I could rack up multiple counts of comparing myself to others. To combat this, instead of turning off social media, I changed who I was paying attention to.

    Any celebrities that added nothing to my life except their flashy lifestyles were unfollowed, deleted, and replaced by more useful content. Most acquaintances that I didn’t really know well were also removed. My feed became a mixture of close personal relationships and cool interesting things I could learn from.

    In the World/In Conversation

    These two were much harder to combat. Yet while the solution to cutting them out was far from easy, it was quite simple. Since I could not prevent myself from getting these thoughts, I would use the notepad on my phone and record the instances after they occurred. After noting each occurrence, I would write, “Compare less, be more.”

    In about two weeks something strange began to happen.

    Not only did I see a dramatic reduction in my count, but now my brain would catch itself. Right as I was about to compare myself to something or someone, the principle would play in my mind instead, “Compare less, be more.” This would instantly break my thought pattern and put me back into the present moment. This wouldn’t happen every time, but it happened more and more every week.

    After one month I noticed a dramatic increase in my happiness. I conducted the experiment again and found the number of daily comparisons were reduced to thirty-seven to nine.

    Ultimately, much of our unhappiness comes from us looking onto others’ greener grass while neglecting our own yards. We focus on comparing and competing instead of creating and being. Not having a Ferrari does not make us any less, but constantly reminding ourselves we don’t have a Ferrari absolutely does.

    When we attach our self-worth to anything or anyone, it’s no longer ours. We limit the flow of ideas and range of action as we approach life from a state of lack.

    The next time you find yourself being obsessed over something you don’t have, just remember to compare less, be more. Maybe one day we can all be as rich as Luis, the richest kid in the world.

  • Accepting People You Dislike as They Are: How It Benefits You and How to Do It

    Accepting People You Dislike as They Are: How It Benefits You and How to Do It

    “We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” ~Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow

    We can sometimes have difficulty accepting our friends, family, and loved ones as they are when their habits, quirks, or behavior annoy us. Our natural tendency is to try to change what we don’t like about them, which often leads to resentment. Nonetheless, given their importance and presence in our lives, we are usually willing to make an effort to accept them as they are.

    But what about people we dislike—people who cause us grief? For example, an overbearing boss, a scheming coworker, or an annoying relative. Should we also make an effort to accept them as they are?

    Before you decline to do so, consider that when we don’t accept such people as they are (and more about what that means shortly), the adverse consequences for ourselves can be even worse.

    One problem is that we will be prone to engaging them in combative, retaliatory ways, as was my modus operandi. I now realize that I suffered unnecessarily from my refusal to accept people I disliked or despised, in terms of both greater personal anguish and counterproductive responses to their actions.

    And especially so when I was betrayed by a business partner several years ago.

    I Refused to Accept My Business Partner for Who He Was

    During a particularly difficult period in my life when my first wife and I were on the brink of breaking up, a business partner was intent on squeezing me out of my most profitable real estate investment in the Midwest. He controlled the purse strings and withheld the money due to me from the investment.

    He also made disparaging remarks about my wife and me to our banker. The problem was, we shared the same banker—my partner introduced us—and my partner happened to be one of the bank’s wealthiest clients. The bank called my loans, and I didn’t have the means to repay them.

    Accepting this person for who he was and acting in my best interests under the circumstances was not even a consideration. Instead, consumed with unbridled anger and resentment, I foolishly launched a costly five-year legal battle that brought me to the brink of bankruptcy.

    My sense of urgency also caused me to miss important doctor appointments for the removal of a small lesion on my nose, which later resulted in my losing half my nose to a vicious tumor and enduring four major reconstructive surgeries.

    When an offer to settle came in shortly before trial, my attorney asked me what I wanted out of the case—meaning financially. I righteously announced to him my intention to make my partner stop taking advantage of people and change his unscrupulous business practices.

    Dumbfounded, my attorney turned to me and exclaimed, “Danny, you must be kidding! Do you really think you are going to change this man? That’s just not going to happen.”

    And it didn’t!

    What Acceptance Is—and Isn’t

    As I mentioned, accepting my partner for who he was and not trying to change him was not a consideration. At the time, I equated acceptance with surrender and excusing bad behavior—and being weak. I also believed that I had the power to change people’s ingrained ways, which I now know is myth conquering reality!

    I have since learned that true acceptance has nothing to do with surrender, backing down, condoning bad behavior, or the like. Rather, true acceptance means accepting people and things as they are without judgment or harboring negative feelings such as fear, anger, resentment, and the like (or at least minimally so).

    As such, true acceptance is the detached, even-keeled acknowledgment of the underlying or objective reality—the “how is” and “what is”—of the person or situation.

    With that mindset, you are able to accept someone you dislike as they are, and still terminate the relationship if you determine it is in your best interest to do so. You can also change the dynamics of the relationship if cutting ties is not practical or realistic.

    For example, you can accept a divisive sibling (or other family member) as they are, and still set boundaries, such as avoiding problematic topics of discussion, or choosing the type, extent, and frequency of contact you wish to have.

    Further, acceptance does not mean that you need be passive or give up principles and values that are important to you. Thus, whether in dealing with dishonest politicians or business leaders, or when you feel an injustice has been done, acceptance does not mean that you shouldn’t take corrective actions that voice your own “truths.”

    The Gifts of Accepting People You Dislike 

    When you are able to accept people you dislike (or anyone for that matter) as they are, you can then recognize the choices that will serve you best.

    Why? Acceptance induces a critical shift in focus from what you are powerless to change or do to what you can do to better serve your needs. In short, accepting what is lets you discover what might be—and no less so when dealing with people you dislike.

    I certainly had viable choices with my business partner besides pursuing the combative, self-harming course I chose. One choice was to not sue and instead devote my time and energy—and money—to improving my other properties. However, my unprocessed fear and anger obscured this much wiser path.

    A related gift of acceptance is that it brings you freedom by releasing the shackles that bind you to troublesome relationships. (This is particularly true when dealing with past parental transgressions, control freaks, and other “crazy makers.”)

    Acceptance is also a great stress and anxiety reducer. When you accept people and things as they are, you have little to stress (and lose sleep) over.

    Keys to Accepting People You Dislike

    Practicing acceptance with people you dislike is challenging. It is often a process that evolves over time and in which incremental steps are fruitful. Certain keys will facilitate the process.

    Process your fears.  

    Unprocessed fear prevents acceptance because it dominates our thoughts instead of allowing us to make the choices that serve us best. Apt acronyms for FEAR are “Future Events Already Ruined” and “False Evidence Appearing Real.”

    With my partner, for example, I was in that “already ruined” mode because of my strong fear that his actions would irreparably impact my livelihood—but they in fact wouldn’t because I had other profitable investments.

    We thus need to process and reduce our fears in order to benefit from the even-keeled type of acceptance I have described. Most fears are illusory and speculative; they diminish and even leave when they are closely examined.

    It helps considerably to examine the objective reality of the person or situation you are dealing with rather than be guided by negative speculations about what might happen and what could be. Face and lean into your fears. Their bark is much greater than their bite. When you so process your fears, their hold over you (and your thinking) will lessen considerably, and viable options and choices will be revealed to you.

    Defuse your anger.

    In much the same manner, our anger and resentment toward people we dislike obstruct acceptance. Moreover, anger can easily exacerbate situations in ways that are harmful to us, like it did for me when I dueled with my business partner.

    The late Carrie Fisher expressed it well in her book Wishful Drinking: “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” (I certainly drank a lot of poison while waiting for my former business partner to change his dishonorable ways!)

    It softens the edge of your resentment if you try to see things from the other person’s perspective. Many—perhaps even most—times, people’s behavior is based on their fears, anxieties, and self-interests and not on any intent to harm us.

    An overbearing and controlling boss, for example, is likely guided by fears and anxiety about his business rather than your job performance. A fierce competitor, whether in business or on the playing field or at school, is likely guided by her need to win rather than a desire to suppress you. And an unkind gossiper is likely guided by her low self-esteem and need to be liked rather than an intent to harm you.

    In the case of my partner, looking back I now recognize that he acted mainly out of the concern about how the break-up of my marriage would impact one of his largest investments.

    Look for the good!  

    Some—maybe most—of the time we are so engulfed in the turmoil with those we dislike, that we can’t see the “positive” influences that they have on our lives. I learned an awful lot from my partner during the years we worked together. He’s a very astute businessman. My departure totally changed my career trajectory. It lead to establishing a real estate investment company in which I have been able to apply what I learned from him in my own business dealings with great success.

    Another major gift was that he played a major role in helping me to prove to myself that I can take care of myself under severe pressures and adverse circumstances. I always had doubts about that.

    Recognizing these “good” things removed my anger and I was later able to accept my partner for the person he was, even offering a toast to his good health at a dinner gathering of friends following the settlement of the law suit.

    Acceptance Intentions

    Below are some intentions that will assist you in accepting people you dislike as they are.

    I will: 

    Process my fear and anger.

    Not take what they do personally.

    Recognize the fears and anxieties that drive them.            

    Pause, reflect, and think objectively.

    Not assume an intent to harm me.

    Set appropriate boundaries.

    Trust that I will be able to take care of myself.

    Be true to myself.

    In doing these things, you will feel less annoyed, more grounded, and more focused on taking care of your needs—and the gifts of acceptance will be yours!

  • The Most Powerful Tool for Healing: Tell the Right Stories

    The Most Powerful Tool for Healing: Tell the Right Stories

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people.

    “Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful parts of ourselves.” ~David Richo

    In my mid-thirties, I had what I experienced as a breakdown.

    If you had asked me ten or even twenty years earlier whether I had been sexually abused, I would have said no. But in my mid-thirties, strange and scary memories started surfacing in my body—along with pieces of story and language.

    These pieces of memory and my responses to them seemed to glue together many of the disconnected, unincorporated experiences of my life; it was as if I were connecting the dots and seeing a shape that had been there all along but that I had never perceived before.

    In part, my reading had taken me to recognizing the trauma that I was unearthing. I found myself reading again and again about violence: violence in war, in families, in almost every facet of society. And almost every book I read about violence referenced Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery. So finally I took the book out from the library.

    Reading the book, I felt as if I were looking in a mirror.

    I thought I’d had an easy, carefree childhood. Now I needed to reconfront that story and reimagine who I was.

    Herman’s book, published more than twenty-five years ago, is still the bible of trauma studies: it maps out, step by step, how trauma and PTSD affect people; it draws the link between public and private traumas, between PTSD in war veterans and survivors of domestic and sexual abuse.

    It put into language so many of the experiences that I had never been able to name: feelings of dissociation, disconnection between the mind and the body, fear, self-blame.

    At first the experience of reading the book was empowering, and then, as the memories became stronger, I began to have panic attacks. I felt as if I were in the grips of something so much more powerful than myself that I didn’t know if I’d make it through.

    It was as if enormous waves of pain and horror were sweeping over me, and I would lose all sense of myself, all grounding. I felt somersaulted, upside down. I felt as if I was losing the person I had been, slipping away from my old, composed, presentable self into a new identity dominated by this early wounding, scared by the world around me, horrified at what humans do to one another, unable to even imagine feeling safe.

    I felt as if the ground were falling out beneath me.

    Over time, I came to piece together the trauma story: a babysitter had sexually assaulted me when I was very young. Because I was so young and because there were no other witnesses, fear, horror, and shame were lodged in my body without having clear language around them.

    But at first, as the memories started to come, my memories were more physical than verbal: I experienced physical sensations and flashbacks of being pinned down, of not being able to breathe, and piercing sensations of both physical pain and psychological and existential terror.

    It took all of my energy to keep my life from falling apart. I was a mom of two young kids and had a relatively successful professional life as a writer and academic. But now I didn’t have any energy for anything other than raising my kids and taking care of myself.

    I tried to concentrate my energy on bringing my best self forward to get through the day for my kids and to keep up with the daily demands and to be the kind of mom I wanted to be—present, listening, compassionate, even fun. I was able (mostly) to remember how to do this in their company, and the routine of being with them kept me on track and reminded me of the good in the world and, despite my pain, of hope and love.

    But once they went to sleep at night, I was immersed in a dark world of struggle.

    I didn’t know who I was anymore. And my basic trust in my body and in the world felt eroded. Along with the physical memories of the sexual assault and my fear and horror was a deep physical sensation of shame.

    For complex reasons, shame seems to arise as one of the symptoms of sexual abuse, more than in other forms of trauma, especially when the abuse occurs in children. The violation of the body often brings up feelings of self-blame, of separation from the self, and of disgust that gets turned on the self.

    In children especially, it is often easier to blame themselves than to blame the adults who should be taking care of them—it’s a way, subconsciously, to create an image of a safer world, where the adults are reliable, and a sense of control.

    So when these feelings came flooding back with the memories of what had happened, even though intellectually I understood I had not in any way been to blame, I was nevertheless overcome by a physical sensation of shame, spreading from my stomach up into the rest of my body.

    Because the wounding had affected me so deeply, I (irrationally) felt that it had colored every part of me, as if I were covered in filth. I felt as if the very fact that I had been violated as a child spread contamination in my own house as an adult.

    When I wrote, the stories I found myself telling were stories of trauma and horror, violence and violation. And I wasn’t comfortable sharing these stories. These weren’t the stories I wanted to be putting into the world. I largely put my writing career on hold, unsure of whether I’d ever get back to it.

    It was 2009. Sexual abuse was still largely a taboo topic. I felt that I would be judged poorly if I shared my experience.

    I didn’t personally know anyone who was public about childhood sexual abuse. Or if I did, it was something long in the past that seemed no longer to affect them. I certainly didn’t know anyone who was public about being affected by PTSD. And it was clear that what I was suffering from was PTSD.

    I didn’t know anyone who had healed from PTSD. Was this a life sentence?

    At first, I had thought I would get through this breakdown relatively quickly, but I found myself plunging farther and farther.

    Ashamed and scared that I would never heal, my crisis was something I mostly kept to myself. For a long time, I didn’t tell anyone what I was going through other than my husband, my very best friends, and the professionals I reached out to for support.

    I had friends who got sick with other illnesses, and mutual friends looked after their kids, brought home-cooked meals, and the whole community came out in support. But I had no such support, and so in its own way the secrecy around my struggle with PTSD perpetuated the cycle of shame and the silence that I had experienced as a young child.

    One year turned into two and then three. The future that I imagined for myself as a writer and professional seemed forever out of reach.

    Gradually, though, and very slowly, I worked my way out of the crisis. I began to put myself back together, but with a less rigid story of myself.

    I went to therapy. I joined groups of women also suffering from PTSD and practiced speaking about what was happening to me. I developed a strong meditation and yoga practice.

    I began to break the silence and reformulate my own story, and I wrote and wrote in my journal at night, a safe place where no one could see what I was struggling with, but where I could learn to witness all the many different parts of myself.

    Putting into language what had happened and listening to my body with compassion helped me begin to turn the tide.

    As I began to tell just the few people I felt most safe with, many people who I never knew had suffered from trauma began to tell their trauma and healing stories to me, or friends would put me in touch with other friends who had also suffered from sexual abuse and healed. There was a whole underground network of people sharing stories and sharing techniques about how they had healed.

    I was so moved by the stories I was hearing haphazardly that I began to interview people who had suffered any number of different kinds of trauma to understand how they had gotten through their crises. I wanted to learn more for myself if and how people got through the healing crisis and came out on the other side.

    I talked to people who had lost their children and people who had been incarcerated, people who had suffered serious cancers and people who had healed from sexual abuse. I learned from their strength and their ability to make sense of and learn and grow from their own stories—a capacity that I saw made many draw on a deep spiritual sense of self and connection.

    In the people I interviewed, I saw not people broken by trauma, but strong people with great vivacity and much to teach. And I saw that the people who could tell compelling narratives about their life experiences, that is, those people who had really faced head-on, explored, and healed, had a kind of luminosity to them.

    Many had suffered a great deal, but in the face of that suffering, many of them had also found an internal and spiritual richness to meet their challenges.

    Listening to others, I came to have more distance from my own suffering and came to be able to witness my story from the more compassionate space of a witness.

    As I saw how others had grown and deepened in response to their life experiences, I also began to reframe what I was experiencing. I came to develop my own spiritual life more fully. I deepened my meditation practice and was trained as a kundalini yoga teacher.

    Though I had been eager to get on with my life and had perceived the pain and turmoil I was in as harmful and keeping me from all that I wasn’t doing (getting on with my career, etc.), over time, I came to see that that period was not a breakdown, but a time of healing, transformation, and growth.

    And I came to see that I was only able to go through that period of healing and transformation because I was strong enough to bear to look at and process what I had not been able to bear as a child or even as a younger woman. I needed a certain amount of stability in my life and inner strength to face the challenges of my past and allow myself to remember my horror and confusion.

    And as I did this, I began to develop new strength and appreciation within myself.

    What can feel like weakness, confusion, and failure very often is the doorway to courage and resilience.

    Today, I am happy to say that not only have I healed my PTSD, but I also feel much better physically and emotionally than I did before my crisis. I’m able to listen with more openness, compassion, and understanding not only to myself but also to the suffering of others’ around me. And I’m more able to let go of my fear of joy, what Brené Brown calls foreboding joy, and be fully present for the pleasures and beauty of the world.

    I was able to heal because others shared stories that let me know that healing was possible. These stories gave me faith in the ability to heal and were the foundation for allowing me to do the work necessary to get through the crisis. They allowed me to see the disruption in my life and psyche not only as a descent into darkness but also as a path to more light.

    Because I knew to trust the process, even when a part of me found it hard to believe there was ever going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, I kept going.

    From Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery to the friends who shared their stories to the therapists who offered trauma support groups to the yoga and meditation teachers who offered their wisdom, I was supported by others who knew about and believed in the possibility of healing from PTSD.

    There were any number of times when I might have turned away from healing in despair, when I might have looked outside myself to solve my problems, turning to substances or throwing myself back into work or even looking to move or change my marriage, instead of staying with the pain inside of myself.

    But I was supported because I knew that the pain and even the shame were part of the process—that they were not unique to me, that there was no way around, but only through, and that when I felt I had hit a wall, it was not time to stop, but instead time to look for extra support and more tools.

    If we believe a narrative that tells us that we need to be moving forward all the time and that feeling pain and shame is a sign of weakness, we will almost certainly miss out on opportunities to heal and grow.

    Like Brené Brown, who calls her breakdown a spiritual awakening, I believe that we can only grow if we allow ourselves to go to those difficult, hurting places, if we don’t expect our lives to unfold in a straight line, and if we share stories not only of the way trauma happens but also of the ways healing happens.

    We need to talk about how healing takes time and energy; the way it often seems to take us down before it can bring us up; the way we sometimes need to go back before we can go forward; and the way, ultimately, it can make us much happier, healthier, more connected to ourselves and others, and more resilient, if we stay with it.

    And we need to make safe places available for healing so that it can run its course. We need to give people time and safety and understanding.

    In the past, cancer was a word that was only whispered, as if the disease itself were somehow secret and shameful. Today, we are public about cancer, but we still often whisper about abuse and PTSD.

    The #metoo movement is starting to change this; more and more people are coming forward to publicly share their stories of abuse.

    And just as our trauma stories are powerful, our healing stories are equally powerful and important. We can and must break the silence and taboo not only around the trauma itself but also around the complicated, messy, long, but ultimately rewarding process of healing from trauma.

    Though PTSD is not often spoken of, it is estimated that 10% of women will develop PTSD in their lifetime and that at any time more than 5 million people in the US are suffering from PTSD. But it’s likely that those numbers are much too low.

    We live in a largely traumatized world, and we can’t heal that trauma if we don’t have the tools to recognize it, name it, witness it, and patiently offer supports for the healing process.

    Denial and shame are natural but immature coping mechanisms and ultimately prevent healing. It can be difficult to break these patterns and look directly at the truth; facing what is difficult can lead to what seems like a crisis and breakdown, but if we stay with our experiences, trusting in the power of healing, we can transform, both as individuals and as a society.

  • There Are a Gazillion Little Ways to Be Kind (and It Benefits You Too)

    There Are a Gazillion Little Ways to Be Kind (and It Benefits You Too)

    “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.” ~Robert M. Pirsig

    One day while grocery shopping I was reaching for a head of lettuce when I heard a shrill, high-pitched wail from a few aisles over. It sent shivers up my spine. It was one of those sounds that grabs your breath and pulls it to your heart.

    It brought me back to a time I had long forgotten—a memory engrained in my brain from about twenty-two years ago when my children were toddlers. I remember those days of being exhausted and trying to wrap up the weekly shopping trip before the tantrum.

    Most people in the store tried to ignore it, but the shrieks came like contractions about every six minutes. People started rolling their eyes. One lady commented that children shouldn’t be allowed in stores. I felt really bad for this parent. I mean, we were all children once, right? It’s pretty rude to fault the parent for something that occurs naturally as a part of being human.

    Eventually, as I filled my cart, I ended up in the same aisle as the mom and child. Mom was spent. There was a Ziploc bag of Cheerios tucked next to the child and a stuffed animal that had probably been picked up off the floor of the aisle about fifty times.

    It is during times like these when we, as humans, need to pause and show some compassion. As a woman, I wanted to support a fellow sister. As a parent, I wanted to support a fellow parent. As a human, I wanted to let her know that stuff like this happens and it’s okay, and in a few years she’ll laugh telling stories like these.

    What I wanted to convey is that this was simply a very human moment.

    I think we’ve conditioned ourselves to overlook many things in life—to shrug it off, roll our eyes, and simply walk away. We evade interaction on a very basic level. We miss so many opportunities to extend our human kindness to each other.

    We live in a fast-paced world; we’re always on the go. We’re too worried about getting from Point A to Point B. Our brains are filled with thoughts and worries. We’re trying to stay two steps ahead of ourselves. Often this results in the failure to stop and do something nice for someone else.

    I think what’s happened in the world today is that we see poverty, abuse, disease, war, hunger, bullying, and violence so often that it is overwhelming. We feel dispirited. What we must remember, no matter how distressing the news is, that we have the power to make a change. It starts with us understanding that because we are human we have been bestowed with the power to change the world with kindness.

    What we need to remember is that when we offer kindness to strangers, we not only brighten their day, we brighten our own. When we express kindness to each other we establish or strengthen connections with each other. Sometimes it’s just a fabulous reminder of our humanness.

    The beautiful thing about kindness is that it lives in your heart. It’s always there waiting to come out and make an appearance. You always know it’s a true kindness when you don’t expect anything in return, like gratitude or reciprocation; you simply want to make someone feel better.

    Also, kindness is good for your health. Being kind regulates our heart rate; we get a warm, cozy feeling. Our brain releases dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins, all of which make us happy. And oxytocin also reduces inflammation in the heart, so kindness is literally good for your heart!

    Committing regular acts of kindness or simply showing kindness to others on a regular basis lowers blood pressure and reduces your chances of dying early.

    Regular practice of kindness also decreases pain and anxiety while giving your energy a boost.

    What are the human benefits of kindness?

    * Kindness builds empathy. It can help us to put ourselves in another’s shoes. It encourages us to do nice things for others because we would like others to do nice things for us.

    * Kindness builds gratitude. We look at the situations others are experiencing and we become grateful for what we have. Even when it’s not a lot, we can find the gratitude easier when we are kind to others.

    * Kindness creates a ripple effect of kindness. One simple act of kindness can put a smile on someone’s face for the rest of the day. It can make someone feel good. In their energy of feeling better that they, chances are they are going to say something nice or do something good for another person, and that baton of good feelings will get handed to another as the days go on.

    * Kindness gives a boost to our own self-worth as well as to the self-worth of the person we are giving the kindness.

    * Kindness is calming. It gives a new perspective for us to step away from a woe and allow that warm, cozy feeling to run through our veins.

    * When we are kind, we become a better human. Everything about us changes. Our demeanor, outlook, and our way of thinking. We become a conduit of hope.

    As for me in the grocery store? I played peak-a-boo for two aisles. I managed to get a smile and the baby’s tears dried up. She even offered me a Cheerio, which I pretended to eat.

    Something as simple as a childhood game relieved a bit of stress for another parent. It was a very simple act of kindness that didn’t cost a thing. To the mom, it was an unsaid acknowledgement of “You’re not alone and I understand what you’re going through.” It really is that simple.

    What did I walk away with? Well… I had pulled up some memories from a quarter century ago that made me smile. That evening when I got home I actually pulled out the kids old photo albums and started to recall my own adventures with them. I felt good knowing that I didn’t add to someone else’s stress by being rude or uncaring, and I made a child smile. I think that’s a pretty good day.

    You don’t have to wait until you see a screaming child in the grocery store; there are a gazillion little ways to spread kindness:

    Hold the door for someone (even if you are running late).

    Smile at people.

    Give up your seat on the bus or train.

    When you see a homeless person, look them in the eye and offer them a meal.

    Stop at an accident to see if anyone needs help.

    Help a parent get their baby stroller up the stairs.

    Volunteer somewhere.

    Let someone ahead of you in traffic without complaining.

    Help someone reach something off the high shelf.

    Visit an elderly neighbor.

    Buy lemonade from a child’s stand.

    Tell someone you love their outfit or hair.

    Tell someone they are a good parent.

    Leave a generous tip.

    Offer someone a tissue if they are crying.

    Do you have anything to add to the list?

  • To Reduce Stress, Stop Globalizing and Put Things in Perspective

    To Reduce Stress, Stop Globalizing and Put Things in Perspective

    “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” ~Mark Twain

    Life happens. And sometimes when life happens, we can get pretty stressed out. I’ve found that the way we view situations can either reduce our stress or make it worse. Here is just one way we aggravate situations, possibly unnecessarily, and how we can adjust our perspective to keep stress in check.

    A colleague of mine claims that he is “calendar-challenged.” He is often unable to attend meetings at the last minute or shows up late. I am, by contrast, a planner. I live by my calendar and know what I am doing months in advance. The different approach that my colleague and I take in the way we plan—or don’t plan—can cause friction.

    I could interpret my colleague’s behavior as merely irresponsible and chalk it up to a fairly ingrained part of his personality. That situation is irritating at worst. Or, I could take his lackadaisical approach personally by assuming that he doesn’t value me or my time. That’s somewhat stressful. I could even interpret his behavior as intentional and assume that he takes delight in making me angry. That is really going to stress me out.

    Do you see how my interpretation of the behavior can be as benign as “he’s not a planner” and it can escalate all the way to a vengeful person determined to sabotage my career?

    When we draw conclusions about a situation without checking the facts first, we can escalate it into a full-blown crisis in our minds. In other words, our negative thinking can spiral out of control, rapidly increasing our anxiety, unnecessarily.

    That’s called globalizing. How we think about our circumstances can make all the difference in the level of stress we feel.

    Many of us have experienced a workplace where budget cuts or a bad economy results in layoffs. The pall that can settle over an organization going through a period of like this can cause a great deal of stress, even for those employees still employed.

    Enter globalizing. I have what I call “straight to bag lady” syndrome. I can become convinced that if I lose my job I will never find another one, I will become homeless, and then I will be forced to live on the street.

    During the downturn of 2008 when many organizations were shedding employees like leaves in the fall, I occasionally went into this spiral in my mind. My good friend and colleague, however, did not. When I would ask her if she was stressed out by the loss of colleagues around us, she would say, “Yeah, I’m not going to worry about it. Even if they let me go, I assume I can just find another job.”

    Wow. What I wouldn’t give to have her attitude.

    She wasn’t oblivious to the fact that there was a good chance she might lose her job. However, instead of globalizing and assuming everything would just get worse and worse, she was able to stick to the facts in her mind and not globalize. She knew she still had a job. She knew there was a good chance she might lose her job. If that came to pass, she had a plan in mind. Being a bag lady was not part of her plan.

    About a year into our firm’s layoffs, my colleague really did lose her job and she put her backup plan in place. She started her own business, something she had always wanted to do. Most importantly, throughout the year of layoffs, a legitimately stressful time in her life, she didn’t drive herself crazy with worry along the way by imagining the worst.

    I’ve heard that our bodies and brains respond to an imaginary worry in the same way they would if the imagined situation was actually happening to us. Why put ourselves through the stress of something that just isn’t as bad as we think?

    Globalizing places a very negative filter over our perception, causing stress and anxiety to feed on itself. We are, then, far more likely to interpret every situation as disastrous and to give the least benefit of the doubt to every person we encounter.

    The loss of a job is made worse by globalizing that we will never find another job again. The loss of a partner is made worse by globalizing that we will never find anybody else with whom to share our life—or that every member of our pool of potential candidates is horrible. The loss of a marriage is made worse by globalizing that we are not loveable.

    The best way to reduce anxiety is to look at the facts rather than our subjective interpretation of them. It is all the more important to doublecheck facts if we have come from anxious environments, where the people around us were globalizing up a storm.

    Digging into our own background to make sure we have not applied a negative filter to everyone we encounter is an important step. Doing so will cause us to lose the opportunities presenting themselves in times of perceived crisis or to miss out on all the people who would never dream of acting in a negative way toward us.

    Is my colleague’s calendar issue just an irritating quirk, is it part of an overall pattern of behavior that evidences one’s disrespect for another’s time, or is it evidence of something worse, such as intentional sabotage? Is my fear of going “straight to bag lady” based in reality in any way?

    One way I bring my perspective back to an objective one is by whipping out a pen and some paper and making a list that separates the facts from my fears.

    I can list the times that my colleague’s lack of organization affected me. Then I can all of the ways my colleague is respectful of me. When I step back and look at both lists, I will have a better picture of what that calendar quirk of his really means, if anything.

    My lists may show his calendar challenges as an anomaly compared to a long list of behaviors in which he is respectful and supportive of me. In that case, I can chalk up poor planning skills to an irritating and innocent habit, find a workaround to the problem, and be thankful I work with such a good guy. No one is perfect.

    On the other hand, if I see that there is a pattern of behavior in which my colleague seems to genuinely devalue me and my time, or the list reveals someone who is intent on sabotage and it is directed squarely at me, then I have clearly defined the problem at hand. Regardless of the results, they will bring my perspective much closer to reality instead of the anxiety-provoked interpretation that may be in my head.

    In gauging my risk of becoming a bag lady, I can write down all of the factors I have working in my favor. If I have solid work experience, a good education, and a good network of contacts, is there a reasonable expectation that I will find work, even in a poor economy?

    I can also list the backup plans available in case it takes a while to find another job. Perhaps I have savings, supportive friends and family, or an available line of credit at the bank. Since someone is always hiring even in the worst economies, I may need to start exploring other geographic areas or industries with opportunities.

    Reigning in our brains from globalizing a situation—even if it reveals that a problem does exist—still relieves our stress significantly. It defines the problem and it clarifies the extent of it, which enables us to respond appropriately. A problem accurately defined is already partially solved.

    Keeping globalization in check also means that we reduce the stress of the people around us. If we are constantly overreacting to others, assuming they have done something intentionally when their behavior is well intentioned—though perhaps imperfect—we are creating conflict that need not exist. People around us will distance themselves from us, since no one feels they can trust an overly sensitive, over-reactive, and accusatory colleague.

    If I freak out every time another of my colleagues is laid off, then the people around me will also keep their distance. They are focused on keeping their own anxieties in check and a frenetic worrisome person in their midst only makes it harder. Anxiety is contagious, but fortunately, so is calm.

    Are you inadvertently making a difficult situation even worse? Unfortunately, it is human nature to globalize about how badly things might be. It is our ego’s misguided attempt to gain control over an unknown. If we think about the worst-case scenario, then we will be prepared if it turns out to be true, right? Wrong. Globalizing just leads to the escalation of a situation.

    Regaining an objective perspective prevents us from floundering in negativity and enables us to move forward into a resolution that accurately addresses the situation.