Tiny Buddha

Tag: suffering

  • Why We Can’t Be Happy All the Time

    Why We Can’t Be Happy All the Time

    Sad Woman

    “Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.” ~Ram Dass

    Suffering by definition: the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. As humans we typically strive for what we perceive the opposite of suffering, happiness: the state of being happy. Of course why wouldn’t you? Nobody wants to suffer.

    For many years I looked at the two as separate states of being. I felt if I was happy I would not suffer. Conversely, if I was suffering I could not be happy. It was a simple focus and one I felt was personally achievable. Easy, right? Choose happiness.

    I systematically removed and stepped away from all people and experiences I felt were in some way not happy or causing me suffering. I left jobs and relationships with little notice, under the guise of “sorry, I am just not happy.”

    I spent a great deal of time meditating, being mindful, and expressing gratitude. Not bad things to do but in my case perhaps slightly misguided. Filling my bucket, so to speak, with all things “happy.” I paraded myself and my Zen philosophy around like I was untouchable to suffering.

    I would sit back and receive compliments on my “evolved” thinking and state of being. I would wake up and plan my day of “being happy.” I mindfully embraced my feelings and thoughts of, “This makes me feel unhappy; therefore, I must remove it from my life.” I did so without hesitation or regard.

    This was all very delightful thinking until reality started knocking on my door. Thinking you can avoid suffering is kind of like thinking you control the ocean tide. Just in case you were wondering, you can’t.

    I had several people close to me pass away. I tried, I really tried, to release it with happiness. I was sad though. The more I tried to “happy” through it, the more I suffered.

    I fell in love, but I thought attachment would lead to suffering, so I denied my feelings and missed out on the possibility of a great relationship. The more I tried to “happy” through it, the more I suffered.

    I came under a great deal of professional stress, so I quit everything. Just like that, I chose to “happy” through it. How brave and mindful of me. What happened? The more I tried to “happy” through it, the more I suffered.

    I had created a perception to those around me and myself that I was happy, living in the present. So Zen. *So not Zen.*

    You know those people who go to yoga every day and glide though life with a calm flow, but then you are driving with them one day and someone cuts them off and they lose their mind, waving their fist and swearing? That was me. I had even started to refer to myself as 80% Buddhist and the other 20% of the time was reserved for “other.”

    For all intents and purposes I should have worn a t-shirt that said “happy most often with moments of reactive insanity.” I make light of it today, but it really was an ongoing and uncomfortable feeling of chasing happiness and justifying my unhappiness.

    One day I was sitting having my morning coffee and I thought to myself I don’t get it. I try to be happy; I do all the things that are “supposed” to bring happiness. Why do I feel like I am on a pendulum swinging between happy and suffering?

    Maybe part of happiness is not avoiding suffering? Maybe to experience happiness we actually have to experience everything else, including suffering. Then it hit me: Maybe my avoidance of suffering is actually causing me to continually suffer.

    Maybe I don’t control the tide of the ocean; maybe I am supposed to just go with it.

    What would happen if when I felt like I was suffering (hurt, fearful, or sad) I just went with that and stepped toward it rather than away from it? What if I didn’t dump the feelings and try to exchange them for happiness?

    So that was what I started doing. I didn’t stop doing all the things that bring me happiness. I didn’t stop being a good person, being thoughtful or mindful. I didn’t stop being me. I suppose I started being more me.

    I was learning to accept that suffering isn’t a bad thing, it is just part of life. Sometimes in order to appreciate happiness we have to experience unhappiness. We can’t say we are living if we are only choosing to allow in experiences and feelings that feel safe for us.

    As I write this today, I can’t say that I have mastered some special skill or can even offer some great insight in to happiness. This time last year I probably would have told you I did know the answers to it and could have given you a “top ten” list on how to achieve happiness and avoid suffering.

    I can offer my own experience. Happiness it isn’t a thing, just like suffering isn’t a thing. They are just feelings we experience. We either step toward them or we step away from them.

    I wake up every day and for the most part I would say I am a happy person. I find many things during the day that fill my heart, make me smile and laugh. I also have just as many things that scare me and that make me feel uncomfortable, things that take bravery and make me feel vulnerable. This doesn’t make me anything except human, just like you.

    I once viewed myself as a very unhappy and reactive person. I worked very hard to be an unreactive happy person.

    There is a place in the middle that respects our entire being.

    It is a place where we can be everything and anything.

    It is place where we are gentle with ourselves and brave.

    It is a place where we can embrace it all, with the understanding that each thread is important in weaving our story.

    Rather than chasing happiness or running from suffering there is another place we can go, an action we can take. I almost feel foolish for missing it for so long, as it is simple. It is called being yourself. It is a humble place, a sometimes scary place, a gentle place, and a place full of wonder, love, and opportunity.

    All you have to do is simply be yourself.

    Sad woman image via Shutterstock

  • How Pain Can Lead to Pleasure and Why We Should Embrace It

    How Pain Can Lead to Pleasure and Why We Should Embrace It

    “The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.” ~Unknown

    We all hate to suffer, and avoid suffering at all costs. I’ve gone through great lengths to avoid discomfort, pain, and sorrow.

    I stayed with the wrong people to avoid the suffering of letting go; I indulged in tasty, fatty snacks to avoid the suffering of not eating them; and I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day to avoid the suffering involved with quitting.

    I stayed in bed for longer than I should to avoid the discomfort of waking up when I needed to. I didn’t exercise to avoid the misery of running and doing pull ups, even though being unhealthy causes a lot more pain. And I avoided the aching uncertainty by staying within my comfort zone instead of going into the unknown.

    Oh, yes! I’ve avoided hardship in so many ways; however, this constant avoidance of temporary distress led to a postponed agony and never-ending pain.

    My life was out of my own control because of this constant avoidance of suffering. I found temporary pleasure in cigarettes, alcohol, sleep, chocolate, procrastination, and T.V. And so I tried to constantly numb myself with these external pacifiers to keep myself from doing and thinking.

    I didn’t want to think; I didn’t want to face my inner demons because I knew that would bring an even bigger amount of pain. It was like a Band-Aid that I didn’t want to rip off, and so I was slowly taking it off and putting it back on.

    I was miserable most of the time, even while I smoked a cigarette with a glass of wine, but at least they numbed the pain. They made my time endurable but not enjoyable.

    I had a never-ending list of things, errands, and problems that needed addressing, but that I kept postponing. Procrastination is the mother of instant gratification and long-term suffering.

    My life was far away from what I had hoped for or wished for, and there was no one to blame but myself.

    I needed to suffer. I needed to suffer for the right reasons and in the right direction. I needed a temporary amount of suffering so I could have a more durable amount of happiness.

    I needed to feel tired and get things done, I needed to crave that chocolate and not eat it, I needed the suffering of nicotine withdrawal, and I needed to look deep inside myself and suffer so I could fix what was broken.

    I needed to stop fearing the pain and embrace it as part of the battle to achieve something greater, something better.

    Suffering is not bad if you know what your suffering is worth.

    I remember when I told a swami, “I don’t know how to quit the things and people who are bad for me, because it causes me pain to let them go.”

    He replied, “Yes, it might cause you pain, and so what? You suffer a little bit and you gain so much more in return; you avoid greater suffering in the future from getting lung cancer, becoming an alcoholic, getting treated badly, losing your job, etc. Don’t fear suffering if you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

    Nothing ever gets done without a little bit of pain.

    And this is all right. When I pushed myself to what I thought was my limit, I realized that it is limitless on the other side of pain.

    A wise man once told me “Pain is just part of the process of commitment. Nothing ever gets done without a little bit of pain. And when you see the result the pain is gone.”

    Change Your Perception About Suffering

    Pain, discomfort, and displeasure. They’re negative emotions and feelings we need to avoid, right? Not always. It is this precise perception I had toward suffering that kept me enslaved to many things.

    That painful moment when my alarm clock shouted at me to wake up, with my eyes still closed, my head spinning from the glasses of wine I had drank the previous night, my lungs burning from all the cigarettes I had smoked and my heart empty of satisfaction.

    For those few hours of fun, five, maybe six hours of “pleasure,” I had to endure sixteen hours of pain, and this was just the tip of the iceberg.

    Of course, how could I endure the displeasure of not drinking and partying on a Saturday night? “Who cares about tomorrow?” I would think. This is the clearest example of instant gratification and long-term suffering.

    Sometimes we indulge in things that are bad for us only to experience a short amount of pleasure, overlooking the long-term effect.

    Enduring short-term suffering can bring on a greater amount of long-term happiness and pleasure. When things get done, when I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and meditate, exercising and fitting into my clothes, freeing myself from abusive people, when I wake up with a clear head and no hangover. And so, suffering becomes pleasurable.

    Slowly, with one foot after the other, I push myself to long-term happiness. Sometimes I give a step back but always remembering the sweet pleasure that suffering can bring me if only I decide to ache for the right reasons.

  • How to Free Yourself from the Pain of High Expectations

    How to Free Yourself from the Pain of High Expectations

    Imprisoned

    “Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.”  ~Rob Bell

    During my pregnancy, I was the poster child for prenatal health. From taking my supplements and participating in birthing and breastfeeding classes to doing downward dogs up until three days before my birth, postpartum depression never crossed my mind.

    I am married and financially and professionally successful.

    I hungered to be a mom.

    I have a robust community of friends.

    I do not fit the stereotype of who is at risk for postpartum depression.

    And yet, less than six weeks after giving birth to my daughter, I found myself sobbing and shaking on my bedroom floor in the middle of the night—incapable of getting up, incapable of taking care of myself or of my daughter.

    To understand how I found myself in this position, it’s important to understand what happened leading up to my birth.

    From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I began designing the vision for how I wanted to bring my child into the world.

    This was going to be my greatest creative act.

    I would labor at home as long as possible so that I could take baths and walk in my meditation garden.

    When I finally arrived at the hospital, I had an iTunes playlist (think Yanni, Jack Johnson, and Snatam Kaur) that was to play while my husband rubbed lavender and frankincense essential oils over my body.

    I did not want any pain medication. After all, my husband and I trained in hypnobirthing so that he could help me manage my pain.

    I created a lengthy document listing my desires as well as what I most definitely did not want. I posted it in multiple spots in my hospital room and provided a copy to my obstetrician and each nurse who attended to me.

    As you have probably guessed, my birth did not go according to plan.

    From the moment I was told that I needed to be induced because my daughter was in fetal distress, I watched myself move from protagonist to bit player in my birth story.

    Cervical ripening. Pitocin. Ruptured membranes. Epidural. Each of these medical interventions I abhorred the thought of I found myself submitting to as my labor stalled and my daughter’s breathing become more erratic.

    Twenty-seven hours after my induction, I gave birth. Only, I did not feel bliss or even gratitude. I was emotionally exhausted, disappointed, and anxious about what would come next.

    Within a day of my beautiful and healthy daughter entering the world, my cat of thirteen years exited it. As I grieved his passing, I found it difficult to bond with my daughter, particularly as she struggled to latch and my attempts at breastfeeding became futile.

    My fragile emotional health ultimately compromised my physical health. After a lengthy upper respiratory infection and weeks of postpartum insomnia, I began to feel like a dark, unfamiliar force had taken over my body. And I had no will to do anything about it.

    Fortunately, my mother and husband rallied to my rescue. They ensured I received the multiple forms of treatment needed to get back to me while my daughter was provided the nurturing that I could not give her at that time.

    By five months postpartum, I felt whole again. I felt connected to my daughter. Fortunately, she felt connected to me.

    I felt excited about my own and my family’s future.

    Postpartum depression forced me to question everything I thought I believed about what makes me happy, what I want my life and work to look like, and what makes me feel worthy to receive love and happiness.

    I am grateful for these lessons, even though the process to them was painful.

    While I now know that I was unconsciously equating my success and self-worth with my birth experience, strangling one’s self with an unrealistic benchmark for success is most definitely not just a woman’s issue.

    I do not want to allow myself to become prisoner to my expectations ever again.

    And I do not want you to become a prisoner to yours.

    Most of us struggle with how to create an ambitious and achievable vision for what we want for ourselves without getting our identities wrapped up in achieving them.

    Whether we strive to scale a business, negotiate a salary increase, payoff debt, buy a house, or take a family vacation, the key to having aspirations that fuel us, that make us feel good, is shifting our expectations about the outcome.

    First, we want to create goals for how we want to feel as we pursue what we are seeking to achieve.

    Prior to postpartum depression, I had never realized that in both my personal and professional life my goal setting always revolved around achieving something I could check off a list. And unfortunately, whether or not I checked off that thing on my list, was in large part not in my control.

    As a result, my feelings often operated by default rather than by design, and they were directly connected to my outward achievement.

    If we want to set ourselves to do well and feel good, we have an opportunity to set expectations for how we want to feel going through the process of achieving our vision.

    Had I done this during my pregnancy, I would have been lauding myself along the way for feeling healthy, creative, present, and so forth rather than pinning all of my success on the ultimate destination, the childbirth.

    We know from neuroscience that our beliefs shape our thoughts, and our thoughts give rise to our feelings. We have an opportunity to decide we are ready to feel a particular way—i.e., grateful, inspired, or accomplished—and align our beliefs and thoughts accordingly.

    Of course when we are triggered from something unexpected, upsetting, or downright devastating we are entitled to whatever emotional response is evoked. In these moments, we can observe our emotions moving through us without becoming them, or getting stuck in them, until we are back on the path we want to be on.

    When we put our awareness on believing that the feelings we desire can and will happen, it empowers us to have moment-to-moment thoughts (even if there are some occasional interruptions) that support the realization of the feelings we are striving for.

    This, ultimately, gives us a more solid base for realizing our expectations.

    Second, we want to find a way to measure success that goes beyond yes and no.

    To me, a successful childbirth was delivering my child without what I deemed were “unnatural” forms of medical intervention. I now realize how silly this goal was, given that it did not even address my daughter’s health.

    Yet if I were to time travel back or at some point have another child, I likely would still strive to minimize many of the medications and procedures I experienced.

    The key is the word “minimize.”

    I would focus on minimizing medical interventions that were not needed for the emotional, physical, and spiritual health of my child and me.

    That is very different, yes?

    How can you create goals that allow success to be lived in the gray, very important space, between black and white?

    Third, we must surrender in the wake of surprises and setbacks.

    When we surrender, we make peace with what is, and we use our newfound awareness to expand our conscious capacity for how to move forward with grace and ease.

    Note: This is not giving up.

    When we have an expectation that clearly cannot be met, we may grieve the shedding or the reframing of the expectation, but we do not adopt embarrassment, shame, or guilt about what has happened.

    We give ourselves space to awaken to the lesson, and then we incorporate it in how we move forward.

    To recap, if we want to consistently preserve our self-worth and ensure our identity does not become enmeshed in our results, we begin by shaping expectations that set us up to be successful in multiple and holistic ways.

    Then, we pause and pivot when expectations are challenged or outright dashed. We forgive ourselves for whatever role we played in the situation. And no matter what, we remember we are the protagonists in the story we choose to create about our lives.

    Prisoner image via Shutterstock

  • Help Instead of Judging; They May Be Blinded by Pain

    Help Instead of Judging; They May Be Blinded by Pain

    Compassion

    “We can judge others or we can love others, but we can’t do both at the same time.” ~Unknown

    When I was eighteen, my father took his own life. I was just a baby, really, a mere freshman working on my Bachelors Degree at UMF.

    There are times when I feel lost in the pain of missing him, stuck with this empty hole inside. Hovering in between confusion and anger, where the feelings consume me.

    Losing my father in such a traumatic way has shown me just how deeply I can feel, how hard I can fall, how grief can overcome my entire being at times, how forgiveness can heal—and also how I can help others so they don’t need to suffer as my father did.

    A military man who dealt with severe depression and PTSD, he desperately tried to find his place in this world. He tried to find comfort through his adopted family, he tried to find courage through joining the military, and he tried to find understanding by becoming a father.

    He was a quiet soul who was sociably awkward in a sweet, innocent way. He radiated beams of sadness from his eyes and tried desperately to express his love to his family without actually having to verbalize it.

    Monday, February 19, would become the date that measures time in my book. Time would be measured before this date and after this date.

    I awoke that morning, traveled south to a friend’s home, and fell asleep on her couch after arriving.

    Around 9:00pm, there was a knock on the door. There stood a Maine State Trooper and a priest. As I sat up on the couch, they walked into the living room. My heart pounded so hard I felt as if it were outside of my chest.

    As they sat down, I screamed, “What’s happened? Why are you looking at me like that?”

    The state trooper said, “I’m sorry to tell you this Jessica, but your father has died.”

    The priest quickly intervened, “He died quietly, in his sleep, with his cat next to him. He took his own life, dear, by overdosing on medication, but he’s at peace now…”

    Time stopped. My heart stopped. The pounding noise in my ears stopped. I cannot recall what they said next. I don’t remember what I even did next. I remember faintly hearing questions like, “Did you know he was ill?”, “Maybe this is a good thing considering the circumstances?”, and “Do you want to go see your mom now?”

    It was all a blur. We rushed back to my family home, I ran into my mother’s arms, and suddenly the funeral planning began. Life would never be the same.

    I remember feeling awkward and out of control. I worried about the stigma attached to the way he died, along with the potential judgment, the unknown pain, and the unknown future.

    What looks will I get upon returning to the University? How will people act around me? Am I a statistic? Am I a survivor? My mind raced. My feelings cycled through anger, resentment, betrayal, confusion, and hurt.

    How could he do this to me and our family? Didn’t he want to see me graduate college, get married, and have children? Why leave me with all these questions? This guilt? This pain? Why would he do such a thing, take the easy way out and refuse any help? He was such a great father, a strict Catholic, a military man…why would he do this?

    Then I realized that all of my pain and all of my questions were centered around me, not him. My inner victim was loud and self-pitying. And that’s part of the problem. People who are in such pain from deep depression or mental illness aren’t thinking rationally.

    My dad wasn’t thinking about my wedding in the future or the grandkids he would have or his next vacation; he was in pain. Period. Unbearable pain that he just couldn’t escape. He needed help. But people turned away because it can be uncomfortable to reach out, or perhaps because they thought it wasn’t their problem, or that he was just mean.

    We all have the power to recognize pain in others and offer compassion instead of judgment. In doing so, we can help those in need instead of forming mistaken conclusions about them and writing them off.

    Let go of the assumption that the man talking to himself on the street or the person in the straight jacket are the only ones “crazy” enough to take their own life—and that those people aren’t also worthy of compassion.

    Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. And everyone processes loss and hardship in different ways. How much you can handle will vastly differ than what someone else can handle.

    We’re all hurting in some way, perhaps damaged due to tragedy, and yet in spite of everything, many of us rise out of bed in the morning and put a smile on our face.

    Many people appear composed or happy to give the impression to the outside world that they have it all together, only to return home to feel sad and alone.

    When you encounter someone in distress or look into a stranger’s eyes and see sadness, offer kindness. Don’t wait for others to be kind to you, show them how to be kind. Don’t prejudge or assume something about anyone; allow them to tell their own story—and believe them.

    Listen, be present, and give others the space to be themselves.

    This is what I learned from my father’s loss—that you never know who’s completely blinded by the depth of their pain, and you never know how much you could help by offering kindness and compassion.

    Compassion image via Shutterstock

  • We Can Choose to Let Go, Stop Suffering, and Find Peace

    We Can Choose to Let Go, Stop Suffering, and Find Peace

    Peaceful Woman

    “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    I’ve called it my “Epiphany Bubble,” and it might be hard to believe, but it’s my true experience.

    I stood on the lawn of our city’s hospital. The sun was shining down on our group of grieving parents. My belly was big with my third child, but my heart was still heavy with grief from my second.

    Jonathan. I’ve never personally known anyone whose entire life was surrounded by compassion and love, like every minute of his twelve-and-a-half hours in my arms.

    Although the summer of 2000 was a long, painful journey through terminal pregnancy, Jonathan had blessed my life in countless ways. I just hadn’t yet understood that.

    Our hospital had this gathering a couple times a year. Parents who grieved babies would come, enjoy some cookies and punch, and chat with other moms and dads who were coping with loss.  

    At the end, we always did the same thing—write our baby’s name along with dates of birth and death on a white balloon.

    As I wrote “Jonathan 9-21-2000 – 9-22-2000” on my balloon, I smiled a little just at the joy of writing his name. I gave my belly a gentle touch and said a little prayer for my next little boy.

    Then I looked to my left. There were three women standing together, quite distraught in tears, comforting one another. I, of course, knew why they were crying, but I was curious.

    I was curious about the dates. When I looked at their balloons, I saw dates reflecting years prior. Six, seven, eight years earlier. My heart sank. I wondered, “Do I have to be in that much pain years from now? Does this heartbreak never end?”

    And that’s when it happened—my epiphany bubble. I suddenly felt as though I was in my own space, and that the world had ceased to spin. Everything outside of my bubble was blurry, and everyone seemed frozen, when I realized…

    I have choice.

    I stood for a few moments more, and the bubble vanished. But its effect on me did not. Something now stirred within me—a determination to really heal, let go, and be genuinely happy again.

    At home I began to wonder about choosing how to feel about life and how to perceive all that I experience on my journey. I started to seek within.

    Through journaling, praying, and meditating, I felt a shift. I sensed guidance. I glimpsed a bit of inner peace.

    Some of my wonderings were a bit surprising, but I gave space to let them unfold. Rather than judge, I allowed them to come to me without logic. I also resisted the teachings from my childhood, which would have stopped them from showing me a new way to perceive Jonathan’s life.

    I wondered, maybe Jonathan is a guardian angel. Perhaps he will protect and look after his big sister, Sydra, and his little brother who has yet to take his first breath.

    I smiled a bit at imagining my sweet Jonathan, from some other place of being, guiding and loving his siblings.

    I wondered, perhaps Jonathan was meant to leave this life at a very young age, and perhaps this could have happened in a variety of ways.

    Would I choose for his life to be very short, spent in my arms, and surrounded by love and compassion? Or, would I choose to have more time with him, but risk something worse—have him be a child who I’ve heard horrifying stories about, children who are abducted and hurt?

    I felt a bit of trust at realizing that I don’t know how it all works. Life, death, and all the days between and following are a mystery, really. Maybe his life was exactly how it was meant to be, or perhaps it might have been more tragic.

    I wondered, could it be that Jonathan was my son for this short time to teach me?

    I reflected on the months we spent together—when I learned he was terminal, my decision to carry him, the long nights, the quiet moments, the countless tears and prayers, the painful delivery, and the hours I had him in my arms looking into his beautiful eyes three times.

    I relaxed a bit realizing all I had learned. I was a strong woman, someone who was willing to give all I had to another, a woman who remained hopeful and optimistic amidst a very difficult time. I was a woman who sent prayers and love to other pregnant women, asking that they not suffer as I was.

    I wondered, could Jonathan’s life have served purpose beyond me, our family, and my understanding?

    I thought about all the people who had surrounded Jonathan with love and compassion before and during his life. I recalled the many people who came to his memorial service, each saying how deeply he had touched their heart.

    My trust deepened. I knew Jonathan’s life, however brief, served purpose. He was a blessing, a sweet, little blessing, to many people, and I was the lucky woman who was honored to be his mom.

    Grief is nothing to be rushed. Throughout this time, I was gentle and patient with myself, honoring all my emotions, not pushing through them or stuffing them in the secret places of my heart. By doing so, I was better able to deeply heal.

    Grief is also nothing to cling to simply because it’s familiar. Although the journey had many twists and turns, and I needed to allow it to show its way, it is worth the inner work to let go and find peace.

    It is not just grief where we have choice. With all our life experiences—every emotion from anger to joy, from love to fear—we can choose.

    Allowing our heart and mind to wonder, taking time to feel it all without judgment, and seeking within for the path of letting go, this is the way to embrace all of life and peacefully enjoy the now.

    Peaceful woman image via Shutterstock

  • Managing Chronic Pain: 5 Lessons from Being Hit by a Truck

    Managing Chronic Pain: 5 Lessons from Being Hit by a Truck

    Woman in Pain

    “Pain can change you, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a bad change. Take that pain and turn it into wisdom.” ~Unknown

    You know how people say, “It was like being hit by a truck”?

    I know what they mean.

    But the impact took over ten years.

    It was a cold, snowy January, and I was in my car, singing along to the radio.

    I was doing a steady, careful sixty miles per hour, in the middle lane of a busy British highway. I was on my way to deliver my first solo course for the company I’d joined a few months before. It was a good day.

    Suddenly, my world shook. I saw a flash of yellow in the passenger side window, and two big bangs jerked me to a stop.

    I went from cheerily singing to a terrified shaking in the front seat, car stopped dead at a lopsided angle in the fast lane.

    My body, infused with adrenaline, struggled for air, and I felt paralyzed, knowing I needed to do something, move the car, get out, anything, but it was as if my brain was frozen. What the hell had just happened?

    I’d been hit by a truck.

    A foreign lorry (the driver on the opposite side of the cab to UK cars) had pulled into the middle lane without seeing it was already occupied. By me.

    The side of his yellow truck hit the side of my car at sixty miles per hour, pushing it out of the way like a child knocking over toy soldiers.

    I was shunted at speed into the fast lane, where I hit the back of another car. Instead of spinning out into the middle of the highway, I came to a stop after this second hit.

    And then I wept as the adrenaline hit me and I realized what had just happened. And what could have happened. And was just grateful it was over.

    I wonder what my reaction would have been if I could have seen the longer-term impact of that accident—the impact that would stretch ten years and more ahead of me.

    Immediate Impact

    At the time, I suffered mild whiplash, my car needed extensive work, and unsurprisingly, I didn’t deliver the course.

    But after that, apart from some slight twinges in my shoulder and neck, I felt okay. Maybe a little quieter and more anxious than usual for a while, but okay.

    There was some pain, but I saw an osteopath for a few sessions, and my body seemed to settle.

    But after another couple of months, the pain returned. I saw the osteopath again, and after a few sessions it subsided.

    Rinse and repeat.

    This pattern happened again and again, and I started to expand my treatment options. Physio, acupuncture, Bowen, deep tissue massage—you name it, I probably tried it.

    And although the treatment often did help, the intervals without pain became smaller and smaller until eventually, the pain was constant. I was diagnosed with chronic pain, something you need to manage, rather than acute pain, something you can cure.

    Sometimes You Have to Learn Lessons the Hard Way

    Fast forward another five years, and I’m no longer in London, working in a stressful job with long hours and high demands.

    I spend most of my time in Thailand. Yoga is a big part of my life, as is writing, blogging, and sharing both my expertise as a psychologist and my experiences as someone who’s lived through great personal change and development myself.

    So what lessons did I learn from all this that helped me to change my life so dramatically?

    1. Think of your body as an integrated system and not unconnected parts.

    When I started to see consultants, I would see “the shoulder consultant” or “the back consultant.” But our bodies don’t work like that. I had more than one issue, but struggled to get the back consultant to think about my neck, or the shoulder consultant to take into consideration my arm.

    Since the accident, I’ve learned a huge amount about my own body. I understand more about the “flavor” of different kinds of sensation and pain. But most importantly, I know that my body is a complex system of many different parts working together, not a set of connected-but-separate pieces.

    Doctors aren’t trained to think that way. But that doesn’t mean you can’t. Keep track of your symptoms, read up, and be open to seeing different practitioners who might be able to help you view your body as a whole.

    2. Your body is both strong and fragile.

    I used to have an arrogance around my body, my spirit, my independence. I used to say that I never wanted to be dependent on anything—food, coffee, pills, a person.

    Now, I take a number of different medications every day. I’m no longer independent.

    I wasn’t particularly fit, but I thought my strength of will was enough. I was wrong.

    I learned that our bodies and minds have both infinite strength, but also fragility and vulnerability. And I’m slowly learning to embrace the vulnerability as well as the strength.

    Where are you strong? Where are you vulnerable? Work on identifying and more importantly, accepting, both.

    3. Be open to what can help you.

    I was also very skeptical of any kind of alternative therapy. But when you’re in constant pain, you’ll try anything. I’ve seen many different practitioners now, and have tried to be as open as possible to each.

    Unless I really feel uncomfortable or negative about them, I will give a practitioner three goes. And I’ll monitor the impact of their treatment.

    Given that you can also end up spending quite a lot of time and money, if the impact isn’t enough—the cost-benefit isn’t high—then I won’t continue. Some treatments have surprised me in how much they helped; others have disappointed me.

    I’m well aware of the placebo effect, but I’m okay with it. But I’m also cautious when the practitioner says something like “the effects are subtle.” Too subtle, and maybe I should be spending my time and money elsewhere.

    What have you closed your mind to without further exploration? What could you experiment with if only you could put pride aside?

    4. Manage your own “stuff” with boundaries and kindness.

    Chronic pain is a challenging condition in many ways, as it’s invisible; it’s not like a broken arm, where your cast clearly shows others something’s wrong so they don’t bump into you.

    To other people, I look no more or less healthy than them. When I have a bad pain day, it’s hard for others to know, and they are much more likely to “bump into me.”

    We all have “stuff” like this—and it doesn’t have to be a health condition. Invisible stuff—a stressful day, a bad day, grief, loss, pain, rejection—the list goes on.

    My relationship with my body has also changed over time. Before the accident, my connection with my body was functional; it did what I needed it to. After the accident, I was angry, and disconnected my mind and body. I even talked about it as another entity: “My body and I have a difficult relationship.”

    It took me a long time—and work with mindfulness, yoga, and meditation—to learn to accept my body and just “be” with it.

    And rebuilding the shattered relationship between body and mind has also meant learning how to be in my mind (remembering that the two aren’t distinct). Understanding what I need when I have a bad day. Being kind to myself. And also creating self-care boundaries; I don’t have endless energy, and so need to curate it carefully.

    Do you know when you’re having a bad day? What do you do to protect yourself? Where are your boundaries? How are you kind to yourself?

    5. Good things can come from bad.

    I don’t believe that I had to be hit by a truck to change my life—that “everything happens for a reason.”

    I try and flip it round—what good can I find in this tough situation? How can I, as the quote says, turn this pain into wisdom? It’s not easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is. I’m a work-in-progress, just like everyone else. I get knocked down; I get up again.

    Chronic pain was a critical factor in my decision to completely change my life, going from a workaholic management consultant in London to running my own business online, basing myself mainly in Thailand.

    It’s helped me to learn (and re-learn!) the lesson of acceptance of “what is,” rather than constantly wishing the world was somehow different.

    Because once you accept the now, you can build on that foundation and apply all the other lessons to the next stage of your life, or even just the next day.

    Because every moment is a new moment. An opportunity for change. Another start.

    Woman in pain image via Shutterstock

  • Pacing Yourself When You Want the Pain to Stop

    Pacing Yourself When You Want the Pain to Stop

    Pace Yourself

    “The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    I was in pain.

    My legs hurt, I felt nauseated, my heart thumped hard and fast, and I labored for every breath.

    I was halfway up a steep, three-mile hill, and I was so exhausted I could barely keep my bike upright.

    My mind tried desperately to solve this problem: “Should I stop? I should stop. No! I’ve done this hill in the past without stopping—what’s the problem this time? I hate this! Why is this so painful?”

    I glanced over at my riding buddy, Keila. She was pedaling slowly and methodically. I couldn’t hear her breathing at all. Of course, it was hard to hear over my loud gasps.

    I uttered an expletive.

    I kept going. The road stayed the same, but I suffered more and more.

    After twenty more minutes of cardiovascular hell, we reached the top of the hill.

    I unclipped from my pedals and stood over my bike, elbows on the handlebar, head hanging as I tried to regain my breath.

    In the middle of a wheeze I looked over at Keila. She was standing over her bike, too. But she was on her phone texting someone. No sign of struggle there.

    After a few minutes, I was able to stand upright and Keila was done texting. We had climbed this hill together many times. Today had been a bad, bad day for me.

    Still panting, I said to Keila, “That was awful. I wonder why it was so hard this time?”

    A wise and observant young woman, Keila softly replied, “It’s because when you start to suffer, you speed up. And then you get mad.”

    I looked at her for a moment and then, despite my still thudding heart, I laughed.

    She was right.

    An experienced cyclist, Keila acted as my coach when I first started riding. One of the things she always had a hard time getting me to understand was how to pace myself, especially going uphill.

    I had actually become fairly good at it, but today I had forgotten the lesson. Today, when I came to a very steep section of the challenging hill, I tried to speed up to make the pain stop.

    But then I didn’t have enough energy for the rest of the climb and really struggled.

    Out of fuel and suffering, I got angry and swore at the pain and myself.

    After I recovered from the ride, I started thinking about what Keila said:

    “When you start to suffer, you speed up. And then you get mad.”

    I began to wonder if this manifested itself in my life off the bike, too.

    It didn’t take long to see the pattern.

    • Averse to being in conflict with anyone, I often sped up during disagreements, either acquiescing to the other person or abruptly cutting them out of my life.
    • Times of confusion or indecision also caused me to speed up such that I would make impulsive choices just so I wouldn’t have to suffer any longer with being unsettled.
    • At the beginning of a long period of deep and heavy grief, I quickly latched onto someone I thought would help me get past the pain only to have that person bring me more heartache and sadness.
    • And, during some of these times of indecision, confusion, conflict, or sadness, I used anger as a motivator to propel me into action, but again, usually in a rash, compulsive manner.

    Inevitably, these “speed up maneuvers” backfired on me. I ended up regretting choices I made, cut off people I would have enjoyed keeping in my life, and lost myself in the process of getting the pain to stop.

    But I also noticed that as I’ve aged and become more conscious of my speed up maneuvers, I’ve learned to pace myself more. To move more slowly and with greater awareness of my actions and their outcomes.

    And I’ve learned that pacing myself doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt.

    When I’m on my bike and climbing a hill, I still get to a point that I’m suffering no matter what I do.

    But when I pace myself rather than try to outrace the pain, I have confidence that I can both tolerate the suffering and make it to the top of the hill.

    So now, when I pace myself during life’s struggles, I don’t hold on to illusions that it’s not going to hurt in some way.

    I have confidence in the knowledge that slowing down and moving forward with awareness will allow me to manage the suffering so that I can make it to the top of whatever emotional hill lies in front of me.

    I encourage you to identify your speed up maneuvers.

    What do you do when you’re suffering?

    What are the ways you try to get the pain to stop that only drain your energy and cause you to struggle even more?

    How can you pace yourself so that, even though moving forward may still hurt, you can make it to the top of the hill?

    On our next ride, I told Keila about my insights that sprang from her quiet observation of my cycling struggles.

    She laughed gently and said, “Everything that happens on the bike relates to what happens off the bike, Bobbi.”

    Amen to that, Keila.

    Amen to that.

    Tired man image via Shutterstock

  • We Can Be Happy Despite Pain from Our Past

    We Can Be Happy Despite Pain from Our Past

    Grateful

    “Think of all the beauty that is still left in and around you and be happy.” ~Anne Frank

    At first glance, the happiest person I’ve ever met appeared to be a simple man. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly sophisticated or spiritual about him.

    Srulik was five-feet tall, with a big round belly and a wide smile permanently plastered on his face. He enjoyed the small things in life: a good joke, a familiar television show, a wholesome meal. He radiated such joy, and was so unassuming in his demeanor that one would assume he was blessed with an equally simple and joyful life.

    Many years ago, when I was only ten years old, I remember coming home one day particularly distraught.

    My class had just learned about the Nazi Holocaust. At the sink, my mother was washing dishes. I started telling her about what I’d learned in school, when she gently cut me off and, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, said, “Oh, your grandfather is a survivor. You should talk to him about it.”

    “Wait, which one?” I asked.

    “Grandpa Srulik,” she answered as she continued scrubbing a pot.

    I was flabbergasted. What? Him of all people? How could that be? He is always so happy. It just didn’t make any sense.

    I was only a child, and yet I could feel that something out of the ordinary was happening here.

    Later I learned that, indeed, volumes of psychological research confirms that a difficult past leads to a difficult future.

    No need to go as far as the Holocaust. Common problems we suffer in times of peace and plenty, such as bullying and poor attachment to our parents, can have serious psychological consequences, preventing us from enjoying our lives many years after the problems go away.

    Veterans often suffer from severe post-traumatic stress, and Holocaust survivors in particular are known to suffer from a wide array of emotional problems after the unspeakable horrors that they suffered. Who would expect anything else?

    And yet, there was my grandfather, happy as ever—smiling, telling jokes, and laughing his heart out. I had to know what enabled him to survive so wholly.

    “How do you manage to stay so happy?” I said during one of our conversations.

    “You need to learn to be happy from any success,” he told me. “Any success at all. When some misfortune happens, we need to view it with humor and think of it as temporary. Think of something else.”

    “I view everything with optimism, it’s very important,” he added later.

    His secrets boiled down to gratitude, the power of positive thinking, and optimism. I must admit, I have heard it all before. But, suddenly I saw it in a whole new way. Can things such as gratitude and optimism help us overcome even the most tragic of traumas? How powerful are these principles?

    When Grandpa Srulik was ten years old, the Nazis came into the Polish town of Nowosiolki, and gathered up his family—the only Jewish family in town.

    With the entire town watching, a Nazi pushed Srulik’s father against the brick wall of his house. Then, the Nazi grabbed hold of his mother and pushed her hard against the wall. Next, he did the same to his brother.

    Realizing that he was next, Srulik picked up his heals and ran as fast as he could through the thick crowd surrounding his house. Behind the river across from his house, he suddenly realized that he was alone. He had escaped the Nazis. He decided to hide in the bushed until morning before returning home.

    The next morning, Srulik overheard three women doing laundry in the river. This is when he learned that, the previous night, his mother, father, and brother were shot dead into a hole in the ground. Devastated, utterly alone, and on the run from a powerful enemy, he tearfully mourned their loss.

    Yet through this pain, he never lost hope. He shared with me that even in that terrible moment, he believed with all of his heart that he would find a way through this challenge, monumental as it was.

    But, things got worse before they got better. Several weeks later, Srulik was discovered and imprisoned in a Nazi ghetto.

    There, he saw Nazis throwing live infants against walls and witnessed the murder of thousands of innocent people every day. He nearly died from starvation and disease, and narrowly escaped the Nazis’ bullets on numerous occasions.

    Against all odds, optimism carried Srulik through this unimaginable horror. Every day, he told himself that the Nazis would be defeated and he would be free.

    Through the years he spent running and hiding from the Nazis, Srulik never forgot to be grateful for the small rays of light that lit his path.

    He recalled with delight the wonderful homemade pickles that a young Polish woman gave with him when he had nothing. He never forgot the kindness of a German cook, who, instead of reporting him to the authorities, shared his delicious soup.

    Srulik held onto his positive attitude for years after the war. He was grateful for all the kind people he had met along the way, the orphanage that took him in, and the opportunities he had to earn an education.

    Until his last day, Grandpa was able to find something positive in every situation. “Even good weather counts,” he taught me.

    Despite an incredibly difficult past, Srulik grew up to be a joyful, contagiously positive man. Having had the most difficult past of anyone I’d ever known, my grandpa was, and still is, without a shred of doubt, the happiest person I’ve ever met.

    If gratitude, positive thinking, and optimism helped him lead a happy life, then imagine what these principles can do for the rest of us. Surely, there is hope for all of us, no matter what lies in our past.

    Man with raised hands image via Shutterstock 

  • Wanting More Time: Have You Lived Enough?

    Wanting More Time: Have You Lived Enough?

    Woman with hourglass

    “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” ~Marcus Aurelius

    I remember attending a lecture by the Tibetan monk Sogyam Rimpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, in which, smiling all the while, he confessed, “So many people, they say, ‘I’m not afraid of death.’I tell you, they’re lying! Death? Very scary. Me? I’m very scared of death.”

    And I thought to myself, “Phew, if he’s scared, then it’s certainly okay that I’m scared too.”

    For many years after that, I carried a question around with me. “Have I lived enough yet?” Without hesitation my answer was always, “No way! Not by a long shot!”

    And then I’d follow this up with all the reasons why I wasn’t yet satisfied—I hadn’t left a mark on the world, wasn’t married yet, didn’t have children, didn’t know who was going to win this season of whatever reality TV show I was following.

    Even after I had built a decent career for myself, published a book that I know helps others, got married, had two adorable sons, and found out who won that season (and many others) of various TV shows and sports, the question and its familiar response still remained. Had I lived enough yet? No!

    It suddenly dawned on me that, if I continued to think this way, I would never experience fulfillment. I’d never arrive at that mythical destination I’d set out for myself where I’d finally cease yearning for more. Especially now that I had kids, this became abundantly clear.

    I’d always want to see what came next in their lives, to witness each step upon their journey into and throughout adulthood.

    Then if they had kids, I’d want to share as much of their lives as possible too. Feeling so much love in my heart, I knew I’d never reach a place where I’d had enough. I’d always want more.

    Realizing that I was chasing what could never be caught, I stopped to pose myself a new question.

    I asked, “What do I want my last thought in this world to be?” And my answer came back as something like, “I’d want to be thinking, Ahhhhh, that was good… that was nice… that was enough…”

    This new question might not have helped me much, if I didn’t remember something else, namely, that how we live this moment is the best predictor of how we will live in the future.

    So, it then occurred to me that, if I wanted to be thinking I have lived enough in the future, then the best way to get there would be to live with that exact same thought right now.

    Immediately, I started asserting this new notion that, already, I had actually lived enough. After all, there are many humans that are not blessed with the experience of even a second day of life on earth. How greedy was I willing to be? How selfish and ungrateful?

    The deeper this pronouncement that I had lived enough sunk into me, the greater the shroud of fear surrounding death lifted.

    Whether I initially had believed this or not, I slowly grew to the place where I knew, beyond any doubt, that I had lived enough. Yes! I had already lived enough! And, just like that, all my fears vanished and I finally felt free, overflowing with a sense of appreciation and contentment.

    Ever since, I’ve been discussing this concept of “enough” with others in the throes of grief and loss.

    What I explain is that “enough” is always a value judgment, rather than something that can be quantified or measured. It’s about perspective, a determination on our part to choose gratitude for what we’ve been granted over regret for what we have lost or fears about what we might lose.

    This can be tremendously powerful, though admittedly very hard at times. Is it possible to view the death of a young child and understand that he or she lived enough?

    Can a parent suffering through such a loss perceive their abbreviated time with their son or daughter as enough?

    When a friend or parent or anyone else we care about passes away, can we experience the time we had with them as enough?

    The answer is yes. It is possible, if and when we choose to exercise our right to invoke this perspective.

    We can view whatever time we’ve been given through the continually available lens of gratitude, appreciation, celebration, and love. We can understand each moment as a gift, as “enough.”

    To be a human is little short of a miracle. In the limitlessly vast universe of atoms and particles and stars and planets, gases and quarks and molecules, stones and trees and bugs and platypuses, of all the possible manifestations of life that are possible, we have been given the rarest of privileges of experiencing what it is like to be human. That’s cool!

    Just by being here, we’ve already beaten the odds, no matter how many more minutes of this miracle we get to experience.

    We know when we lived enough by knowing this right now, during this and all future moments, even while we crave to drink in as much as life continues to offer us. We appreciate that no more is needed.

    We’re thankful and, from the wisdom of this thankfulness, we smile, at ourselves and all around us. We’ve already lived enough—and that’s a beautiful thing.

    Woman with hourglass image via Shutterstock

  • 6 Secrets to Moving On From Serious Struggles

    6 Secrets to Moving On From Serious Struggles

    “Never be ashamed of a scar. It simply means you were stronger than whatever tried to hurt you.” ~Unknown

    People who knew me ten years ago would probably expect me to be dead now. They wouldn’t expect me to have escaped my problems. They wouldn’t expect me to have stopped drinking, drugging, taking overdoses, and cutting my arms.

    People who knew me ten years ago saw a scared shell of a girl, terrified of her own shadow and on a mission to self-destruct. They wouldn’t expect me to have turned my life around completely. They certainly wouldn’t expect me to be sharing my story and helping others to let go of their struggles, too.

    But then those people who knew me ten years ago didn’t know that I would find the secret to moving on from my struggles. I didn’t know it back then either; I thought that there was no hope for me, and that I would never be over my woes.

    The secrets to moving on came to me slowly. It took years of suffering from anxiety and alcoholism before I found my solution, but it was worth the wait. Whatever your problems, and no matter how inescapable you think they are, the answers are always universal.

    Here are six secrets to moving on from your struggles:

    1. Draw a line.

    When you’ve decided that you’ve had enough of suffering, of tying yourself up in the same old knots and landing up in the same dead ends, draw yourself a nice mental line to mark your decision. Everything up until now was the part of the problem, and everything from now on is a learning experience.

    Use that mental page break to give yourself new courage and enthusiasm for the healing process. Leave any guilt and shame firmly in the past. Decide that no matter what happens, from now on you will do your best to break away from your negative patterns and never give up on trying.

    It’s okay to screw up, to cry sometimes, or to find it hard, as long as you never move back into that space where you’re not willing to try. Let your attitude be part of the solution to your problems; focus on living, learning, and breaking free. Take at least one extra step forward every time you stumble.

    2. Learn from others.

    When an emotional or mental problem is holding you back, don’t try to cope with it all on your own. If you’ve ended up in a sticky place or a cycle of self-sabotage, your own thought processes and feelings will have aided and abetted you. In order to get out of the hole, you must be willing to learn from other people.

    I have always found that those who have previously been down the same rabbit hole are the best people to give you advice and a helping hand. Hang onto the hope they present, learn their lessons, and see how the decisions they made have helped them to succeed in moving on.

    See the patterns in others’ successes, and look for people who live the solutions. If people appear bound by bitterness and negativity, they’re probably not the ones to help you. Look for those who are truly free of their issues—the ones who you aspire to be. There is no need to struggle alone, when others can help you through.

    3. Try everything.

    When it comes to particular problems, you may need to get specialist help to deal with them. You may feel you have tried so much, without success, to find the solutions to your issues that you will never find an answer. I know that trap; I nearly gave up, myself, on the quest to beat my anxiety disorder.

    Counseling, books, courses, pills, potions, and therapy had not provided any solutions. I had almost given up hope. I am so glad I didn’t.

    The last thing I tried was something I had never considered, and it happened to be the one method that gave me back my life. Try everything; think outside the box. The answer is only irretrievable if you stop looking for it.

    4. Let go.

    To truly move on, you must let go of blame, resentment, and anger. Realize that negative feelings are counter-productive. However justified you feel they are, it is only hurting you to hold onto them. Forgive others so that you can be free to follow a new positive path.

    Forgiving yourself is possibly the hardest part of letting go, but it’s also one of the most beneficial things you can do. Accept that you are only human, and humans make mistakes; it’s how we learn, after all. You did the best you knew how to at the time, and now you’re willing to admit it didn’t work out so well.

    Stop criticizing and chiding yourself. Talk to yourself kindly, like a patient teacher, rather than a harsh taskmaster. Unkind words will only make you feel frustrated and sad, dragging you back into that negative cycle. A warm, encouraging tone will help you get the best out of yourself.

    5. Do what works.

    It sounds so simple, but people do what doesn’t work all the time. They wish things were different, bury their heads in the sand, or use sticking plasters that will come unstuck later on. I used alcohol to numb my anxiety disorder, not taking into account the alcohol dependence, the plummeting self-esteem, and the pancreatitis that would punish me for my choice later on.

    Deal with reality to make sensible choices. Don’t allow anger, self-justification, or feelings of unfairness to stop you from doing the right thing. Sometimes the way we have to constantly battle and the things we have to do to solve our problems may feel unfair, but the alternative is staying stuck in pain and self-loathing.

    Keep your end goals in mind when making decisions. Do what works on a consistent basis and you will eventually escape from your problems, making it worth the fight. The longer you keep doing what doesn’t work, the deeper the hole you will have to dig yourself out of.

    6. Change your mind.

    The only permanent solution to our struggles is to change the mind that creates or perpetuates them. While your problems might not be of your own making, the endless suffering that comes as a result of them is down to the way you use your mind.

    It may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to work on the way you think if you want to be free.

    My own mind-set kept me stuck for many years. It refused to acknowledge the good and was responsible for a lot of negative emotions and responses. It was only by practicing over and over to refocus my mind that my feelings, and responses to life, became more positive.

    Watch what you’re feeding your mind, as well. If you’re feeding it a diet of dross and negativity, don’t be surprised if it’s not all that helpful. Educate yourself, and surround yourself with good, supportive people.

    Your mind and attitude are ultimately the things that can keep you stuck—or end your struggles. Learn to use them wisely, and you can overcome any problem, no matter how serious it seems. Having a supportive mind makes it much easier for you to see clearly, and to be happy and content, even in a life where challenges crop up.

  • How to Love More and Hurt Less in Relationships

    How to Love More and Hurt Less in Relationships

    “Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.” ~Ram Dass

    In my personal experience, I’ve learned that it is sometimes easier to dance this journey of life solo rather than in partnership. Many of us have experienced life both in relationships and outside of them. Both are just as sweet.

    I’d like to offer up some lessons I have learned in my dance in and out of relationships:

    1. They are not meant to last forever.

    Our society seems to put a lot of pressure on the idea that things will last forever. But the truth is, everything is impermanent.

    After a recent breakup, I found myself feeling as though I had failed the relationship. Then I stepped outside of my conditioned thinking and discovered that love and failure do not reside together. For when you have loved, you have succeeded, every time.

    It was Wayne Dyer that introduced me to the rather practical concept that “not every relationship is meant to last forever.” What a big burden off my back! Of all the souls hanging out on this planet, it seems to make sense that we might have more than one soul mate floating around.

    Relationships can be our greatest teachers; it is often through them that we discover the most about ourselves. In relationships, we are provided with an opportunity to look into a mirror, revealing what we need to work on as individuals in order to be the best version of ourselves.

    Each relationship will run its course, some a few weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime. This is the unknown that we all leap into.

    2. Attachment is often the cause of suffering.

    We sometimes cling to people in an attempt to hold them closer, but this often pushes them further away.

    In love there is nothing to grasp; it is so expansive that trying to capture it is like trying to capture water with a net. When we attempt to control where a relationship is going, we become disconnected with the sweetness of the moment.

    Ram Dass shared one of the most exquisite paradoxes: “As soon as you can give it all up, you can have it all.”

    It is silly to think that we can own someone’s love, but many of us have tried to do it.

    I often find myself fantasizing about how my future will unfold with a new partner, but it is in that moment when I fall out of the present.

    We have the opportunity to surrender to the natural flow of relationships, letting go of our proposed outcomes and taking ourselves out of the driver seat.

    This means being fully present in moments of intense love, conflict, uncertainty, vulnerability, and joy.

    3. Being vs. doing.

    In the beginning of relationships, we strive to show up as our best selves, hoping to impress the other person and to receive their love in return. In most cases, we are focused on doing simply because we want to make an outstanding impression on the person we fancy.

    But if you’re anything like me, being and doing are extremely hard to keep up at the same time.

    In relationships there is work, but there isn’t much we have to actively do. In fact, doing can often be associated with attempting to control a situation.

    The place where we should hang out is in the being. Being allows us to show up as our authentic selves. When we show up as humans being, something magical happens. Being is our natural state. Love thrives in this space.

    4. Allow for change.

    Don’t be attached to any particular way your partner is showing up each day. Change is inevitable. As humans being, we are constantly growing and discovering new passions and experiences.

    For example, next week your partner might wake up with the realization that they want to leave their job as a lawyer and become a yoga instructor. How will you respond? The news might be shocking and somewhat unusual, but change happens. The question is, can you allow space for that?

    Oftentimes it is harder to embrace change within others than it is to accept within ourselves. If you are anything like me, consistency is super important; however, completely unrealistic. Someone once told me “you are consistent with your inconsistency.” I initially took this as an insult, but now I see it as a practical strength. It shows movement and willingness to change.

    —

    Love is the greatest dance in life. Surrender to each step. Hold your partner close to your heart, but don’t grasp. If we can allow ourselves to enter into partnerships with this awareness, it may dramatically shift the way we see and experience relationships and love.

    Couple image here

  • Dealing with Life’s Inevitable Pain: 4 Lessons to Help Reduce Your Suffering

    Dealing with Life’s Inevitable Pain: 4 Lessons to Help Reduce Your Suffering

    Sad Woman

    “Suffering is not caused by pain but by resisting pain.” ~Unknown

    Pain is everywhere. Whether through heartbreak or a broken bone, we all struggle with unavoidable hurt at some point in our lives. Often, even the suggestion of suffering is enough to send us running for cover.

    One of our most basic instincts is to avoid being hurt, and for good reason. The world is full of sharp objects and hot frying pans. While our instinctive wiring is helpful when it comes to cooking, it only contributes to our suffering when applied to the pain of relationships and physical discomfort in our lives.

    I have an unusual amount of experience with physical pain. Along with the sprained ankles, broken toes, and pinched fingers of everyday life, I have survived three open-heart surgeries, a bone marrow tap, and hundreds of needles.

    From the slight pinch of a blood-pressure cuff, to the white-hot burn of needles touching bone, to the agony of layers of skin coming off with bandages, I have experienced a thousand degrees of pain.

    I spent years hating every moment of pain I endured. I have fought tooth and nail (and many an unfortunate nurse) to escape the experience. Yet, my resistance and anger did not lessen my pain. If anything, my struggle only increased it.

    Each us will someday face the experience of unavoidable emotional, mental, or physical pain. Whether mild or excruciating, how we approach our physical suffering can change how we approach any discomfort in our lives.

    Here are the four lessons I have learned from pain:

    1. There is only this moment.

    In the midst of pain, there is only the eternal present. The past and future become meaningless when we cannot imagine a time when we will not be consumed with pain. Living in the present moment may be the last thing we wish to do, as we scramble desperately for any distraction from our suffering.

    Yet, we must allow our pain to exist, as no more or less than it is.

    By asking ourselves every moment “Can I bear this right now?” we disengage our minds from creating more suffering through struggling against what is real.

    One breath, one second at a time, we can breathe through any pain, physical or emotional. In attuning to the present, we realize that not only are we strong enough to endure, but that our pain is lessened when we cease to struggle against it.

    2. Resistance creates more pain.

    A tense muscle feels more pain. As we expend more energy to keep our suffering at a distance from ourselves, we increase our distress. Paradoxically, relaxing into the sensation of pain, even by the smallest degree, makes us more resilient.

    By approaching physical distress with curiosity and compassion for ourselves, we may notice small differences in our experiences. We may even discover that the anticipation of pain in our minds is worse than the actual experience.

    Surrendering to suffering allows us to pass beyond it. Mental and emotional pain cannot dissolve until we acknowledge that they exist. By ceasing to struggle against an internal or external force, we leave room for our courage to move through us.

    3. It’s okay to cry.

    The image of the strong, silent warrior is a misleading symbol. Often, we think that holding our breath, stifling our tears and our cries of agony will make us stronger. In fact, the opposite is true.

    Our body releases biochemicals and hormones in response to both physical and emotional pain. Giving voice to our suffering is healthy and allows us to process these chemicals much more quickly.

    Just as vocalizations are used in martial arts to focus the energy of a strike and students of yoga breathe into poses, we can use our voices to channel and release pain. Animals shake, run, and shriek to blow off the intense energy that pain creates. We can do the same by letting our inner creature howl.

    4. A life without pain is impossible.

    While a cushioned life without pain is appealing, it is impossible. Striving for a life free of physical suffering not only takes us away from reality, but also isolates us from the joys of life. Our moments of agony can help us appreciate our times of ecstasy even more.

    Cultivating the idea that pain is only one of many experiences allows us to reframe our suffering. Rather than interpreting is as a punishment, we can choose to see pain as just another bodily sensation. We certainly do not have to enjoy it, but we can strive to accept pain as a part of being human.

    In opening myself to the experience of pain, I have discovered not weakness, but unexpected courage within myself. By striving to remain present in moments of discomfort, we can unearth hidden grace in the most painful situations.

    Photo by Robert Vitulano

  • A Message for Anyone Who’s Been Abused and Has Kept It Inside

    A Message for Anyone Who’s Been Abused and Has Kept It Inside

    Stand Strong

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

    “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” ~Maria Robinson

    My uncle molested me from the time I was about four until I was in my early twenties. He held me too long and hugged me too tight. He would growl in my ear like an animal in heat, his warm, wet, often alcoholic smelling breath overwhelming me.

    This is how he greeted me at every occasion. When I was really small, I almost looked forward to seeing him because I liked the attention and believed he loved me, although deep down inside, I always felt as if I were doing something wrong, something naughty.

    As I grew, he began to grope my ass through my clothing while he whispered in my ear. He would tell me that I was sexy as he growled and hugged me tighter, pressing me up against his body. Much to my horror, I was aroused.

    I was aroused by my uncle. “MY UNCLE!” I would think to myself. “What on Earth was wrong with me? Surely something was gravely wrong with me to be aroused by my own uncle.”

    I wasn’t even sure of what arousal was at that point and only in retrospect could identify what I was feeling. I didn’t have a name for sex at that age, but I could feel it and knew it was wrong deep down in my belly. I felt wrong. 

    He was an adult. He was my uncle. He loved me.

    I felt the problem was surely mine and would chastise myself as disgusting and dirty. I kept my secret close. I assumed the other members of my family knew of his behavior and that he was normal. He didn’t try to hide it, or so it seemed to me.

    He acted out all the time. He was loud, erratic, and verbally abusive. His behavior was blamed on his drinking and the fact that he was an eccentric artist who simply couldn’t control himself.

    This was the way it was. This was the way it was to be.

    When I was a teenager dancing at a wedding, he told me seductively that he wanted to “make love to me.” I laughed, deflecting his advance as he pulled me in tighter. He had told me that he wanted to have sex with me.

    I knew it was true. I wondered if I would have the strength and courage to say no. I felt the planes and curves of his entire body pressed into mine on that dance floor as I drifted up above, looking down from a cloud, wondering how I might ever escape myself.

    It was only in my late teens that I began questioning if my sickness wasn’t possibly in part his sickness, because in every book that I read and every movie that I saw, I searched but could not find a relationship like the one I had with my uncle. 

    I would wait for the scene in a movie between two related people to become romantic. When it never did, I began to wonder if that bad, ugly feeling in my belly had been trying to tell me something about him.

    I cried to my boyfriend night after night, because the more emotionally intimate we became, the harder it became for me to be physically intimate with him, and he wanted to know why I was in such pain.

    After a Thanksgiving dinner accompanied by my uncle’s raucous behavior and inappropriate advances, my boyfriend insisted on confronting my father. To my shock, my father claimed that he had no idea of my special relationship with my uncle. He never would have guessed.

    No one knew but me.

    I simply never imagined that I would be in the position of having to defend myself. My uncle had been so free in his behavior with me. It never occurred to me that he would deny it.

    He denied it, as did his wife and the entire side of the family that accompanied him. Not only did they deny it, they threw accusations at me.

    “Crazy. Depressed. Liar. She’s unable to interpret harmless behavior.” They defended his honor as husband, father, and grandfather with vigor as if he were a hero—someone to be lauded, not disparaged and blamed with this filth.

    My father had confronted him and relayed the information to me. I did not have the courage to confront him myself.

    Just as I never dreamed I would need a defense, I never dreamed of how many would accuse me. Even my own brother sided with them, and my father would soften my uncle’s blame with statements like “he didn’t mean to hurt you.”

    I wanted to scream so loud the heavens would respond. Cry so long my eyes would bleed into pools of blood around my feet on the floor. Vomit up every one of my organs in sheer disgust.

    But what they didn’t understand is that the blaming, name-calling, and crafting of an airtight defense against me were all unnecessary. I wanted nothing from any of them. I did not want an admission. I did not want an apology. 

    I did not want revenge.

    I did not want him grabbing my ass at my wedding. I did not want to have to explain to my someday husband my “special” relationship with my uncle. I did not want him to have access to the children I would someday have.

    I wanted him to reconsider his behavior before his son’s newborn baby girl, the first girl born into the family since my birth, turned four. I did not want to ever see his disgusting face again. I did not want to feel anymore that sick, dark pain deep in my belly as he touched me.

    I did not want him to touch me again, ever. I wanted my future to be different from my past.  That is all I wanted.

    And I got it. I never saw him again. I turned and walked away from all the disbelievers and my uncle the molester.

    I found people who did empathize and help me heal. I faced the truth of what had been done to me and got the help I needed to go on to live a healthy, normal existence. In doing so, I learned that it is common for families to turn on abuse victims and believe the abuser rather than the abused.

    Were you abused? Did you speak your truth, and no one believed you? Did you speak your truth and experience the pain of even one person doubting you?

    If you were abused and someone, anyone, didn’t believe you, know that I do. I believe you. I stand with you, and for you, in the small way I can. 

    Speaking the truth after being abused takes incredible courage and strength. I am proud of you.  My story can be your story.

    We can be victorious together as survivors. I am a survivor. You are a survivor.

    We are stronger for having survived. We stand together triumphantly and move forward, bravely living abuse free lives.

    If you have been abused or are currently a victim of abuse and have not yet spoken out, I urge you to reach toward a safe person and speak your truth. You too are strong and courageous and deserve to live an abuse free life. Stand with me, no longer a victim but a survivor.

    Start today and make a new ending.

    Photo by Cornelia Kopp

  • Why Bad Things Happen to Good People: How Is This Supporting You?

    Why Bad Things Happen to Good People: How Is This Supporting You?

    Mourning Woman

    “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival… Be grateful for whatever comes. Because each has been sent
 as a guide from beyond.” ~Rumi

    Yesterday my boyfriend’s father told me that he doesn’t believe that everything happens for a reason. He explained, “Where I can’t get on board is, if that’s true, then why do bad things happen to good people?”

    It touches close to home for their entire family because not only does one of their sons’ girlfriends have a rare and terminal form of cancer, she met their son because he successfully removed a melanoma (a fast acting, lethal cancer).

    His girlfriend is in her late twenties, and she’s one of the sweetest young women I know. While she beat it into remission last year, it’s just come back. She’s living with constant fatigue, a broken rib that won’t heal, and the harsh reality is that she could die.

    His father and I began to connect over this age-old conundrum: Why do “bad” things happen to anyone—especially the kind-hearted, ourselves, or the ones we love?

    Hundreds of thousands of years of religion, philosophy, and artistic expression have sought to grasp: why are we truly here and why is there suffering?

    Certain chapters of my own life have seemed ruthless or even tragic as they were happening.

    As a child, I was often disappointed by my father, a person in my life who I loved dearly and who disappeared on my birthdays and holidays. sometimes without so much as a call.

    As a young adult, I learned that he battled his own demons with drugs, alcohol, and a traumatic past, which helped comfort me for why he wasn’t around when I was a child, but it broke my heart in a different way. I have often asked myself, “Why is there so much pain in the world?”

    Asking this question led me to realize it was more about my own pain within. My suffering drove me to search for happiness and freedom within myself. In fact, it’s been through the most challenging and darkest experiences that I’ve cultivated the greatest connection with the light of my heart.

    Have you ever heard how when someone has a near-death experience, they begin to realize what’s truly important to them in their lives? It’s said they often begin spending time with the ones they love, and ticking off items from their bucket list to do what they love.

    A really dark experience can be like a metaphorical near-death experience. Through the most painful life circumstances, I’ve discovered what’s most important to me.

    I’ve realized what’s most important for me is feeling free to do what I love, write, speak what is true from my heart, and cultivate a deep connection with love inside and outside myself.

    With love as my intention, I’ve overcome circumstantial challenges to realize that connection, authenticity, and freedom doesn’t depend on what happens in your life as much as how you respond to what happens.

    But how do you overcome challenging life-circumstances rather than falling victim to them?

    The question I ask myself in times of resistance is:

    “How is this supporting me?”

    Not everyone believes that certain things are “meant to be,” but opening yourself to how a negatively perceived experience could be supporting you is a powerful way to stop resisting what is and create space for acceptance.

    When you fall into a state of acceptance, you naturally connect with your being-ness: the now.

    When you are truly in the now, this present moment, is there ever anything actually wrong?

    Rumi must have known this about non-resistance, as his words remind the world to embrace everything that happens as a gift, a gift to support you.

    If you want an end to pain, resist nothing you feel in the present moment. When you open your heart to feeling, rather than responding with “why” or “why me?” you have a great opportunity to transform your circumstances into your destiny.

    Difficulty and challenge aren’t inherently bad. The difficulty of running that marathon, working to chase your dreams, or overcoming challenges—including the failures and disappointments—aren’t they part of the stuff that makes our lives meaningful?

    While it may be easier to say this about marathons and dreams than to say it to the little girl who felt more and more betrayed by life with each birthday missed by a father who seemed to cause a hole in her heart, or to the young woman who perceives to be losing her dreams because of a debilitating illness, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a purpose in what is being experienced.

    It’s not for me to understand why she is facing this twist in her life story, or what’s true about circumstances that have touched the lives of your family, friends, or those who you feel connected with during tragedies that may hit another part of the world.

    I can only say that by embracing every emotion caused by my own life stories, every perceived tragedy, and asking life with an open heart, “How is this supporting me?” I’ve reached acceptance and neutralized my own judgments time and time again.

    I have spent a lot of time reminding myself, “This is how I’ve asked it to be, so what is it trying to teach me?”

    Sometimes the answer was just to feel helpless, to let go of control, cultivate patience, know a deeper compassion, or just realize that no matter what, I love my father, despite the role that he has played in my life.

    I love life, despite the challenges I face.

    I’ve learned to keep my heart open to feel. And now I’m not so afraid of feeling. It is through feeling the depth of all my pain that I’ve created more space for love—and now I just feel more alive.

    So why do “bad” things happen to “good” people?

    When you stop resisting, start feeling, and ask how life is supporting you, you get out of your own way. This is what it means to surrender. And from seeing life that way, bad things stop happening; or rather, it’s not that “bad” things stop happening, you just stop seeing them as such.

    For example, if I hadn’t experienced so much pain and suffering in my life, I would have never gone on a journey to connect with my heart at such a deep level.

    How can I label pain and suffering as “bad” after realizing it’s what has supported me to expand, to experience more intimacy and love, and become more authentic? True acceptance subtly transforms “bad” into “meant to be” and slowly life naturally becomes less painful and more fun.

    The truth is, life doesn’t always give you what you think you want; life gives you what’s perfect. But perfection only becomes your experience depending on how you choose to respond to what happens.

    Did Nelson Mandela stop believing in a vision of freedom in jail? No. Do you think Mandela would have felt free stifling what he felt so strongly on the inside even if it kept him outside of jail? In fact, do you feel it’s possible Mandela felt freer even within the confines of that prison cell? Why would that be true? Because he was free in his heart.

    He transformed his circumstances into his destiny, and he transformed the world. He was just a man; he is no different from you or me. He chose to transform his circumstances into his destiny.

    Freedom and happiness have nothing to do with your circumstances, and everything to do with your level of connection with the truth that you feel in your soul and express to the world.

    As my boyfriends’ father and I sat there, he said in an afterthought, “I suppose if that kind of disease happened to me, I would just do my best to stand up as a living example to my children of how to face such an experience with ease and grace, so they would also know that it’s possible.”

    And isn’t that all anyone can do, face our own individual challenges with as much ease and grace to discover what we’re meant to do: be our selves, follow our destiny, and realize what’s truly important—love.

    For when you transform what happens “to you” into your life destiny, you become the change you wish to see in the world.

    Photo by Mitya Ku

  • How We Can Reduce Our Suffering by Feeling Uncomfortable Feelings

    How We Can Reduce Our Suffering by Feeling Uncomfortable Feelings

    “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    Just about everyone experiences sorrow at times. I know I do.

    The other morning, in fact, I was caught off guard by a very particular sorrow. Nothing happened, per se; but from the moment I awoke, I felt an aching sense of sadness and loss at the fact that my career path has taken me away from the field of mental health counseling.

    As I became aware of my sorrow, it filled my heart and mind like a cup, and eventually spilled over into a rather woeful consideration of the many changes my life has undergone over the past several years.

    It was uncomfortable while it lasted, but it was also quite fascinating, once I became aware of what was happening. As such, I emerged intact and, ultimately, quite proud of myself for waiting out and weathering such an unexpected emotional storm.

    I haven’t always dealt with my emotions this way—sorrow, fear, uncertainty, inadequacy, and guilt in particular. Indeed, I still slip into old habits at times.

    My life has proven an excellent instructor, however, and I am pleased to note the above-described scenario is becoming more commonplace.

    Vocation has been extremely important to me. In fact, I clearly recall a moment in my childhood when I declared to myself (in so many words), “I want my work to be meaningful and enjoyable.” That notion has informed my life ever since.

    When it came time for me to declare a major in college, I mulled my options and settled on theatre. I knew it wasn’t practical, per se, but it was meaningful to me and I enjoyed it. Besides, I trusted that the act of honoring my passion would lead me down the road I needed to travel. I think I was correct.

    A year or so following graduation, I took the next step and moved to New York City to pursue my career in acting. It was an exciting time at first. After several years, however, I was exhausted, disillusioned, and burned out.

    The things I needed to do to pursue my career as an actor—“pound the pavement,” rehearse nights and weekends, and work day jobs to support myself—had become nothing short of onerous.

    My originally hoped-for payoff (earning a living as an actor) was no longer worth the commitments and sacrifices necessary to taking an honest shot at it.

    Once I accepted that truth, the decision to stop was a relatively easy one to make. Waiting for me on the other side of that decision, however, was the ominous question “Now what?”

    I had the luxury of avoiding the question at first, because I was attending to other aspects of my life, which, in many regards, was on auto-pilot: I got married, my now-ex-wife and I moved, she entered law school, and I started working full time to help support us.

    Life settled into a routine, and, to my dismay, the urgency of the still-unanswered question “Now what?” intensified. I approached it with a sense of helpless, dire urgency; as such, I soon descended into a full-blown existential crisis.

    Whereas my path forward had once seemed so clear and exciting and full of promise, it was now almost entirely hidden from my view. I was tormented by the uncertainty. Full of fear and bereft of experience and perspective, I did the only thing I knew how to do: avoid change.

    I helped maintain my status quo by, alternately, complaining; losing my temper—usually with my ex-wife—over trivial frustrations; pretending to most of my family and friends that everything in my life was going well; and performing what I call “mental gymnastics”—attempting to trick myself in so many ways that I did not, in fact, hate most things about my life, including myself.

    The fact that I had no compassion for myself in view of my vocational confusion, and that I could not accept my own discontent and act accordingly, ensured a certain spiritual toxicity.

    The result, of course, is that I viewed the world through a lens of sadness and anger and darkness.

    Finally, I had the good sense to say, “Enough.”

    With some assistance, I slowly reconnected with myself.

    I rediscovered my talents and positive attributes, which, along with the consideration of several of my interests, led me to pursue graduate studies in social work.

    I felt it was finally time to enjoy my life, fulfill my destiny, and settle into a contented peace. In reality, everything was about to change.

    Yes, grad school was transformative and exhilarating, but it was also the backdrop for what was, perhaps, an even greater learning opportunity: my divorce.

    In the immediate aftermath of my separation, I stuck with my old habit of experiential avoidance. Cracks in the armor quickly appeared, however; and besides, my work as a practitioner-in-training ensured I couldn’t realistically hide for long (thankfully).

    I had the good sense to seek counseling.

    Over the next few months, I learned that I have the tendency, as do many of us, to “jump” out of experiences I deem to be “bad” and into other “good” experiences I would prefer.

    In my case, I was experiencing feelings of deep guilt and sadness in the wake of my divorce, but instead of acknowledging my guilt and sadness, I jumped headlong into self-hatred and shame.

    That might seem counterintuitive at first glance; after all, how could I, or anyone, ever prefer or deem good the acts of self-shaming and hatred?

    What I’ve come to discover, sadly, is that many of us, consciously or not, do just that. We find it safer to attack ourselves than it is to abide certain experiences—such as vulnerability, guilt, fear, and sadness—that we believe may hurt us even more.

    Each of us, I would argue, has these types of emotional sore spots that, when triggered, send us into a basic sort of survival mode.

    While that looks different for each person, one factor remains constant: something about that “emotional sore spot” experience seems fundamentally unacceptable; and, after all, what does one do with something fundamentally unacceptable but reject it somehow?

    For my part, I discovered my “jumping” into self-hatred and shame is a learned behavior.

    It is a well-intentioned one, perhaps, in that it is designed to guard me from what I perceive to be the dangerous experience of acknowledging my (real and imagined) limitations and imperfections; but it is one that ultimately prevents me from fully dealing with, and taking ownership of, the myriad truths of my life.

    I learned to appreciate the validity of the statement “what you resist, persists.” I saw how that which remains unacknowledged and unprocessed can grow toxic, thereby greatly exacerbating the original problem and greatly amplifying suffering.

    I recognized deeply held irrational beliefs about myself, namely, that if I don’t always get everything right, I’m a total screw-up who is unworthy of any positive regard, let alone love, and a propensity for labeling (i.e., “good” and “bad”). These had been the real cause of my extreme suffering, because they incited reinforcing, harmful behaviors.

    I realize now the experiences of sadness and pain itself are just that: experiences of sadness and pain. They are not some fundamental threat to my well-being or a rubber-stamped comment on the quality of my personhood.

    If I acknowledge these experiences, sit with them, explore and express them, I can choose my actions accordingly without jumping into shame, self-hatred, or other unhelpful behaviors.

    So when I woke up the other morning and felt sadness wash over me, I was able to welcome it. I was able to give myself compassion by telling myself, “You’ve been through a lot, buddy, and it’s okay to feel that.”

    And that’s just it, you know? That’s the antidote: compassion.

    I’ve found that by giving myself compassion—the literal and metaphysical space to abide the emotional experiences I generally deem “threatening”—I am able to discover catharsis, forgiveness, peace, acceptance.

    In sitting with our feelings in this way, we are able to live, truly—to be open to the experiences of our lives.

    Photo by Almonroth

  • Forgiving the Unforgivable and Ending Your Own Suffering

    Forgiving the Unforgivable and Ending Your Own Suffering

    Man Thinking

    “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” ~Malachy McCourtro

    I was completely unprepared for the emotional hailstorm that bombarded me when, back in 2001, I learned that my wife had been having an affair with my best friend of twenty-plus years.

    My normal, predictable life (which I absolutely loved, by the way) had been virtually shattered overnight. Not only did it culminate in a very bitter war (see: divorce), it also marked the onset of a toxic poison that had begun to work its way into my veins: resentment.

    It began with crippling depression—depression so bad that I no longer had the appetite to eat or a desire to care for myself. I spent untold hours (and days) under the protective shield of a comforter in bed, drifting into a slumber of numbness. Sleeping meant that I didn’t have to feel.

    And with an empty house now all to myself, I made a decision to lock the front door and refuse to answer it for anyone.

    Having just had a proverbial knife twisted into my spine by the two people I loved and trusted the most, what good could come from anyone knocking on the door with a smile on their face? People hid vicious claws behind their backs, and I refused to be stuck with them again.

    Signs Of Life

    Then, suddenly but slowly, I began to crawl back to life. I spent less time in bed, began to eat on occasion, and even reached out to talk to family. Calling around to local churches, I learned about a divorce support group that met on Wednesdays, and forced myself to attend.

    The people at this group, mostly other men, served to reassure me that I wasn’t the only one facing the frightening task of putting a broken life back together.

    And even though I cried my way through the first few meetings, a footprint for recovery began to take shape. But the poison of resentment was an entirely different monster—one that would take me a full decade to exorcize.

    Sentenced To Suffer

    Despite acquiring a new set of coping skills, I began to suffer through obsessive thoughts about the affair between my ex-wife and ex-best friend. I tortured myself with the painful details of their intimacy, imagining it over and over again throughout the day.

    And when I slept at night, my mental participation was no longer even required—those obsessive thoughts became a box of terrifying toys that came out to play on their own.

    In my paralyzing condition, I came to believe that having an apology from the both of them was the only way to exhale. But neither of them had any intention of doing so. The affair had already been going on for so long before I discovered it that they could never rightly offer any explanation of value—and therefore, never did.

    So much for exhaling.

    After a whopping ten years of this sort of self-inflicted torture—long after my divorce had been finalized—I realized it was well overdue that I look inward for the answer. No one was going to offer the apology I wanted or felt entitled to.

    I could either choose to forgive regardless, or continue in the pattern of resentment and anger that swallowed my current quality of life.

    Making A Decision To Forgive

    I chose to forgive. To let go, and to recognize the past as a dead era I’d never be able to change.

    Forgiving is a hard thing to do when you feel like the recipient is undeserving—even more so when they have no clear intention of ever apologizing. You’d rather they feel the full weight of your hurt and pain, that they suffer as you suffered, and come to know the same meaning of anguish and sorrow that you have.

    But in refusing to forgive, we wrongly assume that we are dealing out due punishment to a deserving party—neglecting to see the poison we’ve sentenced ourselves to continue ingesting.

    The Weight Of A Grudge

    Refusing to forgive can sometimes become so paramount to our existence that we let it define our life. It reflects in our language, in the stories we tell people, and in our attitudes. And since the pain is familiar, we bask in it, subconsciously teaching ourselves to see the negative in everyone.

    We miss the opportunity to form relationships and build healthy bridges with people under the faulty logic that, since one person hurt us, they’re all out to hurt us.

    Research shows that psychological stress accumulated over a period of years begins to settle as physical pain in the body—pain we can literally feel taking a toll on our well-being. Mindful meditation has worked wonders in alleviating that burden for me since I chose to forgive.

    The final stage of forgiveness, at least for me, was to pray for the people who had wronged me—and I find myself doing so a lot, whenever old feelings start to surface. I pray for their health and happiness in a sort of radical act of kindness—a spiritual adoption, if you will.

    Forgiving is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given myself, since with it came freedom and the permission to move on and enjoy what life has to offer in the present moment. A shackle has been removed from my ankle, and I’m free to move about now.

    I was, after all, the only person who could ever remove it to begin with.

    Photo by Will Foster

  • Letting Go of Your Past Suffering to Feel Peaceful and Free

    Letting Go of Your Past Suffering to Feel Peaceful and Free

    “Letting go give us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    I stood alone in what had been my childhood bedroom, staring at the dresser with a familiar discomfort. My fingers clutched at the handle of the second drawer from the top and pulled hard, straining from the weight of its contents.

    I reached in with both hands, the drawer with its quarter inch plywood base teetering dangerously on the edge of the frame, and lifted them out, one by one.

    Unicorns, fairies, rainbows, mystical maidens, all disappeared as I placed the journals into the cardboard box I’d asked my mother to bring to me.

    She watched wordlessly as I carried it through the house and to the front door, then said simply, “I have to say, I’m not sorry to see those go.”

    In that moment, my mother was keenly aware of something that had eluded me for most of my life. And now, at the age of 28, I was ready to let go of something I had always been attached to, something that had caused me so much pain throughout all of the years I had been writing in those journals: my former self.

    Writing has always come naturally to me. As an only child and a classic introvert, I found it far less intimidating to share my thoughts with a blank sheet of paper than with another human being. 

    I began to journal actively at the age of twelve, filling page after page each night with my tales of prepubescent woe.

    I continued this practice until I was halfway through college, dedicating over a dozen spiral-bound volumes to a verbose body of work seeking to prove my hypothesis that my existence was pointless and that nobody loved me.

    My writing habit was far more destructive than therapeutic. It was much easier to validate my own negative emotions than it was to challenge my perceptions, ask others for help, or work to make meaningful changes in my life.

    The more I wrote about my problems, the more I allowed them to consume me. My suffering became my identity, and I didn’t know who I was anymore without it. 

    During high school, I sunk into depression and surrounded myself with other deeply unhappy people. For four years, we alternated between bonding over how miserable we all were and turning against each other in predictable cycles of emotional manipulation and abuse.

    Every night, I sat alone in my room committing all of the day’s events to paper. I chose to not only relive these painful experiences, but to continually remind myself of them.

    Mercifully, high school is designed to end. When it finally did, I cut off connections to my high school friends, but the shame that had allowed me to form those friendships followed me to college.

    It graduated with me, accompanied me to work every morning, and multiplied exponentially after the end of my first long-term relationship at the age of 25.

    It would take three years of therapy and endless support from the loving souls I now choose to surround myself with for me to realize just how much of my own suffering I have caused.

    For the better part of my life, I have chosen to view the world through a negative lens. I have resigned myself to feeling like a victim of my circumstances, instead of applying that energy to changing my perception of them.

    That night, I carried the box of journals home with me, ripped the pages from their bindings, and fed them to my shredder in small digestible stacks. I forced myself to avoid the temptation of rereading what I had written, and returning to the past.

    Watching the brightly colored words slowly disappear between the blades, I felt no remorse, only a deep sense of freedom. Ten years of writing filled four garbage bags, and their last measurable impact on me was the trip I had to take to the dumpster.

    It took me 28 years to release the attachment I felt to my journals, but I’d like to share what I learned from the process:

    Release the judgment you feel toward who you were in the past. 

    I no longer judge the young girl who worked so hard to define herself on the pages of those journals. I wish I could write to her now and tell her that she is loved, and that she does not have to wait for things to get better—that she already has everything she needs to be happy.

    I wish I could show her all that she has to be grateful for, and tell her that I am proud of who she is, and who she will become.

    Know that you are not betraying yourself by moving on.

    I have often been afraid to stop talking or thinking about the past experiences that caused me suffering because I mistakenly believed that they were a part of me. I have to keep reminding myself now that my desire is to live in the present, not the past.

    While those experiences—along with the ones I remember more fondly—have helped to shape who I am today, they are not my identity.

    It is unnecessary for me to feel any more guilt releasing them than I do giving away a shirt that no longer fits me. Remember that you are more than the sum of your thoughts and experiences, and that while you do not need to judge them, these are things that often tie you down from being in the present moment.

    Share the experiences that cause you shame with people you love and trust.

    I have not always found it easy to trust other people, and in the past, when I was not burying my emotions in my journals, I was putting my trust in people who did not treat it with much care or compassion.

    However, I am grateful for those experiences because they allow me to recognize that I am truly fortunate for the loving and compassionate relationships I have today. I have become friends with people who encourage me to share myself with them, who do not judge me for the things I think and feel, and who support me through the process of release.

    In a world where it is all too easy to form superficial connections, I encourage you to take the time to cultivate your real-life relationships. Focus on sharing raw, human emotions with a friend or partner, and on listening to them with all the passion you desire when you are sharing.

    In addition to helping to build trust between you, the courage you show in being open and vulnerable may allow your friend or partner to release one of their own burdens. There are very few things that are more rewarding and life affirming than being present in that way for someone you love.

    Photo by @Rayabi

  • Helping Others Helps Us All: We’re All in This Together

    Helping Others Helps Us All: We’re All in This Together

    breaching

    “Pain is not a sign of weakness, but bearing it alone is a choice to grow weak.” ~Lori Deschene

    I, like many of you I’m guessing, am a wanderer. A student of the soul. At times it can be a bewildering path. Most days I give thanks for the adventure. Many others I wish for clarity and certainty.

    But though I am a wanderer, I am not aimless: I have a path as deep and true as any other. I simply have no map to guide me, only my intuition, and the myriad teachers that cross my path: people, places, books, ideas, synchronicities.

    I have learned to trust my inner senses. When I am on my path, my life feels good and right; off it, I am aware that I am scrambling through the undergrowth and finding my way at the edge of cliffs.

    For a long while I wondered what this path actually was. What was it that defined some actions as “right” for my soul direction, and others “wrong”? Especially when many of them seemed to appear synchronistically, out of the blue, and were counterintuitive.

    The idea of a “path,” or what Lao Tzu calls “the Way,” works for me.

    It’s as though there is a channel through life that is “right” for each of us to take. An invisible highway of least resistance in the midst of white noise, which resonates at the same frequency that we do and seems to draw us forward, exerting some sort of magnetic pull.

    When we are on it everything makes sense, we find flow better, we feel right in ourselves, we have a sense of something larger than our own small ambitions guiding us.

    I have begun to see that the path, this invisible pull to our souls, is in fact our own personal way to wholeness: our own unique healing prescription.

    Our path, I have learned, takes us through the experiences, thoughts, and meetings that will heal every aspect of our selves, even, and especially, those that are hidden from our conscious awareness.

    The words “whole” and “heal” come from the same root. To reach wholeness, we must heal from the wounds and distorted vision that life and our perceptions have wrought on us.

    Therefore, each healing path must be unique, as each of our woundings is unique. And yet they each share many similarities, because in the end we are all humans and our stories cross over.

    This is the part that many of us miss. We are so focused on “finding me,” on healing ourselves, that we walk on our individual paths looking down at our feet. We forget the fellow travellers around us. And this is where our ability to fully heal is lost, because we cannot do it alone.

    The emphasis in Western medicine, the self-help and personal development movements is very much on the individual. “You’re the most important thing in your life” messages have trumped the greater truth, which is that we are tribal creatures and herding mammals.

    We are only as strong as our weakest members. The fate of us all lies in all our hands.

    If you see a group of migrating birds, a shoal of fish, or a herd of wildebeest, there is a constant communication going on between them. They move as one, navigating canyons and predators.

    They listen for the calls of others, and they listen to the instinct within. Both guide and steer them. Both have equal weight. But the overriding aim is to find the path and stay on it together, to find the safe way, the yielding way together—to get through together.

    One day last week, feeling frustrated at myself and the seemingly disparate roles that I could not quite reconcile, I had a realization of immense clarity; I could not let go of any of them because they were all actually different facets of the same thing: healing.

    The internal guidance system that leads my work as a writer, teacher, editor, and artist; my roles as mother, daughter, partner, and friend, are all one big journey of healing myself, and sharing that process with others for their own healing.

    My instinct to heal and to help others heal are equally strong driving forces that determine my whole life.

    This is what I love about all of my heroes: their dedication to healing, and their willingness to reflect on their pain and share what they have learned.

    Then I zoomed out and saw it from a much larger perspective—that this is some human instinct, a basic herd instinct—the need to help to heal the herd, to keep us all together, all moving in the same direction. 

    Like the race that an African tribe does, the aim of which is not who wins or runs longest or fastest, but that everyone finishes together.

    Sue Monk Kidd reflects on this herd healing in her beautiful book, Dance of the Dissident Daughter.

    She recalls watching a nature program about whales and seeing these behemoths throwing themselves out of the water and crashing down on their backs.

    The narrator shared that naturalists believe that breaching, as it is called, might be their way of communicating when the seas get rough. A spectacular way of creating strong vibrations in the water, marking their route so that the others in their group would not get lost.

    She reflects on how women do this too, an example that I feel applies to all humans:

    “Women must have the whale’s instinct. When we set out on a woman’s journey we are often swimming in a high and unruly sea, and we seem to know that the important thing is to swim together—to send out our vibrations, our stories, so that no one gets lost.”

    So here we are, the waters are rising on this precious Earth of ours, the storm waves crashing. Many of our global population are tired, have lost our bearings. But the instinct is strong. Many of us who are aware of the need for healing are calling out, breaching: “This way, this way!” we call.

    We share our stories, show our healing, so that others might find their way onto the path of healing too. So that person by person, community by community, country by country we might find a better way to live. So that we can find healing for our whole herd, and a path, a way through.

    Sometimes I doubt myself. I wonder why I do my work. But now I know. I do it for me just as much as I do it for you.

    I speak or paint or write or dance with One Billion Rising, because I am adding my vibration, which is the most basic thing I can give. Because I yearn to the depths of my soul to be healed. To be free from suffering. To see those I love and those I don’t know free from suffering too.

    So I ask you, every time you feel the instinct rise, like a whale breaching in the center of your soul, with the urge to reach out and share words of love, gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, appreciation, hope, and healing, do it.

    Every time you feel the desire to give a stroke, kiss, hug, gift, or smile, but you think it makes no difference, or that you don’t have time, do it.

    It matters. More than you could ever know.

    In fact, it’s really the only thing that does.

    Photo by Nesbitt Photo

  • Making It Through Pain That Seems to Never End

    Making It Through Pain That Seems to Never End

    “Feelings are real and legitimate.” ~Unknown

    I’ve been thinking about pain lately.

    It’s come up for me more now since my sister, Susie, has been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

    Susie and I are close in age—just 15 months separate us—and close in friendship and love. So I worry about her.

    She’s an electrician and needs to be able to use her hands on a daily basis for wiring, splicing, drilling, and all of the other myriad things electricians do.

    But, of course, her hands are right where the arthritis has chosen to reside currently.

    She told me that some days the pain is so intense that she has to use both hands just to hold her toothbrush.

    So I became curious about pain. How do we manage it?

    I started to observe my own bouts with pain.

    When I’m working out and I’m gasping for breath and my body hurts.

    When my cat reaches out her paw lovingly toward me and accidentally scratches me in her attempt to get some chin scratches.

    When my hip flexor injury flares up and makes it almost impossible for me to lift my leg to get into the car.

    I watched myself and realized something.

    I could manage these painful moments because I knew they were going to end.

    My workout would end and I’d get my breath back and be able to rest my body.

    I could put some ointment on my arm where my cat scratched me.

    Taking ibuprofen greatly eased my hip flexor issue. (more…)

  • 7 Powerful Realizations That Will Help You Suffer Less

    7 Powerful Realizations That Will Help You Suffer Less

    Peaceful

    “More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity.” ~Francois Gautier

    Pain was my norm; not physical pain, but emotional pain compounded with mental self-torture. I was an introvert without introspection, painfully shy and unable to make eye contact. I caved to all manners of peer pressure.

    I was a doormat and didn’t stand up for myself, although I would fight tooth and nail for someone else. It seemed like others often took advantage of my kindness. I took everything personally and cried a lot. Thoughts of suicide lasted for years.

    After more than a decade of misery, I decided something had to change and was guided to self-acceptance work. 

    Gaining self-acceptance was the best thing I’ve ever done. It opened me up to a new perception of myself and to understanding what I did in the past that contributed to my pain.

    In understanding myself and the motivations behind my behavior, I was more clearly able to understand other people’s behavior.

    What I learned (and wish I knew then):

    1. Our behaviors are driven by our needs.

    Regarding: My kindness was often taken advantage of. I caved to all manners of peer pressure.

    Was it actually kindness? Maybe it was weakness. Or was it people pleasing for the purpose of gaining approval? I came to believe it was the latter.

    Everything I did—whether it was in my best interest or not, whether I wanted to do it or not—I did because it provided me with something I believed I needed.  (more…)