Tag: wisdom
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The Abuse Behind My Happy Family Pictures (and Why We Should Talk About It)
TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of physical abuse and may be triggering to some people.
“There remains what seems to be an impenetrable wall of silence around violence, and we must all play a role in breaking this silence.” ~Reese Witherspoon
The other day my brother sent me some rare old photographs of my family. In the middle of those aged images, I found a picture of a seven-year-old girl, so cute! She was wearing two perfect long braids and a smile. Oh, the smile of this lovely girl!
There was also an image of a man sitting down on the sofa, holding a baby in his arms, showing off a big, round, happy face. The man looked loving, respectful, and good to be around. “What a beautiful family!” you would say.
But for me, the one who lived the story behind the pictures, it’s a different feeling. We all know that nothing is what it seems to be, yet we choose to believe in appearances. I guess it’s easier to believe in what we see instead of going deeper.
I wasn’t expecting to receive these pictures on my phone, so when I saw the man’s image, my heart started automatically racing, my hands sweating. He passed away long ago, but my body still remembers my automatic response whenever I heard, saw, or even imagined he was near.
He was actually not a nice person to have around, but you already saw this one coming, didn’t you? I made myself stare at his picture until the feeling faded away. I no longer fear him, but I couldn’t help but get triggered. It was a long time since I’ve seen an image of him.
The last time I saw him, it was in a dream. Not so long ago, I used to have nightmares almost every single night, where he would chase me non-stop, and I would run and run until I woke up. My heart racing, my hands sweating.
I had to go to bed with one light on so I could fall asleep. But the last time we saw each other, there was no fear. In the dream, I looked at him, he looked at me, and that was it. I never saw him again until I got the photographs on my phone.
Those pictures were the image that everyone from outside believed to be the truth or pretended to be. When I was done staring at my abuser’s photograph, I swiped to see the picture of the small girl. I was she, and she was me.
For years I refused to look at old photographs. I would purposefully hide them in drawers to avoid having to look at them and face the hypocrisy: Happy faces, happy smiles, happy appearances. The sadder I was, the happier the smile had to be. That’s what they told me, with words and actions.
The first time he beat me, it was so bad that I lost consciousness for a bit; but the thing I remember the most was the shock I felt. I was absolutely in shock when his big hand hit my tiny face and dragged me to a different room to repeatedly beat my skinny body more comfortably.
He would beat me non-stop everywhere he could, with a rage I never knew existed. I would scream and shout and try to make him stop, but nobody came for me, even though they could. They were still in the kitchen, probably as shocked as I was.
The next day when I woke up, they noticed I had a stroke in the eye. There were no apologies, no explanations.
“Everything is okay.”
“Tell everyone you hit your eye against the table” was the lie I had to tell. I’m a good girl, so that’s what I did. I went to school and I lied to my friends and my teacher, and when I visited family I repeated the same lie to everyone. People were struggling to look at me in the eyes, and my peers wouldn’t play with me. It was hard to watch.
Just like that, I was ugly, everything was my fault, and my abuser was free to go on and make my life a living hell for an entire decade. Typical: the abuser feels like they can continue because there are zero consequences, and the victim is completely isolated, feeling powerless and ashamed for something that someone has done to them.
When I look at myself in the picture, I can’t help but think: “Why would you hurt this child?”
I was kind, I was good. I was a very good girl, I know that now. I took care of my brothers, loved studying, I was funny! I was also very creative and would put on an entire show to entertain you (or bore you to death) in five minutes. I would do anything you say, but I was also an intelligent kid with a strong sense of justice, which did not help me much in my childhood, as you can imagine.
I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been through so much that I would need a book to describe it all. But the worst thing, the most painful thing besides the heartbrokenness, was the silence. The secrecy. If you have suffered from any form of abuse, you certainly know what I’m talking about.
The abuse takes place over and over, and no one speaks up. Plus, we hide it. And we stay silent when we grow up because that’s what we know.
It’s hard to tell your truth when you’ve kept silent pretty much your entire life, especially if everyone around you is doing the exact same thing. Most of the time, until you speak up, until you tell your truth, you go around thinking that you are alone, that you are not ‘normal.’ Unfortunately, you are normal. You are not a rare exception.
What happened to you happens all the time; people simply don’t talk about it. And I would love it if we started having more conversations about this, to help victims and families of victims and to hold the abusers accountable.
The abuse I suffered was perpetuated by silence, and the perpetuation of this silence got in the way of my healing for years. It was through other people’s stories that I was able to start healing.
If you have been through trauma, I encourage you to tell your story. Please, don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to go public and tell everyone about everything if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, but I’d love you to explore the idea of sharing your story of trauma with the people who are close to you.
Something magical happens when you open up.
Each word you let out is a bit of weight that drops. And the more you share, the lighter you feel. I know it is scary, I know you fear people’s reactions, but I promise people will not see you differently. They will just see more of you, and that’s a good thing.
I was so scared of sharing my story with my partner, and all it did was strengthen our relationship. We really see each other now, and I don’t feel like I’m hiding something anymore. I feel free to be me, and he loves me even more for that.
You will see that most people will admire you for the person you have become and understand why you are the way you are or do things the way you do. You will also be surprised to know that some of your friends have been through trauma as well, and you will have wonderful bonding experiences.
It is true what they say: “The truth will set you free.” I believe that. And I believe that it will help liberate other people as well.
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How to Stop Reacting in Anger When You’re Triggered
“Freedom is taking control of the rudder of your life.” ~Yukito Kishiro
“What’s for dinner?” It’s a simple enough question. Yet it’s one that has made me lose my mind at my husband on more than one (or ten or twenty) occasions.
It’s not the question itself. It’s a valid question and one that needs an answer (at least by one of us).
A trigger of mine is being asked to answer a question when I’m already in the middle of something, feeling overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, or just sick of answering questions.
So then I snap and overreact.
I’ve come a long way in my personal growth journey, but I’m by no means perfect. I still react in anger but to a lesser extent and less often. I get mad, but I don’t stay there. I screw up, but I can apologize with humility and forgive myself.
When we’re in reaction-mode to life’s challenges, we aren’t in control. We react in ways that are not in tune with how we want to be.
Learning to navigate our triggers not only enables us to take back control and enjoy life more, it has an amazing trickle-down effect to those around us too. It better connects us in our relationships and models for others or our children what it looks like to be gracefully resilient so those in our circles can mimic the same.
So, what does it look like to react in anger?
Someone at work criticizes you and you instantly get defensive.
Your partner asks you to do something when you clearly have your hands full, so you immediately get pissed.
Plans change unexpectedly, and you panic or get irritated.
Someone in your life is controlling or manipulative, so you either get scared and shut down, or feel livid and lash out.
Someone does something that goes against your core values like being mean or inconsiderate or lying, and you explode.
It can also mean reacting to your own thoughts or actions and getting angry with yourself for “doing it again,” being lazy, or failing.
And all that leads to feeling guilty for saying things you don’t really mean or making a mountain out of a molehill, or maybe even rehashing past events.
It can lead you to beat yourself up again for how you handled things in the past.
And it can leave you feeling misunderstood because you recognize that your reaction stems from something deeper than this one incident; a culmination of events, or some underlying fear created this trigger for you.
Why We Are Reactive in the First Place
We are reactive or over reactive when our stress response is triggered sending us into fight, flight, or freeze mode.
We react on autopilot. In this space, we aren’t in full control, and it’s hard to see things clearly and objectively.
Sometimes our triggers relate to events from the past. For example, you may get triggered when someone ignores you because your parents frequently neglected you when you were a kid, causing you to feel unimportant. Other times, our triggers are events that make us feel out of control.
For example, one of my triggers used to be slow drivers on the highway. I would instantly snap into fight mode and get angry. I’d drive too close to them or shake my fist (or special finger) at them, honk my horn, or speed past them in a fit of rage.
Sitting here calmly as I reflect back on my past, reactive self, I’m a little embarrassed and shocked remembering the actions I took while angry. That’s because I’m in a calm place and my fight mode is not initiated, so I have full control at the moment. I wouldn’t do any of those things when I’m in a healthy mental space—those choices don’t reflect the kind of person I want to be.
When we react from a place of fear and anger, we rarely feel good about the things we say and do.
How to Stop Being So Reactive and Respond to Stress More Calmly
We don’t have to let our fear and anger control us. At any time, we can make a choice to respond to life from a calmer place. Here’s how.
Prioritize self-care so you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or on the verge of snapping.
If you overextend yourself or regularly neglect your needs, you’ll likely feel triggered by even minor annoyances because your default state will be imbalance and agitation. And you’ll find it nearly impossible to handle major issues because you won’t have the inner strength to handle them. Take good care of yourself, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and everything will feel more manageable.
Set yourself up to not be reactive by identifying your stress triggers.
What things lead you to react in anger or fear? Awareness is key here! Create a list of things that you know trigger you, and why.
Then describe how you typically react when those triggers occur.
For example, a trigger of mine has always been other people getting angry at little things that I don’t think warrant being angry about.
Funny enough, my reaction to their anger was anger! I would get mad that they are angry and yell at them to be calm. Obviously, this strategy didn’t work for me.
Then ask yourself, “How do I want to respond instead”?
As I reflected on how I usually reacted to my triggers, I realized I would rather remain composed than lose my cool and flip out. If I could pick any response to other people being angry, it would be for me to stay calm and in control.
And that’s one of the main reasons I realized I have such a strong reaction to other people’s anger. I think that the “right” way to be in this world is to be calm, kind, and compassionate. When someone reacts in the polar opposite way, it conflicts with my values, and ironically, I end up getting angry with them.
This is why this step is so important. We often react in ways that are not in tune with our values when emotions are running high, so we need to consciously decide, in advance, how we want to respond in stressful situations.
From there, think about what you are trying to control that you have no control over.
At a certain point, I realized that some people are going to get angry, and I won’t agree with their behavior. My anger stemmed from judging their reactions and wanting to control how they were feeling and behaving. I have no control over other people. I may be able to influence them, but I will never be able to control them.
If traffic triggers you, you may be trying to control your time because being delayed makes you feel anxious. If chaos triggers you, you may be trying to control your environment to create a sense of safety. If angry people trigger you, you may be trying to control how other people react and experience stressful situations.
Now, ask yourself, “What do I have control over?
Since I don’t have control over what other people do, and wanting to control them was creating anger within me, in order to reach my desired response of staying calm and in control I had to shift my focus to myself. Because the only thing I have control over is what I do.
So when someone else is angry and I think they’re overreacting, I can take some deep breaths, step away from the situation, and ask the other person how I can help (in an effort to help calm them), or just sit back and allow them to process the situation however they need to in that moment.
I started to notice that as I stopped reacting to anger with anger, the people around me showed less anger over time. And when they did get angry, they didn’t stay angry as long.
I started to realize that they were often mimicking me, whether they realized it or not. Of course, part of it was that I was no longer adding to the anger and fueling it from my end too. But seeing what it looks like to stay calm and in control is an important skill to witness. It shows others what it looks like so they can do the same.
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We all get triggered at times, but we don’t have to say and do things we regret, which will ultimately damage our relationships and leave us feeling bad about ourselves. With a little self-awareness, we can stop reacting on autopilot and start responding to life from a calm, neutral place. Maybe not all the time, but more often than not, and we’ll feel a lot more peaceful and in control as a result!
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Why I Don’t Define Myself as a Victim and What I Do Instead
“The struggle of my life created empathy—I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.” ~Oprah Winfrey
See yourself as a victim and you become one. Identify as a victim and you give your tormentor power over you, the very power to define who you are.
Statements like this have become commonly accepted wisdom today because they are undoubtedly true. If you see yourself as a victim, you will be one. You will be someone who has been defeated, someone who is at the mercy of another, and that is no way to live.
And yet, the truth is that many people have been victims. Actually, it’s probably fair to say that everyone has been a victim of something or someone at some point in their lives. So, how can we reject being a victim without denying reality? On the other hand, if we accept being a victim, aren’t we then giving up our own power and independence?
The answer I think lies in part in a subtlety of language, a small distinction with a big difference. Rather than defining ourselves as victims, why not just say that we have been victimized?One thing this immediately does is to describe the act, not the person. It means someone was taken advantage of, mistreated, bullied, tricked, or whatever the offense was. It does not disempower that person thereafter by defining him or her going forward after the event.
In fact, “victimize” is a verb, and just using it seems to bring a sharper focus on the subject rather than on the object. When I hear the word “victimize,” my first thought is “Who did that?” not “Who was the victim?”
While that may sound like splitting hairs, the word “victimize” describes a moment in time, not a person. It accurately portrays a reality without turning that reality into a perpetuity by defining someone as a victim. It rightfully places emphasis more on the person who shouldn’t have done that rather than the person who shouldn’t have let it happen, as if he or she had any choice in the matter.
However, there is a much more important point here than those semantics, which is this: While we don’t want to define ourselves as victims, we also don’t want to erase an important part of our story, a part that may have played more of a role in our personal growth and development than anything else.
As unpleasant as it may be to experience, pain deepens people. To hurt and to be sick is to commune with all of those people who are sick and hurting and who have ever been sick or hurt or ever will be sick or hurt.
In suffering, one is given the chance to suffer along with everyone else who is suffering, to be connected with a vast array of people facing innumerable different circumstances. To suffer is to be human, part of a much greater whole.
When coming out the other side, we have a choice. We can forget our suffering and learn nothing, remaining unchanged. Or, we can define ourselves as a sufferer and collect another sad story to cling to. The telling of that story is what creates our ego, and indeed, for many people, that ego is a victim story.
While on its face a victim identity is not a happy thing, the victim story does have its allure. It certainly can be a way to avoid responsibility and curry sympathy from others. More than anything, it provides the stability of an invented identity, which is exactly what the ego is.
That stability staves off the ultimate fear—that of life’s ever-changing uncertainty. But, at the same time, clinging to this stability causes us to fight with life, and hence leads to suffering. It is a rejection of life.
However, there is a third way, which is to accept what happened to us and learn from our suffering to become a wiser, kinder, and more empathetic person. It is to embrace our victimization without becoming a victim.
Suffering is the great teacher and the great uniter. There is an ancient spiritual teaching from India which asserts that there are three ways to acquire spiritual knowledge: through experience, through reading books, and through a teacher, or someone who knows about it.
Unfortunately, if you’ve ever met or read about people who have undergone a major spiritual awakening, or if you have experienced one yourself, it is usually the result of the former, and that “experience” is usually pain and suffering.
So, when we’ve been victimized, we gain some insight and some power. We can recognize those people who are or have also been victimized, or even who are just hurting, and more readily empathize with their experiences. We are more able to be that helping hand, that listening ear, that open heart.
This is a lesson I have learned though painful experience.
A few years back, I was in a cancer caregiver support group when my mom was going through her cancer journey starting just a few weeks after my father passed away. I moved back home from very far away and had served in part as caretaker to both of them—a very difficult experience.
I stayed in the group until my mom was miraculously recovered and it was time for me to get on with my life, maybe after a period of sixteen months. When someone left the group, different members would go around in the circle a say a sort of little tribute to the person leaving.
One woman in the group came from a very different set of circumstances than I did. I’m a white guy from the suburbs who grew up in stable family and attended a prestigious university. She was a mixed-race African American and Hispanic woman who grew up in a single mother household in the Bronx and went back to get her degree as an adult.
She had a confession to make. She said when I first came to the group, I just seemed like a privileged white guy from the suburb where I was born. However, as she got to know me and heard me in the group, she knew there was “something” about me—that I could listen to people and hear their pain and somehow relate to them. I could hold space and give good advice at the same time, and she knew it was from the heart. It was not something she expected of “someone like [me].”
What she couldn’t tell was that the picture-perfect suburban upbringing I had masked an uglier truth. Unfortunately, my childhood story was one of frequent abuse—physical, emotional, and even on a couple of occasions sexual.
I grew up in a family of four children, the scapegoat of the family. It was a relationship dynamic that my parents taught to all of my siblings. Thinking back on my childhood, nearly all of my happy memories took place outside of the home—at school, at friends’ houses, by myself, anywhere but home. I was alone in a house full of people.
While I’d love to say that ingrained a tenderness in me, an intrinsic empathy for the downtrodden, it didn’t. It hardened me and made me uncharitable. I could tough it out. I could push past it all. Why couldn’t other people? That was my attitude.
Then, well into my adulthood, I had a crisis—a complete emotional breakdown. After years of illness, a difficult career, tragedies among my friends and family, it all become too much. I collapsed but was reborn. It was at that time, when all my defenses crumbled, that I experienced a total change of heart. Among other things, I found my empathy. It was a bottomless well of goodness that I never even knew was there.
More than anything, I found myself drawn to the outsider. Deep down my harder self had seen the outsider with contempt, probably because I could recall how painful it was to be the outsider growing up. Now, I was able to empathize with that outsider as I fully accepted and integrated the whole of my experience, including my childhood of victimization.
And yet, having grown up the way I did and even after the big “shift” caused by my breakdown, I still didn’t really think of myself as a “nice” person. I suppose my outer reserve remained intact because I didn’t think people thought of me that way either.
What that lady in the cancer group said to me that day was better, more meaningful, and more rewarding than any trophy, award, accolade, or recognition I have ever received. But it was a compliment dearly bought, for without my childhood victimization and the suffering I’d experienced in my adult life, I never would have earned it.
A victim I am not. For that to be true, I’d still need to be sad or resentful. I’d need to be living in some maladapted way, surviving through coping mechanisms and pain management. Is it upsetting when I think about that innocent, happy, carefree childhood I never had? It sure is. But my past brought me to my happy present and taught me heart lessons that I never would have otherwise received.
When I look back, would I want to live through it all again? Definitely not, but I’m glad it happened that way and thankful for those experiences.
But, while being nobody’s victim, I do not reject—indeed I embrace—my victimization. It’s part of my story, maybe the most critical part.
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How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself and Feel Like a Success Even If You Fail
“If you love yourself it doesn’t matter if other people don’t like you because you don’t need their approval to feel good about yourself.” ~Lori Deschene
In 2010, after a surge of post-ten-day-meditation-course inspiration, I publicly announced to the world that I was going to make a film about me winning the kayak world championships.
A very bad idea in retrospect. But at the time I felt invincible and inspired.
I had super high expectations of myself and of the film and thought it was all possible.
Coming out of a four-year competition retirement meant a rigorous six-hour-a-day training schedule, while simultaneously documenting the journey, alone.
I put an insane amount of self-imposed pressure on myself not only to be the best in the entire world, but also make an award-winning documentary at the same time, without a coach.
To make a long story short, it was a disaster.
Three days before the competition, my back went into spasm. I was so stressed out I couldn’t move.
Jessie, a good kayaking friend, knocked on the door of my Bavarian hotel room.
“Polly, take this, it’s ibuprofen and will help your back relax. Remember why you are here, you can do this,” she said.
The morning of the competition I felt okay. I did my normal warm up and had good practice rides. “Okay. Maybe I can do this,” I thought.
My first ride was okay, but not great. All I had to do was the same thing again and my score would be enough to make it through the preliminary cut to the quarter finals.
Someone in the crowd shouted at me, “Smile, Polly!”
I lost my focus, had a disastrous second ride, and made a mistake that I wasn’t able to recover from.
The worst thing happened, and it all went wrong.
Humiliated, embarrassed, and disappointed, I went on a long walk and cried.
My lifelong dream of being a world champion athlete just vanished, and my heartbreak was compounded even more by the public humiliation I’d created for myself.
I pulled it together and continued to film the rest of the competition and felt some protection by hiding behind my camera.
“So, what’s next Polly? Are you going to keep training for the next World Championships?” Claire, the woman who won, asked me at the end of the event.
“No,” I replied without even thinking. “I need to go to India.”
India had been calling me for years, like a little voice that connected a string to my heart.
“Being the world champion isn’t going to give me what I thought I wanted. There is more for me to learn. I want to approve of myself whether I win or lose. I want my thoughts to support me rather than sabotage me. I want to feel connected to something bigger than myself,” I told her.
A year later, I went to the equivalent of the world championships of yoga.
Three months of intensive Ashtanga yoga study with R. Sharath Jois, in the bustling city of Mysore, India.
Practicing at 4:15 am every day on my little space of yoga mat, surrounded by sixty other people, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, I began the journey of facing my internal world.
The toxic energy emitting from my mind, in the form of constant internal commentary of judgment and drama, looked and felt like an actual smokestack.
I felt like a dog chasing its tail and was in a total creative block with editing my film.
A yoga friend said, “Polly, even if your film helps only one person it is worth finishing it.”
This was not what my ego wanted to hear.
My ego wanted to inspire the world and had visions of, if not the Academy Awards, well then at least getting into the Sundance Film Festival.
It took three years, and I finished the film. However, releasing it to the world brought up all of my insecurities. I felt exposed and like a huge fraud.
How could I have made such a bold statement, failed, and then remind everyone about my failure three years later?
I released the film and ran to North India, high in the Himalayas where there was no internet.
Like leaving your baby on the doorstep of a stranger’s house, I birthed it and bolted.
Even though Outside Magazine did a great article about the film, in my eyes it was a failure.
It didn’t get into the big festivals I wanted it to get into and I didn’t bother submitting it to the kayaking film festivals it would have done well in.
In 2019 I left India and returned to Montana to teach kayaking for the summer.
It was the twenty-year anniversary of the kayak school where I spent over ten years teaching.
The school had hired a young woman paddler named Darby.
She told me, “You know, Polly, I watched your film about training for the Worlds, and it inspired me to train too. I made the USA Junior team and came second at the 2015 Junior World Championships. Thank you for making that film.”
Humble tears of disbelief welled in my eyes.
My film helped one person, and I was meeting her.
The takeaway was that my ego and perfectionism got in the way of possibly helping even more people.
I shot myself and my film in the foot so that my ego could continue to tell me I was not worthy.
But this simply is not true.
Hiding and running to keep my ego feeling safe no longer cuts it.
The world is in a deep spiritual crisis right now.
My ego would love to be in a cave in the Himalayas meditating away from it all.
However, that is not what I have been called to do.
Putting myself out there still feels uncomfortable, but I know that hiding is not going to help people. I have decided that good is good enough and am now taking small steps in the direction of my discomfort.
I have learned a huge, humble lesson in self-acceptance, self-love, and self-compassion.
The top fourteen lessons I now live by:
1. Listen to the inner voice that whispers and tugs at your heart. If you’re passionate about something, don’t let anyone or anything convince you not to give it a go.
2. Do the thing first. Enlist support from someone you trust but share about it publicly after you have done it so that you don’t create unnecessary pressure and feel like a failure if you struggle.
3. Do things one small step at a time so you don’t feel overwhelmed and tempted to quit.
4. Helping one person is a massive win.
5. Drop all expectations—the outcome doesn’t have to be anything specific for the experience to be valuable.
6. Do your best and let go of the results. If you’ve done your best, you’ve succeeded.
7. Celebrate every small success along the way to boost your confidence and motivate yourself to keep going.
8. Be proud of yourself every day for these small successes.
9. Approve of yourself without needing the ego-stroking that comes with massive success and know that the results of this one undertaking don’t define you.
10. True success is inner fulfillment. If you’ve followed your dream and done your best, give yourself permission to feel good about that.
11. Do not compare yourself to other people. Set your own goals/intentions that feel achievable for you.
12. Every “fail” is actually a step in the right direction. It redirects your compass and helps you learn what you need to do or change to get where you want to go.
13. Growth means getting out of the comfort zone, but you don’t need to push yourself too far. Go to the edge of discomfort, but where it still feels manageable.
14. If you freak out or feel resistance, take it down a notch. Move forward but in smaller steps.
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![How to Access Awakened Consciousness Through Meditation [Free eBook]](https://dev.tinybuddha.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_3042.jpg)
How to Access Awakened Consciousness Through Meditation [Free eBook]
If you’re anything like me, you’ve likely tried meditation, or even adopted a consistent habit, only to question if you’re doing something wrong. You show up and put in the time, but despite your best efforts, you’re not reaping the expected benefits, or at least not with the consistency you originally hoped to see.
Perhaps you initially turned to meditation for stress-relief, some way to defuse the constant sense of pressure and overwhelm that’s prevalent in our achievement-focused society.
Or maybe you first tried meditation to help you focus and be more present so that your days don’t go by in a blur while you’re busy rehashing the past and worrying about the future.
Both were true for me.
Before I found meditation, I lived my days shuffling through a number of damaging mental habits: dwelling on victim stories, beating myself up for all the ways I felt I’d failed, and pressuring myself to somehow achieve massive success in order to prove my worth.
I was missing out on my life while focusing on all the life I’d already missed and all the life I might miss if I didn’t somehow do better.
I hoped meditation would save me from myself, and in some ways it has. But I’ve also placed unrealistic expectations on my practice and found myself making, what I later learned, are common meditation “mistakes”—mistakes that prevent us from experiencing the greatest benefit of meditation: awakened consciousness.
Spiritual luminary Craig Hamilton explores this thoroughly in Unlocking the Power of Meditation, a FREE eBook that I suspect you’ll find both eye-opening and life-changing.
In a nutshell, awakened consciousness is a sense of connection to our true nature, beyond our mind and ego. It’s the place where we can easily access our intuition, wisdom, creativity, confidence, inner strength, and resilience.
This is what I think we’re all after: not just reduced stress and greater focus in the moment, but access to an expansive, sacred part of ourselves that brings us an immense sense of freedom, flow, and connection to everyone and everything around us.
If you’ve struggled with meditation, as well—if you’ve found it difficult to maintain a regular practice and feel you haven’t experienced all the mental, emotional, and physical benefits you’ve read about—I highly recommend you check out Unlocking the Power of Meditation.
In this powerful resource based on groundbreaking research, Craig reveals the five surprising, yet pervasive mistakes most of us make that prevent us from accessing the true potential of meditation.
He also shares one powerful shift we can make to ignite our meditation practice and access awakened consciousness.
When you learn how to practice what Craig calls “direct awakening” you’ll discover how to:
-Access the miracle of awakened consciousness every time you meditate and allow its powerful energy to infuse every aspect of your life.
-Experience a deep inner freedom from the hypnotic spell of fear and desire, enabling you to meet life’s challenges with courage and grace, beyond reactivity or compulsion.
-Access a source of wisdom that arises spontaneously in response to the needs of the moment, bringing forth laser-like clarity faster than the speed of thought.
-Tap into a dynamic and seemingly limitless source of energy, enabling you to do whatever needs to be done in each moment without burning out or becoming drained.
-Access an inner well of creativity that brings forth a seemingly endless flow of unexpected new ideas, visions, and integrative solutions from a place beyond the mind.
-Become a conduit for an overflowing love and care that flows through you into the world from a place beyond your mind’s comprehension.
It’s a short eBook with a massive impact, and it ends with an invitation to a free ninety-minute workshop that can help you take your meditation practice to the next level.
If you’re ready to move beyond the most common mistakes meditators make and live a life filled with meaning, purpose, love, and inspiration, you can download the free eBook Unlocking the Power of Meditation here.
I hope you find it as helpful and illuminating as I did!
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6 Mistakes We Make When Depressed or Having a Panic Attack
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.” ~James Allen
When I was eighteen I went through a very stressful period, which led to the onset of panic attacks. I often remember how in bed one night I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of terror. I’d never experienced such fear before. Sure, I was scared of lots of things, but this new feeling was unique.
The most accurate way I can describe it is a kind of animal-like horror. It seemed to have come from the deepest, darkest recesses of my subconscious mind, caused by primeval, bestial mechanisms.
The feeling was so deep and all encompassing that it was as if nothing else existed, just this fear coursing through my body as I writhed about, sweaty and tense.
The most unfamiliar and therefore terrifying aspect of the fear was that it didn’t have an object: it wasn’t clear what I was actually afraid of. From the very start, it was simply fear—unconnected to any tangible thing.
That night marked the beginning of my period of panic attacks. Over time, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, and general health issues augmented these.
At the age of twenty-four, I started to fight back; with the help of meditation I managed to get over my depression and panic, and now they no longer torment me.
During my struggle I came to realize that I was hindering myself with mistakes I was making, and it was only when I overcame these that I started to make real progress.
I often talk with people who have been or are going through the same kinds of problems, and I notice just how many of them also come up against these mistakes. So what are they?
1. Resisting.
When we feel a bad mood, depression, or panic coming on, our first wish is to get rid of it as quickly as possible, to change the “bad” mood into a “good” one. This is natural; it’s how we’re made. But all too often our attempts just make everything worse.
Resistance forces us to think constantly about our condition, to focus all of our attention on it, to feel bad because it won’t go away, to wait tensely for relief.
The simple truth is that you can’t control everything. Attempting to get your condition “under control” often leads to extra stress and unwanted bad feelings. It’s sometimes best just to let go and cease resistance.
If we relax and let our depression or panic come, without trying to control anything, accepting that they’re only temporary feelings that will pass in due course, things become much easier.
2. Feeling bad about feeling bad.
We start to have thoughts such as “I’m going to die or go crazy,” “This’ll never end,” and “I hate that I can’t enjoy life like other people; I feel utterly miserable.”
Our mind starts to add new fears and negative emotions to the depression we already have. And, as I saw for myself, these fears and feelings end up constituting the main part of our condition.
It’s actually your mind, not the depression and panic themselves, which makes each episode so unbearable.
If you don’t believe me, try this experiment: The next time you’re overwhelmed by an attack, try to simply observe it without getting caught up in or assessing it in any way. Just watch it in its pure form, without any thoughts. Try to notice which parts of your body you feel it in and how it comes and goes.
In this way, you’ll remove your mind from the formula of your distress. You’ll notice how much weaker the attacks become when they’re no longer supported by your thought processes. Give it a try, making notes of the results if you like. Would it be true to say that it’s not all as terrifying and dreadful as it seemed at first?
When you stop feeding your depression with fears and thoughts it becomes much easier to shake off.
3. Comparing.
“Everything was so good when I wasn’t depressed! What an amazing time it was, and how awful it is now. Why can’t I go back?!” These are the kinds of things many people think, me included, but such thoughts bring nothing but harm.
If you want to beat depression or panic, you have to stop comparing. Forget that there’s a past and future. What’s happened has happened. Don’t dwell on it, and instead live in the here and now.
Start with what you have, and don’t think about how it all was before. Learning how to live in the present moment will make your depression or panic much more bearable.
4. Asking pointless questions.
Many people spend hours asking themselves all kinds of questions: “When will this end?” “Why me?” and “What have I done to deserve this?”
To make use of a well-known Buddhist parable, these questions are as much use as trying to figure out the source of the arrow which blinded you: it’s just not that important. What you need to know is how to pull the arrow out.
Questions of the “Why me?” ilk just make your condition worse, forcing you as they do to complain and be upset about something that’s already happened. Focus on what will help you get past your depression and don’t bother with questions which don’t serve this purpose.
5. Believing your fears.
We think that because we experience such fear at the idea of going outside, meeting people, or going on the underground, it means that something bad is going to happen. There’s nothing surprising in this, because nature has made fear in order to warn us of danger. We’re made in such a way that we instinctively believe this fear and respond to it.
But our fear hardly ever arises due to a real threat. For example, the fear of losing your mind or suffocating during a panic attack is simply fallacious. Stop believing this fear. Whatever it is you’re afraid of at these times isn’t going to happen.
Fear is nothing more than a feeling, a chemical reaction in your head. If you’re overcome with terror when you go down into the underground, it doesn’t mean that something horrific is laying in wait there. It’s like a malfunctioning fire alarm—just because it’s going off doesn’t mean there’s actually a fire.
So stop listening to your “inner alarm” every time it goes off. Don’t pay it any heed: go out, meet your friends, get on a plane, and let the alarm keep ringing. Nor should you try to “switch it off,” as this doesn’t always work. Just ignore it. In other words, stop taking your fear as something real.
6. Seeking reasons for your depression in the outside world.
This is another mistake I made myself. I thought that my malaise was linked solely to the way my life and work were going. I believed that if I could just change that, I’d be happy.
But then, with meditation, I realized that everything I needed to be happy was inside me, and likewise what was causing me to suffer!
I was so edgy, anxious, feeble, caught up in bad habits, undisciplined, and irresponsible that even if I’d succeeded in changing the external circumstances of my life, the traits that had given rise to my depression would still be there.
In order to get rid of my depression, I had to get rid of the internal reasons that had caused it.
So don’t keep telling yourself, “If I get a new job, everything’ll be smooth sailing,” or “If I get rid of everything I’m scared of, there won’t be anything to be afraid of any more.” Your depression and fears reside inside you, so wherever you are, they will be too, projected onto the outside world.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to improve your life. First of all, though, you need to direct your efforts inwards.
Conclusion: Acting Against What Feels Like Common Sense
Now, when I look at these mistakes and remember making them myself, I can see the one thing that unites them.
The reason we make them is that when depression or panic pounces on us, we start to think and act in the way our instincts and gut feelings tell to us. “Be afraid, run away, resist, danger awaits you everywhere, you’re trapped,” they whisper.
Tuning in to this during a bout of depression aggravates our situation. This is because our mind, emotions, and instincts are strongly conditioned by depression, so listening to them is like listening to the voice of a malicious, invisible demon intent on leading you to ruin.
To free yourself from depression once and for all you have to drop all your notions of common sense; abandoning your sense of reason, you must act against them.
Don’t resist your depression, accept your fears and allow them to simply pass; don’t get caught up in them and don’t believe them; don’t compare your current situation to how it was before—all things that feel illogical when you’re in a state of terror or intense depression.
What I’m advising may seem to be the polar opposite of what your gut encourages you to do. But it’s precisely because people continue to give credence to and obey these feelings that depression is such a widespread complaint. You need to act somewhat paradoxically to get rid of it.
My own experience has convinced me of this. The understanding I reached allowed me to come through my difficult situation and continues to help me cope with challenges I encounter on my journey.
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10 Reasons Why I Ditched the Drink & What Happened When I Quit Alcohol
“When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That’s when the sparkle started for me.” ~Mary Karr
Growing up I thought alcohol meant adulthood. As a child I eagerly watched the cacophony of advertisements, commercials, TV shows, and movies swirling, mixing, swigging, sipping, and smelling those delicious drinks that the beautiful and the sexy preferred.
Alcohol was literally the forbidden fruit—a mystery and an abomination that not my parents, nor anyone in my family—really had anything to do with. I assumed this was due to my family’s lack of class or sophistication. Wine, beer, and spirits meant pairing with palates and inclusion in the upper reaches of society. It was beyond us, and it seemed foreign and fun. I couldn’t wait to try it.
I remember my first full beer at around twelve or thirteen. I snuck away with my best friend Mimi to guzzle a couple of Coronas in the woods behind my house. It made my head spin and we giggled, but it left me feeling confused and dirty.
Even as a teenager, alcohol failed to prove its glory. The glamour that I’d read about in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker’s Jazz Age novels never manifested in the desperate high school parties or back seat sessions I had available to me, so I gave it up, opting for other types of drugs like marijuana and LSD.
Fill the Void
I stayed busy striving academically during my years at university, so alcohol never played a starring role. I drank a few glasses of red wine on a Friday night when I cleaned my apartment and learned how to chug an Irish Car Bomb with my friends at our local pub, but it never disrupted my flow.
It wasn’t until I graduated and started working in the “real” world that alcohol became my dearest friend. And looking back, I realize that I only get chummy with alcohol when I’m not feeling fulfilled or satisfied with life.
I finished my degree in 2002, a year after September 11, 2001. The US economy was in a downward spiral, and I had serious doubts about my place in the world. It was hard enough being twenty-two, but twenty-two trying to find a decent-paying job with a BA in Historic Preservation was almost impossible. I landed a paying internship and then a part-time gig as an assistant archivist and filled in my extra hours working as a paralegal at my friend’s dad’s law firm.
After a lifetime of school and four years of university, I couldn’t believe the adult life and the freedom I was promised consisted of desk work for eight hours a day that didn’t pay enough for me to move out of my parents’ house. The prestige and the career I assumed was waiting for me failed to be a possibility. My life was nothing but a rebooted version of monotony from my school age years, so I started drinking to escape it.
I remember needing to go out during my early twenties—like needing it so bad. Staying home alone on a Friday night was akin to suicide. I had my weekend planned and sorted by Wednesday, my friends assembled, outfits purchased, and possible bars and clubs all picked out.
I needed the release. I needed to ring out the chaos and the comfort and the elation those sixty hours away from work could bring me. I needed to dress up, go out, get as drunk and insane and wild as I possibly could to get all that balled up energy and anger out of me so I could stuff down my disappointment at life from Monday to Friday. Even when I worked a Saturday shift at a clothing boutique, I was either still drunk or hungover.
I remember how being drunk made me feel. It made me feel alive, energetic, magnetic, magical, powerful, fun, charismatic, fearless, hilarious, untouchable, and sexy. Alcohol gave me what I could not seem to muster at all during the weekdays sober, but what I so desperately craved.
Looking back, I see now that what alcohol gave me was an undiluted, raw version of myself. What was happening after two or three drinks was what should have been happening sober—I felt like myself.
But years of child abuse and learning to people-please and put others first had forced my authentic self into the backroom. Alcohol was the only way I could feel like myself. But I didn’t know that then and I never stopped at three drinks. I stopped at stumbling, mumbling, passing out at 4am drunk.
Alcohol was an escape from a life and a person I didn’t like, but nonetheless, both I had created.
Finding Freedom
At twenty-six, I did something radical. I cancelled my wedding to a lovely man and decided to leave the US and travel to Australia. After four years of steady alcoholism, I finally realized that the life I was living was a prison not a life.
As soon as I made the decision to leave, I stopped drinking. I started working more and saving money. I had somewhere to go and someone to be. I wanted a future.
By the time I was twenty-eight, I was married, in love, and pregnant with my first child. Happy and healthy, alcohol had no room in my life. It didn’t come to stay again until after my second child was born, and I realized my husband wasn’t happy. Then, alcohol settled in while I drank myself into ignorance as a mother, wife, homeowner, and business-owner who didn’t want to admit that she had again constructed a prison instead of a life.
Alcohol kept me alive during my subsequent divorce. The pain was so severe that, looking back, I’m grateful I had something to numb it. But two years after my divorce I realized that I was thirty-eight and totally free.
It was time to finally live the life I knew I wanted. I was old enough to know myself and know what I needed to feel creative, alive, and happy. So, on 1 April 2019, I made a list of all the things that were not actively contributing to my life. Alcohol was number one on that list.
Now, two years after giving alcohol (and all other drugs and addictions) up, I can easily say that I am so much happier and healthier without alcohol in my life. I don’t miss it at all. In fact, I wish more people would jump on the sober bandwagon.
If you think you might be keen to join me, consider these ten ways giving up alcohol changed my life for the better. I hope these reasons are enough to convince you to ditch the drink.
1. I learned how to feel my emotions.
Instead of numbing myself, I had to learn how to feel all the feels. This led to learning how to feel and clear emotions as well as deal with my childhood trauma head on. Healing my trauma was the best thing I ever did.
When hiding my true self, I had invited alcohol into my life in an attempt to numb the pain I was carrying around in my body, but it also allowed me to be my authentic self without fear. Healing trauma allows you to present your true self to the world.
2. I learned how to play.
Not drinking alcohol leaves more space for you to be a kid again. Instead of sitting at the bar complaining about your problems, you are free to ride a bike, swim at the beach, splash in the pool, run, jump, explore, and learn because life becomes a wonderland again. Living alcohol-free just invites in more of those rare, beautiful, and innocent moments.
3. I lost weight.
Alcohol is pure sugar, people. There ain’t nothing good about it. Bad for your liver, bad for your insulin levels, and bad for your brain. Not one good thing. At forty, I am thinner than I was during my twenties when I was binging all weekend long.
4. I balanced my hormones.
As a female, I can attest to having very disrupted hormone levels. After quitting alcohol, my PMS symptoms drastically improved. Alcohol is sugar, which disrupts your insulin. Because it disrupts sleep, it also throws off your cortisol. Studies have also proven that increased alcohol intake increases your estrogen levels. If you want balanced hormones, say goodbye to alcohol.
5. I slept better.
Alcohol massively disrupts REM sleep. Take a few nights off from your evening wine and see how well you hit the sack. While we mistakenly believe alcohol relaxes us and eases stress, it actually has the opposite effect. Not getting proper deep sleep leaves you feeling worse and worse.
6. I saved money.
Alcohol is expensive, and when you’re drunk you want more and will stupidly spend it. Saving money creates the actual freedom you seek. Not going out to bars and sipping on fancy cocktails is one of the easiest ways to save money.
7. I developed hobbies.
Instead of using alcohol as a hobby, I started to play tennis, learned sailing, and started up a side hustle. As a result of not drinking, I’m much more interesting.
Quitting alcohol sadly means losing a few friends. You’ll instantly notice which friends do have alcohol hobbies. But that’s okay. Having actual friends and real hobbies is much more rewarding.
8. I’m happier.
I’m not as stressed, tired, worried, or angry. Alcohol seems to take away the pain of life momentarily, but it comes back to bite you tenfold the next day. Alcohol is like a health and wellness credit card. You don’t have to pay now, but you will have to pay later, plus interest.
Not needing alcohol to numb or feel comfortable in scary situations is such a relief. My mind is clear and calm, and that brings me immense pleasure and joy.
9. I don’t need alcohol to talk to people.
Instead of running straight for the wine at networking events, I just sip on water and make casual conversation. I am who I am. I also try to make sure that I ask interesting questions.
No more “So what do you do?” I want to know who you are, what you’re about, and I dig around and see what interesting facts about you I can unearth. People become much more fascinating sober.
10. I’m leading by example.
My kids are witnessing firsthand that their mother does not need alcohol, so neither do they. I’m sure they remember when I drank, but I also want them to see me sober.
While I don’t villainize alcohol and I know that they will most likely experiment with it, I want to be sure that they know that they can live a happy and fulfilling life without it.
Bottom Line and Disclaimer
I’m not advocating for the abolition of alcohol by any means. What I am advocating for is more responsible representations of alcohol in advertising, movies, and film. Being exposed to such blatant subconscious programming at a young age gave me the belief that alcohol would add something to my life that I felt it was missing.
And while I know that I used alcohol as medication to treat my unhealed childhood trauma, I know that teaching kids why people use drugs and alcohol would be more effective. If someone told me during my teenage years that people abuse drugs and alcohol to cover up the pain they are in, that could have changed everything for me.
I never sought out treatment from AA because I believed my consumption of alcohol was not irregular or excessive by society’s standards. Looking back, this greatly disturbs me. I needed help. What I really needed was to heal my trauma much sooner. It took many, many years to find the right help to heal.
If you are consuming more than two glasses of alcohol on more than two subsequent nights per week, then you most likely have a problem.
If you need alcohol or any drugs just to get by, then you have a problem.
Drugs and alcohol are ways for us to cope with pain. The best advice I can offer you is to seek help for the underlying issue and heal the reason why you need to drink. I wish you all the best and know that you are more interesting, powerful, and fun sober.
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When the Pursuit of Happiness Makes You Unhappy: Why I Stopped Chasing My Dream
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~Joseph Campbell
From as far back as I can remember, I was enchanted with music. One of my earliest memories is of circling a record player while listening to a 45 rpm of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” I made my public singing debut in the third grade, performing Kenny Rogers’ mega-hit “The Gambler.” I sang it a cappella at a school assembly, even though I technically didn’t know all the words.
At home, I devoured my dad’s records and tapes (pop, show tunes, classical, “oldies”), and started building my own collection at the age of nine (early ‘80s Top 40, and hard rock). For fun, I made up my own bits and pieces of songs and wrote the lyrics down in a notebook.
After much begging, I finally got my hands on a guitar at the age of thirteen and began lessons. Having discovered The Beatles a year or so before, music became nothing short of an all-out obsession. I practiced relentlessly, paying for my lessons with a job I took at a local record store at the ripe young age of fourteen (I was in there so often they eventually hired me), and within a couple of years began my first serious attempts at songwriting.
My musical heroes provided such joy, comfort, catharsis, and inspiration during my teenage years that it was only natural for me to emulate them and develop an overwhelming desire to have a music career of my own. Performing for my peers in social situations tended to generate lots of positive attention, which fed my already ravenous appetite to succeed that much more.
Music also became, for me, a way to mitigate the typical insecurities that come with being a young person.
In college, I would habitually wander around the dorm with my guitar and offer spontaneous concerts for anyone who would listen. It was a great way to test out new material and connect with others, and few things in life gave me as much pleasure as singing and playing.
I recall a coffeehouse gig I played on campus that received such a positive response, there was simply no turning back. Being so appreciated for doing something I already loved to do was a euphoric high, so I sought out performing opportunities—formal and informal—even more compulsively.
Somewhere along the line, music and entertaining became not just my passion, but the thing that made me feel worthwhile. The guitar was like a superpower—with it, I could be wonderful. Without it, I was insignificant.
After college, I moved to Nashville—a mecca for songwriters of all stripes—and dove headfirst into the music scene. I lived frugally, worked whatever day jobs I needed to, and spent the bulk of my energy on making music and attempting to get a career off the ground.
I wrote new songs, performed at writer’s nights all over town, and befriended and sometimes shared living quarters with like-minded musicians.
I recorded a studio demo that was rejected or ignored by seventy-five different record companies. But to me, these rejections were simply part of the dues-paying process and made me feel a spiritual kinship with my heroes, all of whom endured similar trials on their way to eventual success.
My closest songwriter friends and I became our own mutual-admiration-and-inspiration society, and helped each other endure the slings and arrows that are par for the course pursuing a career within something as notoriously difficult and fickle as the music industry.
One Sunday morning, I received a call from a DJ who hosted a show on my favorite local radio station, Lightning 100. “What are you doing this evening?” he asked.
Apparently, he liked the demo I had sent him.
To my amazement, that same day I found myself on the 30th floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville with a king-of-the-world view of the city, being interviewed live on the air. The DJ played two of the three songs on my demo over the airwaves during my visit. I shouted gleefully in the car afterward and headed straight over to my closest friends’ apartment (they had been listening from home) to share my giddy excitement with them.
Without record company backing or interest, I ended up financing and overseeing the recording and production of a full-blown studio album myself, while working full-time.
Once the album was complete, I started my own small label to release it, and quit my day job so I could focus full-time on working feverishly to get it heard. I became a one-man record company (and manager and booking agent, to boot), operating out of my bedroom and sending copies of my finished CD (this was the ‘90s) to radio stations, newspapers, and colleges nationwide. I followed up with them by phone (this was still the ‘90s) in the hopes of securing airplay, reviews, and gigs.
I contacted hundreds of colleges and universities—mostly on the east coast where the concentration was highest—to book my own tour.
The idea was to play as many gigs as humanly possible at schools large and small, driving myself from one to the next, selling CDs, and building up a mailing list along the way. This would allow me to eke out a living doing what I loved, in the hopes of gaining greater exposure, building a fan base, and ultimately establishing a bona fide career as a musician/performer.
It was an incredibly exciting time, but also stressful and intense. I did get some airplay on radio stations around the country, and received some reviews of the CD, but not many. I was racking up debt, working obsessively, and putting everything on the line to make my dream a reality. On the practical side, I figured that whatever attention the CD did or did not attract, I would experience life on the road and most likely at least break even, financially speaking.
After months of relentlessly following up with the 182 schools that gave me the green light to send my promotional materials, things were looking increasingly bleak. My points of contact frequently changed hands (and were often students in unpaid roles), and promising deals fell apart.
When all was said and done, I ended up with a single, solitary booking to show for all my efforts. One. This would be the extent of my “tour.”
What I had not anticipated, aside from such dismal results, was the toll this would take on me. I was exhausted in every way imaginable: physically, financially, emotionally, creatively. Most significant, though, was the toll on my spirit. I had believed that if I just worked hard enough, I would succeed, on at least a modest level. These results suggested otherwise.
I never expected, regardless of the rejections I had accumulated, to ever stop trying, as this was the only thing I wanted to do with my life. But now it seemed I had no choice. I could barely get out of bed.
I soon learned that even though I had dutifully kept up with my share of the rent, the housemate I was renting from had apparently not been paying the landlord! A notice I found showed that we were many months delinquent and faced potential eviction at any moment. I needed to find a new place to live. And a new job. All of which would have been a nuisance but doable, had I been my normal self. Alas, I was not. I was a wreck.
On a phone call with my mom, she said, “Why don’t you just come home?”
In what was perhaps the biggest testament to my desperate state, I could not come up with a better option. I moved back into my childhood home—for me, the ultimate concession of defeat.
I had completely lost my way, my direction, my purpose, my drive. A huge part of my self-worth had been tied up in my success—both artistically and commercially—as a musician. I had defined myself by this identity and pursuit. What was I, who was I, without it?
Though I struggled greatly with accepting it, I found that I had no more energy, zero, to invest in my dream. The immediate task at hand was climbing out of depression. And debt.
It took a couple of years before I felt the urge to re-engage with life in ways that reflected my natural enthusiasm. Even then, the desire to resume the pursuit of a music career was gone. But once I started to regain a degree of emotional and financial stability (a boring office job helped this cause tremendously), I took some tentative steps in new directions. I enrolled in a few adult education classes, including an acting class that was quite fun and led to trying my hand at some community theater.
Hiking had been a key factor in my recovery, so I joined the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club and began hiking with groups of other folks rather than just going out in nature by myself. This led to being invited on my first-ever backpacking trip, which proved to be life-changing and sparked an even greater love of the outdoors.
Feeling better, and finally regaining a sense of possibility for myself, I moved out to California and did a lot more exploring, both inwardly and outwardly.
In the twenty-plus years since, I have done things I never imagined I would do, broadening my palette of interests and life experiences in ways that no doubt would have completely surprised my younger self. I also met an incredible partner and got married.
In other words: I made a life for myself, and became a much happier person, despite never having realized my dream of being a professional musician, nor of even having achieved any notable career success in some other domain.
Though I abandoned my pursuit of music as a livelihood, I never stopped loving music.
Over the years I have performed in a variety of settings, sometimes for pay but more often just for the love of it.
I have shared my passion for music with numerous guitar students, played for hospital patients as a music volunteer, been an enthusiastic small venue concertgoer and fan of ever more artists and styles, continued developing my own skills on guitar and even began taking classical piano lessons.
I will never stop loving music. The difference is that I finally learned to love myself, regardless of any success in the outer world of the music business or lack thereof.
We all, to varying degrees, seek external approval, appreciation, recognition, and validation from others, and it can be momentarily pleasurable to receive these things. Being dependent upon them, however, (not to mention addicted to them!) is a recipe for persistent unhappiness.
The Buddha teaches that all our suffering stems from attachment. While it is perfectly normal and human to desire things, our desires are endless and never satiated for long.
If we make our own happiness or sense of self-worth dependent upon things going a certain way, then we are signing up for misery. The more tightly we cling to our notions of what should be, it seems, the more profound the misery.
The good news, as I have learned, is that life is so large that it does not need to conform to our meager ideas about what can make us contented, happy, or fulfilled. It is large enough to contain our most crushing disappointments and still make room for us to experience meaningful and satisfying lives, often via things we never would have expected nor could have anticipated.
My twenty-something self would likely not have believed it, but I lovingly send this message to him anyway through space and time: It is possible to be happy and live a fulfilling life even if your biggest dream fails to come true. Hang in there! I love you.
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How I Stopped Making Men My Everything and Losing Myself in Love
“Yes, love is all about sacrifice and compromise, but it’s important also to establish a limit. You shouldn’t have to throw your whole life away to make a relationship work. If you have to lose yourself to please your partner, you’re with the wrong person.” ~Beau Taplin
When I was twenty, I fell in love with a man who became my everything. My close friends watched me becoming someone else because I found myself trying to ceaselessly knead myself into someone who would perfectly fit into this man’s world, even if it meant betraying myself in the process.
I changed my worldviews to fit in with his. I changed my dreams and ambitions to better align with his. I gave up friendships I valued that he wasn’t comfortable with me having. There was nothing I wouldn’t have sacrificed for this relationship and its survival.
The relationship was only ten months long, but in that very short space of time, it became the center of my universe. When the relationship ended, to me, it almost signaled the end of my life. I did not see any life beyond that man or the relationship I had with him.
At the end of that relationship I was forced to go into the hard journey of self-discovery. By the time I turned twenty-two, I realized that I would be in grave danger if I continued defining myself and centering my life on men and romantic relationships.
The end of that relationship and the devastation that came with it made me vividly aware of my tendency toward engulfment. I found myself being someone who allowed romantic relationships to over consume her and take up her whole life.
And now, eight years later, my idea of what a loving partnership looks like is so different and much more freeing. These are the truths that I had to learn the hard way that have allowed me to love my partners without losing important parts of myself in them.
1. A relationship or partner will never meet all your needs, so stop expecting them to.
My relationship broke because I placed a heavy burden on it to be my everything.
Many of us give our partners a god-like status and expect them to satisfy our every whim and need.
I looked to my partner to be for me what I had never learned to be for myself, thus putting on to him a responsibility that was always mine to carry.
I now firmly believe that whatever our partners give us should merely be a drop into what we are already overflowing with because we did the work of nourishing our lives first before looking to a partner to do that for us.
One is bound to lose themselves in partners that give them things that they don’t know how to give to themselves—like love, validation, and confirmation of their worth.
2. Controlling your partner is a sure-fire way to lose the love you fear losing.
I feared abandonment so much that there’s nothing about my partner I didn’t try to control. I wanted his obsession with the relationship to match mine. That was my twisted way of trying to put on a leash his love and affection for me.
The downside of losing ourselves in love is that when our partners don’t lose themselves in the relationship like we do, we quickly equate it to lack of love, rather than having healthy boundaries necessary for the thriving of any healthy relationship.
In retrospect, I cannot imagine how suffocated my then-partner felt about my misplaced efforts. The thing I feared most ended up happening because he could no longer take the extreme lengths I would go to in order to have his love.
3. A healthy relationship will not change you, but encourage you to be more of who you are.
It’s hard to maintain a strong sense of self in relationships when you don’t know who that self is. If you don’t know who you are, people can easily scrunch you up into versions of who they desire you to be. It’s so much easier to resist a relationship changing you into someone you know you are not when you have a clear sense of yourself.
I still believe that love should always be transformational. But if love changes us, it should always be for the benefit of ourselves and our life purpose, not to please our partners or to meet their idealistic fantasies of what a perfect partner looks like. Love can only do its work in us when we allow ourselves to be fully seen, loved, and accepted for who we are.
4. You should never neglect other areas of your life because of a relationship.
There is nothing as thrilling as meeting a possible soulmate. It’s tempting to lose yourself in the new relationship and change your regular routine so that you can focus on this exciting new part of your life. This never turned out well for me.
By the end of my relationship, I had enmeshed myself so deeply in this man’s world that I did not have my own world to go back to. My relationship became the most important thing, and I lost sight of every other beautiful thing I had going for me before I had him.
A healthy relationship should never alienate us from our own lives but should be able to peacefully co-exist with all other parts of our lives.
5. Your individuality should never be a threat in a relationship.
I know we romanticize the idea of becoming one with our partners. We know the poems about becoming so intertwined with our lovers that we don’t know where we end and they begin. But love should never mean losing sense of who you are as an individual.
We don’t have to be spitting images of our partners for love to mean something. When your partner first met you, they fell in love with your individuality, and it would cease to be love if you had to change the very things that drew them to you.
Sacrificing ourselves for relationships will always be an act of self-betrayal. Loss of self is a cost of love I have sworn to never again pay. A healthy relationship is one where we can find a balance between being independent and interdependent.
6. Be okay with loving in small doses.
Love does not have to be all-consuming to be real.
I struggled a lot with loving at a slow pace; I wanted everything, and I wanted it right now. I gave too much too soon hoping to get my partner hooked on to me. But now I understand that love takes time and it matures with time. It’s okay to keep certain parts of your love to enjoy and share later with your partner once the relationship has solidified and become more grounded.
We want to stuff ourselves with love and affection and get shocked when we lose our balance in relationships. Love is much more satisfying when we savor it bit by bit, a day at a time.
For me, surviving a relationship that was my everything, first and foremost, meant learning to develop my sense of self-worth (outside of my romantic relationships).
It’s easy to lose yourself in a relationship. When you feel unlovable, you subconsciously believe that you need to give yourself up to avoid rejection. You can also find yourself obsessing over this one connection because, “Wow, someone finally loves me,” and you will do anything and everything to try and keep that connection.
Life had to take me on a journey of learning that happiness can be found anywhere and not only through romantic relationships. When I discovered the idea of “multiple streams of happiness” centering myself, my life, and my joy on a romantic partner became close to impossible. Because now, in my late twenties, I have many beautiful things about my life that bring me great happiness, and should I fall in love again, it would merely be one of the many different streams that fill my life with joy.
Now, on the other side of engulfment…
I want my future relationships to be filled with freedom.
I want a love where we can be apart while being beautifully together.
I want my partner to have many other beautiful things about their life outside of me without feeling like I am not enough for them.
I no longer want a love that I drown in but a love that will always let me come up for air; a love that puts me on steady ground, and never a love that I feel lost in.
I want a love that reminds me that before we belong to each other, we will always first belong to ourselves.
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How to Spot Abusive People and Stop Getting into Toxic Relationships
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt
When it comes to dating, I have always been drawn to people who made me work for their love and validation. Despite the fact that I, like anyone else, wish to be with somebody that loves and supports me, I have always somehow managed to attract the opposite.
My relationship history has been fraught with rejection, feeling unworthy, and trying harder to win love and approval. Every time I felt criticized or undervalued, I would look inward and ask myself what I could do to make my partner love me more. I always felt as if it was my fault, and when in doubt, I would blame myself.
I’m an overthinker and would spend a lot of time in self-reflection. I came to understand that the trauma I had experienced as a child played a large part in my relationship choices.
Experiencing trauma as a young child leaves a faulty wiring imprint on your nervous system. Instead of developing a secure attachment, the trauma/abuse/neglect causes the brain to develop differently.
I grew up with very little love and affection and never felt valued by my parents.
Children who grow up without consistent care and love learn to cope in various ways. They become hypervigilant of people’s moods around them (so that they can stay out of the way of an angry/moody parent, for example), and they can also learn to disassociate from their feelings because they cannot escape the situation.
Trauma as a child often leads to an anxious attachment style or an ambivalent attachment style, and this affects adult attachment styles too.
I know for sure that I have an anxious attachment style, and I also have low self-belief and self-confidence. This makes me a prime target for toxic partners such as narcissists or other abusive individuals.
It is commonly known that narcissistic types attract co-dependent, insecure types. The root cause of co-dependency is the fear of being abandoned. Co-dependents work hard in relationships to avoid the threat of abandonment. Toxic people, however, don’t respond to more love and attention; it just fuels their abuse.
I knew I needed to break this pattern, or I would never be happy in love. I am now quite adept at recognizing the signs of a toxic person.
Here are the common signs that you’re in a toxic relationship:
They tend to lack empathy (although they know how to fake it for at least the first three to six months) and the world revolves around them, not you.
Of course, people on the autistic spectrum can seem to lack empathy, so this isn’t a guaranteed science, but it is still a sign to consider. My ex found it virtually impossible to put himself in my shoes. He would sometimes say the right things, but his words never really came from the heart.
My ex abandoned me at Heathrow airport because there was an unexpected issue with my passport. Instead of considering how I might feel, he swore loudly and kicked the baggage around and then said he had to go without me because he didn’t want his birthday ruined.
We had planned to fly via Singapore to Sydney. I should have known then that this was the start of many awful episodes to come. Thankfully, I joined him twenty-four hours later after hastily getting a new passport issued, but he dumped me (for the first time) four weeks later.
They will always be at the center of everything they do, and your needs will be unimportant.
Their time and needs take priority over yours. Relationships are all about compromise and consideration for each other. When the give-get ratio is imbalanced it is often a sign that the relationship will not be equal.
If you confront them about this one-sided dynamic, they will either dismiss what you say, ignore you, or turn the conversation around and begin to play the victim.
When I would confront my ex about his selfishness, he would sometimes breakdown and cry and say, “I know I am a terrible boyfriend,” but then he would soon stop crying and life would carry on as it did before.
They will justify cheating on you and lie about it.
A friend told me over lunch one day that she had seen my ex on Match.com for the previous nine months. I felt sick, and when I confronted him, he said that it was only ”light window shopping.” I was an idiot and I stayed. I only had myself to blame for allowing this to continue.
Toxic individuals regard others as objects to be used. I felt replaceable and never felt fully secure in the relationship. Ironically, the one thing that attracted me to my ex in the very beginning was how keen he was on me. I love the way he chased me and the very next day after our first date he called and said, “At the risk of seeming too keen, I was wondering if you’d like to join me again tonight?”
I was flattered, but of course this is a common sign of a toxic individual. They move in fast; they gain your affection and trust very quickly. Once you’re hooked the manipulation and the control begins.
Another thing to look out for is subtle or overt criticism.
My ex would comment on my posture at the dinner table, the way I spoke to friends, the way I cooked, as well as the tidiness of my house. He didn’t like it if I watched television too much and would treat me like a child. He was very controlling, but he never saw that in himself.
Once, on a journey in the car, I saw the funny side (thank goodness I had humor to help get me through) when he said, “I am not controlling, but don’t ever use the word ‘controlling’ to describe me.”
A friend of mine remarked at a later date, “That’s like saying ‘I don’t f#%@ing swear’.” Utter madness!
Emotional abuse can also occur in the absence of criticism, selfishness, and controlling behavior.
Being ignored can be just as painful. When I was stone-walled or felt neglected, it triggered my childhood trauma and transported me back to the feeling that nothing I did was good enough.
In fact, my ex triggered me a lot and made me realize how dysfunctional the relationship was. It’s an interesting cycle that I have come across numerous times: childhood trauma and subsequent toxic adult relationships.
This is what I have learned since finally moving on from my toxic ex-partner:
If someone is too smooth in the very beginning and tries to fast-forward the relationship, I am wary. I would far rather be with someone who was slightly clumsy and forgetful than someone who is super slick.
If they lack friends, that can be a red flag.
Again, this doesn’t happen in every situation, but it can be a sign of trouble to come. My ex-partner had very few friends. He didn’t seem to understand the value of connection and keeping in touch with people unless he needed something from them.
Underneath all of the bravado was someone who was quite insecure and had high standards for himself. I’m not sure that he actually even really liked himself. He would act extremely confident around others and was able to charm others especially when he wanted something from them. Toxic people often boast about their achievements and seem to think they are more entitled to things than others.
What I Have Learned from My Past Relationships
All of my failures in relationships have taught me that the old cliché of loving yourself first is actually true. Instead of planning my life around somebody else’s, I made choices about where I wanted to be and what was important to me going forward.
I have built a strong foundation from which to explore the world. My strong foundation is built on self-awareness of my strengths and weaknesses. I understand why I sought out toxic individuals and have worked on my self-belief and self-esteem. The inner bully (the negative voice inside) is still there trying to tell me what I can’t do and why I need to be fearful on my own but I’m learning to tune it out.
I have made more time for people and experiences that uplift and inspire me as well as focusing on inspirational podcasts and videos. What you focus on becomes your reality, and it ultimately affects your quality of life. I’ve become less accommodating to people who make me feel bad about myself.
Feeling bad about myself is familiar, and I am convinced that previous childhood trauma altered my way of thinking and behaving, and over time it became a habit. The good news is that habits can be changed. We can’t change the past, but we can certainly update our beliefs about what happened and how we wish to see ourselves now.
When you like and value yourself you will be far less likely to take abuse from others. You will also be more inclined to have healthy boundaries and ensure that there are consequences for those that violate them.
Know what you will and won’t accept from others and let others know when they have overstepped the mark. If they are decent, they will be upset that they have hurt you and will make an effort to consider your needs. If, however, they dismiss your needs and feelings, that should tell you all you need to know.
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The Simple Path to a More Fulfilling, Far Richer Life
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” ~Seneca
Many of us say we want a simpler life, but we don’t make any changes because that would require us to make hard choices that go against the flow. We say we want to be less busy and enjoy more of our days, but it feels easier to do what everyone else is doing, even if it’s actually harder.
The path of least resistance is a well-paved six-lane highway that barrels forward in one direction. The constant hum of traffic tricks you into thinking it’s the best way to get where you want to go. If you’re interested in a simpler life, take the next exit because I’d like to share a new route with you.
But first, a few important questions…
Why do we accept rules, expectations, or beliefs forced on us as adults? If this comes at a cost that consumes our soul and leaves us questioning life, why do we view this as a fair trade-off?
Why do we subject ourselves to the torture of leading chaotic lives? Do we think our sacrifices are worthy and just because they’ll enable our kids to live better lives? Does our reality really reflect the life we want to pass on to our kids? Or are we passing the torch to a relay they don’t actually want to be a part of?
At some point, we forgot why we work. And the forty-hour work week is something no one questions. It is what it is. How is it that every job needs the same length of time to complete its tasks in a week?
You need to have a source of income to put a roof over your head, food in your belly, and clothes on your back. I won’t debate you on that. After we fulfill these necessities of life, we start to get lost with everything we think we need to be happy.
We live in a consumerist culture. As a result, we’ve come to believe that our wants and needs are the same thing. This requires us to make far more money than we really need for a happy life. It traps us in jobs we don’t want. And it forces us to spend our most precious resource (our time) on things that don’t make us happier.
I know, I’ve been there myself. In my mid-twenties, I was in a job I hated, living with someone who deserved better, in a city I didn’t want to be in. Rather than address the root of my unhappiness, I bought a brand-new shiny sports car. I was depressed and I wanted a car to fulfill an emotional need. Spoiler alert: All I got in return was more depression and a bank-draining monthly payment to remind me you can’t buy happiness.
I don’t want to spend my life endlessly consuming in an attempt to avoid my feelings and needs. I want to be present in every moment and enjoy as much as I can, like my niece, who’s coming up to her third birthday. She’s already the world’s greatest mindfulness teacher.
Like a penguin marching through the Antarctic, she waddles forward with purpose. She stops to let that grass tickle her toes. She laughs as the feeling of a breeze kisses her cheeks. She is present with every ounce of her being. I’m with her, but a moment before I’m whisked away by the thought of upcoming projects and emails I “need” to respond to.
Modern society squashes the whimsical out of you like a fat June bug under a careless foot. The decades of school and meaningless work are like buckets of water drowning a campfire. Only the embers remain. The fire that burned within your soul waits for oxygen to stoke it back to life.
To reach the simple life you have to make the hard choice to carve your own path. It’s that voice that says don’t settle and points you in the opposite direction of everyone else. It’s the words of Dr. Seuss who urges, “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”
Getting started with a simpler life doesn’t require anything you don’t already have. It only requires you to focus on everything worth appreciating in your life as it is right now.
The purí tribe lived along the northern coast of South America and in Brazil. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau modeled his life after their ability to live simply, present, and fulfilled. Their way of living was in the presence they gave each moment: “For yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.”
While we can’t all uproot our lives and live in the woods like Thoreau, and modern life is decidedly more complicated than life in the time of the purí, their commitment to presence offers a simple solution to the chaos of an ever-connected life.
By doing less and being more engaged in everything we do, we’re able to enjoy our lives now instead of waiting and hoping we’ll find happiness and fulfillment sometime in the future, when we’ve accomplished or earned enough.
But this requires us to tune out the noise of the world, an ever-present buzzing that drowns out the voice of our soul as the years add up.
As a kid, that voice whispered to us about exploration and adventure. We were driven by curiosity and refused to be idle.
Everything was exciting.
Everything was magical.
Everything was a gift.
Living this kind of life comes back to our ability to be present like the purí tribe.
It’s in these moments of presence that we get a chance to listen and hear what our soul is saying. We know deep down that material things will not make us happier. We know deep down that all the promotions in the world will not fill the void of missing out on life. We know deep down that the rat race is a game we don’t need to be a part of.
Being present with these uncomfortable feelings is the beginning of a new and rich life.
Left unchecked the rat race crushes your soul like the grass beneath an elephant stampede. This way of living is toxic for the mind, body, and soul. It’s a disease that fills you with stress, destroys your family, and gives you little to hope for.
This is the reality I was facing when I was forty pounds heavier and had hit rock bottom with my mental health. I often found myself drinking with the hope that I wouldn’t wake up.
It wasn’t until I was present with this pain that I could see that I needed help. And it wasn’t until I faced my feelings that I was able to strip away the things that didn’t fulfill me so I could make space to enjoy the now.
If you’re living like I once did—distracting yourself from your discontent and missing out on your life as a result—know that things don’t have to continue this way.
At any time, you can choose to be honest with yourself, let go of the things that drain your spirit, and allow yourself to find joy in the simplicity of the now.
At any time, you can tune into life’s simple pleasures—the excitement of your dog’s wagging tail, the unexpected smile of a passing stranger, or the way your son’s eyes light up when he smiles—and recognize that this is happiness. And It’s available at any time if you’re not too busy or caught up in your head to appreciate it.
The purí tribe would point overhead to the passing day as a reminder that this is the only day we have. There’s no sense looking backwards unless that’s the direction you want to go. Each and every day carries a new opportunity to be present and live a rich life.
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How to Embrace Your Sensitivity and See It as a Strength
“Sensitive people feel so deeply they often have to retreat from the world, in order to dig beneath the layers of pain to find their faith and courage.” ~Shannon L. Alder
Being a highly sensitive person can be rough in a world full of agendas, processes, rules, and numbers. Feelings and senses, being intangible and invisible, are often dismissed because not everyone experiences them in the same way. The intensity of those experiences varies, as well, depending on the individual, which makes it all the more confusing.
Living in a society all about speed and efficiency, feelings can often be perceived as a hindrance to productivity. They are not seen as what they truly are—internal signs and guidance of what needs attention in the present moment.
I came into this world a sensitive empath with a keen intuition. I would pick up energy from my environment, as well as other people, quickly and easily.
Even as a fun-loving and carefree child, I noticed tiny details no one else did and felt things toward them no one else felt. I could be laughing one minute, then at the sight of an injured, struggling bee, stop in my tracks and start to panic because I didn’t want to see it in pain.
I dreaded being sensitive as an adult, especially when I worked in the corporate world. I felt so out of place and different from others, who seemed to just let things roll off their backs and focused on their own goals.
I would sense someone was having personal problems before anyone else knew, or that something was going terribly wrong about a project before it happened, and then I’d want to change direction. I felt those things were more important than the minute detail of who was bringing bagels for the next meeting.
People often saw me as irrational, paranoid, or even difficult because there was no concrete evidence that what I was saying was true. It would take days, weeks, sometimes years for things to surface and prove me right. I often felt frustrated.
For many years, I wished I was less sensitive, that I wasn’t so easily affected by others’ words, expressions, moods, and intentions. I felt my sensitivity had caused me nothing but pain and frustration.
Life would be far easier and less complicated if I wasn’t so sensitive. I could just be blissfully unaware and truck along like everyone else.
The many personal praises I’d received for being kind and compassionate became meaningless because, in my mind, I’d gained nothing in return. I continued to feel overlooked and unappreciated, doubting I had any deeper value to offer the world besides my productivity.
I tried to suppress my feelings for a long time, then went on to read books, join workshops, and acquire self-improvement tools in an attempt to lessen my sensitivity.
Ironically, through that journey, I learned that I had it backwards. I’ve come to not only accept my sensitivity as is, but also see it as a gift and use it every day to my advantage. Now I actually want to strengthen my sensitivity and encourage my feelings to speak louder.
5 Advantages to Being Highly Sensitive
If you see your sensitivity as a liability, as I once did, take a minute to reflect on the many advantages to being highly sensitive…
1. You are self-aware.
You are good at putting yourself in others’ shoes and sensing their feelings. That makes you conscious of your words and actions and how they may affect others.
Having this solid foundation of self-awareness enables you to constantly learn about yourself and how your environment responds to you so you can adjust accordingly if needed. Not everyone has the capacity to respond with sensitivity to others and adapt to unique personalities and situations, but you do, and that helps you along the journey to happiness and personal fulfillment.
2. You are intuitive.
You pick up the abstract and invisible, and you have an ability to detect hidden information. This gives you insights into issues that have not yet surfaced and enables you to identify solutions that benefit you and the people around you.
For example, I was recently put on a call by a client with a web designer I’ve never met. She reacted angrily toward my tardiness (my previous meeting had run late) and the fact I was talking to her in my car and not at my desk.
Even though I’d never spoken with or met her, something told me this wasn’t about me being late. I waited until she was finished and asked her if my client had told her about the design changes I was going to make. She responded immediately: “No, actually this all came as a shock!” I then explained my position and filled in the blanks for her, and she changed her tone right away. She even apologized for her earlier reaction and said that she was having a bad day on top of that.
It was a situation that could have gone very differently if I had taken it at surface value and reacted with annoyance instead of listening to my senses and being empathetic.
3. You have a deep capacity for compassion.
You are compassionate toward others because you feel more deeply and intensely than most. Compassion is one of the most underrated strengths in modern society. While it does not come across as an obvious trait for monetary success, it contributes greatly to anyone’s long-term personal success. It is a required component for love, forgiveness, overcoming setbacks, and sustaining personal and professional relationships.
4. You have higher EQ (emotional intelligence).
You are most likely good at reading others and recognizing what they’re feeling and are better at relationships, whether personal or professional, as a result. Being sensitive to others’ feelings makes you caring and understanding, with a knack for sorting out complicated emotions.
5. You let your heart guide you.
You are soulful and in tune with the essence of who you truly are. Your feelings are the driving force of your desires, needs, and choices in life, which means you don’t simply go through the motions. You are sensitive to subtle internal signs that help you make choices that feel right for you.
5 Steps to Harness Your Sensitivity and Turn it into a Strength
So now that you’ve changed how you perceive your sensitivity, how can you leverage it to help yourself and others?
1. Do not judge yourself.
It’s easy to tell yourself “Stop being so sensitive” or “I have no reason to feel this way” when you hear these things often from others. It’s important to change your internal dialogue and stop shaming yourself for your feelings. They come up for valid reasons and they deserve your attention.
2. Practice gratitude.
Thank the universe for your sharp senses and live as if you consciously chose to have them. The more gratitude you show toward your gift of sensitivity, and all its advantages, the more you will embrace and understand it.
3. Trust the energy or messages you pick up.
You feel what you feel for a reason. Your job is to figure out what that reason is. Regardless of how nonsensical your feelings may seem, respect them, honor them, and explore them further.
Your feelings could be a reaction to someone who triggered something inside you, or they could indicate something that needs to be resolved so you can move forward in life. Trust that your feelings are guiding you toward the next steps in your journey. Don’t react until you have an understanding of the message or lesson to be learned.
4. Establish an emotional (or energetic) boundary.
You likely pick up other people’s feelings and moods so readily and easily it can become confusing or even overwhelming at times. Pay close attention to the way you feel or react. Are your feelings your own, or is your energy being swayed by someone else’s? Whenever your energy is affected by your environment, take a deep breath in through your nose, exhale from your mouth completely. And recenter yourself.
It will also help to practice mindfulness, perhaps by developing a consistent yoga or meditation practice, so you can more easily recognize when you’re being affected by someone else’s energy.
Remember, there will always be people who seem to clash with you. Expect it and let it be okay while maintaining your own emotional space by consciously choosing the energy you want around. If you feel the energy of anger, frustration, or doubt reentering your space, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and choose again.
5. Help others.
Highly sensitive empaths are likely in this world for the purpose of spreading kindness or healing others. Because you have been through so much internally, you have a soft spot for others who are going through painful experiences. Whether you choose to do so as a career or just by being there for someone who crosses your path, you have the ability to touch someone on a deeper level and help release their hurt. Don’t let that talent go to waste!
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I hope this has helped you see what a gift sensitivity really is. As you understand your sensitivity and gain more trust and confidence toward it, you will feel more empowered to use it every day to your advantage, just as I have.
