If you are reading this, it’s likely you’re going through a bump in the road.
If you are human, you have and will face future challenges, insurmountable problems, issues that make you want to crawl under the covers.
If you are a human living in the 2020s, you probably have faced this multiple times.
These could be small hurdles or giant ones. If you’re a parent, you might want to read this post.
If you are struggling with the decade we’re living in now, you might want to read this one.
If you are living with chronic illness or some situation that feels like it will never go away, you are a warrior. You may not always feel this way especially on the really hard days. But you are.
The key to surviving through it, isn’t willing it away or vision boarding your way out of it. It’s not scrolling social media, or drinking a glass of wine, or watching a really great movie. I’ve tried all of those many, many times.
They key isn’t to fight it or to try to escape from it.
When you are suffering, the only way through is to be in the moment with what you are going through.
I have been sick many times this year and every time I feel unwell, I go through waves of self-doubt. What if this will not go away? What if I don’t feel better? What if I get worse?
For you, it may be a financial situation or a relationship issue. It could be another type of chronic illness. It could be something that you want but haven’t been able to achieve.
What I’ve learned through the process is that the only thing that works is to be there for yourself. Have compassion for what you are going through. Can you support yourself from one moment to the next? Can you do one thing to make your situation just a little better? Dr. Rick Hanson often gives these reminders that we can both accept our situation and also improve upon them. That by controlling what we can control, we gain agency in any situation. We pull ourselves out of helplessness and into growth.
We might not be magically able to get what we want or change our situation immediately, but there are things we can do to feel just a little better.
We can focus on what is working right now.
We can put our hand over our heart and send ourselves love, compassion and care.
We can rest.
We can meditate or do tai chi or yoga.
We can pray and ask the universe for support and help.
We can remember that this situation like all situations will pass.
We can tell ourselves that we don’t have a crystal ball, but we do have a past. And we can feel confident that we have survive difficult situations before and things eventually got better.
Most importantly, we can try to sit with where we are in this moment, no matter how difficult and dark it may be, and we can love ourselves through it. We can treat ourselves the way we would treat a best friend or our child, and have compassion for how hard it is to be a human at this time, in this moment. And we can have gratitude for the moments that are less intense, and we can breathe deeply into that.
Sometimes we can get caught up in the things we think we need. This year there has been many disappointments – inflation, all the new viruses, housing prices. But maybe what we really need is to feel safe, loved, and secure. And those things we can learn how to grow and nurture.
We don’t need external things to fulfill what is missing. We need to work on building our internal reserves.
Because life is an ocean that’s bound to throw waves at us, we need to learn ways to ride it and have the utmost compassion when we fall and get tossed in the current. We need to build support so that when we get thrown in, we’re courageous enough to get up again.