Tag: wisdom
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The One Thing You Need to Make the Best Decisions for You
“If you are not living your truth, you are living a lie.” ~Joseph Curiale
Her sobs break my heart. We have all been there. When the relationship starts feeling like a war-torn city as opposed to home.
I close in for a hug. “You can’t go on like this,” I whisper.
“Well, I don’t know what to do. Please don’t tell me to break up,” she looks up pleadingly. “I can’t do it. I won’t be able to bear it. I am not as strong as you.”
A familiar musical refrain from Tina Turner comes to mind albeit with a slight word twist…
“What’s strength got to do, got to do with it?
The Oxford Dictionary defines strength as “the emotional and mental qualities necessary in dealing with difficult or distressing situations.” It almost seems as if these set of qualities are innate—something you are born with, like blue eyes or curly hair.
Those in possession of strength flit about larger than life, surmounting all obstacles without a strand of bother, achieving Herculean glory. They can do just about anything, bear just about anything. Nothing stands in their way.
That was my assumption as well until I realized some people actually considered me part of this mythical group. My response to that? Utter incredulity.
I am scared of literally everything. I am scared of public speaking. I am scared of the dark. I am scared of ants. I am scared of meeting new people (I have been known to hide behind bookshelves at loud parties). Most of the time before I start something new or need to do something confrontational, I spend hours under my duvet or eating an entire chocolate fudge cake from Sainsbury’s to soothe my nerves.
If anything, fear has been my faithful partner since Day One. Yet, despite this, I have made what can be considered difficult decisions; taken risks, explored the paths less traveled, moved myself out of comfort zones, acted contrary to advice from friends and family, etc. And that’s not because I am strong. But it is because I choose courage.
And courage, my friend, is not strength.
Courage is Simply Your Truth
According to American author and professor Brené Brown, an early definition of courage is “To speak one’s mind by telling all, one’s heart.”
The root word of courage offers a telling clue. “Cor” in Latin or “coeur” in French means—the heart. So being courageous is nothing more than being true to your heart, or in other words, telling your truth.
But speaking your truth is tough since most of the time, we often aren’t on good terms with our own truths. We get caught up with keeping up appearances, where or who we ought to be, what others expect of us, what is socially acceptable, what is convenient, etc. Our truths wander lost amongst this crowded landscape.
A long, long time ago, when I was still in the corporate world, my then-boss asked me where I saw myself in a year’s time. I knew he was keen to promote me. And I was convinced I wanted to be promoted as well. After all, I was due one, and well, who says no to a promotion? All I had to do was give the ‘right’ answer—something about wanting to grow further, taking on more responsibilities, I was ready, etc.
Yet that afternoon sitting across from him, an unanticipated response sprung to my mind instead—“Anywhere but here.”
That floored me. Until that point, it never had dawned on me that I was that dissatisfied at work. I mean, was I deliriously fulfilled? No, but I wasn’t never expecting fulfillment.
I was comfortable, I loved my colleagues; the money was good and enough to support a lifestyle that I loved. I thought that I had struck a sweet spot; a happy compromise I was willing to put up with for the rest of my life. But my heart apparently seemed to disagree. This sweet compromise started to feel like a huge mistake—as if I was on the wrong train.
Sometimes when faced with an inconvenient truth, our first reaction is to will it away. And that’s exactly the strategy I adopted. I pleaded with this feeling; tried to cajole it into disappearing. But it never did. It stood, simple and unwavering in the deep cave of my being.
And that’s what you will realize about The Truth. It comes from the reservoir of wisdom, and like everything from those parts, it never shouts or screams. Your fears do. Your ego will screech. Panic attacks will roll like devastating hurricanes through you. But your truth is like a meditating monk, sitting quietly, waiting for you to catch up with it. A steadfast signal for your life.
Courage is a Navigation System
Courage is not a set of qualities. You don’t pursue courage. Courage beckons you. It is your life sat nav or true north (to use a Martha Beck term). A lighthouse that guides you through the sea that is your life.
It is true what they say, you cannot serve two masters. When you orient your decision-making around what is true to you, fear stops factoring in. It doesn’t disappear from the landscape completely, but it gets more muted in the distinct light of your truth. You will stop moving to whirlwinds of opinions and projected futures. Your life will instead be propelled by your unique, sacred truths.
I hate having my writing read by other people. It feels like someone has peeled off all the skin on my body, and I stand facing the world with nothing to protect me. Yet I continue to write despite my fear of the cauldron pot of criticism, judgments, and embarrassment because that’s what my heart wants. Writing is what I have do to fully inhabit myself. It is more necessity than a want. Everything else such as my fear and shame fades in significance.
The Path of Courage
The path of courage is usually not one of grand feats; it is woefully undramatic. It will never demand you break up today, or else. Instead, it will guide you to go and sleep, sign up for a retreat, dance to Kate Bush, sit quietly to watch the clouds, or even watch a particular YouTube video.
The path is gentle because your heart is all about love, and gentleness is the language of love. Unsurprisingly, walking the path of courage will also soften you and make you gentler.
The path of courage is also utterly simplifying. When I centered my life around my heart, I stopped hankering after certain things I had previously assumed I liked or would make me happy like learning a new language, doing tango, traveling, going out with friends, etc.
It became easier to admit that these activities never actually fed me, and I wasn’t really enjoying them that much. With clarity, no became an easier word to articulate. So did my needs.
There is no guarantee that the path of courage will lead you to a happily-ever-after. Oftentimes, it will lead you to situations where you will struggle to find meaning. It will drag you through the mud, tempt you to promising roads, and then fling you against a dead-end. But I promise, even when you wander with no map in sight, you will never feel led astray. Or that you are on the wrong train.
What is courage calling on you to do right now?
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What Is Stress-Induced Illness? How Trauma Can Cause Physical Pain
“Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.” ~Rasheed Ogunlaru
Three years ago, I fell into the blind spot of medicine: America’s unknown epidemic.
After numerous tests, scans, scopes, and too many doctors to count, modern medicine could not find anything seriously wrong with me. I also consented to have my gallbladder removed. My first and only surgery at age forty, an “experiment” of sorts.
Six months into the worst nightmare of my life, my spiraling health started to take a huge toll on me physically, mentally, and emotionally. I didn’t want to live anymore, but I was too chicken to take my own life.
They Cannot See the Forest for the Trees
If just one doctor had paid closer attention to my backstory and probed it further, the diagnosis would have been obvious and the treatment plan effective. Here’s the problem: My doctors were only focused on my presenting symptoms and not on my whole being.
Instead, thoughts of the following conditions (in this exact order) became my daily companions: colon cancer, GERD, IBD, IBS, pancreatic cancer, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, Meniere’s disease, interstitial cystitis, chronic pelvic pain, pelvic floor dysfunction, motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, bladder cancer, thoracic outlet syndrome, pudendal neuralgia, peripheral vascular disease, bile reflux, and a few other conditions I’ve surely forgotten. I was one big, hot mess.
Of the twenty-six symptoms I experienced, the constant bladder pain was the most excruciating and difficult to deal with. Imagine a UTI that never goes away. Nothing could knock it down.
The pain took me to the edge of wanting to take my life many times. At one point, I told a doctor that I would give him my entire 401k savings if he could make the pain go away.
It’s Time to Surrender and Trust the Process
In September 2021, I surrendered to the pain and requested a referral to an academic medical center after fighting it for nearly two years. Somewhere along the way, I made the conscious choice to walk with the pain instead.
I quickly learned that doctors specializing in pain medicine do not try to cure pain, but they try their best to equip patients with strategies to cope with their pain. Along with the things my pain psychologist taught me, he encouraged me to reacquaint myself with Curable, an app I had actually loaded onto my phone almost a year prior but had quickly dismissed. Stupid mistake on my part.
Addressing pain at an emotional and psychological level did not make any sense to me. After all, I had a structural problem, not a brain problem—or so I thought.
Fortunately, during my second round of trying the Curable app, I discovered Howard Schubiner MD and one of his colleagues, Alan Gordon LCSW, a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of chronic pain through pain reprocessing therapy (PRT).
Dr. Schubiner is the founder and director of the Mind Body Medicine Program at Providence Hospital in Southfield, Michigan. His program uses the most current research methodologies to treat individuals who suffer from the mind body syndrome (MBS) or tension myositis syndrome (TMS), as described by Dr. John Sarno.
What is mind body syndrome? I’m going to answer this in a second, but first I need to take this story back to my childhood. This is where the story gets very interesting and revealing.
The Haunting Effects of a Bad Childhood
As I started to dig deeper, I was introduced to the landmark 1998 ACE study that, as its abbreviation indicates, explored “adverse childhood experiences.”
The ACE research concluded that the more adversities a person experienced as a child—whether it be a parental death or incarceration, poverty, neighborhood violence, or abuse—the more likely that person would be to suffer from serious physiological disorders as an adult. I had six childhood adversities: a household with substance misuse, violence, divorce, severe poverty, neglect, and incarceration of a parent, all at or before the age of ten.
I also discovered a recent meta-analysis showing that individuals with a history of psychological trauma, regardless of the type of trauma, were almost three times more likely to have chronic pain than those who had experienced no trauma.
Bingo! Just call me Sherlock Holmes.
Translation: As a child, I was threatened repeatedly—not physically, but emotionally—causing my body to have a stress response. This prepared my body to fight or flee. Because my body stayed in this stress response mode for an extended period of time, crucial neural connections in my developing brain most likely suffered damage, causing me to be hypersensitive to stressful events.
In other words, my alarm switch is always “on,” unless I can lower the perceived danger in my brain. My divorce was just the tipping point to my spiraling health.
The Day the SWAT team Visited My Home
To illustrate how inept society was in the early nineties at addressing emotional trauma, I only need to point to one early morning when the SWAT team jumped my backyard fence and pointed their submachine guns at me while I was feeding our family dog, Smokey. Their target was my dad (he sold drugs), but he was nowhere to be found.
He had been out partying all night and had yet to return home. I was the only person home at the time. A scared shitless ten-year-old boy. I liked watching the reality show Cops, but this was completely surreal.
This is the crazy part. The SWAT team left me in the backyard and told me to go to school, like nothing had happened. I never spoke to a counselor or therapist about this frightening event.
I grew up thinking it was normal to not talk about emotions—or scary things like being stuck in the middle of a drug raid, alone and helpless. I grew up real fast that day.
Mind Body Syndrome, Anyone?
Mind body syndrome, or psychophysiologic disorder (PPD), is a certain diagnosis arising the majority of the time in the absence of tissue or structural damage in the body, when nerve pathways become continuously or intermittently activated by past or current life stressors.
The Psychophysiologic Disorders Association states that the symptoms of PPD are due to altered nerve pathways in the brain that affect the body. Symptoms can include headache, back pain, chest pain, muscle or joint pain, abdominal or pelvic pain, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, nausea, irritable bowel syndrome, discomfort in the bladder or during urination, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and many other symptoms.
To illustrate how inept today’s doctor is at diagnosing a psychophysiological disorder, I only need to point to my first-ever encounter with a board-certified gastroenterologist in March 2019. Gastroenterologists are doctors who are highly trained to diagnose and treat problems in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and liver.
Basically, they get paid handsomely to look up people’s butts and take pictures all day long. If you ask me, it sounds pretty mundane and not all that creative. The best news you can receive after getting one of their colonoscopies is that you really didn’t need the procedure after all.
Emotional Tone Deafness
To help remedy my bowels that had gone haywire (the first of my many symptoms), I anxiously took the slot of the next available doctor at a nearby GI clinic. While on the examination table, I related that I was smack dab in the middle of a horrible divorce and in a lot of emotional distress after being in a dysfunctional marriage for the last ten years.
The doctor’s response? Nothing. Zip. Nada. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. Instead of acknowledging my unfortunate circumstances, this dimwit doctor went about the rest of his examination and acted like what I had shared with him was the most benign, most boring thing he had ever heard in his life. By my definition, this was a moral injustice.
News flash: The Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale indicates that divorce is the second highest stressor for humans, second only to the death of a spouse.
Searching High and Low
I had secretly wished that my doctor was going to validate my emotional trauma and scars and identify them as the cause of my bowel changes, but his lack of a response only reinforced the fact in my brain that something was structurally wrong with me. And so that’s the path I went down for nearly three years, trying to find something structural to explain one unexplainable symptom after another.
When I say I turned over every stone, I really did.
I went as deep as internal pelvic floor therapy to try to cure my bladder pain. That’s right. My physical therapist and I mapped out and explored every nook and cranny of my pelvic floor via my anal canal. As a bonus, I had homework to complete with a funky wand apparatus.
Remember, I was desperate and willing to try almost anything. Everything except the butt gas. It’s basically ozone therapy gas that is administered into the body. In my case, I would have given it to myself through my butt.
I can’t help but laugh when I recall the day I was first presented with this option. This is what my life had become. Wacky alternative therapies.
In my career, I get paid to find solutions and fix problems. Fixing my health was no different, I thought. In my futile attempt to fix my health, I flushed thousands of dollars down the drain in the process and just about lost my sanity.
Can This Really Be Real?
At this point, one might ask if PPD symptoms are real or imaginary. The symptoms are real. In fact, the symptoms can be just as severe as those from any other disease. Some patients with PPD are ill enough to be hospitalized.
Experts like David Clarke MD, a retired gastroenterologist and president of the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association, like to point out that one in six adults and 30–40% of primary care patients suffer from pain symptoms and chronic conditions that are “medically unexplained.” This is America’s unknown epidemic.
But wait. There is a silver lining that comes with all this unfortunate news. Once PPD is recognized, treatment is available and is often effective in alleviating symptoms. Dr. Schubiner likes to ask: “Why manage your pain when you can cure it?”
The Best Treatment Around
So how effective is the mind body syndrome treatment? Dr. Schubiner and his colleagues published an article not too long ago demonstrating that emotion-focused therapy was superior to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for dramatic pain reduction in people with fibromyalgia, many of whom had experienced childhood trauma.
Dr. Schubiner and Alan Gordon also helped lead the recent study at the University of Colorado–Boulder that showed that not only can chronic back pain be managed, it can be cured using a mind body approach. In their study of 151 total participants, 66% randomized to PRT were pain free or nearly pain free at post treatment.
Once I heard this, I started to tackle my pain at the emotional and psychological levels. Along with somatic tracking, expressive writing, mindfulness, and reprogramming the brain, my favorite treatment activity has been intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (outlined in Dr. Schubiner’s book, Unlearn Your Pain), where deeply buried emotions of anger, resentment, guilt, shame, sadness, and grief are uncovered and released. Healing often occurs rapidly once these emotions are stabilized.
During this process of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP), I have taken several of my most incompetent doctors, and even my dad, behind the proverbial woodshed, and I have given them the worst tongue lashing they’ve surely ever received in their lives. Cursing is highly recommended and encouraged.
While I couldn’t literally slash the tires of the doctor who appeared earlier in this story, this was the next best thing. And it felt so good.
You might be wondering what happened to my dad. He eventually turned his life around, and I am so grateful for this.
Today, while my pain is not completely gone yet, it’s generally at about a two or three instead of a six or seven. I will take this any day.
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Why Other People’s Comments Hurt Us and How to Let Them Go
“It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.” ~Tony Robbins
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Wow. That one takes me waaay back. All the way to the elementary school playground. A place where I attempted to use it as a shield. As juvenile as this saying is, I would search for comfort in its words for years to come.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how old we get. It’s good to feel a part of something, to be understood, and to be accepted, and it hurts when we feel we’re not good enough to belong.
Whether it’s due to the words of a schoolyard bully (with a flat-chested joke), a passing remark from a stranger (“your arms are hairy”), or an observation by a loved one (“you’re too shy), we begin to transform into a guarded version of ourselves.
Daily interactions with others thicken our skin a bit, allowing some words to roll off our backs. But the ones that stick around change our inner landscape.
For many of us, the physical pain we suffer come from accidents, adventures, or clumsiness. They are unpredictable events that originate from nowhere in particular. They don’t feel personal.
Words, on the other hand, always stem from people. And they almost always feel personal. For a species that thrives on connection, acceptance, and love, words are a primary source of information about where we stand within our tribe.
With words, we define ourselves, find our people, and take a stand. Words reinforce who we are. Words inspire. Words make us giants. With words, we feel pain, loneliness, or betrayal. Words cut us down. Words keep us small. Words plant seeds of doubt. Words deflate.
Words are powerful. Choose them wisely.
When it comes to delivering a message, how we say things matters.
Words can be positive, negative, or neutral. Imagine how using the very same word creates different outcomes.
“Quiet!”
Spoken at a surprise birthday party, this gets everyone excited. The guest of honor is coming!
Spoken to a questioning child, this makes her feel small, unimportant, hurt.
Even an adult can suffer at this word. Imagine a man watching a football game. His wife runs in to share an exciting piece of news. He shouts “quiet,” and just like that she feels diminished and robbed of joy.
Words are powerful. But is all the power reserved for the speaker?
When it comes to receiving a message, we can feel powerless. Just as a spider’s web catches much more than dinner, our minds become cluttered with a lot of word debris. I have spent years unpacking my pain and my past, and the ickier parts are born from comments, passing phrases, and direct attacks.
So, here’s my question: Why do some things go in one ear and out the other, while others have a way of following us around? Why do some words so profoundly affect us that we give up our joy and opt not to dance, sing, or speak?
Here’s my revelation. Those who know me have heard me say it before: What we believe matters.
It seems that words can become seeds planted in my brain. The ones that stick around begin to grow into something messy that tangle with my very being.
After a lot (and I mean a lot) of soul searching, I have found my common denominator—two actually. My hurt is born from the truth or from my fear of what might be the truth. The pain is my feelings of lack that get amplified.
Whew. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. None of us want to believe that we think we’re not smart, beautiful, fun, cool, lovable, or funny. But I’ll say it again. Almost all the remarks that have hurt me are ones I thought were true. Or ones I feared might be true. That’s it.
When our truth is revealed or challenged it is painful. Our truth is often a part of us that we cannot or feel we cannot change. Whether it’s our laugh, our bodies, or our dreams, we are exposed.
What do we do with this? The only thing we can—accept ourselves. Just. The. Way. We. Are.
This doesn’t mean we cannot continue to grow and evolve as humans. It means that we are always being and becoming.
Most of us go out into the world as ourselves and slowly withdraw into our shells as we feel less and less safe to be who we are. We become a watered-down version of our colorful selves to avoid vulnerability.
But I’m here to challenge the idea that vulnerability has to be painful. Uncomfortable, yes, but maybe not painful. Our best defense is knowing and embracing who we really are so that when someone questions our character or motive it is either true or not true—and if it is true, being okay with that.
If I find myself ruminating on a comment, it’s an opportunity, a chance for me to know myself better.
Now, when a word stings, I approach the discomfort differently. I ask myself: Why am I hurt? Is this true? Is this something I can change? Do I want it to be true? If it is me, can I do more than accept it—can I love this part of me?
I used to think my problem was that I wasn’t enough ‘this’ or needed to be more of ‘that.’ I used to think that if I could just take the best parts of other people and become those things, I would feel secure, confident, and untouchable.
But it was exhausting, and I would inevitably fall short of my goal. My life was like a house of cards, ready to crash at any moment. Living in fear is draining. I also began to feel like I couldn’t make any forward progress. It was like treading water when I could be swimming.
It wasn’t until I took a break and developed faith in myself that I found my full energy, optimism, and confidence return. Because in the end, we can never be great at being anything but ourselves. There is no trying anymore, only being. And the knowing that I don’t need to be all things. Just myself. Regardless of what other people have to say about that.
And you know what? The strangest things have begun to happen. I have found new strengths, new joys, and new opportunities. When I let go of mimicking others’ successes, I have found more of my own. The kind that I’m not afraid to lose. The kind that doesn’t make me feel like a fraud.
Sharing my voice has gone from scary and nerve-wracking to a way to create connection and joy. The transition feels like nothing short of miraculous. If you would’ve told me all this several years ago, I would never have believed that I could achieve this kind of peace and confidence. But I have come to believe in believing. And I highly recommend it.
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How to Thrive in Life after Surviving Cancer
“Have a little faith in your ability to handle whatever’s coming down the road. Believe that you have the strength and resourcefulness required to tackle whatever challenges come your way. And know that you always have the capacity to make the best of anything. Even if you didn’t want it or ask for it, even if it seems scary or hard or unfair, you can make something good of any loss or hardship. You can learn from it, grow from it, help others through it, and maybe even thrive because of it. The future is unknown, but you can know this for sure: Whatever’s coming, you got this.” ~Lori Deschene
Isn’t it amazing how some days are etched in your mind forever and other days are just lost in the wind? One day that is etched in my mind forever is December 27, 2006. This is the day I was told I had breast cancer. While breast cancer is common, being twenty-six years old with breast cancer isn’t that common.
So here I was, twenty-six years old with breast cancer saying to myself, “Well f*ck, that sure throws off the plans I had for basically anything.” I quickly fell into fear, worry, and “why me?”. I will spare you the details of treatment; it wasn’t any fun. I lost my hair and my dignity and fell into depression when life returned to “normal.”
Whatever normal is, I was living it. However, nothing was normal. I didn’t know how to live without a doctor’s appointment to go to. I mean, all I wanted was an end to the endless appointments and here I was without them, and I couldn’t figure out what to do.
So, I took lots of naps because I was exhausted, or so I thought. Well, it turns out I wasn’t exhausted; I was depressed. I was alone with thoughts of wondering when my cancer would come back. I was sucked into a pit of despair that I had never seen before. Who was I becoming? The person who sat in their pajamas all day while I worked from home—yep, that was me.
I wanted to scream, “I survived cancer, now what?” Where was the manual on how to live after cancer? Who helps me get back to living? I just go back to what I was doing, as if nothing happened? I was tired of saying to myself, “But I’m supposed to feel better, right?”
As the stream of appointments, scans, lab draws, and phone calls from friends and family continued to slow, I tried hard to be well and remain optimistic. Continue doing my job, walking the dogs, and dragging myself to the gym. Life just didn’t seem real, and depression overwhelmed me for days or weeks at a time. A quick nap turned into a four-hour slumber; my physical body was healing, and my mental body was spiraling downward.
The difficulty of shifting back to life was not what I expected, and thank goodness for friends. My dear friend Rebecca asked if I wanted to run a half-marathon, but my visceral reaction was no. Then I learned the race took place one year to the date after I finished chemo, so I thought, “Heck yea, take that cancer!” It was perfect timing. One foot in front of the other, I trained for my first half-marathon.
I kept myself going by trying to run when I could. Running was my go-to mental health fix pre-cancer, and it was starting to work post-cancer too. I remember there were days when I would drag myself to run and come back home in minutes. Then there were days I felt like I had superpowers and it felt so good.
Rebecca and I crossed that finish line, hand in hand, and celebrated with margaritas and Mexican food, my other go-to mental health fixes.
So why do I feel inclined to share my story? It’s not just about cancer, depression, running, and margaritas. It’s about making something good come from something bad.
Cancer taught me a lot of things. The biggest lesson was to control what I could. That looked like taking a long way home instead of sitting in traffic, not getting worked up about long lines in the grocery store, taking risks like rock climbing in Utah, trying new things like fly fishing in the mountains of North Carolina, singing in my car on the way to work to pump myself up for the day, going on camping trips with my girlfriends, and leaving behind a soul-sucking career.
I can’t say I am exactly happy I had cancer, but I can’t imagine life without it. It’s a love/hate relationship. Looking back, it was an opportunity for growth and learning that I can do hard things. It was a reminder to focus on being truly alive.
There is not a guidebook for cancer survivors, no way to time travel to the person you were before your diagnosis, no way to return your body unscathed, or quick way to restore your trust in your body again. It’s a journey that you must figure out for yourself, one minute, hour, and day at a time.
You must accept what has happened and discover a new self.
I learned more in the year after cancer than I had in the previous twenty-six years. You don’t need a cancer journey to do this.
Life is short; learn to live life to the fullest. However, if cancer is part of your journey back to living, you are not alone in your quest to learn to live again. You can do this. One tiny step at a time, you will learn to truly live again. You will stumble back and take huge leaps forward.
You can have a life full of purpose, happiness, gratitude, and adventure. Don’t merely survive cancer, thrive after cancer! What are you waiting for? Let’s do this.
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Mindfulness, Creativity, and Nature: A Healing Trifecta for Lasting Peace
“It is the marriage of the soul with nature that gives birth to imagination.” ~Henry David Thoreau
Before my accident, before we had kids, after we divorced, after my father died from Covid, before the pandemic…
We tend to divide our lives into the before and afters that define our world, whether personally or on a grand scale. These divisions offer context, providing a kind of roadmap that supports us in reflecting on the beauty and darkness, the decisions we made, and who we might be if certain things had never occurred.
I have always believed that the only reason to look back is to learn. Still, I can’t help but wonder: What if, when my marriage ended, I already had mindfulness skills in place? What if I had known the infinite ways nature could soothe my soul? Would my life have been different if I had consciously known that creativity was the safest place to process my emotions?
Perhaps I would not have been paralyzed in grief and sorrow. Maybe my children would have been spared a terrible custody battle. I suppose there is a chance I would not have gone bankrupt. I wonder if I would have ever gotten divorced at all.
Here’s the biggest question: Would I change any of it now?
Not a chance.
As difficult as it all was, I learned that every tool I needed to survive and thrive was right in front of me, and always will be.
My journey led me to a path of sharing what I am most passionate about: helping others find their way, through what I called a “spiritual toolbox”—a personal supply of healthy actions and practices to choose from or combine when things become difficult.
Your spiritual toolbox can hold things like creativity and gratitude practices, exercise, meditation, time in nature, and journaling; a hug, the love of a pet, a hot bath, and even an occasional glass of wine. It’s wonderful to open in the moment, and it’s even better to use as preventative medicine (the toolbox, not the wine).
My “aha” spiritual-toolbox moment came when I accidently discovered the transformative power of combining three tools specifically, as a trifecta. These were: creativity, meditation, and time in nature.
This trifecta insight divided my life into two parts: asleep and awakened.
The first part is quite literal: at age nineteen, I fell asleep while driving and didn’t walk for nearly a year afterward. My accident was the synopsis and ending of a carefree childhood and adolescence, where I suffered no hardship that would have “awakened” me to anything beyond plans for the next evening.
However, while I physically woke up pinned under the tire of my car, I also woke up spiritually: I was alive, and my two best friends who were with me, were uninjured. I was officially “awake” on infinite levels, primarily to the deepest sense of gratitude. And, while I metaphorically “went to sleep” later in other areas of my life, the trifecta was always there to support my awakenings.
From the time I could crawl, my preference was to do it outside. My imagination was my best friend, and my mother could more easily find me digging mud from the creek behind our house rather than playing next door. I made togas from my curtains, spoke in my own language, and told everyone I was “Elizabeth from another land.”
Obviously, I had no way of knowing about the robust and ever-growing body of research indicating that artmaking and creativity have been shown to increase positive emotions, decrease depression and anxiety, reduce stress, and even boost the immune system. That art therapy could boost the memory of Alzheimer’s patients, or reduce the side-effects of chemotherapy.
I didn’t know that indulging creatively literally creates a “cascade of endorphins, serotonin and dopamine, the brain chemicals that affect our well-being,” increasing feelings of joy and contentment.
I hadn’t yet wrapped my head around the fact that everyone is creative, and the benefits have nothing to do with artistic skill. I simply knew that I was happiest when I was being creative, and that artmaking could pull me out of almost any funk.
I was intuitively awakened to creativity.
Then, at age forty, my marriage collapsed. I collapsed with it, down a slippery and medicated slope, into what was later diagnosed as “brief psychosis disorder.” I struggled with insomnia, bankruptcy, a custody battle, losing my home, and losing my business, all at once.
And, while I am a believer in whatever prescribed medications are necessary and helpful, mine were not properly prescribed, so my body and mind simply gave up.
Thankfully, I had recently awakened to meditation.
You can quote me that meditation and mindfulness are the most powerful tools you will ever discover on your path to well-being, in every single aspect of your life. The research on this topic goes back thousands of years.
But here’s where it gets interesting: The brain responds to meditation and mindfulness in a similar way to how it responds to creativity—in both cases, external stimuli is blocked out, and the front of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, quiets down. The pre-frontal cortex, AKA the “gatekeeper,” is like a control center, and is very much involved in emotional regulation, decision making, planning and attention, and self-monitoring.
In other words, dialing back the “gatekeeper” can free us up from planning, worry, projecting, and ruminating. Who wouldn’t feel happier as a result?
Armed with the foundations for my spiritual toolbox, I soldiered on, raising two boys on my own, supporting myself in various marketing and PR endeavors, discovering my inner advocate through non-profit work, writing two books, and facilitating creativity retreats. My love for the outdoors had evolved, and my first choice of exercise was hiking.
I did not know that studies had linked time outside to reduced anxiety and depression, or even that nature inspired creativity. I had no context for nature therapy, where nature is literally characterized as a therapeutic environment.
I hadn’t read the Time Magazine research about how spending time in nature can lower levels of cortisol, improve heart health, promote cancer-fighting cells, help with depression and anxiety, inspire awe, and increase overall well-being. All I knew was that for me, outside was better than inside.
I had awakened to the healing powers of nature.
I began meditating outside, tuning into the natural world. I practiced walking meditation and was awestruck by the beauty and felt sense of connectedness. I was present in a way I had never experienced.
Before long, I began gathering materials from nature and making art with them. I realized that I was more at peace than I had ever been—and there was a definite “carry-over” of calm, peace, and joy into my overall functioning.
I can’t recall if I was on top of a rock in Nevada or in a California canyon, but then came the moment: It was the trifecta of nature, creativity, and mindfulness that was changing my life. When I used these tools together, my depression lifted and my fears dissolved. For the first time in a long time, I experienced hope.
Slowly but surely, my spirit began to heal. I had a safe, accessible, and powerful way to safely process my experience, build resilience, and move forward, joyfully.
Since that time, I have awakened to many other tools that go inside my spiritual toolbox. For now, as an emerging art therapist, meditation junkie, and nature lover, it is my honor to awaken you to simple practices that support you in the most powerful trifecta I know.
Creating Peace on Earth
The peace sign is a powerful symbol that is universally recognized. It connects us, consciously and unconsciously, in something positive. It’s also simple to make, right outside, on the earth, implementing the spiritual toolbox trifecta of creativity, mindfulness, and nature. Here’s how:
Head outside alone or with a friend or loved one. Kids will also enjoy this practice!
Breathe deeply and move more slowly than you normally would, taking in the sights, sounds, and sensations of nature. Pause and let this experience sink in.
Let objects in nature call you: Begin gathering stones, branches, leaves, or wildflowers. Observe how each object looks, feels, and smells as you touch it with your hands. If you are with someone, share your observations with them.
Find the right spot and create your peace symbol. This could be in your own yard or in a public place, like a park or beach, where other people can see and enjoy it.
Have fun, indulge, and witness. No one is looking! Sink into your experiences and senses for this brief time. Take a few long, deep breaths, feeling and smelling the earth.
Reflect on the peace symbol. What does it mean to you? What memories or sensations arise in your body as you reflect on this powerful symbol?
Set an intention to bring forward any feelings of peace and wellness that you have experienced in this practice.
Be patient and honor your journey. Wellness and healing are lifelong endeavors. Stepping into intentional self-care is an act of compassion, for yourself and the world.
Be grateful. By creating “peace on earth,” you are implementing the healing trifecta while sharing a powerful message that others might see and experience on their own nature walk. You are also awakening to peace, within yourself.
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How I Overcame Shame from Sexual Assault and Began to Love Myself
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” ~Martin Luther King Jr.
It was Saturday, August 29th, 2020, when I admitted to myself, for the very first time, that I was a victim of sexual assault as a child.
Twenty-five years of complete denial that this ever happened, and suddenly all I could think of was the fact that my innocence was taken at the age of five. “Why now?” I wondered. “Why does it suddenly matter? Was I so resentful of my trauma that I denied its existence altogether?”
Between the ages of five and eight, I was repeatedly molested by a family member. Although I wasn’t sure what was happening, I knew two things: This felt pleasurable, and therefore, there was something inherently wrong with me.
I carried this shameful image of myself into adulthood, unaware of how it impacted my self-esteem, my sexuality, and my overall perception of myself as a woman.
As the sexual abuse eventually ended, so did any thoughts about it. No one knew that it had ever happened, and I planned for it to stay that way.
From the time I became sexually active, I struggled. I never felt safe while being intimate, even when I was with my ex-husband. I always carried this feeling of shame, and the more pleasure I felt from having intercourse, the more shame I experienced.
When I finally stopped denying that I was a victim of sexual assault, I knew there was no coming back. Once I became brave enough to admit the truth and accept the discomfort of it, I remembered all those times when the assault took place. It was terrifying and intimidating.
I felt disgusted, shameful, and angry. I was upset that this event was suddenly present in my life. My plans were to build my online business, make money, and have fun with friends, while making sure I consistently whitened my teeth and maintained my Florida tan.
Instead, I was forced to face my demons and address the truth I’d buried so well. All I could think of was “What’s wrong with me?”
For many victims of sexual assault, especially young children who can’t comprehend what’s happening, it’s easy to develop a belief that we are sick, dirty, undeserving, and not enough. We develop a strong survival mechanism where we pretend, guard up, in some cases become promiscuous while self-sabotaging any real connection with anyone else.
Our trauma supports the belief that we can’t trust anyone, everyone is out to get us, and that feeling any pleasure for ourselves is bad and sinful.
What I couldn’t wrap my head around, and what also brought unbearable shame, was the pleasure I felt when the assault happened. Logically, it didn’t make sense to me.
These were my thoughts: “I didn’t do anything about it, and there wasn’t any force or rebuttal present. I let it happen over and over, and in a sense, I enjoyed it. How can I ever say that I am a victim of sexual assault? If it was wrong, I would do something. Instead, I did nothing. There must be something wrong with me.”
What you just read is a common thought process for many victims of sexual assault. It is why we stay silent; why we let the shame grow each day and exercise self-hate full force. Many of us truly believe that there is something inherently wrong with us, and this is where speaking your truth and seeking help comes into play.
Shame was probably the most intense emotion I observed, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. So, as a master in denial, I let it go, again. Or so I thought.
A year went by, and nothing happened. I kept the truth hidden and didn’t talk about it too much while convincing myself that I’d already addressed it and all this messiness was behind me.
Then a few months ago one of my friends mentioned the nonprofit RAINN—the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization that helps survivors and victims of sexual assault heal and recover.
I knew this information showed up in my life for a reason. My shame was still present, and my sense of unworthiness wasn’t subsiding. It was time to call their hotline and get help.
I dialed and hung up four times before I was brave enough to stay on the phone. The process was easy, and I was able to get a counselor within a few days, at no cost.
It was time for my first session. I was nervous and guarded, but I clicked with my counselor, so it eventually became easier to open up and start sharing.
At first, we started addressing the elephant in the room: How could I feel pleasure while being sexually assaulted, and would my shame ever go away?
I learned in my recovery that arousal during a sexual assault is common. It is one of the best-kept secrets that prevent us from speaking up, sharing our trauma, and breaking the shame once and for all.
We are terrified that no one will understand us and will judge us instead. Considering the amount of judgment and shame we already exercise daily, the idea of criticism and more shame is just too much to bear. Therefore, we stay silent and often let the shame get out of control.
Although I am not a doctor and can’t impress you with some Ph.D. explanation, here is what I now understand:
Being aroused during any form of sexual assault doesn’t mean we want it, it doesn’t mean we consent, and it certainly doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with us. Physical pleasure is a natural bodily reaction, even during sexual assault.
As I progressed with my sessions, I was able to open up about things I never said out loud. Things like excessive masturbation during childhood or using self-pleasure and intercourse in my adult life to punish myself and feel disgusted. Without seeking help and getting a counselor, I might have never been able to overcome my self-destructive beliefs.
This is the best part about therapy: it provides a safe space to say the things you’ve kept inside. And that, in and of itself, provides healing.
During my therapy, I learned some powerful coping skills. Things like recognizing my triggers, soothing myself with compassion while drowning in self-hate, pausing, taking a step back, and reevaluating the situation before it gets out of control. These skills were especially useful when I spiraled into one of my shame attacks, wanted to punish myself, or felt overwhelmed by self-judgment.
I learned the importance of self-love in this process; how to approach myself when feeling defeated, sad, upset, or shameful. Mostly, I understood the universal truth every victim of sexual assault needs to understand and focus on: Recovery requires us to stop questioning what’s wrong with us and instead face what happened to us.
At the time of this writing, my therapy sessions are coming to an end. If I were asked what’s been the most impactful part of my recovery, I would say it’s the ability to speak up and share my story while exercising empathy and compassion for myself.
As Brené Brown said, the best way to break the shame is to speak about it with those who deserve to hear our story—people we trust, people who have been through the same or similar situations, and people who are educated enough to understand our trauma. People who aren’t afraid to offer empathy and hold space while withstanding the discomfort of the conversation.
Although my therapy is ending and the time to run solo is approaching, I know that to heal, I must commit and stay committed to my recovery. I understand now that healing is available to all of us, and all it takes sometimes is five minutes of courage to make a phone call and say, “I need help.”
As my recovery progresses, my hope for living a happier life grows each day. I am beginning to understand that no matter what I go through or how deep my trauma is, I can make different choices and live my life from the most empowering place that’s available to me—from within.
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Obsessed with Healthy Eating? 9 Things I’ve Learned Since Recovering from Orthorexia
“Sending love to everyone who’s doing their best to heal from things they don’t discuss.” ~Unknown
I used to obsess over healthy eating, and I mean OB-SESSSSS. I spent virtually every waking moment thinking about food. What should I eat today? Is there too much sugar in that? What will I eat when we go out next week? Should I claim that I’m allergic to gluten?
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was suffering from orthorexia (that is, an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating). Yes, I fully agree that eating nutritious food is good for you—there’s few who would deny that—but when you are thinking about food non-stop, something has definitely gone awry.
It all started innocently enough. My daughter (who’s my youngest) was about a year old, and I was ready to “get back in shape” and reclaim my pre-pregnancy weight. However, since I was against the idea of fad diets, I was looking for something else.
That “something else” turned out to be wellness culture, and I absorbed it all. I followed several influencers who said we must eat in a certain way for ideal health, which often meant organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, and absolutely no sugar. The influencers also used a lot of pseudoscience to support their ideas, and I totally fell for it.
With the idea of eating in a certain way for optimum health swirling round my brain, I decided to follow a thirty-day kick-starter healthy eating plan. It was all about focusing on health (and not weight loss). Easy enough, hey?
There was no counting calories, macros, or weighing food. No points. It was just about eating nutritious, wholesome food and having a protein shake for breakfast. What could be the harm in that?
Well, it was probably the long list of “not allowed” foods that you cut for thirty days (such as sugar, dairy, gluten, and soy)—essentially an elimination diet. The idea being that after thirty days you reintroduce the foods to help you identify your food intolerances. See? It’s all for health! Or so I thought…
And, as my “clean eating” regime was underway, I started to get a lot of positive feedback.
You’re so disciplined! How do you eat so healthy? Wow, you look really well.
It was alluring.
This was my slippery slope and the beginning of an unhealthy obsession with food.
Three years in, my life looked something like this: I claimed a gluten and dairy intolerance and was experimenting with being vegan, all for the sake of my health. Unfortunately, there’s not much food left to eat on this kind of restrictive diet.
Every few months I would follow an elimination diet (again) and would cut out all sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and soy (alongside the dairy and gluten that I was no longer eating). I started avoiding social events because the list of “safe foods” was getting so complicated; it often seemed easier to stay home.
All of this in the name of “health.” Except that it wasn’t healthy.
I was missing social events and avoided spending time with friends, my mental health was suffering, and I was developing an extremely disordered relationship with food.
While orthorexia isn’t classified as an eating disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, some healthcare professionals believe that it should be. And, personally speaking, my relationship with food was starting to remind me of the time when I’d suffered from an eating disorder back in my twenties.
I had a series of aha moments that finally woke me up to the fact that my behavior was not at all healthy and my extreme approach to food was doing me more harm than good.
It was when I started feeling embarrassed going to someone’s house for dinner and sending a long list of foods I couldn’t eat.
It was when I started to notice bingeing behavior: I’d binge on five sweet potato brownies because they were supposedly “healthy.” I’m sure that if I’d just had access to a chocolate brownie, I might have only eaten one
It was when I was doing my elimination diet so frequently, I had to make lots of excuses about why I couldn’t join evenings out.
Eventually I realized that my old eating disorder had morphed into orthorexia.
Thankfully, I had the resources to make a quick recovery, and my relationship with food has done a full 180 turn… In hindsight I can see clearly how very disordered my thinking, feelings, and behavior were.
With that in mind, here are nine lessons I learnt from my brush with orthorexia. My hope is that if you question some of your own food behaviors, you seek help before too much damage is done.
#1 There is no need to restrict food groups from your diet.
Unless you have a medical reason to do so (like coeliac disease), restricting food groups from your diet is unnecessary. Nope, you don’t need to be carb free; in fact, research shows that in the long term, a low-carb diet is actually bad for you.
#2 A flexible approach to eating is best.
You just don’t need overly rigid food rules. My food rules were too rigid, and I tried to eat perfectly all the time. Perfectly to me was organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, and absolutely no processed sugar. Alongside that, I stopped eating fruit because it has sugar in it. So, for a while, the only fruits I would eat were berries. Bananas, red apples, grapes, and tropical fruits were totally out of the question.
The problem with rigid rules is that all the fun things in life become stressful, like holidays, eating out, and going to a friend’s house, so flexibility is key.
#3 If you get overly upset when food rules are broken, something’s wrong.
I felt compelled to stick to my food rules, and I would feel emotional, distraught, and upset if I broke them. Like I had failed. I remember once crying in a French supermarket on holiday because I couldn’t buy the organic and gluten-free versions of food I wanted. It’s kind of missing the point of a holiday, isn’t it?
#4 Food is NOT just fuel.
Have you heard the quote “food is fuel”? It’s bandied around everywhere in the wellness and fitness spheres. But food isn’t just fuel. It’s about so much more, and this kind of thinking limits our potential to enjoy food to its fullest potential.
Food can be comforting; it can be a time to connect with friends and family. It’s nourishing for our bodies, and also nourishing for our souls; it can be nostalgic or related to our culture. A cup of tea and a biscuit can remind you of your granny, while a single meal can take you back to your childhood.
#5 All foods can fit in a balanced diet.
Yes, even sweets, chocolate, and pastries. It’s totally unsustainable to cut out “bad” foods for the rest of your life. I’ve also found that you’re more likely to crave these “bad” foods if you tell yourself you can never eat them again. When all foods fit, the ice cream comes off the pedestal and you can keep it in the house without bingeing. It’s a total revelation.
#6 It’s worse for your health to stress about sugar in food than to actually eat a damn cookie.
I used to stress about the sugar in food constantly. I would read every food label when shopping; I would calculate grams of sugar in things like raisins; I would only eat a green apple and not a red apple (too much sugar, apparently). Yup, I was one of those mums who cooked gluten-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free cakes for the kids’ birthdays. Yuk! Poor kids.
I’ve learned the stress of worrying about food is way worse than just eating the food itself. So relax, and enjoy that cookie.
#7 “Health” is more than just the food we eat.
Health is not just about what we eat; it’s way more than that. It’s about your genetics and your access to nutritious food and decent healthcare, which means it’s associated with your income level.
Also, what you consider “healthy” is different to what I consider “healthy.” Maybe my “health” is about being able to run around after my kids without feeling breathless, or improving my flexibility to keep my body feeling supple.
Your health might be about improving stamina and strength to run a marathon, or about sleeping seven to eight hours a night.
#8 Social events shouldn’t be awkward.
Quite the opposite. Social events should be fun, or relaxing and enjoyable. Not fraught and stressful. I had many an awkward conversation with hosts about things that I couldn’t eat.
I would avoid events when doing my cleanse, or re-arrange things around these months. And if I did venture out, I would endlessly worry about what I’d eat, sometimes calling the restaurant ahead to see what they had on the menu to fit my rigid rules. Or I would claim allergies so I could work out what was gluten-free and dairy-free. #awkward
And finally, if you are a parent…
#9 Your kids are watching you.
You might not say anything to your kids, but they are watching you. They notice what you do, reading those labels, and how you talk about food. They see when you skip the fun meals or cook something separate for yourself. They see when you are down on yourself and your body.
They are watching. Everything.
If I’m truly honest, this was the biggest driver for me to heal my relationship with food. The last thing I wanted to do was pass my disordered eating down to my kids.
Finding food freedom was the best thing that happened to me. I no longer fall to pieces in a restaurant or on holiday. Eating is no longer a stressful experience. I love food for all the things the eating experience gives us—connection, chats, family, and friends. I hope you can too.
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The Two Sides of Gratitude: When It Helps Us and When It Hurts Us
“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” ~Shauna Niequist
Imagine if you had a tool that, with no effort or change on your part, could cast a glow around you, exposing hidden gems within your everyday life.
You do! It’s called gratitude.
It has the power to light your way through tough times. And it can multiply the good. Of the many tools I use daily, I love gratitude the most. It is so simple to implement and immediately effective. It’s a powerful way to change the world—through seeing, not doing.
I’ve invested a lot of thought, time, and deliberate action into creating the life I want. But building a life is one thing; relishing it is another.
Having gratitude allows me to squeeze every last bit of joy from what already exists around me and within me, creating more with no extra effort. Few things in life are simple, practical, and magical.
Without gratitude, our tendency is to focus on what’s missing. Life is what we choose to see. Without gratitude, we might waste a lifetime searching instead of enjoying.
Using this practice keeps me out of dark places. There are days when I find myself in an emotional fog for reasons I cannot explain. I used to dwell in those moments, or days, weighted down and powerless. Though I wanted to feel like myself again, I would retreat within rather than allow myself to engage with the world and resurface.
Gratitude has forever changed that. I possess a knowing (stemming from a consistent gratitude practice) that gifts are all around me, and I use them like a ladder to climb out of my hole. Gratitude shows me I always have choice.
I choose to want to feel better and then I ask for what I need—a hug, time, inspiration—and then I allow myself to move on. Spending so much time in awe and appreciation for life allows me to see beyond my temporary state. I no longer confuse my present state with my true state of being—joyful, grateful.
Gratitude doesn’t eliminate all the icky feelings and thoughts, but it absolutely makes me more resilient. It is my springboard. Not only am I aware of my shifting mood, but I actually take the action I need to take in order to come back to my true self.
Gratitude and I go way back. As a first generation South Asian, it was instilled in me to always see the blessings around me. My family worked hard to give me a leg-up in life: a life with love, education, and opportunity.
Gratitude also complements my positive nature. But it took me years to realize gratitude also appealed to my younger self because I was a pleaser, a peacemaker, a don’t-rock-the-boater. It turns out gratitude was also a great tool to keep me small. I used it as a ceiling.
As my dream job turned into a nightmare, I confused fear for gratitude. I could not bring myself to seek a solution because it felt ungrateful. I was so thankful for the opportunity that I endured a hostile work relationship with a superior that belittled and disrespected me. I am not a complainer, I told myself. This is the price I pay for my dream, I thought.
Gratitude allowed me to settle for less.
I have avoided conflict by exercising gratitude. In difficult situations, it gave me an out. Have you ever said or thought the following?
“It could be worse.”
“At least they didn’t …”
“I’m so grateful for this job/partner/friend. Who am I to complain?”
In all of these scenarios, I wasn’t wrong to see the upside. Things absolutely could’ve been worse. But they also could have been opportunities to practice enforcing boundaries, to see my own self-worth, and to imagine new possibilities.
I wasn’t able to see it then, but it’s clear now. Gratefulness is a powerful tool, but it should never be a way of accepting less than we deserve. It should amplify us, not diminish us. It should be our springboard.
Gratitude is a way for each of us to find joy, not a way to make excuses for others.
Yes, I have a loving family, but that’s no excuse to allow or accept disrespectful behavior. Yes, I work for an amazing company, but no, I don’t have to accept a toxic work environment. Yes, I love my partner, but I am worthy of a healthy relationship and love.
It can be so easy to slip into limiting beliefs, tricking ourselves into thinking we are grateful when we are actually unhappy. Many of us have more than we need and are aware of how many are in need in our communities, near and far. But we serve no one by making ourselves small.
How do you know when gratitude is limiting or a springboard? Know this: More is never made from less. Putting yourself below someone won’t create lasting joy, love, peace, or happiness.
Practicing true gratitude requires understanding that we are equals. No one is better. If you hold yourself to the same (not higher or lower) standards as someone else, then gratitude will be your springboard.
Gratitude is also a way to find what you’re looking for within your current life. It often requires little to no change. When we’re unhappy or unfulfilled we often think we need to get rid of things, maybe start from scratch somehow.
But the truth is, what we’re looking for is often already in our lives. We must simply possess (or practice) the ability to see it.
Gratitude also slows things down for me which, in this day and age, is precious. Being able to identify the gifts I have means knowing what’s important to me and taking the time to cherish them. It’s the ability to find my why—why I work hard, why I sacrifice and give of myself… why I am here.
That’s a lot to gain from one simple act of seeing. How grateful I am to gain so much from a simple practice.
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Why I Never Let Anyone Support Me Until the Day I Almost Died
“Why don’t you get up and make the coffee, while I stay in my sleeping bag and plan our ascent route?” I half-heartedly ask my climbing partner Hank.
He just looks at me with that unassuming, “give-me-a-break Val Jon” look of his. It’s three o’clock in the morning, cold, dark, and damp, and neither of us wants to leave the comfort of our tent. But we’re committed to this climb, so we don our parkas and gloves and confront the bitter cold.
In silence, Hank and I gather up our gear and join the rest of our climb team assembled at base camp, which is located at eleven thousand feet.
Thirty-three climbers in all have come together for this extraordinary ice climb to the summit of Mount Shasta in Northern California. During our team meeting, we decide to make our ascent via “Avalanche Gulch,” a treacherous glacier route up a steep icy slope. This particular route is shorter than others, but it’s also notorious for its deep crevasses and unstable blue fractures, so one wrong move could mean sudden death.
Ice climbing requires crampons for the boots and ice axes for leverage and braking. Ropes, carabiners, and belays are reserved for near-vertical climbs, which we may or may not need for this particular ascent route.
For those unfamiliar with ice climbing, braking is used when a climber loses their footing on steep slopes. It’s done by grabbing the ax with both hands, flipping onto one’s side, and plunging the sharp metal tong into the ice.
A firmly planted ax serves as an anchor and stabilizes the fallen climber’s position until they can regain their footing. Everyone on the team has practiced the braking procedure many times over along with other vital safety and life-saving protocols.
As the full moon casts a bluish glow over the ice, we begin our ascent to the summit. At about twelve thousand feet, we come upon a massive fissure running horizontally across the steep glacier face. We traverse around its left edge and cross back about thirty feet above it. Climbing to the slope’s center, we zig-zag our way up to gain altitude and distance from the crevasse.
Traversing around crevasses is a treacherous activity. If one climber slips, the entire group could be pulled into the abyss. For this reason, we are untethered and climbing independently. We are, however, organized into small teams of six to provide each other support if needed.
All goes well as we gain altitude above the crevasse, until one fateful moment when the crampon on my left boot suddenly pops loose and I lose my footing.
Tumbling headfirst downhill, I instinctively grab my ice ax with both hands and prepare to stop. Landing hard on my back, however, my ax bounces loose from my hands and I slide uncontrollably down the steep slope towards the crevasse.
In a moment of frozen terror, my life flashes before my eyes and I am going to die! Then suddenly my flailing body slams into something solid, knocking the wind out of me.
Stunned and disoriented on my back with my head pointed downhill, I’m unable to get a bearing on how close to the edge I’ve come and how close to death I am.
Looking up, I see a blur of movement and shifting dark images. Clearing the snow and ice off my glacier glasses, I realize Hank and my fellow climbers have formed a human net, catching me just a few yards before I careened over the edge of the crevasse!
I’m in shock, numb, and completely speechless. I’m also totally embarrassed and feeling extremely vulnerable. I’ve spent years being a strong and independent man, priding myself on not needing the help of anyone. Needing help always seemed like a sign of weakness to me, so this emergency situation is deeply disturbing.
“We’ve got you, VJ! Hold on buddy, we’re not gonna let you fall!” I fidget around trying to stand myself up and respond, “Thanks guys, I can take it from here.” “Lay still, you’re pushing us back towards the edge!” Hank barks at me. “No, really, I’m okay guys, I’ve got this.” There was no way I was going to be the weakest link in this chain! This time, however, a number of my team members replied, “No you don’t have it VJ, you need to stop right now or you’re going to kill us all!”
That message got in. The reality of killing my fellow climbers so I can stay in control is just too much for me to bear. The humbling realization shatters my macho control mechanism and I suddenly relax into letting them help me.
As they reattach my gear, stand me up and reassure me with pats on the back, I realize it’s nearly impossible for anyone to support me. Experiencing them caring for me this way is both wonderful and wrenching.
My chest tightens and tears come to my eyes as I realize how many times in my life I’ve not let others help or support me. I would always say, “No problem, I can do it myself.” I didn’t want to burden anyone or put anyone out.
The deeper truth, however, is that if I let someone support me, I would be obligated to them in the future. The result might be that they could then somehow control me the way my father controlled me as a child.
Looking into the caring faces of my fellow climbers, I suddenly see superimposed images of my mother, sister, and little brother, my friends, and exes who I’ve shunned and alienated with my stubborn macho independence
I reflect on the pain and frustration that not being able to help me must have caused all these people in my life. So many opportunities I have had to accept the support of those who love and care for me, but no, I have to be strong and independent.
How selfish and arrogant of me to rob them of the opportunity to contribute to my life! And how easy it would be for me to slide into humiliation over this display of narcissism.
Standing here among those who just risked their lives to save mine, I realize I have a choice; I can dramatize my humiliation and hide behind my rugged individualism, or I can humbly open myself to their care and support.
I choose to set humiliation aside and open with humility, and as I do, a wave of emotion fills me. For the first time in my life, as far back as I can remember, I’m able to see that accepting help from others is not a sign of weakness, it’s an act of humility.
I also realize that rather than being a burden to people when I’m in need, it allows them to feel useful and to make a difference by offering their support and care. There’s no doubt that my fellow climbers are ecstatic about having just saved my life; I can see the joy and exhilaration on their faces.
Still surrounded by a human net of care, I thank each member of my team for saving my life, and I apologize for placing them in additional danger. Each one of them nods in recognition, and nearly everyone assures me that having the chance to help save my life was far more important to them than blaming me for being a bit heedless.
As I allow myself to be vulnerable and let their care in, my defensive armor melts, then drops away. We resume our ascent, and tears fill my glacier glasses as I reflect on the experience of my life being saved by this remarkable group of friends.
How strange and new this is for me. I don’t need to see out of my glasses because I have the full support of those behind me as well as those in front to help me along if I need it.
I’ve always been the one to give support to others, but now I can receive support as well. I breathe into this new awareness and suddenly have a profound realization that has remained with me for years.
As I exhale, it’s synonymous with the movement of giving support, and as I inhale, it’s synonymous with the movement of receiving support. Engaging in both inhaling and exhaling doesn’t mean I’m weak, it means I’m human.
Without further incident, we all ascend to the 14,179-foot summit of Mt. Shasta where a crystalline blue sky embraces the curve of the earth. The summit perch looks like a small crater and is no more than about twenty feet in diameter. Its outer rim is composed of a ring of rocky crags with one high point that signifies the very pinnacle of the mountain.
Shining, sunburned faces grinning from ear to ear sit together in a blissful exchange of laughter and tears.
After celebrating our joint accomplishment, we begin the ritual of reading and signing the register book stowed atop most climbable mountains in the world. The one at the summit of Mt. Shasta is contained inside a green metal canister under the Western crag.
Each member of the team, like those before us, takes the opportunity with the book. After finishing, Hank hands it to me. As the last to see the register, I flip through its yellowed pages and my eyes fall on a passage written by a climber on October 23rd, 1972. I’ll never forget the inscription:
“Father, I dedicate this climb to you. I’m standing at the top of Mount Shasta today because of the love, support, and encouragement you gave me as I was growing up. It’s because of your commitment and love that I was able to make it to the summit today. And although you lost your legs in the Korean War and have never been able to stand beside me. Father, I want you to know that today I stand on the top of this mountain for both of us. I love you with all my heart and all my soul, your son John.”
How beautiful this dedication is! I take in the grandeur of the Earth’s curve from this high summit, close the book, and clutch it firmly to my chest. A wave of inspiration fills me, and I feel deep abiding compassion for all the world’s fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters . . . and I am challenged to act upon the humility that was moving so deeply within me.
You see, up until this very moment I’ve coveted a deep wound in my psyche. As a boy, I was violently abused by my father, and as a result, I cut myself off from him in my early twenties vowing to never speak with him again.
But now I am faced with a choice . . . should I maintain my position and continue to empower all the reasons why I should not reach out to him? Or should I humble myself and take a chance by reconnecting after all these years? It is here, within these deeply challenging life choices, that we both test the authenticity of our inspirations and discover what we are truly devoted to.
I made my choice, and not only did I resurrect my relationship with my father, I affirmed that there is nothing more important to me than living with an open heart and honoring the humility I was gifted with high atop the summit of humility.
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The False Comfort of Having More: Finding Peace in Living with Less
“Be a curator of your life. Slowly cut things out until you’re left only with what you love, with what’s necessary, with what makes you happy.” ~Leo Babauta
As a kid, I remember begging my dad to take me to Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonalds, and any other number of fast food restaurants. Their food was okay, but that’s not the main reason I went. The toys were what beckoned me.
Each chain offered different ones, some of which interested me more than others. The Mini Nintendos at Taco Bell? I was there. Assemble your own Inspector Gadget at McDonalds? Count me in on that Happy Meal.
I remember gleefully jotting my Christmas lists inside the Grinch who Stole Christmas ornament-shaped notepad I’d extracted from beneath a soggy container of fries at the bottom of my Wendy’s kids’ meal bag.
When Burger King came out with Pokemon toys, I raced on over. My goal was to get enough Poke balls to strap to every belt loop—because people in class, pedestrians sharing the street with me, and my family at home all needed to know how serious, esteemed, and accomplished of a Pokemon trainer I was.
Meanwhile, the neglected burger and the remainder of fries glistened untouched beneath the fluorescent lights, off to the side.
Ever since I was little, surplus brought me comfort.
An all-in kind of girl when it came to my belongings and collections, I threw myself into the hobby of collecting and amassing—everything from Archie comics to souvenir pennies to Pepsi cans featuring photos of different Star Wars characters (which my mom hated and my cat enjoyed swatting around, only to be startled by the noise whenever they crashed against the ground).
My room contained surplus—whether that was after a trip to the library with my mom, or from Beanie Babies scattering the floor. Bobbleheads crowded my shelves. Shot glasses that I used as cups for my dolls and stuffed animals during our play tea parties did as well.
So did the pages of my angsty adolescent diary. One poster of Aaron Carter or a single pin-up of J.T.T. didn’t cut it for me—I had to fill the entire wall. How I managed to not feel unsettled falling asleep under the watch of so many prepubescent boy eyes still mystifies me.
Material surplus as a child became surplus of a more abstract kind as a young adult. People, experiences, a large social circle, and nonstop activities took the place of physical objects. These grown-up versions of childhood collections served the same function my clutter once did.
I scheduled back-to-back activities, unnerved by the thought of banking on solely one interaction to sustain me though the day. My schedule was constantly full.
Where Does the Drive for More Come From?
Reasons for “hoarding mentality” are numerous. I can see looking back now how surplus brought me comfort as a kid. Material excess likely allayed feelings of solitude.
At one point I even wrote in my journal: “I believe many of us collect to fill voids. More means never going without, never living in scarcity. More confers safety. More means escaping alone-ness. If I just keep accumulating more more more, maybe at some point I can let out all this breath I’ve been holding in.”
Our cultural climate likely also contributed. It capitalizes upon low self-worth and generalized ennui to sell the message that solutions and relief lie in consumption—consume more to fill the emptiness, may as well be their mantra.
Additionally, I believe we create surplus when we don’t trust. We don’t trust what we have is enough. Or we don’t trust it’s good enough.
I think about all the unfinished drafts on my computer over the years. Littering the pages were paragraphs of clumsy prose and scattered ideas, all chucked into the document and then abandoned.
One paragraph on racial inequality. Introduction, scattered thoughts… abandoned.
Two paragraphs of a fiction piece on a one-night stand. Introduction, rising action… abandoned.
I didn’t trust the voice. I didn’t trust the content. I didn’t trust the direction the piece was going in. I didn’t trust anything about it—so abandoning it felt like the comfortable, somewhat logical option.
After fleeing it and attempting to start anew, I didn’t trust in the voice of this draft either, so I fled that one as well. Abandonment seemed the common trend, syntactically if not thematically. And over time all these abandonments, fueled by lack of trust, left surplus in its wake.
I once compared the scatter-focused to the hyper-focused work style: More cups for the scatter-focused worker means less likelihood of failure—because if one’s not working, they can always shift focus to another. A half-finished project isn’t a failure. It just hasn’t been completed yet.
Or think of it as putting your eggs into different baskets. You don’t want to put too much pressure on any one friend; instead, you spread your efforts onto multiple so that no one gets overwhelmed.
It’s similar to the way some scatter-focused workers might view tasks. Dividing our attention amongst various simultaneous assignments takes pressure off any single one of them, reducing the likelihood of “botching it.” Because if one’s not working, they can always shift attention to another.
Some of us who allow surplus into our lives may have difficulty with letting go.
I grow attached to the things I write, for instance, even if I know they’re bad. A weak sentence, or a paragraph wherein the phrases are all jumbled together and not working in unison—even as this clunky tangle of words on the screen makes my head spin, I still fear hitting that delete button and watching my ideas vanish completely.
I fear hitting it because even in their imperfect expression, they were still my ideas, born in a moment of generativity. I was adding something to the world, however small and insignificant, when I spawned them.
Is Surplus Bad?
I’m not trying to say that surplus is inherently bad; many people not only can successfully juggle multiple commitments, but likely even have to in order to stay afloat in this increasingly demanding world.
What I am saying is that sometimes the hoarding mentality can prevent us from mindfully attending to what’s directly in front of us.
As I came to find through my own later life experiences, “‘more” can sometimes feed disconnection.
I once drove a Lyft passenger who, together with his wife, fostered twenty-two cats—a number he said was a “manageable amount.” He said that he didn’t think he could take in any more.
“It’s very hard, because we want to say yes to all of them,” Jacob said, “But we’ve also got to think about how many we can realistically care for.”
He then quipped, “Crazy cat ladies get a bad rap because they’re too idealistic. They’re in over their heads even, is what I’d say. She’s crossed the threshold from cat lover to cat addict.”
We talked about the point at which a loving impulse turns into an addiction. About how even if the addicted person started out loving the thing they’re now addicted to, once compulsion has replaced it, love may no longer be at the center of the equation anymore.
Jacob’s saying that he “wouldn’t be able to love fifty-six cats” resonated with me. I recalled how back when I had only one or two Pez dispensers, I really treasured them. They meant more to me. We had as close to an intimate connection as is possible for a human and a chunk of plastic to have with one another.
The more my supply multiplied though, the less connection I felt with any single one of them.
Looking back now, I’m just glad those Pez were inanimate objects rather than living creatures with needs and pain receptors—because they surely would have felt the sting of negligence under my care.
~~
Becoming more aware of the roots of these tendencies has helped me to gradually shift them.
The past few years I’ve slowly and steadily fengshui-ed many of the items accumulated throughout my past. The Pez dispensers were the first to go—to a customer through eBay.
Next it was 1,050 of my 1,075 Archie comics (I kept a few as souvenirs from childhood, for nostalgic purposes). Writing I’d always found too difficult to part with, I’ve slowly recycled as well (after salvaging whichever remnants I saw some potential value in).
I’ve sought more one-on-one interactions, careful to not plan too many in too short a period of time—both to preserve my energy and give each encounter the attention I feel it deserves.
As minimalist Youtuber Ronald Banks said, “Minimalism is living with more of what matters by choosing to want less of what doesn’t.”
When I do find myself starting to accumulate—be that material items or events on my social calendar— I ask myself questions now. Questions like, Am I saying yes to have one more item to add to my stash? Or because I genuinely connect and derive meaning from it?
Are my motives extrinsic and escapist—tied more to bolstering my image or avoiding an uncomfortable emotion? Or are they intrinsic and self-actualizing—aimed toward the purpose of connecting?
I wouldn’t say I’m a minimalist now, but I have become a bit more intentionally resistant toward what I now regard as the false comfort brought by surplus. I realize now I don’t need more things, more friends, more projects, more commitments. I just need to recognize when I’m trying to fill a void and instead focus more on the things I value most.
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You’re Bent, Not Broken: A Mindset Shift That Can Change Your Life
“Bent but never broken; down but never out.” ~Annetta Ribken
I lived for a long time thinking I was broken beyond repair.
Let me rephrase: I thought I was unloved, unworthy, scarred, and broken. What a package, right?
It started young, never feeling like I was good enough for anything I did. Being the youngest of the typical modern recomposed family in the eighties, I never knew on which foot to dance and always thought I needed to bend left and right to be seen and loved.
I carried this baggage under my badge of anxiety, feeling like no one and nothing could ever make me happy, that no one could love the real me, that nothing could ever make me feel worthy.
It reached a point as I was entering my forties when all I wanted to do was disappear. I wanted to not be who I was. I wanted to die.
I thought that was my only solution.
I believed the world would be better without me.
What I didn’t understand then is that by thinking I was broken, unworthy, unloved, and all the other awful things I told myself daily, I was pouring salt into old wounds that had no chance to mend until I stopped the self-loathing.
The more I told myself I was broken, the more I was breaking my soul. The more I told myself I was unloved, the less I loved others and opened myself up to love. The more I told myself I was unworthy, the more I interpreted others’ words to mean the same.
I didn’t know what I could do. I didn’t know how to get out of the storm I was stuck in. I didn’t know what could help me live in the moment and stop hurting from the past or getting scared of the future.
How do you get out of hurting so much you want to die?
For me: writing.
It was the only thing I could do.
I was losing friends left and right, closing up like an oyster, hurting myself and others with my words and actions—but my pen and paper were my salvation.
I bled tears and words until the day I could take a step back.
The pain, the feeling of being broken and unworthy was still here; I could barely look at myself in a mirror, even less love anyone properly. But as I was playing with my pencil not finding words for a poem I needed to write to survive, I kept pushing into a crack it had. And I pushed my nails into it, and I played with it, and picked at it and some more not really thinking what I was doing, desperately trying to find words, until the pencil broke in two.
No, let me take responsibility—until I broke the pencil in two.
I looked at the two pieces in my hand.
I had played with that pencil’s crack until I broke it.
My fingers kind of hurt, but I smiled.
This wasn’t me. This couldn’t be me. I really didn’t want this to become me.
I wasn’t two parts of one entity.
I was still one.
And if I was still one, I wasn’t broken, I was just scarred. I was just bent.
From that moment on, everything shifted.
I wasn’t broken, just bent. I could learn to love myself again.
It became like a mantra I repeated daily.
And if I wasn’t broken, just bent, then maybe I wasn’t unlovable but loved by the wrong people. And maybe I wasn’t unworthy but only surrounded by people who didn’t recognize my worth, or maybe I was blind to my awesomeness.
And if I wasn’t broken, if I stopped playing with my wounds, then maybe the healed scars could tell a story. And if I could tell my story and help others in any way, maybe, just maybe my pain and hardship and years of anxiety and depression could become more than a feeling of brokenness.
So maybe I wasn’t broken. Maybe I was indeed just bent.
It was hard to say it out loud, it was hard to explain, but the moment I shifted my mindset, I felt a relief.
I knew then I could rise from the traumas I’d gone through. Even the smallest ones.
I could give myself a second chance at life by healing and sharing my story.
I wasn’t broken; I was made to break the shell of my past and show that if I could do it, you could too.
Because here is my biggest secret: I am no one, and I am everyone.
My story is the same story as most of yours. I didn’t deal with my traumas, and they caught up. I thought I had dealt with the past by putting a bandage on it when I really needed an open soul surgery.
I thought I could wear a mask and be loved for who I thought people wanted me to be, but this made me feel unloved to the core.
I thought I was broken when I was only bent by circumstances I needed to untangle. I thought I was unworthy but I was capable of creating art with my scars and shining a light on the most common depression story ever to tell others they weren’t alone and could get out of it too.
So don’t tell yourself that you are broken.
Don’t think you need an extraordinary story to help others find their light.
Don’t believe you are no one, because we are all no one, and we are everyone.
I’m not a life coach, I’m not selling classes, I’m not even trying to save your soul. I’m just like you, trying to find a light of love and joy. And together, we are healing, and we have a story to write. A story about the power of choosing to see yourself as someone with strength, value, and purpose.
Change your mindset today. See yourself as just bent, and don’t try to straighten yourself up.
Allow yourself to be bent, and let the shift happen.
Broken is irreparable.
Bent is not.
It’s not a big difference, but it might change your life.
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A Guide to Saying No Without Guilt: 7 Steps for People-Pleasers
“You can be a good person with a kind heart and still say no.” ~Unknown
Why is it so hard to say no? The uncomfortable buildup of emotion I felt while contemplating dropping the ‘n’ word used to have me rushing around town, home, and work for the people I loved in a heartbeat.
I remember one day I was on the cusp of complete overwhelm with the responsibility of being a mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend, and business owner. Hanging up the phone with a potential new client who was keen to work with me, I was wired. I had jumped the gun and said yes, when I knew all too well that this was a bad idea.
I jumped in my car to go pick up my kids from school, slightly perplexed at what had just unfolded in that thirty-minute conversation. It went from me asking questions to see if we were a good fit, to things being turned around when the potential client questioned my ability, to being locked in to meet in person a week later.
Yet, something didn’t feel right. Still, the thought of landing them as a client was exciting, as it brought in a sizeable paycheck. And it gave me a sense of purpose knowing that I could help them, especially since they’d had bad luck in the past. My past track record of helping people is pretty expansive; I will do just about anything for anyone if I can.
Sending over the invoice and contract with my two kids running around me wildly meant that a fifteen-minute task required an hour. Finally hitting send made my stomach drop. I questioned “How did this all happen?”
Reality hit when one of my kids fell to the floor with a flood of tears—I now needed to get back to my day-to-day tasks.
My life was busy, and I was desperate to get to my yin yoga class. My hubby was running late from work, the kids’ dinner was on the go, while my mate was on speaker phone.
I shared with her how this new client wanted me to drive an hour for our sessions at no extra charge, and that somehow, I had agreed. I felt totally taken advantage of and my alarm bells were going off, but I wanted the extra income.
She asked me, “How would you feel if you didn’t say yes?”
I replied simply, “Bad, because I know I can help them.”
Resting my head on my pillow that night, my mind whirled with thoughts about “what if?”. Is it too late to change my mind? What if they’re amazing people and I’m just scared because I felt a little resistance? I don’t really want to have to drive. Why did I agree to that? It’s my whole day out the window.
The day before our meeting, I noticed that the invoice and contract still had not been paid or signed.
Then my kids’ school decided they were throwing a last-minute sports day, which I really didn’t want to miss. My heart was loud and clear. My daughter won. I decided to call it. These people had not paid or signed, and it was twenty-four hours until their meeting.
I emailed them to cancel our meeting and suggested they find someone else for the job. It took me a good hour to write that short, to-the-point email, and it took me another hour to hit send because I felt so guilty for letting them down. I wished I had just said no at the beginning. Instead, I took a week to stew.
Within five minutes, our phone rang. I had forgotten that they had our number, which I never give out, but they’d insisted that we speak that way. I was completely caught off guard as a woman’s voice started questioning why I would do this at such late notice.
Considering her tone, I felt under attack.
I explained about the unpaid invoice and unsigned contract and then shared how I wanted to be there for my daughter’s unexpected sports day. She grilled me for ten minutes. The only thing I could say was “I apologize,” which I had to repeat over and over until she abruptly hung up the phone.
Rattled, I sobbed while my body slowly stopped shaking. I realized that I had just asserted my boundaries by prioritizing my family first. Still, I felt guilty about what I had just done. But I also felt guilty for not wanting to say no in the first place.
When we continually say yes to things we don’t really want, we are saying no to ourselves. We are confirming that other people matter more than we do.
This is why it’s so important to embrace saying no and practice it with grace instead of guilt. If I had done that from the beginning, I would have saved myself—and my client—a lot of stress.
Here’s how I now practice saying no without guilt, and how you can do it too.
7 Practices to Embrace Saying No Without the Guilt
1. Resist the urge to justify or overexplain yourself.
The fear of saying no is just one part of the puzzle. The second is that we often feel we need a legitimate reason to say no, like we have to prove that our no is completely justifiable. Otherwise, of course we would help, right?
Wrong. Overly explaining or justifying why we are saying no reinforces our need to please others—as if we need them to confirm that our reasoning is valid. That we’re still good people even if we can’t do what they’re requesting. A simple “no, I can’t” is actually enough, so get straight to the point.
Try: Thanks, but I’ll have to pass. Or: I can’t today. Or simply: No, thank you.
2. Give yourself more time to respond.
Not all situations are created equally, but if you can buy yourself some extra time to respond it might save you from jumping right in with a big ole yes to save the day.
Now this doesn’t mean giving yourself permission to ghost someone with an “I’ll see” or “I’m not sure” and then leaving them hanging. What you’re trying to do here is stop yourself from reacting impulsively so you have time to make an informed decision. Give yourself a little time to think it through and realize, for example, that staying at work for an extra couple of hours and missing your weekly yoga class is not worth the overtime in your pocket.
Try: Can I let you know in {insert timeframe of choice}? Or: I’ll put some thought into it and get back to you.
3. Refer them.
The need to please often leaves us wanting to do all the things for everyone. We might not have the exact right skill but will throw ourselves into a task to help someone out.
Over the years I’ve learned that I can only work with my skill set, and if I can’t do something, that doesn’t mean I’m letting someone else down. This simple way to say no is honestly my lifesaver. It doesn’t mean I’m palming off a task but redirecting where to find the right person for the job. I no longer need to be a jack of all trades
If you’re broken down on the highway, you call roadside assistance; if you need your bathroom sorted, you call a plumber. Everyone has a skill set unique to them, so let’s all honor that.
Try: Unfortunately, I can’t; however, you could try {insert person for them to contact}. Or: I know someone who would be perfect for this.
4. Know your limitations.
This is drawing a line in the sand according to our boundaries, and it requires us to learn more about who we are and what we value so we can understand our priorities around time, finances, relationships, home, family, and even our environment. Respecting our priorities means saying no when we realize we are not honoring our values. Each time we let one of our values drop, we are devaluing ourselves.
These limitations can be simple, like not going out because you’ve got a big meeting the next day and want to be well-rested. Here, the importance of work outweighs socialization.
Try: Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that today. Or: I’d like to help, but I can’t manage that at the moment.
Negotiating solutions that work for both parties will help curb the pattern of always saying yes first. Here we already understand our limitations, so now it’s about supporting others in a way that feels good for us instead of just caving into what we’ve been asked.
For example, perhaps a friend needs your help doing something on Saturday, but you have a full day planned out with your family. Instead of saying yes in a heartbeat and moving your family day, you could suggest that you can help on Sunday instead. Think of this as offering what you can do instead of what you can’t.
Try: I can’t help you with that, but I can do *this* for you instead.
6. Be persistent.
If you’re anything like me, I bet the people around you think you’re superhuman. It’s almost like they expect you to help because you have never said no before.
Here is an opportunity to get a little uncomfortable and stand your ground by practicing persistence with that one person who won’t take no for an answer, or keeps going and going until you break. It will bring up a lot of mixed feelings, especially if the other person doesn’t listen and throws all kinds of accusations and emotional tidings your way.
Reinforcing your response over and over again until they get it takes courage, and it might be tempting to start offering excuses if they keep it up. But hold on in there.
Them: “Can you help me get to work?”
You: “Unfortunately, I can’t.”
Them: “You can pick me up whatever time suits you?”
You: “I can’t today.”
Them: “What if I give you gas money?”
You: “Unfortunately, I still can’t.”
Try: Holding your ground. Eventually they’ll get the message.
7. Write yourself a permission slip.
It’s okay to honor ourselves and respect our priorities. And if this is the permission slip you need today, then here it is: There is absolutely no need to do all things for everyone around you. It’s okay to say no. You are not responsible for anyone else but yourself. Remember that. It’s okay to turn down your best friend for a Friday night dinner when you’re exhausted. Or decline a work opportunity when there’s something you’d rather do. Or say no to anything when it’s not in your best interest.
Try: I’m honored you’ve asked, but I can’t. Or: Thank you so much for thinking of me, but not today.
—
Saying no was challenging at first, but it became easier with practice. I no longer feel like I have to be the one to save the day all the time—and this has saved my sanity.
Do you find it hard to say no? And how are you tackling it?
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Feeling Weighed Down by Regret? What Helps Me Let Go
“Be kind to past versions of yourself that didn’t know the things you know now.” ~Unknown
When I taught yoga classes in jails in Colorado and New Jersey, I would end class with the Metta Meditation:
May we all feel forgiveness.
May we all feel happiness.
May we all feel loved.
May all our sufferings be healed.
May we feel at peace.
The women, all clothed in light gray sweatpants, would be in a relaxed yoga posture, usually lying on their yoga mat with their legs up the wall. The fluorescent lights would be full blast, as they always are in a jail or prison. Some women would feel comfortable closing their eyes. Some wouldn’t.
With quiet meditative music playing, I led the meditation with the gentlest voice that I could, taking into consideration that the noise outside the room would be loud. Often, we could hear the incessant dribbling of basketballs in the men’s gym. Someone in the complex might be yelling, and we all would have to work past it.
As I spoke that first line, “May I feel forgiveness,” their tears would start, steady streams rolling down their faces. When we would talk afterward, they said that the most challenging part of the practice was forgiving themselves.
If these inmates had been allowed to dress as they wanted, they would have seemed like any other group of yoga students.
I couldn’t tell who had murdered someone—because their life felt so desperate; or who had too many DWIs—because their addictions (the ones that they used to cover up abuse and trauma) were out of control; or who got a restraining order against an abuser, and then violated it herself—because she was sure he would be loving this time.
Now that they were incarcerated, their parents and children were also suffering the consequences.
Choices That Become Regrets
We can all understand that our personal choices have sometimes created challenges for others. Some of us were just lucky that we weren’t incarcerated for our decisions.
We have all made decisions that we wish we could reverse. We have said things that we want to take back. We neglected something important, sacred, and cherished, and there were consequences. We might have been too naive or too absorbed in principle or perfection, and there were emotional casualties.
These regrets lurk in the backs of our minds. They are like dark shadows stalking our heart space, with ropes binding our self-acceptance, keeping us from flying high. We might still be feeling the repercussions of choices made twenty, thirty, forty years ago. And even today, the shame and guilt impact our decision-making.
The mistakes I made that affected my children are the most challenging to process. The abuse in my second marriage was harmful to my children, my community, and me. The fallout took years to unwind.
When life seemed back to normal, I had time to see my part in the trauma—mainly the red flags that I ignored when I was dating him. Ignoring what went on in his first marriage and the comments that he said, that made me feel uncomfortable, but I didn’t respond to, are my hindsight, my ball and chain, dragging on my self-worth. Time was healing, but I could also be triggered by even little mistakes. Even if I said something wrong in a conversation, like we all do, I could be pulled down the slippery slope to a pile of unresolved remorse.
I have come to enough resolve not to think about those stories most of the time. I’m not sure that I will ever find total peace with some of them. I know that they still have the power to sabotage my peace of mind.
I know that it is worth the effort to come to some resolution of our regrets, even if we have to keep chipping away at them over time.
Processing Regrets Consciously
One way that I have processed regret is to write out the story. Dump it all out of my head—including the hard stuff. If possible, I write out what I would do or say differently the next time. I find that there is healing in knowing that I have learned from my past mistakes.
Writing the story out can also give me a clear picture of what amends I need to make.
Is there someone to say I’m sorry to? Do I need to muster the courage to have a heartfelt dialogue with the other player in the story? Or if I have already said I’m sorry, do I need to forgive myself? Do I need to consciously let the story go now? Do I need to remind myself that it doesn’t do me any good to dwell on the story?
I also take my regrets to my meditation practice.
One of my most potent times of processing regret happened when I was sitting on the garden roof of our stone home, early one morning in the spring. I was feeling heavy. The weight of the abuse in my second marriage, and the resulting divorce, was pulling me down once again.
Listening to the birds singing to each other, I felt a sudden inspiration to recite the Metta Meditation—the one that had brought tears to the inmates’ eyes in those faraway jails.
“May we all feel forgiveness,” I began. This time, the wonderment of my surroundings combined with the ancient familiar words to give me a feeling of release and freedom I hadn’t felt before. The sound of birdsong let me know that I could let go of another piece of my remorse over what I could have done differently. My tears welled up. My heart relaxed.
Accepting that I might not see complete harmony with my regrets is, itself, part of letting them go. I have heard this from other clients.
A common challenge for women in the second half of life is not feeling close to their children. Marcia, the mother of five adult children, regrets how hard she was on her oldest daughter. Her attempts to repair the relationship haven’t had the results she wanted. Accepting that this estrangement might or might not be temporary is challenging. She has assured her daughter that she wishes to be closer, and that is the peace that she can find each day.
We also might need to find a resolution with someone who has already passed. I came to peace with my mother, twelve years after she died, using the Metta Meditation. That completely surprised me and freed up my heart more than I ever thought possible.
Becoming Whole
Every regret, memory of shame, and overwhelming guilt are part of who we are. When we are driven by them, we might make choices that aren’t in our best interest. We might believe that we don’t merit good things or that we deserve to be relentlessly punished. If we fuel our regrets by reiterating them, we reinforce our shame and increase the emotional charge. Our spirit will continue to be fragmented, tethered to the past, and we will feel incomplete.
If we can process our regrets with tenderness and compassion, we can use these hard memories as a part of our wisdom bank.
Wholehearted living is accepting ourselves with all the mistakes that we have made. Wholehearted living is compassion for all the times in our life when we made mistakes. It is understanding that we are not alone—every single adult has regrets. When we live wholeheartedly, we can have healthier relationships and make wiser decisions in all our endeavors.
