Tag: wisdom
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The Power of Staying Put When You Feel Like Running Away
“You cannot keep running away from your fears. At some point in life you will have to build up the courage to face and overcome them.” ~Unknown
Last year my family and I relocated overseas from Australia to Singapore, which meant new jobs, new schools, new relationships—an entirely new way of living.
My husband was busy with his work, and I had two wide-eyed children looking up at mummy for direction. A part of me was excited for the challenge, but another part of me, of equal measure, was feeling overwhelmed by the prospect and struggling to let my feelings go. I also knew that the only way out of this emotional prison was through.
This chapter in my own zigzag journey has reconfirmed to me that we never have everything figured out. You think you’ve got it (eureka!), then life throws a curve ball and you take a temporary step backward. And that’s okay.
I would say I’m more of an introvert; give me a good book and I’m happy. Reflecting, writing, and analyzing come naturally to me, whereas extroverting is more of an acquired skill. So the hardest part of our new life, for me, was the social aspect.
Singapore has a large and diverse expat community, and we were welcomed with open arms—lunches, school events, BBQs. Yet being an introvert all of these well-intentioned invitations sent my ego into overdrive. For me, this was social overload, and it felt hard.
Being the new kid in town, I felt pressure to go to everything and be my best, shiny self (whoever that is). Yet, a few weeks into this I hit the pause button and jumped off the social escalator. I needed to recalibrate and find some healthy ways to support myself and my family through the change and adjustment.
To keep with the theme of new challenges, I took up Ashtanga yoga. I’d heard it was a powerful practice that helps us learn to be present with difficulty, and it sounded like exactly what I needed.
I picked up my yoga mat and took myself down to a local studio to thrash it out, Claire vs. ego.
The first morning I entered the studio, the teacher was supporting someone in a back bend while saying “trust yourself, let go.” The Mysore style of yoga is teacher supported as opposed to led, so you take yourself through the postures at your own pace.
He pointed to an empty space to roll out my mat, and his first words to me were “no one’s going to rescue you, so lets get to it.” (I’ll add here, for the record, that this yoga teacher is a former US National Gymnastics coach, so he doesn’t do light and easy!) My ego was well and truly confronted. This studio was not going to be a place to hide.
Yoga has a reputation for being about super hard, impressive postures and showing off your best active wear. Yoga is also about soul work. What I have found is a practice that challenges, confronts, and supports me.
The yoga mat became my metaphor for life and for my insecurities. I took my struggles to the studio; they spilled out on the mat, I worked with them, and then repeated the practice the next day. And as my body strengthened and my posture straightened, I felt stronger and straighter inside.
Some days were easier than others. On my better days, the dopamine was pumping and I took to my mat with a relaxed determination; on the not so good days, I sweated and strained and my mind was off planning what to cook for dinner that night. Such is life. We still show up and do what we can with what we have in that moment.
There were times (frequent times!) when I wanted to give up. My mind would say, “Claire, this is so hard and painful. Why are you putting yourself through this? Can you honestly be bothered? Just roll up your mat and let’s hot foot it home for a cup of tea. That’d make life so much easier.”
Similarly off the mat, at times it was tempting to hide away from new people for fear.
The community in Singapore is diverse, and the diversity and newness scared me. What if I couldn’t find anything in common with my new community that consisted of people from all over the world—India, Burma, Denmark, Norway, Germany and so on? What would we talk about? Would they like me? Would I like them?
A large part of me was crying out for the familiarity and security that my old life and friendships contained. I wanted to go to that BBQ with a garden full of familiar faces and be able to pick up a conversation (or sit in comfortable silence) with all the ease and intimacy that is earned over time.
In life, how often do we allow ourselves to side step new experiences because of our pain, discomfort, and fear? Fear of rejection, of failure, of success? But embracing life’s inevitable pain is the only way to grow and to live fully.
As my yoga teacher shared, “Claire, don’t mistake an opening for an injury, because they’re different. When you face your pain, be it a tight hip or an emotional wound, it’s going to hurt, but go through it, release the energy tied up there, and push through to the other side. This is where your freedom lies.”
My new tool, yoga, has helped me to release old tied up energy and better utilize my present day energy too.
Yoga has taught me to navigate the world with the language of feeling my body sensations, rather than solely thinking about them.
I can feel if my body is getting unnecessarily tense and tied up or if I’m losing energy ruminating or stressing about something, and that gives me a choice—I can stay in that state, even feed that state, which doesn’t feel too good; or I can chose to let the tension go, get my energy flow back on track, and handle my present day moment differently.
Familiarizing with my body in this way has brought a new level of awareness, or friendship toward myself, and helped me make better choices.
At one of the early community events I went to I put so much pressure on myself to be pleasing to everyone that I became somebody else—a nodding, smiling, frozen person. Who I was being felt unnatural and uncomfortable, so it wasn’t long before my little friend anxiety appeared.
With my new body awareness it clicked a lot sooner that I wasn’t being real and that I didn’t feel at home in myself. This new information gave me back my power and I was able to breathe and relax my way gradually back into myself.
These little emotional detours have been more frequent in Singapore, but I also know that they don’t have to mean anything. We don’t need to think about them, ascribe some complex theory to them, worry about them, and generally just fuel the fire.
These days I feel more able to normalize these uncomfortable body sensations and feelings with understanding. “I’m human, and this is a human experience. I’m okay.” Cue self-compassion.
So I guess I have let go of perfectionism.
What if life is about showing up, regardless of what happens, and having the courage to be seen? What if I allow myself to fail and to make mistakes? What if I accept and embrace that there is never going to be a perfect?
It really hasn’t all been as bad as my ego tried to claim it would be, either! In my yoga practice I’d had a strong aversion to doing a headstand. My teacher knew this, and every session he would make a beeline for me at headstand time and teach me to fall—over and over again, week after week. And I got good at falling.
Paradoxically, I also got better at my headstand. I found both the fall and the headstand actually weren’t as hard or as punishing as I had created them to be in my mind.
Similarly, over time and with practice, building new relationships with such a diverse range of people has become less daunting and actually incredibly fascinating.
Last week, I met with some other class parents for coffee and listening to the sharing of experiences from people from all over the globe was pretty amazing.
I’m pleased I’ve pushed through fear; otherwise, I wouldn’t have reaped the benefits or gained the life experience that I have from being part of this diverse community. And I’m pleased to say I’ve met some incredible people who have started to become firm friends.
Essentially, the pain and the fears (of falling from a head stand or making faux pas with potential new friends), while challenging, haven’t been as bad when I have actually faced them.
A move overseas aside, everyday life contains pain and discomfort. Fact. Being human we experience a continuous ebb and flow of pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, praise and blame, gain and loss, and so on.
Experiencing pain does not mean that there’s something wrong with you. Another fact. If we can keep learning to accept life, warts and all, and to “stay put on our mats” whatever we’re dealt, we gain more and more emotional freedom.
Pain, when faced, offers us the chance to grow and emerge some more—so for all it’s challenges, it’s actually a good thing. With the learning it provides comes the opportunity to make better choices for ourselves and to show up more fully for our lives.
Many of us, as children, never learned how to handle the inevitable pain of life, and there’s no shame in that. But it’s never too late to get curious and start working with our pain (wherever you are on the path) using supportive tools, people, and techniques. As we learn to let it go, we create the space where the magic happens.
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Our Power Lies In How We Choose to Respond to Our Pain
“The strongest hearts have the most scars.” ~Unknown
Maybe it’s true, that the strongest hearts have the most scars.
And maybe the pain and the discomfort we experience in life can serve as a great teacher, if we choose to see it that way.
Everyone has bumps, bruises, and pains in life, right?
Things happen that are outside our control, and it’s up to each one of us to decide how these experiences shape us.
There are those who endure incredible trauma and pain and choose to use those experiences to see life differently. They learn from it, grow, and move on.
And there are also those that go through horrible pain and don’t have strong hearts. They have broken hearts that just stay broken.
What’s the key difference between those who are able to find meaning from their hardships and move on and those who don’t?
This difference is the very key that took my life from one big red-hot-mess to what I would define as true success—a life of freedom, happiness, and meaning, soulfully driven and led by spirit.
But it didn’t start that way.
I didn’t choose to be adopted.
I didn’t choose to have a table fall on my head when I was five, causing a severe head injury and coma, which would require a decade full of EEG’s and anti-seizure meds.
I didn’t plan an ugly divorce. I didn’t plan on meeting the love of my life at a wacky spiritual retreat in Brazil and then, in saying yes to that love, losing friends, family, and my home in the process.
I didn’t choose a lot of the bumps, bruises, and scars that visibly covered my body and secretly covered my heart.
The first, most significant scar probably started when I was adopted.
I was the product of a teen pregnancy—loveless and unplanned. My birth mother was sent away from her small hometown to give birth to me in a strange city, alone and, I am sure, quite freaked out. I don’t imagine it was the idyllic birth experience most of us moms would want to have.
Having two incredible daughters that are pretty much pieces of my heart walking around on this earth, I know well what it means to be a mother. I know what it means to carry, grow, nurture, and raise a human in this world. I know what it means to be willing to do anything for your children.
I also know what it means to not feel connected to a mother.
I know what it’s like to feel like an outsider—unwanted, unseen, and unheard.
And regardless of how amazing my adoptive parents were (and still are), I still felt like the oddball, and not a real part of the family.
I felt like a mistake.
I grew up feeling like there must have been something wrong with me since my own mother gave me up for adoption.
I must have been broken. I must have been a freak, so I had to do everything humanly possible to not let them see the truth—that I was not worthy of love because I was not worthy of being kept.
So I carried that scar with me, ready to sabotage relationships due to a fear of abandonment.
Ready to sabotage success due to a fear of not being good enough, for anything.
I didn’t realize, at that moment, that I was choosing a pattern of thinking and feeling that was keeping me stuck.
No one was forcing me to feel unworthy and to think negative thoughts about myself. I was choosing my pain. I was perpetuating the story rather than seeing my pain as a teacher, learning from it, and finding meaning in it.
It wasn’t until I made a conscious choice to address my pain, get help, and learn to see my struggles in a different light that things shifted dramatically for me.
And this didn’t happen overnight.
It was a gradual process of awakening that began with seeing a qualified therapist in my late teens.
Because I had a deep desire to understand more about human behavior and motivation, I majored in psychology and sociology. After that, I became a voracious student of personal growth and spiritual work, digesting all I could in the form of books, courses, and retreats.
I started noticing that I was relating to my past experiences differently.
I was telling a new story that embodied what I had learned from these various modalities.
It wasn’t my fault that I was given up for adoption, nor did it mean I was unworthy. And I wasn’t a horrible, ugly person because of some of the choices I had made—I was human.
Those painful experiences didn’t define my life in a negative sense any longer. The old story of hurt, blame, and resentment was replaced with a new story of healing, awareness, and inner strength.
In my opinion, this is one of the key reasons people either learn, grow, and move on or they stay stuck in victim mode and keep hurting. They choose to stay stuck in the painful place by holding on to the disempowering story that causes them to suffer. They keep playing the tape of the hurt rather than the tape of the healing.
To move on, transcend, and grow from any painful experience requires courage, willingness, and the belief that you can choose to see your past differently—that you can feel differently about it and free yourself from the chains of pain.
But it can’t change without that belief. You need to believe it’s possible in order to choose a different way of reacting.
That is ground zero.
Some will argue that it isn’t that simple—that there would be less misery and more joy on our planet if it were that easy to move on from our emotional pains.
And I would respond by saying that while it may be a simple idea, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
It’s simple to understand that you can choose to see and think differently about something, which will then change how you feel about it.
The hard part comes in choosing to think and react in new ways, and choosing to get help if you need it. This requires work, strength, support, compassion, and sometimes just time.
It’s not a quick fix and it’s not always a straight line to get from hurt to healed.
But it’s the very thing that turned my life from mess to miracles, and the very thing I have seen create massive shifts in others lives as well—the power of choice.
We have to choose to feel and acknowledge our pain so that we can heal from it; to commit to therapy or support groups so that we can understand our pain; and to know that it’s possible to turn any pain, and challenge, into our greatest teacher.
When we are able to turn our messes into miracles, our pain into purpose, we win.
And I get it; when we are in the middle of our suffering, we aren’t able to see the gift in it because pain can consume us. In the moment, no one is going to see the positive side of being hurt, abused, or abandoned. At that point, it’s more about survival.
But what we do after we experience pain is our choice and our point of power.
While we may not be able to choose all the things that happen to us in life, we do get to choose how to react to those things. We get to choose what they mean to us.
I think about the Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist Victor Frankl, who survived the holocaust and was able to find meaning in that terrible experience.
His story, like so many others who have survived terrible tragedy, always leaves me in awe of the strength of the human spirit and heart.
He was able to see, even in his unimaginable situation, that he could still choose hope and love. Even though his wife had been killed, he chose to remember her love and let that be his guiding light and strength.
Although they had taken everything else from him, they couldn’t take the most profound and precious of all human freedoms—the ability to choose his own way. The ability to choose love over hate and hope over despair.
I stop and remember this when I think my life is hard or when I feel strongly challenged by something. If Victor Frankl could choose meaning over misery in a situation as dire as the holocaust, then anything is possible. Any hurt is possible to heal.
As Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
When you look at your hardships and challenges as just another personal test and know that what’s on the others side of that is a more expansive way to see life, it’s a win. But when you see life’s bumps as one giant bummer and nothing but that, it’s a loss.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve experienced pain like Victor Frankl or pain from a broken heart, health diagnosis, job loss, or whatever. Pain is pain, and it’s all subjective. One person’s pain isn’t greater than another’s. We all feel, we all hurt, and ultimately, we all have a choice in how we deal with it.
We move through our pain because we must. We do it because the alternative is a slow death sentence.
We have a choice. Our true power lies in our ability to choose how to react to what happens to us. And then to keep choosing an attitude like Victor Frankl’s, until it becomes a habit of empowerment and what pained you no longer does.
Choose to see light in the darkness, beauty in the ugliness, and love no matter what. That is the path that will you lead you to happiness and healing, and the path to a strong, resilient heart.
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5 Beliefs About Anxiety That Can Make You Even More Anxious
“It’s okay to not be okay all the time.” ~Unknown
I never thought of myself as an anxious person.
But here I was again, staring at a computer screen in my office, so stressed I could barely type. I’d been throwing myself into work and I had crashed—hard.
And this wasn’t the first time.
Unfortunately, our mental image of who we think we are and who we actually are don’t always match up. But part of being human is that we learn to live with that, we embrace the struggle, and we grow.
Over the last five years I’ve had a number periods of high anxiety, often triggered by work-related stress. In that time I’ve realized that my beliefs about anxiety were unhelpful, and they often worsened the experience.
When I was able to let go of the firm grip I had on these ideas, I found that when anxiety came to visit, it didn’t stay around as long as it used to.
Here are five beliefs about anxiety that can make you even more anxious. If you recognize them in yourself, I hope you can let them go when they arise.
1. It’s not normal (or okay) to have anxiety.
When you first start to notice your anxiety, you might think it’s not normal. The feelings in your body will be so intense that when you look around at other people, who on the surface look so calm, you won’t be able to believe that what’s happening to you might happening to them.
But I want you to know something. You are not alone.
Though everyone’s experience will be different, there are dozens of people you’ll come into contact with daily who have probably had similar feelings.
That guy who gave you your coffee this morning, he had a panic attack before work. The girl next to you at the bus stop, she’s trying to calm herself down right now. The boss who yelled at your coworker an hour ago, he’s anxious that his own boss is breathing down his neck.
Anxiety is common.
Holding onto the (false) belief that what’re you’re experiencing isn’t normal only intensifies the problem by making you feel separate from everyone else around you. It keeps you in your head where the question “Why is this happening to me?” may circle round and round without ever finding a good enough answer.
2. I need to get over my anxiety in X weeks, months, years.
Putting strict deadlines on when you want to completely rid yourself of anxiety is never useful. But I used to do this all the time.
The role that anxiety is going to play in your life isn’t predictable—you just can’t know. Telling yourself that you must overcome it in a certain amount of time is just going to feed it. Once you can truly learn to accept that you don’t know when or for how long it will come to visit, you’ll notice it does so a lot less often!
3. I can use my anxiety as a motivational tool.
One common way we often justify our anxiety is through the cliché “I work best under pressure,” but what we’re usually doing is placing an unnecessary amount of stress on our bodies and brains.
In the long term, this can leave us drained of the necessary energy to prevent and ward off anxious thoughts. When you experience stress, don’t focus on doing more. Just ride it out, let it pass, and try to be productive from a place of relative calm.
4. The magic bullet cure for my anxiety is out there somewhere.
Overcoming anxiety is a process, and holding onto the idea that you’re just one more book, course, or technique away from the ultimate cure will inevitably lead to disappointment, and typically more anxiety.
Take it day by day and relish in the small victories, and over time you’ll make progressive but sustainable changes in the way you handle your nerves.
5. Anxiety is all in my head.
This is completely false, and an unhelpful way to look at anxiety. It’s an issue with your nervous system, so it’s just as much in your body as it is in your head.
Trying to think or rationalize your way out of panic can often be a losing battle. By seeing the mind and body as connected, and both as home to your anxiety, you can develop more skillful control over your thoughts and feelings and not get caught up in a maze of worry.
If you don’t already have a movement related practice, something like yoga, Qigong or Tai Chi can be really useful for improving your ability to calm your body.
I’m not yet completely anxiety free, but every year I cope with it better and better.
Make small steps every day, congratulate yourself on the little wins, and remember that you are not alone!
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Life Is Not a Race: Why We’ll Never Find Happiness in the Future
“Life is not a race but a pace we need to maintain with reality.” ~Amit Abraham
Almost all of my adult life I’ve competed in the extreme sport of white-water kayaking.
My life revolved around adrenalin and competition.
Recently, I had a dream I will never forget:
I was running in a race and I was out in front, winning.
I got to a point in the course where there were no signposts showing the next turn. So I asked the race officials, “Where is the course?”
They replied, “We don’t know.”
The race officials couldn’t tell me where the course went from there because there was no course.
All of a sudden I stopped running and thought to myself, “There is no race if the officials don’t even know the course.”
The feelings that followed were first confusion and then a deep sense of relief.
I thought, “I don’t have to try so hard. I don’t have to win anything. There is no competition. Just stop. You are enough exactly as you are.”
And then I woke up.
This dream has stuck with me for weeks, as it feels like the exact message I need.
Just stop. You are enough. There is no race.
What if you already had everything you were asking for? What if this was it, and everything you thought you wanted was just an illusion?
Two weeks ago I got invited to go scuba diving.
I did my scuba diving certification course fifteen years ago and thought it was kind of boring. There wasn’t enough adrenalin and no competition involved, so I never went again.
Upon receiving this recent scuba invitation, I took it as sign and said yes.
Being a beginner at something is humbling. Not knowing what you’re doing. Not being good. Feeling awkward with the equipment.
It gives the ego a big check to say, “I don’t know. I’m a beginner. Please show me. Please help me.”
Listening intently as my instructor reviewed all the details I learned fifteen years ago but had forgotten, I felt vulnerable.
Most of my life I’ve been at the top of my game as an international white-water kayak competitor, and have been the guide for others.
What’s it like putting the shoe on the other foot?
Somehow it was great!
The realization came that I am an absolute beginner not only in scuba diving but in life.
This new way of living I’ve embraced requires stopping, being authentic, and learning vulnerability.
How does this feel?
Actually, liberating!
I did my scuba review and absolutely loved it. I was buzzing. The thrill of a new experience and the learning curve of being a beginner was exponential.
After two real dives in the ocean I was hooked.
This is what my there is no race dream was showing me!
The point of scuba diving is to go slowly, see as much as possible, remain calm, breathe, and relax. There is no winner except who has the best time in his or her own experience.
Under water, it feels like a meditation, no chatting or ego involved. Taking in the beautiful colors, swimming with amazing fish, and experiencing a whole new world was intoxicating.
Two weeks later I got invited to go again. We did four amazing dives in a world-class dive site in Bali. It was so unbelievably amazing. I asked myself, “How did I get here?”
I got there by letting everything else go. Embracing an entirely new way of interacting with the world, and with myself. Questioning everything I ever viewed as worthy.
Three years ago I packed up my life in New Zealand and sold or gave away everything, even my kayaks.
I decided to say yes to the unknown, landing me in a whole new life in Bali.
No extreme sports, no adrenalin, no competition; my new life here is about saying yes to everything I never thought I was.
Going slowly, practicing mindfulness through yoga, meditation, and dance, learning how to speak Indonesian, and now scuba diving, my life looks like something I never in a million years would have guessed it would be.
I am finding joy in the little things, learning how to be in the moment, and realizing all that I thought was important isn’t.
There is no race.
The Western collective consciousness teaches us that when we get to the end of something, then we will be happy, whole, complete, and successful.
When we graduate from high school or college, when we get married, when we have kids, when we get the dream job, then life will really be rolling.
We’re constantly chasing a carrot on a stick that’s always just out of reach.
When we reach the milestone that we thought was our golden key to happiness, the feeling of satisfaction is fleeting.
So we think, “Okay, well I did that, and it didn’t quite bring me the happiness I was thinking it would, so maybe it was just a stepping stone. Maybe when xyz happens, that will make me happy. That will be the real win.”
This elusive state of contentment is always around the next corner. We’re racing toward something that will never give us what we’re hoping for.
The only way to truly win this race of life is to realize there is no race.
Winning is stopping. Going within. Finding happiness within yourself.
True satisfaction can only be found inside.
When we can be alone with ourselves, be at peace, and feel a deeper connection, this is what we have really been racing to find.
Running toward the next accomplishment will never be able to provide this.
It will only take us further away from what we’re hoping to feel.
So what happens when we stop?
It involves going deeper within, which can be a scary prospect for many.
Choosing to constantly be on the go is easier. It dulls the pain.
It means not having to really take a look at yourself. A superficial sense of satisfaction comes from feeling you have accomplished a lot.
Adrenaline can be a drug, providing a temporary rush.
Why do you have to accomplish things to be worthy? Are you reliant on completing tasks so that your life can feel some sense of purpose? What if by just being present and showing up consciously you were living your purpose?
What if instead of feeling constant pressure and anxiety, you could just be with what you were doing in the moment you were doing it?
Our thoughts are rarely focused on where we are.
They’re in the past, wishing we could change it, or in the future, creating false outcomes that will never usually come to fruition.
Both of these thought patterns are actually a form of insanity, and not based in reality.
The past is over. There is nothing we can do to change it.
The future will never come. Reality is always the moment we are in right now.
We can only truly live by stopping the race of the mind to the imagined future—by living in presence. By waking up from the dream that there is something out there that will bring satisfaction, turning inward, and taking responsibility for our lives.
Realizing there is no race means finding contentment right here and now.
Quit running and find that what you have been searching for has been right here all along.
Start by creating small gaps in your schedule. Start small at first. Get places a few minutes early.
Before getting out of the car or leaving the house, consciously pause.
Try fitting fewer things into your day. Less is more!
Do one thing at a time.
When you eat, be present with your food. Enjoy it, really taste it, see it, smell it, savor it.
Turn off the TV.
Take a meditation course.
Notice and be grateful for the small things.
Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, focus on the many things you do have.
Life’s finish line will come one day for us all. Learning how to truly live means we will get to that finish line with a smile in our heart and contentment in our being.
This is the ultimate win. It requires nothing from outside and everything from inside. There is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, nothing to prove, and nothing to do.
All it requires is stopping and refocusing priorities; cultivating awareness by slowing down the race of the mind.
Creating space to be, and valuing ourselves as enough right here and now, requires an inner commitment and unplugging.
Contentment is currently available in abundance; we just need to stop long enough to feel it.
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How to Use Silence to Help Your Hurting Friend
“Sitting silently beside a friend who is hurting may be the best gift we can give.” ~Unknown
There’s a time for words and a time for silence. Thankfully, when I went through one of the darkest periods of my life, I had friends who knew what time it was.
When things go well, your friends don’t usually need to show up in silence. But everything changes when you go through a season of intense pain and disappointment. I know this from firsthand experience.
My life took a drastic turn for the worse when the first ride of the season on our motorcycle ended abruptly. A driver who should have stopped and waited turned left onto the highway, right in front of us. In that moment, we met a world of hurt.
After the initial crash, which I barely survived, I experienced incredible peace and gratitude. I was in a great deal of pain, but I found myself grateful for my family, the excellent care I was receiving, and hope for a better future.
In the early days of repair and recovery, I appreciated the friends and family who came to visit. I enjoyed hearing their news and talking about my journey. I read, with gratitude, the cards that were filled with words of encouragement and love.
But I also appreciated the times when words were not spoken. My true friends would watch me fall asleep in the middle of a conversation and not be bothered. They knew I needed the rest and were okay sitting in silence.
When Silence Meant the Most
At the four-month point of my recovery, the pain and loss took a turn for the worse. An infection in my leg that was supposed to be killed two months earlier was alive and well. It resulted in an unexpected re-admittance to the hospital and a painful fourth surgery.
After that fourth surgery, the reality of my situation started to sink in. My body would never be the same again. The next marathon I was planning to run would never see me at the starting line. The door into a brand new work opportunity that opened up just before the accident was slammed shut.
As the losses mounted, my infected leg throbbed under the pain of reconstruction. I slipped into depression and struggled to find relief physically and emotionally. The pain medicine took the edge off the physical pain but the emotional pain was relentless.
At one particular low point in the hospital bed, my wife and two life-long friends sat with me. In the void of silence, something powerful happened. I started to cry shallow tears at first, but then guttural sobs that came from the deep pain I was feeling.
At that point in my hurt, I would have snapped had someone told me, “It will be okay. Hang in there. You’ll get through this.” Those words would have felt like patronizing pity and been no comfort at all.
What I was given in the silence was the best gift I could have received. I wasn’t out of the woods, but I had moved ever so slightly in the direction of healing and being present with my pain and struggle.
I had a similar experience two days later in the same hospital room. Another dear friend came to visit, not with answers or platitudes, but with support and a willingness to sit in silence. He received my tears in silence without feeling awkward and left having given me a gift.
Life Lessons on How to Help a Hurting Friend
Through my experience with silence, I harvested several takeaways. I apply these lessons to myself and give them to you as you seek to help those in your life who hurt.
Human Companionship Helps Carry the Pain
When you go through a painful experience, part of the load only you can carry. Part of the load, however, can be shared by companions who travel with you. My friends drove me around, shoveled my driveway, looked after my work, and brought me the snacks I really enjoyed. But they also helped me carry my pain.
Carrying the pain of another can be a challenging task, but when it happens, it’s like a cup of cold water on a hot day. When my friends sat with me in silence while I hurt physically and emotionally, they provided reassurance and support so I would keep going and not lose hope.
Well-Placed Words Can Be a Comforting Distraction
Sometimes we use words because we’re uncomfortable with silence. Sometimes we use words because we’re uncomfortable with pain and suffering. But words offered at the right time and in the right way can also be life giving.
The words I appreciated when in pain were the stories of life and experiences in the outside world. I enjoyed hearing about the holidays taken to warm places, babies being born, and the jokes being told.
The stories became a comforting distraction from the pain and difficulty I was experiencing. There were times when I wasn’t in the mood for their stories, but if that was the case, I would just simply tell them and they would revert to silence.
Friends Give Us Strength to Hold Our “Why?”
When I carried an overwhelming load of loss and grief, I asked “Why?” Asking “Why?” is a natural response to loss. The problem comes when we demand an answer and never get to a place of accepting our situation.
The friends who helped me while I was asking “Why?” were the ones who didn’t try to answer the question but sat in silence and allowed the question to be the elephant in the room.
I felt strength when my friends held “Why?” with me without needing an answer or making me feel bad for asking.
Friends Remind Us We’re Not Alone
Online social networks meet a certain need for connection, but when we’re in pain, they’re not enough. You need warm-blooded people to be present with you when you hurt. I certainly did. Having friends like or comment on my Facebook status helped, but it wasn’t enough.
The presence of a true friend who is able to sit in silence meets the human need for connection and affects us more than we know. You know it matters because when you are alone for too long, depression and despair starts to set in.
Just By Being Present, Friends Might Be Doing Enough
When I was in pain the physiotherapist forced me to get out of bed the day after surgery, I dreaded it. I knew I needed to get moving again, but the pain and struggle was intense. What helped was a friend or family member who walked in silence beside or behind me.
My friends saw my pain and struggle and couldn’t take it away. What they could do was be present, and when they did, made my life just a little easier to endure.
Who in your life is in a world of hurt? Who could you help, not with words, but with your presence?
If you don’t have the right words, don’t worry. Your presence and willingness to sit in the silence may be the best gift you could give your friend.
