"I remind myself, while feeling afraid, to love life anyway, to retain the certain knowledge that I will die someday and use that to open to the preciousness of what I see and feel right in front of me. Now I might feel afraid but am determined to have that fear serve as a counterpoint to my tendency to procrastinate. If I have to apologize, tell someone 'I love you', try to make a difference, I need to do it without delay"
- Sharon Saltzberg, meditation teacher
Don't just survive......BE.....
Yesterday I gave a bit of a talk to a group of maybe a couple of hundred people. One of the subjects I talked about was how I retracted into a little ball of nothingness when rock bottom hit. It was the low point when THE questions get asked. The self pity NEGOBS run riot. "Why?, What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose? How am I going to survive? When will it all end?". You know the ones I'm sure. The pain of how I felt back then will never leave me. It can't. The EXPERIENCES become a part of who you are, even though they are baaaad experiences. Of course when you are faced with a pretty bad rock bottom like mine and you don't have any comforts to help ease the pain, it is the mental anguish that causes the baaaad stuff, the stuff that makes you question whether you really want to survive. The physical discomforts like hunger, poor or no accommodation, hygiene, and the other 'missing' stuff, only ADD TO THE MENTAL ANGUISH. But it's important to understand that the pain, the suffering, the devastation, will help you grow...... but it can take a long time and while the anguish is happening the 'things will get better' bits are only words. So what I want you to do is REMEMBER NOW for later on. I hope you are in a wonderful place right now. I hope life is good. Everybody deserves to be happy. But as happens in life it is likely to throw in some baaaad times. And what happens before you even realize it is that your resistance turns itself off. You weaken mentally. Your defence mechanism crashes. So............
Knowledge NOW beats pain later
BE AWARE NOW... for later
When the obstacle appears be ready for it. Any amount of pain from the OBSTACLE will cause NEGATIVITY. That is a certainty. But what you can do NOW is understand that you can lessen the time it takes to repair by TRAINING YOUR MIND. Understand that your MIND is in charge of everything you do. It creates the THOUGHTS you have, both GOOD and BAD. If I had been aware of the destruction caused by the MIND, or more specifically the WAY THAT I THINK, I would have been in much better shape a lot faster because I would have known HOW TO THINK to feel better. And that's what all of us want to do when we are going through tough times because of LOSS...... we want to feel better.
But there is another reason to make yourself aware of your own THOUGHTS created by your MIND. As I have said soooo often pain and suffering provide life lessons. They are thrown at us to MAKE US LEARN so that it is easier next time.
When the obstacle appears be ready for it. Any amount of pain from the OBSTACLE will cause NEGATIVITY. That is a certainty. But what you can do NOW is understand that you can lessen the time it takes to repair by TRAINING YOUR MIND. Understand that your MIND is in charge of everything you do. It creates the THOUGHTS you have, both GOOD and BAD. If I had been aware of the destruction caused by the MIND, or more specifically the WAY THAT I THINK, I would have been in much better shape a lot faster because I would have known HOW TO THINK to feel better. And that's what all of us want to do when we are going through tough times because of LOSS...... we want to feel better.
But there is another reason to make yourself aware of your own THOUGHTS created by your MIND. As I have said soooo often pain and suffering provide life lessons. They are thrown at us to MAKE US LEARN so that it is easier next time.
The never ending question
And one HUUUGE lesson I have learned is that my LIFE is soooooo precious....... and LIMITED. I was not given my life JUST TO SURVIVE my way through it. And that's HOW I was living my life. Making more. Wanting more. JUST SURVIVING. Seriously what is the point in just living to survive? When I talk to people I quite often describe how I felt at my lowest point. I talk about how the reclusive pathway causes terrible loneliness because of the embarrassment and the self pity. I go even further and recall the ugly side of loneliness and describe the tears rolling down my cheeks when I wasn't even crying. I recall the deafening roar of silence, hour after hour. I recall wanting somebody to talk to but being too embarrassed, too proud.
And so I waited. And I suffered in silence while I tried to pick up the pieces of ME!
As often happens when I talk there were many tears as I finished up. And that's good. It means people are listening to some of the misery I had EXPERIENCED. And if that can help lessen some of the misery for them later, well then, mission accomplished! Oh by the way I almost made it through without tears myself. YEEEHAAAR......... well, as I said, ALMOST. I croaked and quivered as best I could.
So do me a BIIIIIG favor, dot. Keep watching my journey and learn about my pain to lessen yours as you travel along the length of your own LIFE. And look at where you are right now. With the Busyness of life, the work, the kids, the mortgage, the friends, the social life, ask yourself the question:
AM I JUST SURVIVING ?
and if the answer is "YES" there is a very simple solution to your dilemma.....
And so I waited. And I suffered in silence while I tried to pick up the pieces of ME!
As often happens when I talk there were many tears as I finished up. And that's good. It means people are listening to some of the misery I had EXPERIENCED. And if that can help lessen some of the misery for them later, well then, mission accomplished! Oh by the way I almost made it through without tears myself. YEEEHAAAR......... well, as I said, ALMOST. I croaked and quivered as best I could.
So do me a BIIIIIG favor, dot. Keep watching my journey and learn about my pain to lessen yours as you travel along the length of your own LIFE. And look at where you are right now. With the Busyness of life, the work, the kids, the mortgage, the friends, the social life, ask yourself the question:
AM I JUST SURVIVING ?
and if the answer is "YES" there is a very simple solution to your dilemma.....
THINK......
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