What do you do when it feels like your life is falling apart? How do you handle emotional pain?
Crises happen. When life gets messy, and it most reliably does, it is at times harder than hard to keep ourselves upright and unified in the middle of the craziness. Our bodies do weird things. Our brains do even weirder things in response. We get swallowed up by traumas from the past, engulfed by something that has happened, is happening, or that we're terrified won't ever stop happening.
Furthermore, the daily mix of worldly and personal woes is endless: kids struggling, marriages exploding, businesses collapsing, people dying, friends hurting, countries starving, contingencies battling, and bodies ailing.
Culturally we are indeed fascinated by suffering, not only because it moves us, but also because it reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles. Though we often skulk away from poignant feelings, we are also drawn to them, as they make us experience deeply what it is to be human. Still, dealing with the feelings is at times unbearable. We believe they will crush us and that we won't be able to move through their heaviness, their viscosity.
Life has uncannily provided some serious opportunities for me to re-investigate the wounds from my chaotic childhood. Knowing however that I have a tool kit when stuff starts brewing is huge. The question becomes not how to keep from ever feeling this way -- pain is inevitable -- but rather how I am in the middle of the pain.
When I feel like I am coming undone, there are the five things I like to do. When we work through these steps, the intensity of the giant tornado overhead changes. It no longer feels like we are the ones breaking apart. Instead, the tornado itself -- of harrowing feelings that make us want to freeze, hide, wail, give up, escape, die, you name it -- is what begins to break up.
Rather than falling apart in these moments, we instead crack open, in a wonderfully vulnerable and true way. Please hear this: Cracking open is not a terrible thing. From it, we become privy to an indescribable sweetness, yes the sweetness in pain that rises up from our willingness to not turn away.
Right here is where we behold the remarkable human spirit. Right here is where the jaw drops in wonder at our strength and unparalleled bravery.
Here are the five things I like to do, and that you can, in your own way, do too:
1. Assess whether or not you're making a big deal out of nothing
2. If you don't think you are, you're probably wrong
3. Get over it, and get over yourself
4. Go do something for SOMEBODY ELSE and stop making everything all about you all the time
5. Dismiss any additional self-help, self-love pop psychology that's too easy to dispense and has no long-term benefit.
If you don't like what you are doing, do something else or simply realize you can
If you lose what was precious to you, be thankful for the JOY you had when you did and not your pain and lost expectation when you do not. Even your loved ones are the JOY you experienced with them and not for when they are not.
Nothing in this life can be given or taken away. This life is Change be the change and not the creator of that which you are not.
Feel Joy and Bliss, not by what you, others or life does. Be JOY and BLISS because you can.
Master the emotions of fear, insecurity, hate, and have no desires or wants. Simply accept what is is and do what you can if you want.
Even Science does not think MAN can or will ever no WHY or HOW life began. Who are we to imagine PAIN and SUFFERING for ourselves and others.
With that, go out and do what you can for why you can and how you can, simply without trying to put a stake in the ground or ever loose you BLISS and JOY, ever.
GOD's WILL BE DONE. LET IT BE, QUE SERA SERA or Pure Random if you must