The difficult moments in life bring us to a cross in the road. We can turn toward despair or we can move toward awareness. Despair leads us to contemplate the dark side of things: discouragement, frustration at others ill attempts at communicating, anger at change, and fear of uncertainty. Awareness, on the other hand, provides an opportunity to grow. The focus becomes an inward look to propel oneself forward.
How do you look inward? I liken it to seeing what is going on inside. Feelings come and go. So, a person who looks inward checks the feelings with the thoughts. They process the input and decide if whatever they are experiencing is worth an output. They stop ruminating, reduce complaining, and find self-compassion for feelings which promote insecurity and discouragement.
To propel forward means to take action from the inspiration of what goes on inside to move toward a goal on the outside. Discouragement will show up. Each human experiences some form of discouragement. What we do with the discouragement will either stifle growth or move us forward to the next level. Acceptance has a huge part to play in the growth factor.
Difficult moments teach us to find the space to breathe.
We cannot change circumstances at every whim. We have to be willing to allow life to be as it is, even if we wish it were something different. Until we are at the acceptance place, we wallow back and forth between awareness and stagnancy.
Reality comes at us full force. We might experience a loss of a loved one, unresolved conflicts linger and create more problems, or the burden of making a huge mistake and trying to rectify it leads to more confusion. Acceptance of the inability to solve problems is not always our fault. Sometimes, we have to let go of the need to solve things and just calm ourselves and accept the reality of what is.
When we fight reality, we hit the wall with stress and strain. We defend ourselves, to the point of alienating others, and we hedge ourselves into fight mode instead of acceptance mode.
Our bodies need to settle and to calm when we are fighting the never-ending battle of self-justification. The concept helps us stop and think instead of swirling in a pile of emotional muck.
One took I’ve used to calm myself is a therapeutic breath. Taking a deep inhale, I breathe in for five seconds, hold the breathe for fives more seconds and then slower than I breathed in, release the air, extending to 7 seconds if possible. I repeat the process about five times to fully experience the calming effects upon my nervous system.
The body, which breathes, is the body, which calms and heals.
Taking the breath also helps to calm the despair-like sensations of an overwhelmed mental capacity to handle too much stress. Until we catch those unwelcome thoughts and feelings, we will continue to downward spiral.
I hope you have found something useful in this little sharing of thoughts. Life is worth slowing down and accepting it as it is, rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole. To feel complete is to allow life to be, and to breathe through experiences where your uncertainty is tested.
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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION and is republished here with permission from the author.
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