Tag: sadness

Reconnect with Your Authentic Self Instead of Denying Your Feelings
“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” ~Lao Tzu

I recently took seven weeks off of work and rented a place in Laguna Beach.

The trip was meant to be a relaxing vacation and possibly a change of residence; it turned out to be a wakeup call.

I started the trip out by going on my first date since 2010. The pollen count was high, and my sinuses were none too happy. I’m still not sure if it was being on a date or the medication that triggered so much anxiety; maybe it was a combination of both.

Later that evening, as I replayed the day in my mind, old insecurities came to the surface. That feeling of not being good enough engulfed my being.

I just smiled, shook my head, and thought to myself, “Really? Does this still ring true for you?”

The answer was no. But it still came up, so I had to explore it further. So I spent the next two and a half weeks in a battle with the Southern California Pollen Count and my inner self-worth issues.

Most of my life had been controlled by an underlying sense of anxiety.

In my teen years and throughout most of my twenties, I numbed it with drugs and alcohol. In 2005, after I celebrated my first year of sobriety, I started to really explore this feeling. I signed up for hundreds of newsletters, spent many hours in the Dana Point Library, and purchased over 100 books that year alone.

I read, listened, and put into practice anything that came across my path.

The movie “The Secret” spoke to part of me, and books from Deepak Chopra, Ester and Jerry Hicks, and countless others made me temporarily feel as if it were going to be okay.

I wanted so badly to just be happy, to be able to really look into the mirror and like what I saw.

By April 2009, I thought I had it all figured out. My goal-setting exercises were bringing my desires to fruition, my body was as healthy as it has ever been, and my love life was what I had always dreamed it would be.

A few months later it all fell apart. I found myself again back to square one. It didn’t make sense and all I wanted was to know was: What part of this equation was missing?

My mission to figure it out was renewed, and the way my life has unfolded since has been a long, strange trip indeed.

Looking back at my self-education is partially humorous and equally frustrating.

I now find it humorous that I worked so hard to “fix” something that wasn’t actually broken.

I find it a bit frustrating to have consumed so much information that perpetuated this seemingly endless cycle of self-help stupidity.

Two very popular self-help ideals come to my mind.

1. “You just have to be positive.”

This may be worst thing you can say to someone who is depressed and sees no way out of it.

You read books on “how to attract everything you ever want in life.” You understand that positive thinking leads to positive results. Just when you start making progress, something happens and you feel frustrated or angry.

You find yourself upset at yourself for being upset. You think, “Why can’t I just be happy? What’s wrong with me?” The depression deepens.

Listen, you don’t have to be positive all the time.

It’s okay if you get upset or don’t feel happy every waking moment.

Before you can cultivate a positive mindset, you must first honor where you are and the journey that brought you here. Our general outlook on life is a mixture of genetics and experience. Some reactions are very deeply engrained and will take a concentrated effort over time to change.

You’re not broken if you can’t see the silver lining, which is why this next bit of wisdom needs another look.

2. “Just fake it until you make it.”

It’s a catchy saying, but horrible advice.

The feelings you have present in your life are valid. The act of faking it is an act of denial, which can have some really negative effects on your psyche.

You can’t fake your way out of sadness and depression.

You can put on a happy face, and to some degree it will change your mood. But, during those times when you take away distractions and you have to sit alone with yourself, the act of faking it will make you feel like you’re crawling out of your own skin.

I didn’t realize that faking it perpetuated anxiety.

Being really comfortable with myself didn’t actually happen until I began to just sit still on a regular basis.

At first it was overwhelming; anxiety turned to frustration, to anger and rage, and finally to shame. I felt cracked wide open, exposed and raw.

The feeling really sucked and it lasted for almost six months.

But I sat with it. I owned it, and in that space of raw vulnerability I stopped faking it. For the first time in my life it felt okay to be me.

There is a real power in authenticity.

It is an act of love to honor where you are right now.

From my experience with sitting in my own stuff came my life as a writer. My first book followed and my newsletter audience grew.

Yet, with all that I’ve studied and think I know I still found myself experiencing that old worn out feeling of “you’re just not ever going to be enough.”

So, how did I find myself in Laguna Beach overwhelmed and feeling less than worthy of love and affection?

Well, that was actually pretty easy for me to discover. You see, I’m an avid note taker and list maker. It only took a few hours to sort through my 2012 notes to see that I had only half been walking my talk.

My practice of meditation had taken a backseat to my “trying to achieve things.”

My practice of mindfulness had eroded; evening meals were consumed along with DVDs and Facebook noise-feeds.

Three months of sunsets went unseen.

My reverence for the present moment had once again been lost while my mind searched for fulfillment in the future; the result of which was the rise of my existential anxiety.

A Simple Plan to Reconnect with Your Authentic Self
- Still your body and mind. Commit to just five minutes of meditation and build your practice from there.
- Maintain focused attention on your breathing and honor the task at hand.
- Witness your reactions to get to the core reasons behind your emotional response.
- Take time each evening to write down little moments of gratitude, love, and awe that happened throughout your day.
- Remind yourself that you have nowhere else to be other than where you are right now.
From my experience thus far the first part of the plan is the most powerful; science backs up that claim. That’s why I am building my daily sitting meditation.

My dream is to see more authenticity in this world.

My belief is that this will lead to more compassion, which in turn will lead to more change.

How about you? Want to change the world too?

Then please join me by spending just a little bit of time doing absolutely nothing, every day for the rest of your life.

Who’s in!? Tell me you’re with me!

Photo by sierragoddess
April 15, 2013
How to Deal with Uncomfortable Feelings & Create Positive Ones

“Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.” ~Jean Kerr

For most of my life, I was a fugitive from my feelings.

Psychologists suggest that we are driven by two connected motivations: to feel pleasure and avoid pain. Most of us devote more energy to the latter than the former.

Instead of being proactive and making choices for our happiness, we react to things that happen in our lives and fight or flee to minimize our pain.

Instead of deciding to end an unhealthy relationship and open up to a better one, we may stay and either avoid confrontation or initiate one to feel a sense of control. Instead of leaving a horrible job to find one we love, we may stay and complain about it all the time, trying to minimize the pain of accepting the situation as real—and enduring until we change it.

From a very young age, I felt overwhelmed by pain. As a pre-teen, I ate my feelings. As a teen, I starved them away. In college, I drank and smoked them numb. And in my twenties, I felt and cried my eyes red and raw.

I sobbed. I wailed. I shook and convulsed. And I wished I’d never chosen to feel them, but rather kept pushing them down, pretending everything was fine.

Except when I did that, they didn’t just go away—they compounded on top of each other and built up until eventually I exploded, with no idea why I felt so bad. (more…)

April 4, 2013
Lessons from Regret: The Time is Now

“Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.” ~Unknown

“Six weeks ago the doctors told me he had six weeks to live. I don’t think he is going to survive the night.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” I whimpered, my voice barely above a whisper. ‘We don’t have any time left.”

I didn’t think that as a 19 year old, seeing my father die in a hospital was going to be something I would experience. Wasn’t he meant to grow old and grey, with me taking care of him?

Nevertheless, in the early hours of the following morning, when the rest of the world was lying in a quiet slumber, I was sat at my dad’s bedside, holding his hand while it slowly grew cold. I wasn’t willing to let go, as letting go would mean accepting what was. I wasn’t ready for that.

My dad and I had always had such a difficult relationship. I was the rebel teenager and he was the frustrated father who just never knew what to do with me. In the end, when the cancer had really taken over, he just gave up. He knew I wouldn’t be his problem for much longer.

As the weeks and months passed, it became easier to be without him. But the one thing that followed me was the regret I felt—of not trying to understand him, and not making our relationship better.

The older I get, the more I realize that that period of life was meant to teach me some tough lessons—lessons that have stayed with me to this day.

If you want to say something, say it.

Don’t wait for a good time. Life is beautiful and cruel in that it doesn’t tell you when your last day on earth will be. (more…)

March 26, 2013
How to Drop the Extra (Mental) Weight and Set Yourself Free

“Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

Most people I know are carrying extra weight—and I’m not talking about gaining a few pounds.

I’m talking about the mental and emotional weight we lug around with us. We carry it everywhere—like a backpack full of bricks—and it weighs us down.

Personally, much of my extra weight comes from the expectations I have for myself to be more—more present, more productive, more enlightened. Although these might be wonderful things to work toward, wanting to be more can easily translate to not being enough now.

In that way, each desire to be more than what I currently am equates to a few more bricks in my backpack. An extra load to haul around on my back, making life a little harder to navigate.

For me it happens to be expectations, but our habits can weigh us down too. Watching television that doesn’t nourish our souls, eating foods that don’t nourish our bodies, and holding on to thoughts that don’t nourish our minds. The effects add up.

And let’s not forget the hand-me-down beliefs. Beliefs like “Good things don’t happen to people like me,” or “I’m just not lucky in love.”

Or the old memories we replay, or the feelings we refuse to feel that bubble under the surface.

They are all heavy, needless weight.

So what?

Maybe you’re wondering, what’s the big deal? So what if you’re a little weighed down; it could be worse.

Or maybe you’re thinking that backpacks and bricks go hand-in-hand with responsibility. It’s your burden to bear; best to suck it up and carry on.

You certainly can go about your life with your backpack loaded up. The weight is rarely debilitating—and that’s exactly when it can be most harmful. (more…)

November 1, 2012
Embracing Our Darkness: We Don’t Always Have to Be Happy

“It is better to be whole than to be good.” ~John Middleton Murray

Discouragement is usually an unwelcome guest. Every time it comes knocking on my door, I try to shoo it away or sweep it under the rug.

In fact, many of us want nothing more than for happiness to be our constant state of being, and have a hard time forgiving ourselves when we falter.

It happens: We can get immersed in the thick of discouragement for days, feeling mopey, downtrodden, physically, mentally, and emotionally “burnt out” and all in all “not ourselves.”

When I am in this state, I avoid the page, others, and even my own feelings, not wanting to face the dark and shadowy sides of my own being.

Though it doesn’t always coincide with the external weather, I can feel rainy inside my own experience and mind from time to time, and I usually struggle against this feeling, only making it worse.

I am so adamant about being a positive person and believe that shining brightly is far preferable to feeling crummy. I think many of us share this tendency toward wanting to hold onto the light—but then, what do we do with our inner storms?

Where do we get this notion that to be our truest and most beautiful selves we have to always be happy, elated, content, and sure of ourselves?

Why do we believe that we must feel confident and inspired, have all the answers, and be buoyant in order to be our best, or at least to “be okay”?

We are only human after all, and nothing in our instruction manuals or in our description before we were born promises that we will always be perfect and shiny. Yet, we carry this unrealistic pressure on ourselves to be so and often berate ourselves for falling short any time a bad mood strikes.

It’s tempting to only put our best foot forward. For example, on Facebook, we can often share our sunshine-y moments proudly but may be less apt to proclaim as boldly when we are feeling negative.

If not for wanting to hide our own seemingly fruitless negativity from others and even ourselves, we might also fear spreading the bad mood to others. (more…)

September 6, 2012
Understanding and Lifting Depression: 5 Helpful Attitudes

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” ~Charles R. Swindoll

People almost always misunderstand depression. I know I used to.

My first dance with depression happened fifteen years ago. I was in my early twenties and it totally freaked me out.

When you’re depressed, your perception of pretty much everything changes.

Except you don’t realize that it’s your perception that’s changed, and instead it feels like the world has turned bad. If you’ve been depressed you’ll know what I’m talking about.

It goes something like this …

One day you feel confident and happy, and then the next day, ugh!

All the ideas and plans you have now seem ridiculous, your thoughts become morbid, and boy do you feel sluggish and sleepy, and why (yawn) is your boyfriend/friend/parent/spouse being so critical and mean all of a sudden?

And if that’s not enough, the world seems more abrasive—as if someone’s turned up the volume and taken off your sunglasses.

This is what happened to me. I cried. I felt sorry for myself. And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I felt so bad: I had loads of friends and an awesome boyfriend; I’d recently been accepted into a post graduate masters degree program for human nutrition.

Life was good. Or it would be if I only could stop crying!

Finally I went to the doctor, which made me feel better because the doctor told me I had a chemical imbalance in my brain; but then she told me I was “depressed,” which made me cry again since I thought depression was for negative people with no plans for their life.

So that was that. I was depressed. I had an illness. I took the medication and kind of, sort of started to feel better.

But after a year things started to change. I don’t remember why I started doing this—maybe I read it somewhere—but I stopped taking antidepressants, and whenever a “flat” period would come I’d watch it with as much distance as I could summon.

I started to notice that if I just let the “flatness” be and stopped worrying about it, my perception about something would shift, and as it did, the depression would lift.

The more times this happened, the more I began to trust that it was going to happen. And always, there standing on the other side of the flatness, was an understanding that made my life richer, less stressful, and more pleasant, well worth the ticket of entry.

Back then I had very little sense of self-care. I pretty much treated myself like a machine—a friendly, do anything for anyone, study-hard, play-hard machine. (more…)

August 21, 2012
Navigating Loss: Dealing with the Pain and Letting Go

“It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.” ~Pema Chodron

I remember when I first read the pathology report on my patient, Mr. Jackson (name changed), my stomach flip-flopped. “Adenocarncinoma of the pancreas,” it said.

A week later, a CT scan revealed the cancer had already spread to his liver. Two months after that, following six rounds of chemotherapy, around-the-clock morphine for pain, a deep vein thrombosis, and pneumococcal pneumonia, he was dead.

His wife called me to tell me he’d died at home. I told her how much I’d enjoyed taking care of him, and we shared some of our memories of him. At the end of the conversation I expressed my sympathies for her loss, as I always do in these situations.

There was a brief pause. “It just happened so fast…” she said then and sniffled, her voice breaking, and I realized she’d been crying during our entire conversation. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told her again. She thanked me for caring for her husband and hung up.

I’d known Mr. and Mrs. Jackson for almost seven years and had always liked them both immensely. I thought the world a poorer place without Mr. Jackson in it and found myself wishing I’d done a better job of consoling his wife, thinking my attempts had been awkward and ineffective. I reflected on several things I wished I’d said when I’d had her on the phone and considered calling her back up to say them.

But then instead I wrote her a letter. (more…)

November 2, 2010
Embracing the Moment When it Sucks: Dealing with Death

“Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.” ~Joan Kerr

A year ago I lost my best friend of forty-eight years to a pulmonary embolism. It came quickly and unannounced, and it took him instantly.

I found out about his death on Twitter. Because of the length and depth of our friendship I had never known life without him. As often happens when we lose someone dear, I didn’t know how I would move forward.

We’re taught that peace and happiness come from embracing and living fully in the moment, but I often wonder what should we do when the moment sucks. How do we embrace the pain of heartbreaking loss without suffering anger and sorrow?

I don’t know that you can entirely. What my year without Blake has taught me is that to live in the moment, I really have to do just that, whether the moment sucks or not.

During the first weeks after his death I allowed myself to wallow in my misery, yet at the same time I took action. I didn’t just feel the pain; I did something about it. I responded to it, I listened to its needs, and gave it voice. (more…)

September 13, 2010
50+ Ways to Beat the Holiday Blues

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” ~Dalai Lama

It’s a well-known fact that the holidays bring on the blues. According to the National Mental Health Association, reasons for feeling blue around the holidays range from fatigue to financial limitations to tensions in personal relationships.

As for me, I’m generally a happy person. I don’t dwell on things I can’t control, I have realistic expectations, I’ve learned overtime that trying to change people is futile, and I’ve even come to appreciate some of my flaws.

But sometimes, melancholy finds me. Like a thick fog that threatens to shroud a picturesque skyline, it creeps up seemingly out of nowhere until I can no longer ignore it.

I had an experience with this recently.

After an intense couple of nights with human rights activists from Ethiopia and Russia, learning about how fiercely and fearlessly they fight to preserve the rights of citizens of their countries, I feel blessed to be in a country where much of our basic rights are intact. Where we have a right to protest, to organize, to speak out. Where, though many may complain, its citizens are still quite a bit more privileged than those of most other countries.

After these intense couple of days, a sadness lingered, a sobering feeling that made me feel slightly off-balance, not-quite-myself, and a little bit powerless.

But, as I have done many times in the past, I’ve learned not to let sadness take over. It’s not easy to do at first but, as always, a little effort goes a long way. Here are some ideas to chase the blues away: (more…)

December 10, 2009