Tag: Happiness
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12 Powerful Gratitude Practices That Will Make You a Lot Happier
“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” ~A. A. Milne
Gratitude didn’t always come naturally to me. If there had been a championship for complaining, for a long time, I would have been a serious contender.
For years I felt entitled to everything, including the kindness of others. This didn’t make me very happy, since it was always easy to find something or someone to complain about. The more critical I grew, the less appealing life seemed and the worse I got on with others.
The weather seemed awful, supermarket queues too slow, bosses too unappreciative, children too rowdy and messy, winters too cold, summers too hot, health too unsatisfactory, work too stressful, prices too high, quality too low, TV too boring, politicians too self-serving, traffic too slow, drivers too inconsiderate, and so on.
If I had continued living like that, I might have ended up complaining that water was too wet and the sky too blue.
Fortunately, I came across countless research studies about gratitude. How it reduced anxiety, depression, emotional exhaustion, and even suicidal thoughts, while boosting happiness and satisfaction with life. How it lowered blood pressure, boosted immunity, and encouraged healthy habits while improving sleep.
Research even suggested that gratitude improved the quality of romance and marriage! Now that seemed like an irresistible offer.
I started collecting practical tips for living in a more grateful way, and started trying them out. Warning: these ways of practicing gratitude could seriously damage your unhappiness!
1. Tell your partner exactly how a recent episode made you love them even more.
Be very specific and detailed. For example, “I love that you thought about what I would really like for our anniversary, and that you made all the bookings because you know it takes me ages to pick a hotel.”
It doesn’t have to be in connection with an annual event, such as an anniversary. It could be something as small as the way they hug you to cheer you up when they see that you’ve had a hard day. But tell them exactly what it is you loved about that, and why.
This detailed expression of gratitude signals your responsiveness to your partner. It tends to make them more responsive too. Romance thrives on mutual responsiveness.
2. If your relationship is going through a rough patch, imagine the disappearance of your partner.
This is counter-intuitive, but it makes you more grateful for all that is good in the relationship. People who suddenly lost their partner often tell of how relatively insignificant their petty disagreements now seem. They often say they would give anything to have their loved one back.
If I even think about trying this, it immediately makes me way more grateful for my partner. It makes me realize how lucky I am.
3. Look beyond a gift.
Think consciously about the trouble that somebody took to bring something good into your life, often at some inconvenience and cost to themselves.
We enjoy watching Grand Slam tennis tournaments on TV. We thought that we might one day get to watch a tournament in person, but tickets for the main courts sell out rapidly. Then our son surprised us with tickets for prime seats at a Grand Slam event.
It was totally unexpected. We were so touched that he went to all the trouble and expense. The tennis and setting were magnificent, and the awareness of his love even better.
4. Relish each good moment more consciously.
Have you noticed, really consciously noticed, the many patterns that bubbles make in a warm bath? Or the bizarre shapes of white clouds in a blue sky? Or the quirky way that an eggshell starts to crack when you strike it? Or the comforting feel of your pillow when you go to bed after a long, hard day?
Wonderful little delights await us, moment by moment. But we need to notice them consciously. Then gratitude starts flowing through each moment of life.
I fill a pan with water every morning, to boil some eggs. I love watching the bubbles in the water as they dance for me. It helps to set the tone for my day.
5. Shout for joy when something really good happens to you.
I used to be an expert in misery.
Did I gain admission to medical school? Keep it quiet, I don’t do happiness.
Was I graduating and did my parents want to celebrate? Don’t bother coming, Mum and Dad, it’s just another day.
What was I thinking? If I could go back and shake myself hard, I would.
“Shout for joy!” I would urge my younger self. “Get up, put on your favorite song, jump around and dance like a wild child!”
Whatever you celebrate becomes more real to your mind. And you become more grateful for it.
6. Fast forward.
When we got married, the photographer made us pose endlessly. We were relieved when it was over. In our relief, we leaned in for a kiss.
The experienced photographer immediately clicked it.
I remember thinking, “That photo’s going to make us so happy when we’re old.”
That peek into the future made me feel even luckier in the moment.
Use every opportunity to create memories that will delight you for years. You’ll feel grateful in the moment, and grateful again that you can look forward to good memories.
7. Tell someone else when you’re particularly taken by something.
We get to see some spectacular sunsets in the summer. I just have to go to our picture window and look out over rooftops. It’s as if a great artist has splashed colors across the sky.
“Wow!” I’ll call out, spontaneously. “Come and look at this! Isn’t it stunning?”
Sharing the appreciation with someone else makes you more grateful.
8. Introduce a guest to your favorite places, people, music, food etc.
There’s a reason why you love some things so much. Somebody else might not yet appreciate those delights. In opening their eyes, you open your own eyes again and become more grateful.
I love it when visitors stay with us, partly because I get to show them around some favorite spots. There’s one place where a man-made canal crosses high over a river with an old mill, and green hillsides with sheep climb steeply skyward. I could spend hours there, just soaking it all in.
Sometimes my guests will even notice details that I missed. Their delight multiplies my own.
9. Build a bank of gratitude.
Life won’t necessarily go your way forever. If adversity strikes, it can be difficult to recall a time when you were grateful.
Build a bank of gratitude by storing notes, pictures, and other documents about what you were thankful for.
Mine includes lots of pictures of sunsets, family, travels, and nature, and notes regarding some kindness shown to me, little improvements in my health and fitness, and things I achieved. I even store some notes about difficult times that made me wiser and stronger, and about unhelpful people whose behavior inadvertently helped me in some way.
If you like to write on paper, you can choose a beautiful notebook and write in it each day. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a few things you’re grateful for. If you get stuck, you can express thanks for being spared some undesirable things (life in a war zone, for example, or a disabling illness.)
If you prefer to write on pieces of paper, you could collect these papers in a big gratitude jar. It will delight you more than a jar of sweets delights a little child.
If life ever gets on top of you and your mind is filled with complaints, you can visit your bank of gratitude to regain a sense of perspective. Gratitude and joy need never be too far away.
10. Invite someone to be your gratitude buddy.
If your partner is a naturally grateful person, you don’t have to look far. You can encourage and coach one another in living more gratefully.
Even then, you might like to invite a trusted confidante to join you in the conscious practice of gratitude. You can make a pact to practice one or more of these tips at least once a day, and encourage each other when you slip. Sharing your practice in this way helps to make gratitude a habit and a new way of living.
I’m fortunate to have a naturally grateful partner, but I do enjoy sharing my gratitude practices with others. Then I have to live up to what I proclaim.
11. Be aware of how gratitude feels in your body.
When you regularly practice gratitude, you start to feel a kind of joy in your body. It’s like a homecoming, as if you’re relaxing into a warm bath after shivering outside in the freezing winter of complaints.
Be conscious of how your limbs, your hands, your feet, your neck, your body, your face and your gut feel when you’re expressing gratitude. Take a couple of minutes to meditate on the sensations. Enjoy the glow of gratitude and add it to your list of things you’re grateful for.
12. Widen your net of gratitude to include more people.
Did you have a favorite teacher? What was it you loved about them? What effect did they have on your life?
One of my big regrets in life is that my first music teacher died before I could properly thank him. He taught me a wonderful approach to musical composition. I use what he taught me almost every day, and music-making brings me so much joy in life.
Think of all the people who contributed to your life. Thank them, one by one. Write to them, phone them, email them, visit them, do anything that works, but be sure to thank them.
Be as detailed and as specific as you can. Show them how much you understand their good intentions and effort. Let them know exactly what their contribution means in your life.
That will make them glow. And it will make you glow.
Express gratitude to people at every opportunity. It strengthens the bonds of goodwill and connection on which we humans thrive. It allows us to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and to attempt good and important things as we join others in working for meaningful causes.
Of course, gratitude is not always appropriate. Sometimes there are very good reasons for dissatisfaction and complaint, such as in abusive relationships. Even there, a habitually grateful person can sometimes more easily find solutions because they are more warmly connected to people who can help out.
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I like these simple practices because they’re relatively easy to do, yet they bring huge benefits. They’ve opened the door to a much more joyful way of living for me. I now experience much warmer relationships with my loved ones and others.
We know from neuroscience that what we do habitually can change even our brains. I used to be a champion complainer. Now I’m steadily improving at practicing gratitude.
If these practices work for me, a complainer by instinct, then they can work for anyone.
I’d love to hear what gratitude practices you’ve found useful. Let’s add to the list of practices and spread the joy. Thanks for the privilege of writing for you.
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Why I Forgave My Cruel, Abusive Father
“It’s not an easy journey, to get to a place where you forgive people. But it is such a powerful place, because it sets you free.” ~Tyler Perry
I still remember the day when I told my mother that I no longer wanted to be at home. I’d had enough of so much pain and sorrow, and the constant yelling. Soon after, I watched my mother cry bitterly as she made the decision to get a divorce.
I was ten years old at the time.
My father had always been a very strict man, who used to believe that his ways were the right ways.
He considered himself “successful” because he had his own house, his own car, a high salary, and a family. He was indeed a success at his office, but his employees didn’t seem to respect him.
They described my father as a man who liked to give orders and to keep things under control—and also a man who liked to tell hurtful, humiliating jokes at others’ expense.
I don’t remember my father having any friends, nor seeing him invite anyone to our home for Christmas.
Father was always working hard, two daily shifts for five years. He later told me he did that to give us a good future, but he was never present.
I don’t recall him playing with me that much, nor taking us on vacation. And he used to beat me with a belt if I didn’t get good grades at school. He used to drill into my head that I needed to “be better than everyone else.” He wanted me to be as competitive as him, as successful as him. He wanted me to become him.
But that wasn’t the whole reason why my parents divorced. My father cheated on my mother with five different women, thinking my mother wasn’t good enough for him anymore. Later in life I understood that it was he who felt not good enough.
One day he got very drunk and began calling me names like “little cockroach,” because he knew I would never be as good as him. That’s when I lost it.
At ten years old, I jumped toward my father and blindly hit him, with my tiny fists, in every part of his body that I could reach. My mother came running from the kitchen and had to separate us because my father, a mountain of a man, was easily giving me the beating of my life.
That was the last straw for her.
That night my mother kicked him out of the house, and I didn’t see him again for a few years.
After that day, we were shocked, but felt a small piece of relief. Eventually, we found peace.
The divorce helped my mother mature and become stronger and wiser. She was always there for me and my kid sister, playing the role of both loving mother and father. My raising made me think that, if I ever had children, I would never let them live the hell I lived.
Time heals all wounds, or so they say. Eventually, I found the strength to see my father again, at a very sad family event.
He was all by himself. None of his former mistresses were in sight. We spoke few words; I gave him my condolences and left. It had been weird to see my father again after so much time.
One day he fell sick with kidney failure and thought he was about to die. I went to visit him at the hospital, and it was shocking to see my once strong father reduced to a thin ghost of a man wrapped in a hospital gown.
There was no one around to help him but an aunt. No friends, no other women, no one. He was all alone.
I spent days and night taking care of him at the hospital. We would joke around and remember the few good things we shared during my childhood. I soon realized my father was just another kid that had been hit and humiliated during his childhood.
His parents had raised him the same way he’d raised me; therefore, he grew up with those values carved in his heart.
That’s when I realized it made no sense to continue hating him for the horrible childhood he gave me. Life was already giving him a tough lesson. Loneliness can be worse than death itself.
My father eventually recovered and left the hospital. I still speak to him and pay him a visit from time to time to see how he’s doing. He’s still the prideful man I knew as a kid, and he still expects me to become better than him. But now, his words don’t hurt me.
Because of my experiences with my father, I have learned these valuable lessons.
1. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting.
Some people say “Forgive and forget.” I would say instead “Forgive, don’t forget, but don’t let the memory of what happened control you.”
I learned this the hard way, sadly. Some days I would get very angry, and other days I would feel hopeless and unloved. This eventually pushed away the few people that really cared for me.
I couldn’t change the past, and I didn’t like the insecure, angry woman that I had become. I had to release that pain and anger.
One thing that helped me was to write down all the things I wanted to say to my father. I would read the letter as many times as I needed, then burn it. Watching the fire consume the letter that contained all my frustrations helped me ease the burden in my heart.
Some days, when I felt the ugly feeling again, I would put my hand over my heart, say a prayer, and repeat the same mantra to myself over and over again:
“I am here, I will help you. We are in this together. I will protect you.”
These words were powerful to me. After repeating that mantra to myself, I would feel my anger melt away.
We have to release our anger—in private, to avoid hurting the people that love us—in order to make space for love and peace. We learn from the pain, and though there’s no way we can easily push it under a rug, we don’t have to be controlled by the feelings that flood us when we remember what happened.
Don’t let the memory of the past inflict pain in your present life.
2. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to include that person back into your life.
Forgiving someone doesn’t always mean welcoming that person back into your life like nothing happened.
There are people who can’t be in our lives without hurting us. These kinds of people need to be loved from a distance. It may be your father, your brother, your former best friend, or your ex. Life is too short to make it harder and more painful by allowing people who constantly hurt us back into our circle of peacefulness.
3. Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning someone’s actions.
Some people might view what happened to my father as karma, but it’s hard for me to see it that way. When I learned about his troubled childhood, I realized that’s where his behavior came from. I finally understood why he did what he did. Still, that didn’t make it excusable. What he did was wrong and not acceptable. No matter how bad your past was, you can’t go around inflicting pain on others, thinking it’s okay.
I know a lot of people who had sad, painful childhoods who turned out to be wonderful parents. Pain can give us huge lessons and make us better people.
4. Forgive to set yourself free.
This was the most important lesson in my life. I was the target of bullying at school because, at that time, children who came from broken homes were seen as troubled kids. I hated my father every time someone made jokes about my divorced parents.
Later in life I blamed my father for all my failed relationships. I hopelessly looked for approval from the men I dated, only to be dumped like a hot frying pan.
I was destroying myself with hatred and pain. All this turmoil made me lonely and miserable.
Eventually, I learned that I was the only person responsible of my life, and that blaming my father was a cowardly thing to do. If I wanted to have a happy life, I had to let go of the pain. It wasn’t easy—it took years of self-discovery and soul searching to achieve this—but when I did, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
Trying to find something to inspire me, I came across one quote that struck a chord with me:
“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
I was poisoning my life, my few friendships, and myself. I’d missed a lot of the big things in life because I’d spent so much time hating my father and my problems. I learned not to repeat his mistakes, and to pay attention to my own behavior. The past can be painful but it doesn’t have to define us. We make our own present; we are our own person.
We can’t erase the past, but we can choose to let go of the pain in order to live a happier, more fulfilling life.
The road isn’t easy; in fact, there were days when I felt I was taking one step forward and two steps back, and some days I would just curl up and cry. But I kept moving forward because I desperately wanted to get out of that place of isolation. I focused on myself, spent time with family, eventually found good friends, and then finally felt lighter and at peace.
In the end, I learned that forgiveness is not about the other person; it is about ourselves.
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When Family Members Push Our Buttons: How This Helps Us Grow
“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.” ~Pema Chodron
You love them most of the time. You can’t stand them some of the time. But in the end, family is family.
I’ve never liked to admit it, but I am just like my dad. Close in birthday, same number 5 life path in numerology, both risk takers, very passionate and adventurous, fun-loving, and witty, and we lead by example. That’s positively speaking.
However, it becomes a negative pattern to focus on the other side of the coin. We both have the ability to become angry, withdrawn, and addicted to drama, and we both try to please everyone then resent others for their own imbalance.
Do you think it’s any surprise the family you were born into?
I used to blame my snappy behavior on my dad, whether at work, with girlfriends, or in social environments. “It’s my conditioning,” was my excuse I told myself. That’s exactly what it is from my perspective—an excuse.
On closer self-reflection, I found myself getting angrier and angrier that I was like my dad and becoming more like him.
Even though he’s a great guy, whenever I had a frustrating moment or lost my temper, I would blame him. No accountability or responsibility for my beliefs and actions, or the decisions I had made that led me to my current state.
What this did was further fuel my anger because I began to resent myself too.
I didn’t love myself as a “whole,” warts and all. I only wanted to see the positive stuff, but that became harder to do when I didn’t acknowledge, understand, and process my shadow as a part of who I am. This neglect strangely disabled my ability to enjoy the more positive aspects of my nature.
From my perspective, my dad was waking me up to own my anger and helping me see how it was also of benefit and service to me.
This moment came to a head at a FedEx Office when an employee made a remark to me that made me feel stupid. Well, that’s how I interpreted it at the time anyway. I hadn’t read the signs on how to use the self-service computers, and the employee reminded me in a condescending tone to read the signs over to my left.
That was enough for me to lose it. “What the hell did you just say to me?” I snapped.
I went from zero to a thousand in an instant and kept shouting like a crazy person. I could feel my head boil. It was then that a friend called on my cell. I stepped away, while the employee looked stunned and embarrassed by my behavior, while the women in line clutched their pearls so to speak.
I picked up the call and subconsciously said, “Don’t mind me, just having a moment here at Fed Ex. Snapped like my Dad.”
There went the finger of blame. Once again, I refused to accept that I could behave that way. My easy-going nature was where I liked to focus my awareness.
The idea that I could sting with my words in a heartbeat, I chose to neglect. It reminded me too much of my dad and how I didn’t like it when he cut me off from a sentence or adamantly refused to see things from my perspective. It was his fault that this was becoming an all too familiar occurrence was my excuse.
Thankfully, my friend on the phone is also a mentor, so he reminded me it was time to take a closer look.
“If your dad is the constant focus of your anger, what is he trying to wake you up to? Can you see he is subconsciously summoning you to investigate a part of yourself that desperately needs attention?” he asked.
It’s hard looking at yourself in the mirror when you may see an aspect of yourself you deny. But in order for me to understand my anger, I needed to become familiar with it and take responsibility.
By owning the positive side of my angry outbursts, I could stop judging myself and release blame directed at my dad.
Sound a little weird? Stay with me.
At home with a pen and paper, I wrote down every benefit I could think of, which told me how being angry was also of service to me. Some benefits included:
- Anger helps me take action; the fire within motivates me to go after what I really want. It helps me create tunnel vision and to block out anything or anyone that I see as a distraction to my goals.
- It adds to the emotion and depth of my writing, which can only add to its authenticity.
- It gives me an opportunity to practice accepting my shadow side. I don’t need to fight my anger; I just need to understand it and become more mindful of how I use it. This becomes a practice of accepting myself as I am.
By the time I had finished this exercise, which quickly became a page and a half, I felt a huge weight had lifted. The more self-aware I became, the less my anger bubbled to the surface.
I believe that was because I let myself off the hook. I forgave myself for being angry and forgave my dad for how he was. That in of itself was a huge weight to lift off my chest. Understanding it made me calmer and accentuated my ability to enjoy the more “positive” aspects of my nature.
This is, I believe, what my dad was waking me up to. I’ll say it again:
Do you think it’s any surprise the family you were born into? Think about it. Considering the amount of time we spend with our families growing up, it comes as no surprise that certain family members seriously push our buttons.
Why do they push our buttons? To help us discover what we’re meant to work through in this lifetime. Simply put, to help us grow. They are our teachers to help us wake up to parts of ourselves that need attention, understanding, and in some cases healing.
When rubbed the wrong way, the idea is to be able to take a closer look at ourselves and grow. What are these button pushers trying to teach us? Why do we react the way we do? What pain point are they touching? Are we willing to admit this and address it? Are we willing to not take it all so personally?
I believe that there are no accidents. I believe that our birth into our individual families is not random. Even if you don’t share this belief, you can still choose to see your challenging relationships as opportunities for growth, thereby empowering yourself instead of victimizing yourself.
The invitation to grow can help us be more empathetic, compassionate, loving, self-aware, trusting, authentic, confident, and less self-absorbed, jealous, envious, uncooperative, angry, and impatient.
You might be thinking, “Well, my brother bullies me,” or “My mother was abusive.” Sure, they might have been and probably were. But what do we know about hurt people? They hurt others.
Put yourself in his or her shoes. Imagine how much he is hurting or what dis-ease she has in her body? You have no idea what it is like to walk in their shoes. And look, it doesn’t give them a “get out of jail free card,” but it does give you an opportunity to become stronger and more self-aware, and to tap into a deeper understanding of your authenticity.
Maybe the bully of the family is summoning you to stand up for yourself, believe in yourself. Maybe your mother is calling for you to treat yourself with more kindness, so you can then teach others how to be kind.
I could go into a billion examples in family relationships, but the point I’m making is that your family is designed to help you grow. The task at hand is to wake up and pay attention to what each one of them has to teach you.
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Do What Excites You: How to Push Through Fear & Make Bold Choices
“You’ve got to do things that feel unnatural if you want to grow.” ~Jon Morrow
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” my boss said.
“Yes,” I nodded.
“What do I have to pay you to make you stay?” he asked.
I just stared at him. No words would come.
“There’s nothing I can do, is there?” he said.
More silence. But my inner voice was anything but silent. I was consumed with doubt and deafened by the bloody battle raging inside my head.
On one side was caution, armed with the strong, fight-to-the-death breed of soldier. Her battalion was fuelled by countless victories over the dozens of glorious ideas that had fallen on their swords before.
On the other side was courage, armed with nothing but hope and crazy determination. There was no battalion. Only a thin veneer of pluck.
Courage won. Only just.
I could have balked at any moment, backed down from my insane plan and taken the easy way out. I could have taken the lucrative job at one of London’s top investment banks that was being offered to me on a silver platter.
But my gut screamed, “No, you’ve got to go! You’ll never find what you’re searching for if you stay.”
Days later, as the plane touched down in the Russian capital, my breath caught in my throat.
A lone, skinny, baby-faced blonde with a crazy notion to catch the train across Siberia.
What the hell was I doing? Caution had stowed away in the recesses of my mind and now screamed in my ear.
Was I mad? Probably. Was I terrified? Definitely. Was I excited? Out of my skin.
Looking back, I believe courage won the battle that day because it was backed by my overwhelming desire for discovery. I wanted to discover the world and my rightful place in it.
And the reason it won? Because I listened to my subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is the feeling mind. Its ancient roots are primitive, and it’s the home of emotions such as fear, anger, and desire. The subconscious is powerful and tireless. Within it, both my fears and desires became formidable forces. But desire was stronger.
The subconscious’s nemesis, the conscious mind, driven by logic, reason, and foresight, showed its face in the battle that day as caution and attempted to derail my desire.
But it’s a fundamental truth that whenever the two minds are in conflict, the subconscious always wins. Deep emotional feelings overpower reasoned thought every time.
Deep inside my subconscious mind, I knew I was searching for something I could only find by pushing myself to my limits.
I knew I’d never find it if I continued with my dreary job. I knew that if I’d not found it in my current life already, it wasn’t there. I knew I needed to look someplace else.
I knew I had no choice but to go.
So I went. Here’s what I discovered on my journey.
Discovery #1: Fear works in two ways: it will make you run or it will paralyze you.
Fear is a curious beast. It manifests itself differently in everybody, but the result is always the same – you fight like heck or you run as fast as you can. But you can’t run or escape a mental threat, so escape becomes paralysis. You escape through inaction. By avoiding the decision itself.
I experienced both impulses, avoiding and fighting, that day. Terrified by what lay ahead, I nearly caved and said “yes, I’ll stay,” as it was the easiest way to flee my crazy idea. But my fight response kicked in, fuelling my swift and steadfast decision to go.
Discovery #2: For every decision you make, caution will present hundreds of safer alternatives.
Successful life decisions are all born as “what ifs.”
It’s easy to be confused by the volume of possibility and the memories of past choices, and miss the best decision.
Sure, I could have decided to take the banking job and make lots of money. I could have decided to build a great career with the help of a strong advocate. I could have decided to remain in the U.K. long enough to secure citizenship that would open doors in my future.
But the strongest and best decision for me was to leave. Because when I fought through the waves of fear and listened to my deepest desires, going on this journey felt right. The prospect filled me with the most glorious excitement out of all the possible outcomes.
Discovery #3: You’re sharply aware of every door you close but blind to all the doors you could open.
It’s true. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. The trouble is that it shadows our foresight. I could clearly see every door I was closing that day. Each opportunity reared its stubborn head as I slammed the door in its face.
But when it came to my future, I was blindfolded.
None of us have a script for what lies ahead, but we all have a critical role to play in casting the characters and choosing the scenes.
I chose to be a bold, fearless character that day. I wrote the opening scene and stepped through the door.
Discovery #4: Every fear conquered today makes tomorrow easier.
Life isn’t always easy. In fact, it’s damned brutal sometimes. But every battle you face makes you stronger. You’re better equipped to deal with the next inevitable blow you face.
I faced my fear that day, and in the days that followed. The moment I stepped onto the airport tarmac with my heart in my throat, I wanted to run. The moment I arrived at the crowded train station, feeling confused by the language and scared by the strange faces, I wanted to run. The moment the train shuddered to life and began its fourteen-day journey across Siberia, I wanted to pull the emergency break and run.
But I stayed. My resolve had been fortified by my hard-won battles of yesterday.
Discovery #5: The only wrong decision is the one you don’t learn from.
Everybody’s afraid of making the wrong decision. We’re all afraid of consequences we might not foresee.
So how do you know if you’re making the right decision? You don’t. I believe no decision is the wrong one unless you fail to learn from it, whatever the outcome.
If you’re stuck and can’t make a decision, change your view. Take yourself somewhere quiet and think through your options, taking note of how you feel during each moment. The answers are there.
Why my triumphs can be yours too.
My decisions, fears, and triumphs aren’t so unique. Everyone experiences them. You experience them.
Sure, I took the train across Siberia on my own. Not everyone does that. But you can catch your own train.
Your train can go to a safe, predictable destination. And that’s just fine if it’s what makes you feel good deep down.
But your train can also go somewhere uncharted.
It can go through the door to life-changing self-discovery.
Self-discovery that can only be fast-tracked with a bold, insane-feeling decision.
A decision that will sit high atop a mountain of arguments and alternatives.
A decision that will wear the scars of the fight it had with caution, fear, and desire.
But if you think about it long enough, and listen to your subconscious mind, its power will win the fight.
And you’ll be the one writing your life script.
That’s what I chose. Will you?
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To Fully Heal Your Broken Heart, Make Sure You Do This
“Grief is healthy and it is healing.” ~Richard Moss
When I was a little girl there was this belief floating around in my head that there was only one person. One person who was my soulmate. One person who could love me. I think the belief was formed by some concoction of Disney movies, religion, and American culture.
What’s worse than this belief is that I somehow found myself afraid that I wouldn’t even have one person. I was afraid I would be alone. Forever.
I don’t know when I adopted the belief that I wasn’t enough, that I might not find someone, that I was unlovable. My mom did her best to reassure me, but it didn’t quite do the trick.
Self-love is the work we have to do ourselves. No one else can give us that gift, no matter how young we happen to be.
Into my third decade of life I did the deep work that led me to discover what it actually meant to love myself. My life transformed in so many incredible ways, and then I no longer worried about whether there was someone out there who would love me. I knew I was lovable, and by more than one person.
At some later point I met a man. I liked him, but there were some red flags. He was a bit flaky, and he lacked the ability to communicate maturely. I was about to walk away, and then suddenly everything changed. The red flags turned green, and we pranced off into the moonlight.
That red lack-of-communication flag never really turned green. Nothing had actually changed. He just hid who he really was until he felt suffocated and invisible. After almost a year of living like this he left me with no warning.
For a long time I felt so much pain that my entire being melted into sorrow. I fell into a deep depression and reached out to a spiritual teacher who wrote me this:
Please do not indulge any thought that attacks yourself or even your ex-boyfriend. Grief is healthy and it is healing.
I wrote back to this teacher that I wasn’t indulging in negative thoughts, that the pain was so overwhelming that I felt no anger, just the deepest sadness I’d ever felt.
I spent a lot of time in bed feeling my pain, crying, and thinking. This was a man who I was building a life with. This was a man I opened my whole heart to. This man showed me love and support like I’d never experienced before. And then he swiftly took it all away. As I lay in bed for days with a churning mind the stories began to surface in whispers:
See, I am unlovable. He didn’t think I was worth loving. I’m not enough.
And the stories grew louder.
“Please do not indulge any thought that attacks yourself.”
The stories we tell ourselves that deny the essence of who we are may be so deeply rooted that we’re unconscious of their presence. I was attacking myself. Each time I allowed these beliefs to hold an ounce of truth I was attacking myself.
So I worked on loving myself instead. I worked on seeing the truth of who I was in each moment. The truth I found was this: I am worth loving. I am enough. I am lovable. I am beautiful. I am whole. All of this is true right now, in every single moment I am living.
A few months into my grief, the anger began to surface, and I started to vilify him. I was tired of feeling the pain, so my mind created stories about him to make me feel better. I told myself he was incapable of loving me, that he couldn’t allow me to be fully me. I thought about how he was a selfish person for treating me the way he did.
“Please do not indulge any thought that attacks yourself or even your ex-boyfriend.”
My teacher was right. Those stories didn’t do my ex justice. They didn’t honor the time we shared together. And they didn’t actually serve me. They were a weak tool to help me avoid my pain.
The truth is simply that he wasn’t my person anymore. And that didn’t make him wrong. It didn’t make him bad. I didn’t have to turn him into a villain to heal my wounds. I didn’t have to diminish my pain or justify his actions. I could simply allow for the pain and allow for the healing.
“Grief is healthy and it is healing.”
That breakup took me down, down, down. It made me forget who I am so I could find myself again. It was the greatest gift I have been given in a very long time, and it took me many months to recognize the gift at all.
Grief is healthy and it is healing. I didn’t need to make up stories to ease my pain because the more I hid from it the more it had a hold on me. Instead, I chose to let the pain wash over me. I allowed it to teach me. That’s how grief can become a gift.
We don’t need to hold on to old lovers, torturing ourselves with “what-ifs” that don’t serve us.
We don’t need to condemn ourselves for being imperfect, for being too much, for not doing all the right things.
And we don’t need to denigrate the people we have loved because they hurt us.
I have never been more confident that I will have an incredible partner in life one day. You can too. But first you have to let go of that story, whether you’ve adopted it as a child or created it to feel less pain as an adult. Stop shrinking yourself down because you won’t let go.
Allow for the grief so you can begin to truly heal. Through healing you will grow more fully into yourself, and from that place you will discover the truth. Release the burdens of storytelling. You don’t actually need them. You are strong enough to heal on your own.
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4 Things I’d Say to My Anxiety-Filled Younger Self
“I vow to let go of all worries and anxiety in order to be light and free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
As I sit here writing this, I’m just a couple of days away from my twenty-eighth birthday.
It’s been a whole decade since an introverted, shy version of me turned eighteen years old and entered into the realms of what many people consider to be “adult age.”
Back then, anxiety, specifically social anxiety, plagued me.
At the time, however, I’d never even heard of anxiety, let alone considered that I may be suffering with this thing that could be termed a “mental illness.” Truth be told, I just thought I was a bit weird.
I thought it was just who I was. And that the uncontrollable sweating whenever I left the house, the monumental nervousness before having to go into any social situation, the sick feeling before making any phone call, and the continual worry of what might happen in the future was just an annoying part of me that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.
The decade that followed, though, brought some huge life lessons. I graduated from college, got my first full-time job, left said job, started several businesses (failing at most), became obsessed with health, nutrition, and fitness, met the love of my life, and traveled to various parts of the world.
But around eighteen months ago, I left the personal training business I was miserable in and became obsessed with spirituality, personal development, and understanding my own brain.
I wanted to know why I’d been on this journey so far, yet still felt completely worthless as a human being and filled with panic about what people thought of me or what might happen in the future.
It was during this time I did monumental amounts of reading, inward reflection, and deep inner work in order to truly get to know what was going on inside of me. I got to understand who I was and connect with myself at a level I didn’t previously think was possible.
So as I sit here now, ten years on from my eighteenth birthday, I’d like to share four things I’ve learned over the past decade and would want to say to that anxiety-ridden, nervous, and severely introverted version of myself if I ever got the chance.
1. Be unashamedly all of you.
Part of the reason I was feeling all this anxiety and emptiness inside was that I had this belief that I somehow needed to be more than who I was. Like I wasn’t good enough as me in any present moment, and so I needed to add on external things in an attempt to bridge that gap.
Deep down, at a subconscious level, I felt that I wasn’t worthy of love or attention without chasing all this stuff that was outside of myself. The degree, the job, the business, the pay bracket.
As I attached my entire worth as a person to all this external stuff, I created a world full of anxiety for myself.
I got anxious about having to converse with people, for fear they would figure me out as a fraud or someone who didn’t have everything together. And my desperate looking to the future for a time when I did have it all together would cause regular panic when something even slightly compromised my ability to get there.
The irony here is that by never feeling “enough” or “worthy” and trying to gain these external things in order to be more than I was, I was actually shrinking my real self.
The real me wasn’t showing up in the world, and I was holding myself back from everyone and everything. Bringing just a miniscule percentage of the greatest version of myself into every situation and moment. And that’s just not fair to me, or the world.
So the first thing I would say to my eighteen-year-old self is to stop trying to be more than you are, and just unashamedly be all that you are at any given moment.
2. You get to create yourself.
One of my greatest fears as an eighteen-year-old, and for a good number of years following, was that I would be this incredibly shy and anxious person for the rest of my life.
In fact, I don’t suppose it was really a fear at the time. More a simple acceptance and frustration at the fact that I’d been dealt this hand of someone who always had a knot in his stomach, struggled to hold conversations, and was perennially labelled “the quiet one.”
If I’m honest, it caused me to really dislike and become irritated with myself. It was overwhelmingly frustrating to see other people make their way into social circles and progress in life seemingly with relative ease. Yet here I was, having to calm down and prepare myself for the simple act of making a phone call to book a dentist’s appointment.
This all just became a part of my identity, just who I thought I was and a part of me I assumed I just had to live with.
At some point along the way, though, I came to the realization that I was choosing to keep this social anxiety as a part of my identity. Maybe not on a conscious level, but certainly on a subconscious one.
I discovered that by facing up to what was going on inside my anxious head, no longer trying to push it away and suppress it, and challenging the negative thoughts floating around, I could create a blank slate of sorts, to assume an identity without all the anxiety.
In short, a person’s past does not need to dictate their present or the future. There is no “hand” we have been dealt. And so we get to create and choose into who we want to be in any given moment or phase of our lives.
3. Life doesn’t have to look a certain way.
For so long, I had this grandiose illusion that everything had to look a specific way.
I believed the “correct” path in life, whatever that meant, was already there for me, and if I veered from it, something terrible would happen. In my mind, everything was filled with “should” and “should nots” around what life was supposed to look like.
I should have a good schooling, a degree, get a good job, behave this way, do this, do that; it’s bad to do this, it’s good to do that; I should fall in line with everyone else.
Of course, I’m not saying we should go against the grain all the time. There are some aspects in life where it’s probably a good idea to fall in line. The concepts of not judging people by the color of their skin or not being a serial killer are pretty good examples.
But to just accept that everything needs to look the way society, the media, a religion, teachers, school, or even your parents tells us is not necessarily serving us best.
All this did for me was create anxiety. I had a path in my mind, and if anything threatened me falling off that path then, in my head, I would be castigated from society, nobody would love me, and my whole world would cave in.
It was as if I was constantly on the lookout for things that could move me away from how things should look. The result was being in an almost perpetual internal state of worry, panic, and dread.
But why do things have to look a certain way? Just because a direction, path, or way of thinking worked for one person, doesn’t mean it will for anyone else.
This is when I realized it was perfectly okay to challenge convention. To investigate different ways of thinking without the whole world judging me and everything falling apart. And that it was perfectly healthy, even necessary, to figure out my own path.
4. Learn to love the darkness.
This was something that took me a while to truly understand and accept. But when I did, it created a monumental amount of inner healing and peacefulness.
We all have dark parts of our past. Some maybe have darker parts than others, but that doesn’t make them any more or less valid.
For a long time I wished those dark parts weren’t there. I would look into my past and feel frustration and resentment for those dark parts that caused so much pain.
I’d look into this darkness and think about how it shouldn’t be there. That it was wrong and bad it existed, and because it did, I would be judged if anyone found out; therefore, I wasn’t worthy of being happy.
In reality, every moment in my life, the good and the bad, was part of a vast sequence of events that led me to this very moment. We need the darkness in order to experience light, up to experience down, and sadness to experience joy. Without one, the other cannot exist.
Of course, deep wounds take time to heal. I’m not saying we should all be able to click our fingers and instantly love every aspect of the past, regardless of how traumatic or painful.
But opening up to the idea of letting go of resentment and frustration, and appreciating dark moments in the past for what they really are, is such a powerful step. They don’t define us, and they don’t need dictate who we are. They have given us the opportunity to harness this very moment and unleash the amazing things that are inside us on the unsuspecting world.
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What would you tell your younger self if you had the chance to speak with them?
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How to Improve Your Work/Life Balance and Reclaim Your Time
“You will never feel truly satisfied by work until you are satisfied by life.” ~Heather Schuck
When I was two years old, my parents got divorced.
In other words, I’ve never seen my biological parents spending loving time with each other. I never had the chance to experience the small things most children take for granted.
For example…
- I don’t remember my mom and dad ever sharing a loving kiss after a long day at work
- I don’t remember ever having both parents around to tuck me in at night
- And I never overheard simple “how was your day?” conversations between my parents in the kitchen
As a kid who didn’t know any different, I thought this was normal. I’d stay with my mom during the week and visit my dad on the weekends. No big deal, that was that.
Looking back, I’m lucky that even though my biological parents were separated, both my parents loved me unconditionally, and supported me whenever I needed it. (And I’m happy to say they still do!)
But, truthfully, the reason for the divorce still saddens me to this day.
The primary reason my parents divorced is because my father was a workaholic.
Because I’m expecting to be a first-time father myself in a few months, “workaholic” is a word that’s at the top of my mind. I’ve thought deeply about how to avoid being labeled a workaholic, especially in today’s world where being a workaholic is synonymous with success.
The biggest question I’ve asked myself recently is, “Should I spend more time with family or should I focus more on my career?”
But, as I’ve thought about it more, I realized that’s the close-minded, dualistic way of looking at things. My shift in mindset from an “either/or” to a “how can I be creative to incorporate both?” has been the first step.
And, as I’ve continued to grow and reframe my limiting beliefs, there have been a few more realizations about maintaining a work-life balance. Here’s what I’m learning.
Making My Time on This Planet Count the Most
No matter how I slice it, I only have twenty-four hours in my day.
In the past, I’ve naturally gravitated toward being as efficient as possible during work hours and doing everything myself. This approach has been supported by an endless amount of tactics to maximize my productivity during the day—tactics that, if I’m being honest, only marginally approve my efficiency.
Efficiency only carries us so far. Even if we’re the most productive person the world, we have a limit to the energy we can spend and a limit on our output.
As I’ve learned, focusing entirely on efficiency and trying to do everything is the wrong approach.
In reality, the people who have figured out how to integrate their family and professional success have done one thing very well: letting go.
Caring for Ourselves Means Saying No
One of my idols, Warren Buffett once said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
A couple of years ago, I had reached out to a mentor of mine asking him for advice. He was a highly respected, gregarious person and was pivotal in my early career.
And even though we had an established relationship, he told me, “No, I can’t meet then. Evenings are reserved for my wife and daughter.”
I was blown away. It stung a little, but after a bit I realized his “no” made me respect him even more.
Instead of talking in the evening, he had asked me to call him in the morning, or to email my questions and he would get back to me within a couple of hours. He defined his boundaries and “let go” of having to please me (and sacrifice time with his wife and kids).
In another example, Caryn Seidman Becker, the chairman and CEO of CLEAR, said: “You can have it all, but each person needs to define their personal ‘all’ because you can’t have everything.”
For my mentor, having it “all” meant saying “no” so he could have a successful career during the day and cherished family time in the evening. He knows his time is limited, and reduces his obligations to the core of what he wants to accomplish.
“Letting go” Also Means Letting Other People Help
One of my favorite theories is the law of diminishing returns. Sometimes, this shows up when I work more than fifty hours at my day job and seeing my output decline. Other times, when I say “yes” to too many people and can’t spend quality time with my family.
In other words, when I reach a point where the benefit gained is less than the amount of energy invested, it means I’m doing too much.
At a certain point for all of us, we need to stop exerting effort to maintain our balance, health, and important relationships, even if it means we’ll stop short of perfection.
When we understand the law of diminishing returns we favor progress and learning over perfection.
The metric for balance varies too. Sometimes the optimal level of effort is when we’ve achieved “good enough” on a project at work, which allows us to focus our energy on family. Or, other times, it’s achieving “good enough” with family so we can focus more energy on a massive project we’re excited about at work.
And once you know what your “good enough” is, you have the ability to ask others to support you so you can free up time and energy for more important things. Whether it’s hiring someone to help you grow a business, having your laundry done for you, or even getting someone to come change the oil on your car at work so you don’t have to waste time driving around.
It’s important to note the goal isn’t laziness—it’s effectiveness. For example, there might be times when we have to put in extra hours to get the job done. The differentiating factor is recognizing when to do something ourselves, and when to delegate.
The Power of Using Deadlines
Have you ever noticed the power of deadlines?
In college, when I had professors set a project deadline, I knew it had to get done. I could cram all I wanted the night before, but no matter what it needed to be finished on the due date. On the other hand, when I have something I need to do “eventually” it gets pushed off…again…and again…and again.
When we use deadlines strategically, we’re following Parkinson’s Law. Here’s an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Body on what the Law means:
“Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for it’s completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of a shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.”
In short, Parkinson’s Law pushes us to take action and focus exclusively on the most important items, and nothing is wasted.
And when we use Parkinson’s Law (or ask for help, or say “no”) we’re making sure to spend our energy and time in the places that matter the most to us.
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What to Do When Your Partner Won’t Work on Your Relationship
“It takes two to manage the relationship, but it takes one to begin the change.” ~Sheri E. Ragland
So, your significant other doesn’t understand you. In fact you’re not even sure if they hear you. Despite trying to talk about things or take a break from each other, you end up arguing about the same thing over and over again.
You try this and you try that. You back away, you move in. You break up, you get back together. You try everything you can think of, and nothing is working, but you don’t want to end the relationship.
You finally realize that no matter what you two do, you eventually find your way back to the same conflict, repeating the same dance again and again and again. Nothing seems to ever change.
So, you get excited when you finally figure out what you need to do—couples counseling! Relief floods you, confident now that couples counseling will save this relationship! And so, you announce to your other half, “We need couples counseling.”
But alas, like a punch to your gut, your partner has no interest in couples counseling and refuses to go. Barely able to breathe, you know your relationship is really at an impasse and you are hopeless to know how to fix it. It is certainly doomed if you don’t get the counseling you both need.
I know the feeling. In fact, my car was packed at least once, and I was sure I was finally going to leave.
Thank goodness I didn’t.
Did you ever hear the old adage, “I married my mother” or “I married my father”? There is truth to this statement. Despite our inability to recognize it, we do often marry or partner with someone like our mother or our father.
And I am going to tell you why.
First and foremost, it’s familiar. We’re attracted to what we know. Secondly and most importantly, we marry or partner with someone like our mother or our father in an unconscious attempt at resolving old conflicts and feelings left over from those original and significant early relationships.
Read that again: We marry or partner with someone like our mother or our father in an unconscious attempt at resolving old conflicts and feelings left over from those original and significant early relationships.
That’s a lot to mull over, for sure.
Never underestimate the impact your childhood experience had on your life. Never underestimate the impact your relationship or lack thereof, with your mother and father had on your life. Even absent parents can have an immeasurable impact.
They were the mirror through which you learned to see yourself. If, more often than not, you had a positive, encouraging, supportive mirror, you likely grew up with healthy self-esteem. If that mirror was more often than not, judgmental, critical, unsupportive, or disinterested, then your self-worth is likely at the lower end of healthy.
Think about it. Those relationships, or lack of, sent you multitudes of unspoken messages.
The question is: What are the messages you took in and how are they affecting your current relationship?
I grew up in a male-dominated household and religion. It was not until I was an adult that I recognized that I believed men were more important than women. No one ever said that to me, but that was how I interpreted the male-dominated environments that gave little to no voice to women.
As a result, I rarely spoke up, remaining hidden. I found myself in unhealthy and unsatisfying relationships where I allowed men to dominate me. I never fully showed up as a valuable and integral part of the relationship I was in.
This is one of the ways that our past follows us into the present, inviting us to grow and learn beyond what childhood taught us. Figuring out how to navigate our emotional world and our relationships is paramount to this process. Hence, a not so peaceful, sometimes antagonizing relationship with the one you love can be the invitation you need.
So, s/he won’t accompany you to couples counseling. What to do??
Go yourself.
The change we want in our world, always starts with ourselves.
Now don’t get me wrong, I get it. If only s/he would [fill in the blank] it would all be okay. If s/he would stop [fill in the blank], I would be just fine. I just need him/her to [fill in the blank] and we’d be happy. And so it goes.
Every relationship has a dance. You do this and s/he does that. S/he does that and you do this. That would be the repeating pattern that has you going around and around and around, never resolving a thing.
You are both trying to convince the other of why you are right. That is a lose-lose situation.
When you can both recognize that this is not necessarily a right-wrong situation, both having valid points, you might find your way to a win-win situation.
If one partner changes their steps, breaking out of the old pattern, the other has three choices:
1. They can, and often do, do everything in their power to get you back into the dance steps you are both familiar with. Don’t let them suck you in. If you don’t they will be left with two choices:
2. They can leave altogether.
3. Their other choice is to change their dance to get in step with yours.
I understand, dear heart. This is hard and it is risky. Truly I do understand, because I’ve been there. If my spouse would just behave the way I want him to and treat me the way I think he should, then life would be perfect. We could just forget this whole dance thing.
In other words, if he molds himself to meet my needs, I won’t have to be disturbed or expected to take care of my own needs. Ah, wouldn’t that be nice?!
Maybe, not likely, but unrealistic, nonetheless.
So, I finally got into therapy. Alone.
Best decision I ever made. (Other than marrying my husband.)
It was hard work. Grueling at times. I had to unearth my childhood experience to finally understand I was expecting my husband to meet the needs that my parents had been unable to meet.
I was demanding. I wanted him to be interested all the time. Drop what he was doing when I needed him. I was irritable. I expected him to know what I needed without my telling him. I wanted him to coddle me and sympathize with my struggles.
I didn’t want a husband. I wanted a parent.
At some point in my therapy, I said, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have never married my husband.”
I have since said, “Thank God I didn’t know!”
I began to heal old wounds. My therapist became the surrogate parent who put a new mirror in front of me. This one showed me my strength, my ability, my heart. I began to realize I was capable and strong.
My moods stabilized. Depression lifted. Anxiety subsided.
I learned to listen to myself the way my therapist did. I learned to have compassion for myself the way my therapist did. I learned to love myself the way my therapist did. That was the mirror I needed—one that showed me my value, equal to that of anyone else.
Having done so, without even realizing it was happening, I stopped looking for my husband to parent me. I didn’t need him to. I was now doing it for myself. I began to see him more clearly, realizing how present and steadfast he had always been.
As I stopped putting demands on him, and accepted him just the way he was, he became more available to me. Our relationship improved. Tremendously.
As my steps changed, he changed his own and we found a healthier dance.
Now, I am not going to tell you that your outcome will be the same as mine. It may not be. You may get healthy enough to realize you don’t want the relationship anymore and you will then be able to take the appropriate steps to do what you need to do.
S/he may leave. Then you may have to grieve what the relationship never was to begin with. If things aren’t working as they are, then maybe you have less to lose than you think and fear is getting in the way.
Facing your fears, and delving in to your own insecurities, distorted beliefs, and unhappiness provides the opportunity to be free from emotional dependence on another person.
And that is a good thing.
That is a very, very good thing.
Don’t wait for someone else to get on board before you do what is best for you. Love yourself first and the rest will follow.
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You Have the Right to Feel Safe in Your Relationships (Even with Your Family)
“Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to[…] It exists for a reason and always deserves our respect and attention.” ~Harriet G. Lerner, The Dance of Anger
My journey to authentic safety began, at long last, with my discovery of my own anger.
Anger is my least favorite emotion. I don’t even particularly like its cousins—annoyance, irritation, frustration.
The moment that cemented my profound dislike occurred when I was a teenager.
I had tucked myself away in a corner of the house—in the dark den where my family kept the computer. (Just a word processor—this was in the dark ages before the internet.)
I was doing homework, I think, and an extended family member who was staying with us—someone I had always trusted and looked up to—burst into the room to confront me about something. (I don’t recall what it was, but I doubt it was particularly bad. I was a straight-A student, a people-pleasing, we-must-ALL-play-strictly-by-the-rules kind of child and teen.)
I don’t remember what I said or did; I think I felt distracted. In any case, I somehow neglected to give my family member what he wanted and he grabbed the printed pages I’d set next to the computer.
They were the pages of an important piece of writing I’d recently handed in at school; they’d been returned with a good grade, and, to my pleased delight, some specific words of praise scrawled in my teacher’s handwriting.
My family member grabbed the pages and tore them to express his impotent frustration at not getting the response he’d wanted from me. I so clearly remember the distorted, crazed look of pure rage on his face.
I remember thinking something like,
That’s really not okay. Those pages, with those handwritten words, can’t be replaced. You are out of control. YOU are acting like a tantruming, irrational, destructive child.
Looking at this from an outsider’s perspective, I realize this would probably not strike most people as a bad outburst. It’s pretty mild.
But to put it in context: On the one hand, my parents were pretty nurturing, and angry outbursts were rare. There was some dysfunction, but enough stability and normalcy that I had a strong inner sense of what things should look like between people.
At the same time, there was a lot of mental illness in my immediate and extended family—a lot of weird, distorted thought and behavior, a lot of unpredictability. Part of why I was such a rule-follower, or, rule-worshipper, even, was that it made life feel safe. Contained.
I just hated anything that felt out-of-control.
I yearned for things to feel normal, reasonable, safe. My trusted family member’s irrational rage struck me as emotionally chaotic; the kind of extremely disorderly thing I despised.
I remember moving into a very distant place inside myself, and vowing something along the lines of:
I don’t ever want to behave like that. Ever. I will never be like that.
Many, many years later, as a long-married adult, I experienced a dramatic counterpoint to that.
I was in my own home, and thinking about someone I love very much and how they had recently been betrayed in a way that was cruel, unjust, and profoundly devastating.
Thinking about the person who had done the betraying, I imagined picking up a heavy piece of furniture in the room (far too heavy for me to lift, in actuality), and throwing it at the wall.
The image startled me and I paused. And then I realized: “Oh. I’m angry. I’m feeling anger. This is what that feels like.”
I now realize it was dangerous for me to distance myself so deeply from my own anger. Not because I’ve ever been likely to act out mindlessly on that repressed anger, but because I had placed myself out of hearing range of the vitally important information that anger holds for all of us.
I couldn’t hear myself scream.
In The Dance of Anger, Harriet G. Lerner writes, “Our anger may be a message that we are being hurt, that our rights are being violated… or simply that something is not right.”
Letting the signals of anger go unperceived is potentially quite risky; those messages may turn out to be important.
It’s also risky to ignore things like: a feeling of discomfort, because something about a situation feels weird or “off,” a feeling of jitteriness. A feeling of I’d rather not be here.
All of these sensations are ones that we’re often discouraged from acting on, but perhaps most especially, with our families. With families, distancing ourselves from our bodies and the unpleasant feelings and signals they may hold for us, is so common that it’s a joke.
“Oh, the holidays are coming up? Time to get plastered!”
The lesson our society seems to be teaching here is: it’s best just to ignore how you actually feel.
Of course, our interpersonal lives are filled with friction; it’s impossible to feel totally at ease with everyone, all the time. It can be noble and constructive to avoid fights, to let little things go.
But sometimes, kindly acting on the information that anger has given us is the most important, most constructive thing one can do.
Friendships and family relationships require care and attention to be healthy. Acknowledging where we feel uncomfortable or angry or hurt, and taking gentle action as early and often as we reasonably can, is a way of honouring and protecting a vitally important connection. So that it doesn’t degrade; so that discord and distrust can be repaired; so that both people in a relationship feel safe and can grow, together.
Ignoring things and hoping they’ll magically get better, well, it turns out, that doesn’t work so well.
Anger deferred too long means that something (or someone) is getting extinguished. In the short term, it’s the person ignoring their own inner signals who is silenced. But that can only be endured so long.
Ignored anger goes underground, but it doesn’t go away. Eventually a person’s boundaries must be protected. After enough pressure builds up, anger erupts, and, too often, breaks trust and destroys friendships.
With families, even more is on the line. We are influenced and affected by family members in ways that are well below our conscious awareness. And there is an active risk of harm to that most vulnerable and emotionally vital part of you—that “inner child” deep within.
I can speak from personal experience about something that all too many of us have had to go through.
When healthier members of a family grow—go into therapy, learn to recognize inappropriate or dysfunctional (even abusive) patterns and behaviors—they naturally want to help bring those insights back into their family systems. To initiate healthier patterns, for everyone.
Attempting that can bring about a negative outcome that is simply blindsidingly bad. (It’s hard to anticipate because most relationships don’t operate like family relationships.)
That blindsidingly bad outcome is: that our family system will not only refuse to change along with us, but our family members will deny that there are any problems at all.
Or, they will tell us both that we are wrong about there being a problem, and, that we are the problem.
Which is crazy-making and awful.
In families, there can be tremendous pressure to let our unallowable anger go unaddressed, to deny our own reality until we extinguish us—our truths, our rights, our authentic selves.
That’s a tragic, awful, unjust outcome. That doesn’t have to happen; instead, find someone—or better, many someones—whom you trust, who believe you, and figure things out in a safe, secure, reliable space.
We are far more whole and wiser,* when we listen to the truths that our bodies, minds, and hearts are desperately trying to communicate to us. This is far from a simple process; listening to our feelings does not mean (as I believed for a long time) melding with the strongest feeling, identifying with it, acting without reflection on whatever the feeling wanted me to do.
Figuring out how to listen well to feelings, how to respond to them from a place of separate-but-compassionate insight, what to do with the awareness and energy they offer—this is a long-term process.
Finding a way to stay safe within a family system, on top of all of that—well, to my mind, there is no absolute right course of action for this.
Having the courage and insight to change, and the further courage to protect our evolving well-being inside our families, it can be so complicated, so challenging, (so grueling!) to navigate all of that.
Self-protection might involve avoiding the family (or certain members) while you take time to figure things out; making gentle requests for a family member to do things a little differently; asking one or more members to go to meditation or therapy with you; it might mean a short, long, or forever period of limited or no contact. It might mean a whole host of other things, entirely.
In other words, it can take a whole lot of exploring and planning with people you trust, who stand outside the family, who have expert knowledge and are absolutely committed to your well-being, to find the path that is right for you, that makes your inner self safe and secure.
It took years for me to understand that when I said “no” to owning and knowing my own anger, I was leaving an extremely wise, and powerfully protective piece of myself behind.
Anger can feel combustible; but it’s also energetic and fierce. It can lend us its strength and bravery and confidence.
Of course, everything that bothers or angers us does not, by itself, constitute a reason to take immediate or drastic action. A world of hair-trigger tantrummers would be a nightmarish one.
But if we are made to feel violated or uncomfortable, invaded in a way that feels “not right” in certain intimate relationships, especially relationships within our family of origin, there is no higher or more urgent calling than to heed and protect that inner child.*
You have the right to protect your heart. The little one within needs you. S/he doesn’t need you to commit arson or murder; s/he might even be safest if you lay low for awhile; but no external accusation against you has any merit whatsoever, if you are taking good care of him or her.
It is not mean, it is not rude, it is not selfish, it is not disloyal, it does not make you a bad daughter/son, brother/sister, family member/friend, to protect that inner child.
Protecting our hearts doesn’t make us “bad” people; vigilantly and nonviolently protecting our hearts is exactly what makes it possible for us to be good, kind, generous human beings.
I still crave approval, like the kid and teen I once was. I still want people to think I’m a “good” person (daughter/ niece/ friend). I still hate to let people down.
But that sort of concern doesn’t matter in the least when it comes to my inner child. For her sake, it is irrelevant whether anyone else likes me or my choices, my words, my behavior, my values.
Ultimately, all that matters is that I protect her. Because her safety is what makes all the rest possible—my sanity, my well-being, my commitment to my values.
I can offer the world my best when I am whole; when I feel safe in the ways that matter to my inner, sensitive, wisely aware child. She may not have the cognitive tools to make sense of what’s going on; she needs my help, to understand and to take right action. But she has a deep, instinctual knowledge of what is and isn’t safe for me/ us.
My highest, most sacred duty is to protect my vulnerable inner self; if my inner child is crying for my attention, that is a more urgent concern than anything else. Caring for her doesn’t make me rude or selfish or disloyal or bad; it makes me a kind, whole, responsible adult.
I value kindness above almost anything else; in my most drastically self-protective actions, I have tried to speak carefully, act gently. But I am ruthlessly committed to my well-being, because without it, I’m worse than “mean” or any other name you might call me—I’m nothing. I’m a powerless, silenced sufferer.
My goodness is a fount that flows from my refusal to allow my inner child to be invaded or abused.
My intact wellness—protected by heeding my inner signals and guarding my boundaries—is the source of my integrity and insight and strength.
If something feels not okay, you and I have the right to disengage, to step out and walk away. At. Any. Point. Without permission or explanation. Even, and especially, within your family.
In fact, the title of this post could have been:
You Have the Absolute Right to Take the Nonviolent Actions Necessary For You to Feel SAFE, at All Times, Especially with Your Family
Family patterns change slowly. All too often, violence, abuse, and other unhealthy patterns are passed along for generation after generation. We can interrupt this cycle by taking ruthlessly kind and compassionately wise care of ourselves.
Let us make our world one that is safe for children, one inner child at a time.
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Footnotes:
*I’m NOT an expert on this, but it’s my understanding that sometimes, in threatening, abusive situations, dissociating from the reality of what we’re feeling is actually a really effective coping strategy. Coping with and coming back from dissociation is, unfortunately, outside the humble scope of this article; but I hope it’s obvious that I symbolically lend my love and support to anyone on that journey.
**I’m sensitive to the fact that responsible adults should actively nurture and protect their own actual child/ren first and foremost (and their inner child second). It seems a tricky thing to balance, and I hope that those seeking a resolution to this question will look, broadly and openheartedly, to the spirit and heart of what I have written here. Also, it is my hope, for all of us who parent or teach or mentor children, that we have been given or found the chance to do vital self-parenting work, first.
Finally: a few minor details included in this piece have been altered to protect the innocent.
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How to Stop Worrying: 5 Things to Try When Nothing Else Works
“I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” ~Mark Twain
If you’re like me—a worry prodigy from a young age—you hate when people say, “Don’t worry about it.” As if it were so easy, as if I hadn’t already tried.
I’ve used many of the tips and tricks out there. Some of them helped for a while, but few did much for long.
The trouble is, most of the advice out there only addresses the symptoms of worry. It’s like taking cherry-flavored cough syrup when you have bronchitis: tempting, and probably the most palatable option, but not likely to do any lasting good since it doesn’t address the real issue.
I’ve been a worrier ever since I was seven years old and slept with my covers over my head because I was afraid that foxes and burglars would attack me at night.
What I’ve learned over the years of working with worry—a nice way to phrase it, though it could also be described as obsessively thinking, planning, and catastrophizing, forgetting to breathe, and grinding my teeth—is that resisting it only makes it grow stronger. In order to find freedom from apprehension, you have to get to its root.
So here are five things you can try if you’ve meditated, said your positive affirmations, and smelled your grapefruit (yes, it’s a thing) and your worries still haven’t gone away:
1. Get curious about why you worry.
As I got older, I began to notice what a big drain worry was on my time and energy. I saw how it never helped me feel stronger, more innovative, or more able to respond. I also began to read about all the negative impacts it has on our health and well-being. So naturally I started to worry about being worried.
A much better response would have been to get curious about why I did it. Because we all get something out of worrying or we wouldn’t do it.
In my case, I realized that I do it most when I feel powerless. The act of worrying helps me feel like I’m doing something, like I have some sort of control over an uncontrollable situation.
Worry can also distract us from even scarier parts of our lives, or from our own intense emotions. And it can help us feel like we’re protecting ourselves and what’s important to us just by thinking about them. Though worrying can’t actually change anything in reality, it can promise to help us feel more empowered and secure.
We worry because we think it helps. When we see what worry promises, we can also see clearly what it fails to deliver. Without this clarity, letting go of worries can feel too scary for most of us to attempt. With it, we can find new, more effective ways of dealing with uncertainty in a world where so much is out of our control.
2. Feel your fear.
In some ways, worrying is an attempt to avoid what you fear, which is really an effort to avoid fear itself. Feel the fear, and the worry becomes unnecessary.
I experienced this recently when I had the idea for a novel. For the first couple of months, everything was great. I kept getting ideas, writing them down, and feeling more and more excited about the project.
And then when I decided to actually start writing the novel, I had a breakdown. Suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about the story line, going over and over it in my head, worrying that something was wrong with it, and trying to get it right.
Every spare moment I had, I was in my head trying to solve this imaginary problem. I couldn’t relax, I could barely sleep, and I certainly couldn’t write.
Finally it occurred to me that the reason I was worrying so much was because I was terrified. I experienced what felt like a huge rejection of my writing when I was young, and it devastated me. This was the first major project I had attempted since then, and part of me was scared that the same thing would happen all over again.
Once I became aware of it, I felt a tidal wave of fear waiting to wash over me. And though part of me wanted desperately to avoid it, I knew I needed to let it in. So I did.
It wasn’t pleasant. Fear can be very uncomfortable, and we avoid it for a reason.
But similar to storm clouds that look dark and sinister on the horizon, once the feeling actually arrived on my shores, it washed over me like rain. I was reminded that fear is really just a bundle of uncomfortable sensations that I can handle. And then it’s gone.
When you let yourself feel your fear of whatever outcome you’re trying to avoid, it loses its power over you.
The best way I know to do this is to name your fear, exactly what it is that frightens you. Then you can let yourself feel it, by sitting quietly, or dancing it out, or moving and noticing where you feel it in your body. If you can let it be there, knowing that it’s temporary and can’t harm you, you can free yourself from the need to distract yourself from it with worry.
3. Do what you can.
Too often we try to get rid of our worries without truly understanding them. The problem is, worries are kind of like toddlers: when they aren’t listened to, they get louder. When they aren’t listened to for long enough, they throw a tantrum.
Our worries are really just trying to help us. They can usually point us towards something worth paying attention to, so it’s worth listening to them.
You can do this by asking yourself:
- What feels like it’s at stake here, and why is this important to me?
- What does this worry want from me?
- How can I address this concern in a way that feels good to me?
In the case of my fears about writing a novel, I realized that the worry was trying to make sure that I wasn’t hurt or disappointed again. It wanted to protect me from possible rejection. It felt like my entire self-worth was at stake, that if I failed, I would know with certainty that I had nothing of value to offer the world.
The worry wanted me to protect myself. It wanted me to make sure that what I did was so good that it couldn’t possibly be unappreciated.
These realizations led me to do two things: first, I reminded the part of myself that was scared that though there will be people out there who don’t like what I write, there are a lot of others who will. Nothing appeals to everyone, and though disappointment hurts, it’s also temporary. Regardless, there’s always value in what I create from the heart, and my worthiness doesn’t depend on the result of one project.
And secondly, I committed to going slowly. Part of myself felt very scared, so rather than push myself out of my comfort zone all at once, I resolved to take baby steps and give my vulnerable self time to feel it out and adjust.
I also promised myself that I would only share it when I was ready, and would start with the people and communities who were most likely to appreciate it. When I did this, I no longer felt the need to obsess about the story.
Sometimes listening to worry’s hidden wisdom and taking action on its behalf is enough to convince it to lay down its arms.
4. Accept the worst.
This is easier said than done, but it’s one of the most powerful ways to undercut worry.
I had to do this big time when I made the decision to get married.
At the time, I was so worried about making a mistake that I could barely think about anything else. (And just to be clear, this had nothing to do with my lovely husband-to-be. I was so scared of committing at the time that I could have been dating Prince Charming and I still would have had doubts.)
It was only when I came to terms with the fact that our relationship might not last forever that I was able to stop worrying and take the plunge. Don’t get me wrong—I sincerely hope that we’re happy together ever after, but I also know that we may not be. And that’s fine. Splitting up would be painful, difficult, and sad—and I also know I would survive and ultimately be okay.
Many of the things we worry about (failure, rejection, embarrassment, inconvenience) are pretty much just temporary challenges when you get down to it.
But even for those things that are more painful or permanent, there is a way to accept them and know you’ll be okay. No matter what happens, you’ll have options for moving forward. Other people will always be there to help. And regardless of what goes wrong, you can count on all the incredible internal resources you have (compassion, loving-kindness, wisdom, strength, intelligence, resilience, humor, joy) being there to support you.
Being willing to accept anything isn’t easy, but it’s an incredibly powerful way to find more equanimity and peace.
5. Practice trust.
The idea of trusting the universe used to give me a rash.
It seemed to me that it was hard work, foresight, and copious amounts of worry that held everything together in my life. I believed that if I relaxed at all, things would fall apart.
But eventually it dawned on me that as capable and amazing as I am, I do not single-handedly hold the world together. I began to notice how other people grow my food, trees create the oxygen I breathe, and the sun provides me with lots of light and warmth everyday, all without my involvement.
What’s more, I realized that if I’m being honest with myself, most of the good things in my life didn’t happen solely because of my own foresight or effort. Sure, I contributed to many of them, but they also required a lot of luck, happy accidents and coincidences, and forces outside of my control.
Recognizing this, I began to be willing to experiment with turning my troubles over to a force larger than myself. When held thrall in the throes of worry, I would remind myself that it wasn’t all up to me to make something happen.
I would recall all the help I’d ever gotten over the years and all the things that turned out well. I would think of all the things I was grateful for, most of which were out of my control, and then I would visualize placing my problem in the hands of a universe that had supported me so well up to that point.
And then I would do my best to let go and think about something else. (This is when meditation and other calming techniques worked really well.)
Much to my surprise, the world didn’t fall apart when I did this. In fact, the outcomes were often much better when I turned things over than when I tried to fix everything myself. Even better, the more I turned over, the calmer and freer I felt, and the more I began to trust.
Trust, it turns out, is the ultimate antidote to worry. And we don’t have to be born with it to use it—it’s possible to build trust in ourselves and the universe through practice, one worry at a time.
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5 Things You Need to Tell Yourself After a Painful Breakup
Have you ever experienced a breakup or divorce but still loved the other person you were saying goodbye to?
I met my ex-girlfriend on a rooftop in Istanbul. I had just sold everything I owned to travel the world, and she was a tour leader in Asia.
She was everything I had been searching for: beautiful, confident, and funny. I followed her to India and China. She followed me to Australia. When the money and visas ran out, we moved back to Canada, found an apartment, got a cat, and shared a strong, healthy relationship for over five years.
And then, just like that, it was over.
There was no huge fight, yelling, or name-calling. It was just an honest discussion about the direction we saw ourselves going into the future. Unfortunately, our visions didn’t align. So we had to ask the tough questions:
Do we stick it out and hope that things fall into place?
Or do we part ways?
We chose the latter, and it was one of the hardest decisions either of us had ever made.
What followed was a month of living in the same apartment until we settled logistics like finding a new place to live, selling the car, and deciding who would keep the cat. We slept in separate beds. We talked, cooked, and went out to our favorite restaurants. We still loved each other but that only served to make our decision even tougher.
I struggled a lot. I couldn’t bring myself to write or work on my business. I shut down. I drank and smoked too much. I cried in the shower. I second-guessed our decision constantly.
But we stuck with it. I figured I had two choices: stay sad and depressed or put my head down and start moving forward. I chose to move forward. And here’s what I told myself to help get me going in the right direction.
Time Doesn’t Heal
“I realized, it is not the time that heals, but what we do within that time that creates positive change.” ~Diane Dettman
During my breakup, friends and family loved to throw out the often used cliche “Don’t worry, time heals.”
But guess what? Time doesn’t heal. It’s only an excuse people use to justify sitting around in their pajamas watching Netflix and eating ice cream out of the bucket with a side of red wine.
Sure, if you wait long enough, perhaps time will heal. But how much of your life are you willing to sacrifice to get there? Six months? A year? Ten years?
We have one precious life on this little blue planet, with no guarantees of an afterlife. It’s a waste to believe that time will magically heal our sorrows.
It’s easy to stay stuck in sadness and depression; it’s hard to move on from someone we still love. But you have to do it. You have to take action because life isn’t going to wait for you.
Get rid of the notion that time will heal because it’s not going to help you get where you need to go. Instead, do something. Get out of your house and meet new people. Take up a hobby you’ve been putting off. Train for a marathon. Start doing yoga. Do anything. Just don’t wait for time to heal your pain.
Love Isn’t Always Enough
Friends and family couldn’t wrap their heads around my breakup. “If you still love each other, can’t you make it work?” they would ask.
We grow up with a belief that love can overcome any obstacle. I blame the likes of Harry and Sally, Edward and Vivian, and Sam and Annie. Romantic movies always end happily because love conquers all.
But real life isn’t so simple.
My ex and I still love each other, but we both understand it’s not enough. There were fundamental things about our visions of the future that didn’t line up. Take having children, for example. If one person wants kids and the other doesn’t, that is a fundamental difference that cannot be changed. Sure, nobody knows how the future will pan out, but it’s not fair to “settle” for the sake of love. Otherwise, there will be regret and resentment later on in the relationship.
Things like the decision of having children, the city you want to live in, or your core values are fundamental parts of a relationship. If the fundamentals don’t align the relationship could be doomed, and you could be delaying the inevitable until one day you really do have a yelling match and break up in anger.
My ex and I decided that we didn’t want to get to that point even though we still loved each other. We ended our relationship amiably before resentment and regret reared their ugly heads.
So remember: love is wonderful, beautiful, and fulfilling. But it’s not always enough.
Grieve, But Not Too Much
It’s important to grieve our losses. Whether it’s the loss of a relationship, loved one, job, or whatever, we need to take time to be sad. We need to get in touch with our feelings and understand what we’re feeling. Labeling and being aware of our feelings is imperative in every area of life. So when you’re sad, be sad.
Like I said earlier, I grieved in an unhealthy way. But at the time it felt good to numb the pain. I recognized what I was doing. I knew it wasn’t the best way. Still, I did it.
And I’m happy I did. After a month of unhealthy grieving I was done with it. My productivity hit rock-bottom and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
There are many ways to deal with grief.
For me, I needed to start creating and writing again. I needed to travel, explore, and have adventures. I needed to connect with other people who had similar experiences to help me realize that I wasn’t alone in my pain.
So go ahead. Grieve.
Just don’t do it for too long or you might find yourself grieving for a long, long time.
Don’t Do It All On Your Own
A friend of mine sent me a blunt text message:
“Stop drinking wine, sobbing with your ex, and move on with your life. You have a goal. Now get off your ass and make it happen.”
Bang! We all need friends like that from time to time. We can’t do it all on our own, no matter who we are or who we’ve been in the past.
My friend reminded me of the importance of keeping my friends and family close. Sometimes in relationships we become so enamored in our romantic partners that we neglect our relationships with friends and family.
But when a relationship with a lover ends, who is going to be there to catch you when you fall? Who’s going to give you a listening ear, shoulder to cry on, or tough love?
We can’t get through loss by ourselves. We need others to prop us up and push us forward.
Keep your friends and family close, all the time, because some day you will need their love.
No Matter What, It Was Not a Waste of Time
It’s too easy to look back on a “failed” relationship as a waste. “Well, there goes five years of my life!” If you’re getting out of a long-term relationship it’s something that crosses your mind.
But think back on the person you were when you first got into your relationship compared to the person you are today. Chances are you’re a different person, for the better. You’ve lived, loved, and most importantly, learned.
Don’t look at it with the mindset that you have to start over again. You’re not starting over because you’ve grown, matured, and become a better person during your relationship.
For me, I learned how to communicate better—skills that will continue to serve me moving forward. I learned to speak French, lived in a new city, and made a career transition. I met awesome people. I took swing dancing lessons and learned about French Canadian culture. All these things happened because of my ex-girlfriend.
It’s easy to look back on a broken relationship as a waste of time, but when you really start to think about it you’ll realize that it’s anything but a waste.
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If you’ve recently experienced a painful breakup or divorce, I’m sorry. I feel your pain. I know what you’re going through isn’t easy.
Spend time reflecting and getting in touch with your feelings. Grieve. Be sad. Cry. Talk about it. Cry some more.
Then move on.
Sounds over-simplified, I know. But ultimately, being stuck in a rut is a choice.
If your choice is to move forward I hope you do so with more confidence, purpose, and authenticity. I hope you’re able to tell yourself some of the things I’ve mentioned above.
Live. Thrive. Life is short so make the best of it.
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5 Easy, Natural Ways to Reduce Stress
“It’s all about finding the calm in the chaos.” ~Donna Karan
Like my grandfather, I have always been a weather geek. I check the weather news daily and, for as long as I can remember, thunderstorms, warm/cold fronts, and clouds have fascinated me.
Close friends of mine will be the first to tell you that I have the bad habit of stopping someone mid-sentence to point out cirrus clouds, or a storm on the horizon.
But it’s more than just a nerdy interest. Looking at thunderstorms and clouds has always had a calming effect on me.
A few years ago I spent a summer in Edmonton, Canada, on my first extended work assignment abroad. It started well, but after a month I began receiving negative feedback from my client on the quality of work that I was submitting. Looking back, I realize there were power struggles going on in the background, and I was the scapegoat stuck in the middle.
But at the time it caused me a lot of stress, and each negative comment made me feel more and more like a failure.
At the end of one rough day in particular, I received another critical email from my client. On the drive home from the office I could feel my heart accelerating and hammers bashing on my forehead, signaling the onset of a stress-induced migraine.
My apartment sat high on a hill, and when I arrived home I happened to catch a glimpse of the outside view from the corner of my eye.
An enormous thunderstorm dominated the horizon; turbulent masses of air and water billowed high into the sky. The sunset was hitting the tops of the clouds at an angle that made the storm look like it was on fire. Hues of orange, red, and deep gray swirled into each other.
I was intrigued and stepped outside on my balcony to take a better look. I sat down on a chair and stayed there for at least an hour, watching churning clouds climb through the atmosphere and streaks of lightning flash through the flaming vapors.
As I sat there, with my eyes fixed on the spectacle before me, my heart rate and breathing slowed down, and the pounding in my head abated.
I knew that everything I was going through would pass and I felt at peace.
We all experience stress at one point. And because we have busy lives, we don’t always have the time to go running, or do yoga, or watch a funny movie to get rid of it.
Practicing mindfulness can be an effective alternative though. This pulls us into the present moment and can reduce our stress with minimal time and effort. Five ways we can use our surroundings to do this are to:
1. Sit quietly by a body of water.
Since mankind first came into existence, humans have used the calming effects of water to find peace. If you are stressed, find a river, a pond, an ocean—any body of water will do the trick. Try sitting next to the water and notice what your five senses are registering.
Listen to the sounds of the waves or the soft gurgles of the streaming water. Watch how the wind dances across the water, changing its surface into different shades of blue. Feel the wind on your face.
You might find that the cool water is able to carry your problems away with it.
2. Surround yourself with plants.
Another option for us is to spend a quiet moment in a green environment, whether it’s a park, a forest, a field, or our own backyard.
Use your senses and concentrate on how the sun feels on your face, or the ground underneath you. Smell the grass and plants. Listen to the birds and watch the various insects and other creatures go about their daily activities.
Surrounding ourselves with trees and grass can have a positive effect on our well-being by removing us from stressful urban environments. This gives us a chance to take deep breaths, reset our attention, and focus on the most important parts of our lives.
3. Look at the sky.
If you don’t have the time to find trees and water, just look up at the sky, wherever you happen to be. I’ve always loved watching thunderstorms, but the sky offers countless opportunities for us to sit back and take our minds off of our problems.
Spotting funny shapes in clouds is useful for expanding our own creativity. A good sunset, on the other hand, with its wide spectrum of colors, helps us appreciate the beauty of the world, even if we’ve had an awful day.
And at night the sky is lit up with the soft glow of the moon and the stars. These remind us that, in the grand scheme of things, our troubles are often a lot smaller than they feel at that particular moment.
4. Observe the people next to you.
Observing the people around us, however, can also be an effective method to take our minds off of a stressful situation.
I often use this technique in airports. It’s hilarious to watch parents try and corral their small children, who are always on a mission to explore every square inch of the terminal.
Or sometimes I pick a person walking by and create a backstory for them in my head. For example, I might imagine who they are, where they are from, and why they are in the airport at that moment.
It sounds strange, and it’s not the same as being in nature, but at least it can be entertaining and help us to think about something else.
5. Focus on the outside world.
When we are stuck in the office though, sometimes the best method for us is to spend a moment quietly observing the world outside of our windows. If you can see water, or trees, these can offer similar benefits as being in nature.
If you are in a high-rise building, and are surrounded by concrete and glass, try observing whatever is outside. Watch the cars driving by, the flashing lights of the billboards, or the people scurrying to and from work. This gives our brains a break and reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles.
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Stress can come at inconvenient moments when we are unable to devote much time and energy to mitigate it. Using mindfulness to observe the world around us, even if only for a minute or two, can have immediate positive effects. .
It’s simple and free, so why not give it a try?
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Life Is a Cycle of Happiness, Sadness, Clarity, and Confusion
“Life is a cycle, always in motion. If good times have moved on, so will times of trouble.” ~Indian Proverb
Two years ago I went on a volunteer trip to Vietnam, where I had hoped to find both myself and my purpose (ambitious), but instead found a rocky adventure that continues to teach me things to this day.
I was in the middle of a difficult time that was secretly a rebirth. It’s always hard to see that when it’s happening, isn’t it?
For a few amazing months, everything made crystal clear sense, and I felt like I could see through all realms of existence to the truth. I started listening to my body and my spirit rather than my brain. Life opened up to me.
I uncovered a deep interest in the healing power of art, especially dance and movement. I realized said interest was embedded in who I’ve been all along, I just had to take a minute to listen and let it show itself.
I have been a dancer all of my life, and somewhere along the way forgot that the reason I started dancing was because it allowed for joyful, authentic expression.
Three-year-old Laura knew that. I got older and forgot—I got wrapped up in doing, in trying to be the best, in comparing myself to others, in pushing myself and my body beyond what was loving.
I believe art is essentially a spiritual practice—any art. But, being humans (oh, humans), it’s easy to get wrapped up in the more worldly aspects of art. I’m talking recognition, fame, money, perfection, applause, all that.
That’s cool, it happens. But what my soul really wanted to do was dance and sing around my apartment and figure out how my body wanted to move when it wasn’t being told what was “good” and what was “bad.”
I could go on forever about this. I’ll spare you. But I implore you, make your art. Just make it, simply because it allows you to express who you are.
You don’t have to make a big stink out of it with performances and shows. You can if that feels right. But if you don’t want to show your art to anyone and want to just create for the sake of creating, that has enormous value and is, indeed, enough.
I started doing dance improvisations in my apartment regularly. I began going to auditions less and going to Central Park to be with nature and read about healing arts more.
I have practiced Pilates for years to take care of dance-related injuries, and a little voice inside said, “Hey, what about teaching Pilates?”
I said, “Alright, what the heck, let’s see.”
I started my certification off with a full scholarship to a mat training program at a studio that welcomed me with open arms. If that’s not a nudge toward something, I don’t know what is.
I met an amazing man approximately five days after declaring, “Okay, Laura! We are not worrying about men anymore! I am going to focus on what I am doing, and worry about that later.”
Before meeting him, I told him flat out, “I’m not looking for a boyfriend right now,” and of course, that’s when your person waltzes right into your life. Our first year together flew by.
I felt my heart opening up. I felt like I was expanding and moving into a different time of my life, a more authentic expression of who I am. I honored my intuition as best as I could, and it served me well. I was crazy happy. Like, hard to sleep happy.
I remembered that I had options and choices—what an incredible blessing. I did not have to keep doing the same thing I had been pursuing for years. I was free to let other, unexplored parts of myself out into the world. This was exciting and relieving.
I simultaneously felt like I had control and that, in fact, I didn’t need to have control, because reality was showing me the way.
I even went to Vietnam a second time and visited the same village I taught in the year before. This time I had a cute and supportive travel companion, as well as a heck of a lot of perspective. I felt like a different version of myself, although essentially the same. (I still got hangry and coped pretty badly with jet lag…)
And then, you know what happened? I got kind of confused again. A few months after the clarity burst, I started questioning again: “What am I doing? What should I do?” And then things were clear again. And then I was confused. And on and on. Sometimes life felt magical and sometimes it didn’t,
Sometimes things make sense and then they don’t make sense again. It’s a spiral.
We circle around to similar lessons, feelings, and challenges, but we experience them at different levels of awareness. And we keep hitting the same challenges until we learn the lessons we need to in order to let go and grow. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
And it also seems that we can learn a lesson, let something go, and then later on forget we learned the lesson and need to do it again. You know what I mean?
For my twenty-seventh birthday in June, I went out of my comfort zone to a hippie farm up in the Berkshires. I’m talking barefoot, vegan, everyone dancing all the time in the grass. It was pretty amazing, but for this city girl, at first it was a lot.
I spent the week on retreat working through Anna Halprin’s life/art healing process. A year before, I read (more like devoured) her book Dance as a Healing Art during my daily trips to Central Park.
The book was one of the first I read during my period of magic. It was very cool to be in the mountains a year later doing the work myself. We danced, wrote, sang, drew, cried, laughed, and supported each other through our individual journeys of self-discovery and healing.
I met some amazing people that I felt deep connections with very quickly. I was skeptical at first, but I did my best to trust the process, and the results were pretty astounding.
One of the last days of the workshop was my actual birthday. I gathered the resources I had created over the week—my writing, drawings, notes, and dances—and saw a message in all of them.
Ultimately, what my heart was saying was “Go deep into yourself and just be.” That was an interesting message, because I came there looking for answers about what to do.
For a week after that workshop was over, I felt like I had expanded, just as I had felt the year before when all the magic was happening, but this time on a deeper level. I felt like I was high. (I wasn’t, I swear).
I felt so secure, so calm, so content just to be—happy sipping tea with my man across from me, happy walking through trees in the rain, happy watching the sky. It was one of the most profound experiences I have ever had, and it all came from being.
Since I’ve been back, I’ve settled back into my humanity, meaning, sometimes I feel grounded and free and other times I feel confused and irritable. I’m getting the impression that this cycle is kind of the way it is, and part of the human experience. Perhaps the cycle is the human experience.
We are in constant motion and everything changes, but this doesn’t have to be scary (even though it is).
Actually, it can be amazingly freeing, because in moments of loneliness or confusion, you can trust that there will also be moments of deep love, connection, and clarity.
Dance the dance, sing the song, write the story, draw the shapes, and embody who you are.
One of my all time favorite quotes is “Joy is the other side of sadness,” which I heard Sharon Salzberg say at Tibet House in NYC almost ten years ago, when I first discovered meditation.
I say this frequently to people who feel guilty or worried about not feeling happy. Joy is not just feeling happy and clear. Joy is also feeling sad and confused with an open heart.
Perhaps the universe lines things up for you in lightening moments of clarity as encouragement, a gesture of unconditional love. But then it pulls away and leaves you to navigate on your own, to wrestle with the uncertainties and take leaps of faith into unchartered territory.
Discovery isn’t nearly as rewarding, beautiful, and profound if you know the exact path to getting there. Up and down, round and round, we keep going, getting closer and closer to who we are.
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Healing After an Affair: How to Get Through the Pain of Infidelity
“I will breathe. I will think of solutions, I will not let my worry control me. I will not let my stress level break me. I will simply breathe. And it will be okay. Because I don’t quit.” ~Shayne McClendon
It was a Wednesday afternoon in late July, and I felt like my entire world was coming to an end. My husband of almost eleven years had become distant, and during a phone call on my lunch break he told me he couldn’t do this anymore. That evening he told me he no longer loved me and wanted a divorce.
It wasn’t until several weeks later that I learned about another woman and reached a low I never thought possible. What just happened to my life? Just a few short weeks ago I was laughing, smiling, and enjoying my life to the fullest. Now I could barely get out of bed.
I spent the next several months feeling like I had no control over my own emotions.
I’d see pictures in our home where he no longer lived and break down sobbing.
I’d hear songs while driving and literally have to pull over until I could pull myself together.
I’d hide in my room for hours at a time so our children didn’t see mommy crying.
I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, my work was suffering, and I was barely making it through my day. I wanted to make this pain stop, to sleep until I figured out that this was all a bad dream. It never happened.
I had to face the fact no matter how much I wanted it to change, the facts were the facts: My husband was having an affair and I had no idea what to do.
I had spent my whole life saying if I were ever cheated on, I just kick him to the curb and never look back. So why was I feeling like I didn’t want my marriage to end? No one ever tells you that this conflict might come up, and no one tells you this is completely normal.
I began reading everything I could find. I was desperately trying to make sense of a situation that made absolutely no sense to me.
We were happy. We were the couple everyone wanted to be. I beat myself up wondering how I missed this coming. I wondered why I even cared, and why I would want to save a relationship that was causing me so much pain.
Was I so selfish that I never saw how unhappy he was? Could I have prevented it from happening? How was I going to become a single mom? How were our kids going to get through this? And the biggest question: Am I going to just give up without a fight?
That question changed everything for me. I decided, right then and there, that I would not just give up.
I was a fighter, and no matter the outcome, I would give my all. While I knew I couldn’t make any choices for him, I also knew I couldn’t live with just giving up on him and my family. This man I knew and loved for so long had to be hurting too.
The information about affairs online is absolutely overwhelming. My search engine became my best friend. As the questions came, I would type them in and search through the thousands of articles for hours and hours. Below are the top ten things that would ultimately give me back control over my own life.
1. Stop and breathe.
It sounds so simple, yet when you feel like you’ve just been punched in the gut, breathing can seem like the hardest thing in the world to do.
When strong emotions came up, I learned to count backwards from a hundred by threes. A hundred (big breath in through the nose), ninety-seven (exhale through the mouth), ninety-four (big breath in through the nose). Counting by threes forces your brain to focus on something other than the intruding thoughts and worries.
I did this a lot of this throughout the days to come. After a while, I finally felt as though I could control my own breathing no matter what was happening around me. At a time when I felt as if I had no control over anything, I finally discovered that I could control something: I could control myself.
2. Start writing.
Get a pen and paper, grab your computer, or put a journal app on your phone. Whatever works best for you, just start doing it. There is something about writing down whatever you are feeling that allows you to release some of the emotion behind it.
In the beginning I felt like I didn’t have the energy to do this. Once I started writing, I realized how much of my energy I could get back by releasing some of the pain I was feeling.
3. Eat.
I literally stopped eating. The thought of food made me sick to my stomach. I had no energy and dropped an entire pant size in two short weeks.
Eat anything. Soup and watermelon became my lifeline. Make it simple, make it nutritious, but make it happen.
You need your energy to get through this, and I promise, you will get through this. I began to notice that when my body was getting the nutrition it needed, I was able to think more clearly and sleep more soundly, which leads me to the next tip.
4. Sleep.
Maybe you’re like me. All you want to do is sleep, yet when it comes time to go to bed you are haunted by thoughts and emotions you never knew existed. For me, going to bed was just a reminder that my husband was not there. We used to cuddle every night before falling asleep, and suddenly I was left with an empty bed.
I learned about guided meditation and would use it to drift off to sleep. If I awoke in the middle of the night, I stopped fighting it, got up, and wrote, and allowed myself to cry. I would write and cry for hours until I had nothing left to say or feel and drifted back to sleep.
5. Talk.
I never realized how creative my brain was and how many false ideas and images it could conjure up on its own. We want to believe we know what is happening, and when we don’t, our brains create some pretty convincing visuals.
Find someone, anyone that you can talk to. Make your intentions clear. I wanted to save my marriage. I didn’t want people telling me to forget about him, that I deserve better, to just move on. So I stopped talking to anyone.
When we only have our own voice, we have no choice but to believe all the lies we tell ourselves. I would tell myself I must not be good enough, I must have been doing something wrong, maybe I’m not pretty enough, smart enough. The list is endless. We need our people now more than ever.
I needed someone who could ground me when my brain was running wild. Whether that’s a friend, coach, therapist, or family member, just find someone you can talk openly with. Find someone who will listen without judgment.
6. Get active.
Maybe you already exercise daily, and that is great. I never exercised, ever. I hated it and I still do. But during this time I found the value in it.
Yoga was easy and relaxing, and so was walking. I realized that it gave me some me time. It allowed space to clear my head if only for a few minutes, and those minutes were glorious. It didn’t always work. Some days I just couldn’t clear my head, and I learned that is okay too.
I learned how to give myself grace. I learned that there is no perfect way to do or get through this. Just take one step at a time, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and don’t stop trying.
7. Know that whatever you are feeling is normal.
You will experience a rollercoaster of emotions that you never thought were possible. How can you possibly love and hate someone so much at the same time? How can you go from laughing to crying in a matter of seconds?
You may feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, love, hope, and everything in between. The rollercoaster is real, and you know what, it is completely normal. This realization was one of the most freeing.
No matter how you are feeling at this very moment, it will change, I promise. No matter what you are feeling, it’s normal. There is no right or wrong way to feel with this, it just is. It is just how you are feeling right now, and that’s okay.
8. Know that this has nothing to do with you.
It was all too easy for me to blame myself. It was my fault that he no longer loved me. I would learn that this never had anything to do with me.
I did not make these choices for him. I did not do anything to cause him to make these choices. He didn’t ask me ahead of time. He didn’t even tell me that he was unhappy. These were choices that he made completely on his own.
He was suffering, and when someone else boosted his self-esteem, he latched on as if it were his only lifeline. He didn’t realize how much he had been hurting over the years. All he knew was that he wanted to feel good, and because he didn’t know why hadn’t felt good before, he blamed me for his years of misery.
He eventually learned that it was never about me. He learned that no matter how far he ran, he couldn’t out run his own demons.
I later learned that while we can all work to improve how we show up in our relationships, nothing we are doing or not doing excuses an affair. However, since I wanted to save my marriage, I had to take a long hard look at myself and see where I could show up better in my marriage.
I learned how to be a better listener. I learned how to be more compassionate and understanding when my husband was going through a difficult time. I learned the art of patience. And I learned what unconditional love really means.
9. Make time for you.
What did you enjoy doing before you were a couple? What hobbies or activities do you have on your own? If you don’t have any now is a great time to find one.
Look at what is being offered in your community. Look at local schools. Did you always want to learn to cook? Take a cooking class. How about sewing, yoga, finances, painting, or computers? Take a class. Whatever it is for you, find something. Find something you can do at least one night a week and commit to it.
Sometimes in marriage we forget who we are as an individual. Now is the time to rediscover that person. The added bonus to this if you are looking to save your marriage is that your spouse fell in love with who you were as an individual. Bringing that person back can be eye opening for the one who left.
10. Give it time.
Last, but definitely not least, know that this will take time. Research shows it takes an average two years to heal from the pain of an affair. I hated this advice in the beginning because I wanted to feel better right then. But time has helped me realize that it really is the best medicine.
Right now all you can do is decide how you will spend that time. You can fight to find the blessings in disguise and learn and grow, or you can choose to become bitter and allow yourself to remain the victim of the cards that were dealt to you.
I choose to fight, I choose to learn, I choose to grow.
Change and healing didn’t happen overnight. Both my husband and I had to put in a lot of hard work. We read and listened to more information than I ever thought possible. We sought out therapy as a couple and as individuals to heal our past hurts and coaching to help move us in the direction we wanted to go.
Ultimately, we learned that our communication had to improve. He needed to be able to communicate when he was upset about things, and I needed to be able to receive this information without becoming confrontational or defensive. His openness and honesty allowed us to begin our healing process and start restoring trust in our relationship.
One day it dawned on me that I hadn’t thought about the affair at all for several days. I wept as I realized I had my life back, only it wasn’t the life I had thought I wanted a few years ago. It was a life that had become better than anything I could have ever imagined.
Three short years later and both my husband and I will tell you we are happier than we have ever been. Our marriage is stronger than it ever was. Our connection is greater and our communication is better.
Looking back on that day when I thought my life was coming to an end I now smile, realizing that for us, it was the start of a new beginning. While I never wish the pain we endured on anyone, I have learned that sometimes the greatest pain brings us the greatest blessings.
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Healing from Depression: It Begins With Asking for Help
“I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.” ~Leonard Cohen
Right before my eighteenth birthday, when I was about to go to university, I was hit by a car and sustained multiple fractures to my right leg. This led to a couple of operations and the best part of ten months with me unable to walk.
While all of my school friends and peers were having the time of their lives in school, I was silently suffering with depression and anxiety, both of which continued to increase.
Whether it was the weed I smoked, the bottles of whiskey I drank, or the junk food I ate, I could not find comfort or relief from anywhere. Things just got worse, and I felt absorbed and consumed by the victim mentality that I had let penetrate my identity.
I dropped out of university after re-doing my first year. Despite passing, I just couldn’t go back. I was so ashamed to be me. I didn’t even tell my future housemates that I wouldn’t be returning.
About this time I realized there was a problem. In retrospect, it should have been glaringly obvious to me, with the self-medicating that was going on, but of course it’s harder to spot problems in ourselves.
In two years I had gone from one of the most outgoing people I knew, someone who always liked to do things like play sports or party, to a recluse who needed some sort of alternate state of consciousness to function. I started working and going out again on the weekends with some of my old friends and people I had met through work.
Naively I thought the problems were dissipating and I was returning to who I used to be. Now I look back on it and I know that the younger me had no idea who I was. Things leveled out for a few years until one day I had a breakdown on the way to work.
There was now no denying the extent of the problem, but hell, if you are in denial you can dig your heels in pretty firmly, and that’s what I did.
After a few more years of self-medicating, something happened, and to this day I can’t put my finger on the trigger, but something changed that made me realize enough was enough. A good friend recommended a therapist to me, and I was keen to see him and work through the issues that had been building up for seven years.
So I met with Peter and it seemed like an expensive chat with a nice guy for the first five or six sessions. Around this time I also had had a regular meditation practice. One day whilst meditating I felt like I gave myself permission to open up at the next session with Peter, but I have no idea from where or by whom this permission had been granted.
I was finally able to approach the issues with candor and rank honesty. I was able to bare my soul and describe how I had felt.
It’s weird to think that at the age of twenty-five this was perhaps one of the first times I’d done this, but I’d been so suffocated by depression and anxiety, and numbed by my self-medicating, that I had not once looked under the surface to see what things were really like inside.
Therapy began to get in to the nitty gritty of what was causing me to feel how I felt.
I had a fortunate and mostly happy childhood. My parents always did their best for my brothers and me. I could never doubt that. Interestingly, though, there were some wounds from my formative years that may well have contributed to me making some less than ideal choices in my teenage years.
Add to this the massive fear of missing out and jealously of my peers when I began university, and it’s a perfect recipe for some kind of psychological disorder, which in my case manifested as depression and anxiety.
I want to take a moment to describe the feeling of depression and anxiety as I experienced it, because I think too often in many parts of our society they are not described in their full ugliness.
Imagine waking up and feeling sick. Sometimes you throw up, sometimes you don’t. You then have to think about going to work. These thoughts mainly contain a deep sense of dread—not dread of anything in particular, but dread at the overall sense of having to interact with the world.
It’s so hard to describe because I wasn’t scared of interacting with people and I had friends, I just didn’t want anybody to know me.
After the dread comes self-loathing. I wasn’t worth knowing. I wasn’t worthy of any attention or any of the good things in life. How could anybody want to be around me? I didn’t feel deserving of anything really, and I projected this on to my work life, where I never tried anywhere near as hard as I could.
If it were the weekend, I’d do the only thing I knew that would help me: smoke weed or get drunk. It seems ridiculous now, and it probably is, that despite me being anxious and paranoid about going out, I would smoke weed, which only served to exacerbate this reluctance to leave the house. But it was my crutch; it held me up. (It didn’t, it made things worse.)
I’m aware of the futility of describing feelings in explicit terms. Nobody else but me will know exactly how I felt.
It’s like having a weighted vest on your chest that makes doing anything difficult. It’s like having the most negative person you could think of on your shoulder constantly nagging you, deeply instilling a sense of not being good enough and destroying any modicum of self-worth and self-respect that remained.
Despite this being my personal experience, I now know that I was not alone. Nearly a fifth of people in the UK, where I live, suffer with depression or anxiety at some stage in their lives. This I am okay with, it’s natural. Life has its downs, bad stuff happens, and it is our psyche’s way of dealing with it.
What I am not okay with is that it’s estimated that 50-80% of people suffering with depression do not receive treatment.
The stigma surrounding mental health issues in functional human beings is astounding. Because of our society’s attitude toward mental health, many people suffer in silence, and suffer much longer than they might need to.
I want people to know that you can talk to people. You can get help. There are support structures in place through healthcare providers that can give you a light at the end of the tunnel.
I was one of the lucky ones who, through a stroke of luck, found a way to ask for the help I needed. I’m still not sure how that happened, but I know I am forever grateful for it.
Through therapy, learning to accept myself, and my meditation practice, I am fortunate enough to say I don’t think I will head down that road again. And I know that the people around me will help me. If not, then I can pay to see qualified professionals who will be able to give me the help I need.
I know we have weeks and campaigns to raise awareness of these issues, but this is something we should always be aware of.
If you are the one who is suffering, know that there are people out there who can help. If you’re suffering in silence and carrying on, then you have already shown you are brave enough to ask for help.
If you know somebody who is suffering, remind them that you are there for them, and that there are people who can help.
With the rate of diagnoses of these types of illnesses increasing over the last half a century or so, it’s more important than ever that we are able to help each other in anyway we can, especially with something as quintessentially human as our feelings.
There are a few links below to free online resources that can provide support in dealing with your feelings. Of course, you can also discuss how you feel with a trusted friend or family member, or a professional. However you do it, know that taking the first step and asking for help is how it starts to get better.
Anxiety Forum – Recommendations and a forum to discuss anxiety
The American Psychological Association – Site includes research on anxiety, getting help, psychology news, and helpful books pertaining to the illness.
Depression Forums – Offers a caring, safe environment for members to talk to their peers about depression, anxiety, mood disorders, medications, therapy, and recovery.
Mental Health Forum – Loads of information and a friendly place to discuss mental health issues.
British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy – Find a UK therapist.
For further resources see the Tiny Buddha Helpful Free Resources page
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One Simple Word That Can Change Your Life (And No, It’s Not “Thanks”)
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” ~Epictetus
About nine years back I was at the lowest point of my life.
We had been trying to start a family for close to four years by that point.
The forty-plus consecutive months of “not pregnant” verdict were starting to take their toll on me. That second line on the pregnancy test strip seemed like it would never appear. Life felt like it was a never-ending cycle of false hope that was always crushed in the end.
I wouldn’t wish that kind of despair on my worst enemy.
I am a huge believer in the power of gratitude. I tried hard to look at all that we did have and find contentment in where we were. But anywhere I turned, it seemed like all I could see was pregnant women, or moms with children. And instantly, it would pull my thoughts back to this one thing that was lacking in our life.
I sincerely believe that “thanks” is one of the most powerful words in any spoken vocabulary. And that gratitude is one of the best antidotes to many of the problems we face.
In this situation, though, where I was hanging by a thin frayed strand that threatened to snap any minute, there was another word that helped me more in keeping it together.
And that’s the simple word “yet.”
Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. I reminded myself:
I’m not pregnant yet.
It’s not our time yet.
Even as I eventually started to make peace with the fact that we would not have kids naturally, I hung on to that one word.
There’s no need to despair yet.
It’s not time to give up yet.
We just haven’t found out a workable option to start our family yet.
It is perhaps the simplest, most under-rated word in the English language. But the power it can have on transforming our outlook is immense.
“Yet” makes things less final.
Whether it is a battle with infertility, a project that isn’t going the way we expected, or a relationship that’s constantly devolving, the simple word “yet” can transform the negative thoughts in our mind into something that feels less final.
And that opens up the space to breathe. To live. To look for alternatives. To look for solutions. Or simply to get through another day.
“I failed [at something]” is so final. It feels suffocating. It leaves very little room for us to maneuver.
“I haven’t succeeded yet” transforms the exact same event into something that has hope. Something with a better future. Something we can change. Something in our control.
“Yet” makes learning easier.
After the four-year struggle with infertility, we were finally blessed with a beautiful daughter.
You would think that after the experience we had, we would have treated her like a princess and lived happily ever after.
Things didn’t quite work out like that for us.
I was at that time in a very stressful job. My daughter had amply inherited the stubbornness genes from both sides of the family tree. I used to be a bit of a control freak.
Apparently, those things don’t mix well.
Before I even knew it, my daughter and I were butting heads on a regular basis and we were stuck in daily tantrums and power struggles.
I used to perpetually feel like a lousy mom.
Until one day I had the epiphany: I’m not a bad mom. I just haven’t figured out this parenting thing yet.
Adding that one simple word to the way I thought about the situation opened the doors to learning and to keep trying until we were back on track again. It paved the way for what has been a three-year journey of discovering and embracing the positive parenting philosophy.
My daughter has blossomed right before my eyes. Our relationship has improved by leaps and bounds.
All because I now see myself as someone who has yet to learn things, instead of flogging myself when I fail (and fail I do… parenting a strong willed child is not for the weak of heart!)
“Yet” makes dealing with others easier.
Over the course of time, yet has become the default lens through with I see others around me as well.
When my daughter is being difficult I remind myself: She is not trying to get to me. She simply hasn’t learnt how to manage her emotions and behavior yet.
When a friend makes what I think is a poor choice, I tell myself: It’s not my place to change her. She hasn’t experienced her share of what life has in store for her yet.
When I’m having a rough time working with someone, I say to myself: She’s new to this. She hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet.
Just as with difficult situations, the simple word “yet” makes it easier to deal with difficult people as well.
And discovering this has been a great blessing for all my relationships.
Beware, though. Watch out for this caveat.
I would be remiss if I just focused on the positive effects of the power of “yet” and not talked about its negative impact.
Unlike some other power words like “thanks,” “yet” is not a stand-alone, but rather an amplifier of what we think.
When used in a negative context, “yet” can make things orders of magnitude worse.
For instance, when we get stuck thinking poorly of ourselves, even a success might make us think: My regular clumsiness (or ill-luck) hasn’t caught up with me yet.
We need to watch out for these, and strip them of the power of “yet” as soon as possible.
The other day my daughter and I were happily coloring together in a parent-child journal I created. She was doing a great job, so I complimented her on it.
She sat back, looked at it and said with a smile: “It does look good, doesn’t it? I just means I haven’t messed it up yet.”
She probably meant it as a self-deprecating joke, but I couldn’t let it pass.
So I replied back with a smile, “No honey. It means you’ve done a great job coloring today!”
Sometimes, there’s just no place for the word “yet.”
So now, a question for you: What is the one situation in your life right now that can be transformed by the power of “yet”?
