Posts tagged with “Pain”
A Little Hope and Encouragement for Hard Times
âIf your path demands you to walk through hell, walk as though you own the place.â ~Unknown
Trigger warning: This content contains references to self-harm and suicide.
It was in the spring semester during graduate school. I was living alone in a one-bedroom apartment and working nearly full-time hours at night.
The anti-depressants werenât working so well. I was keeping up with my therapist, but I suppose it was too much.
I felt too much. It hurt so much and couldnât handle it. You could list out the symptoms of depression, and I had them all.
Unable to deal with …
The Beauty in the Broken: How to Celebrate the Fragility of Life
âSometimes you get what you want. Other times, you get a lesson in patience, timing, alignment, empathy, compassion, faith, perseverance, resilience, humility, trust, meaning, awareness, resistance, purpose, clarity, grief, beauty, and life. Either way, you win.â ~Brianna Wiest
Last month, I was feeling super fragile.
I was deep in the woes of another round of covid type symptoms, along with an onslaught of chronic health conditions that were flaring up left, right, and center. I was one month into a new job, and after the initial excitement, I was starting to feel wildly overwhelmed.
I spent two weeks waking up …
How to Let Go of the Past and Forgive
âForgive others not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.â ~Jonathan Lockwood Huie
As a child, I faced constant physical and mental abuse.
Several classmates would beat me up in the schoolyard, hitting and kicking me. They also chased me down the streets to my home when school was done for the day. I had to cycle at my fastest to avoid another beating. It felt like I had to go through a war zone every day.
Besides the physical abuse, these children also constantly criticized and ridiculed every single thing I did. This made me feel …
8 Things to Remember When Youâre at Your Lowest
âAnd once the storm is over, you wonât remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You wonât even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you wonât be the same person who walked in.â ~Haruki Marukami
Last year was both the hardest year of my life and the most transformative. My partner and I had started in vitro fertilization after years of infertility. The daily hormone injections and invasive procedures were tough, but when we saw two blue lines on the …
Transforming Pain into Power: The Magic of Emotional Alchemy
If it werenât for my darkest moments, I wouldnât appreciate the life I have today. Iâve overcome a lot, and my biggest battle wasnât the hurdles themselves but how they made me feel, draining my energy and desire for life until I nearly lost it completely. Iâm sharing my story to give you hope. If I can transform pain into beauty through emotional alchemy, you can, too.
Iâm not going to lie and say my journey has been easy. Nor is it over; overcoming a lifetime of dysfunctional patterns from a toxic childhood and challenging adult experiences takes time. However, …
How Our Emotional Triggers Can Actually Be Great Gifts
âBe grateful for triggers, they point to where you are not free.â ~Unknown
Your triggers are your responsibility. I know, it doesnât land so nicely, does it? But itâs the truth. The moment you truly understand this, you let others off the hook and youâre able to actually see triggers as gifts pointing to where youâre not whole.
Iâve heard this many times before and felt like retorting with, âBut, he/she/they didâŚ.â Just because your triggers are your responsibility doesnât mean that others wonât do hurtful or infuriating things. It just means the only thing you can control is your …
How I Overcame My Fear on My Trauma Anniversary
âItâs okay that you donât know how to move on. Start with something easierâŚ. Like not going back.â ~Unknown
Iâm one of the 70% of people who have experienced trauma, and it can be hard to deal with. Actually, Iâve experienced more than one traumatic event, which is also common.
In fact, sometimes it feels like trauma and the symptoms have ruled my life.
The gut-churning, confused thoughts, sweating, shaking, inability to breathe and panic are horrible parts, though to me there is something worse.
The fear.
The fear that it will happen again. The fear of what it took …
How to Break the Cycle of Painful, Dramatic Relationships
âNo matter how far we come, our parents are always in us.â ~Brad Meltzer
Had you asked me five years ago, before my healing and personal growth journey began, if my upbringing and childhood wounds were shaping the choices I was making in relationships, I would have scoffed at you and said, âNo way. Are you kidding?â
Somehow, I had normalized the dysfunction I grew up in: the absentee father, the mother with mental illness, the lack of stability and safety, the enmeshment and codependency, the attachment wounds that left me spending a lifetime searching for someone or something to …
How Embracing Grief Can Open Us Up to a Beautiful New Chapter
âWhen we are brave enough to tend to our hearts, our messy emotions can teach us how to be freeânot free from pain but free from the fear of pain and the barrier it creates to fully living.â ~Kris Carr
It’s crazy how you go about your life thinking all is okay, and then BOOM, something happens that changes you forever. Grief and loss come and hit you in the face.
You know⌠the days that you start as one person and end as someone else.
But itâs not your first loss or trauma! You had a childhood of pain …
How to Free Yourself from Pain from the Past
âThere are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body.â ~Eckhart Tolle
When I read this quote, it stopped me in my tracks. So much of our pain and suffering in the present is caused by us repeating cycles and dwelling on pain from the past. We want so badly to resolve our suffering. But our search for resolution often involves repeating the painful cycles we have already been through, in the hope that someone or something will change.
Why I Love My Anger and How It Can Be a Force for Good
âWhere there is anger, there is always pain underneath.â ~Eckhart Tolle
âI donât know why Iâm so angry,â my mother said.
It was 3 a.m., and my mother was standing outside my door. I had awoken suddenly to hear feet stomping up and down the hallway on one of my last visits to my childhood home before dementia and breast cancer really took hold of her.
âPhht, me either.â I tried to empathize, but inside of me rose my own fear and anger, as my siblings and I had watched her decline over the years, yet at the same time, …
Being Grateful for the Peaceful Coexistence of Joy and Pain
âItâs a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. Thereâs no escaping that, but if you are grateful for your life, then you must be grateful for all of it.â ~Stephen Colbert
Life is not a war; you do not conquer it, nor do you overcome it. You simply accept that suffering is an inevitable and necessary rite of passage on our paths throughout life.
No one is immune to pain; it is only dished out at different levels, and our own internal experience is incomparable. We share similar human experiencesâthat is the tie that binds us all togetherâbut …
When the People We Love Shut Us Out: What I Now Understand
âHave patience that is all unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written like a foreign language.â ~Rainer Maria Rilke
I started thinking about a distant relative on a walk in the woods. I had thought about her more often when she suddenly stopped speaking to our family, well over a decade ago. I would reach out to her through email, but after not hearing back over the years, I thought about her less and less and eventually stopped trying to connect with her.
On this particular walk, I began to
5 Things to Remember When Heartbreak Feels Too Heavy to Bear
âIf you feel like youâre losing everything, remember that trees lose their leaves every year and they still stand tall and wait for better days to come.â ~Unknown
For a big lover like me, heartbreak has always gotten the best of me. I have felt heavy pain from the ending of a relationship, the ghosting of a situationship, and the loss of what could have been with someone I never dated. And Iâve experienced the sting of friendships leaving my life.
Itâs all heartbreaking.
It starts with a crippling, piercing full-body agony. And eventually it grows into a dull ache …
Accepting Fear and Sadness as Normal Parts of a Good Life
âBefore you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.â ~Naomi Shihab Nye
I knew it was around that time. When I opened my eyes, it was pitch black outside and I couldnât yet hear the chickens in the distance waking up. It was 4 a.m. again.
In the past few days, I have loved this gift of jet lag; transitioning to a thirteen-hour time change has afforded me this dark, mysterious quiet that has woken up inside of me the place from which I writeâa place that spontaneously arises when the
How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed by Other Peopleâs Strong Emotions
âIt is not your responsibility to figure out what someone else is feeling and why. Let go of the illusion that âfixingâ their bad mood will make you feel better.â ~Sarah Crosby
Some years ago, I was talking to my husband on the phone. He sounded annoyed about something to do with his work, but I noticed an intense emotional reaction in myself. Immediately, my heart contracted and my stomach lurched. I could feel a runaway train of emotions activate within me.
My whole body was awash with nausea, and I felt so very uncomfortable.Â
This was a familiar and …
3 Things to Do if Youâre Wondering: Why Canât I Just Be Happy?
Do you sometimes see people running around enjoying life and wonder what youâre missing? Sometimes I used to think I must be a horrible person. I had so many things going for me, and I still couldnât be happy. I would ask myself, is there something wrong with me? Am I a narcissist?
Then sometimes I would decide I was just going to be happy. I would fake it until I made it and just accept thatâs who I was. But it wouldnât take long for me to feel overwhelmingly depressed.
I had a little dark hole that would …