There has been a lot in the media lately about Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love. I recently finished it myself, and I was mesmerized. My husband and I listened to it during a long road trip recently and were hooked. Gilbert was married and was struggling with her desire not to become a mother. She found herself completely torn with what to do in her life as she discovered she no longer wanted to be married. Ultimately, in order to process all that had happened in her life, she decided to travel (something that deeply resonates within her) for a year. She went to Italy for several months to experience joy, to India for several months to meditate and discover a closer connection with God, and ultimately to Bali to learn balance.
We’ve all been through those gut-wrenching times when our life doesn’t seem to fit us, when we find ourselves in a situation that doesn’t align with our hearts. Gilbert’s remedy to her own situation was to go on a year-long quest for inner truth. Not all of us can go on such a long quest, but there are things we can do if we find ourselves in a situation that doesn’t resonate with who we are internally.
When we find ourselves in those situations in our lives, our world often feels foreign and unknown. We don’t know where to go or what to do. We can feel stuck and afraid, alone and disoriented. There are times when we feel that we will never survive these periods and make it to the other side. Speaking from my own experiences in life, I can say without reservation that the times when I have felt most out of alignment with my heart have ultimately led me to greater self-awareness and peace within myself after I have emerged from those experiences. But it can take quite a while to work your way through those experiences, and they can often be enormously painful. I’ve known for a long time that those experiences can be the most rewarding and growth-promoting periods of life, but that doesn’t make them easier when you are actually in the midst of them simply because they can be so painful.
So what can you do for yourself when you are in the midst of those enormously tough times in your life? Each individual is different and each situation is different, but there are certainly things that you can do for yourself if you can’t take a year off like Gilbert did.
Create a peaceful, restorative environment. If you’re worn out and don’t have the energy to really put in much effort to decorating or doing a lot to your environment, just concentrate on the small things. Get a photo of a time in your life that brought you a lot of happiness, or find a memento that brings you back to a time in your life when you felt safe. Find something that you can hold or look at that brings you peace.
If you’re someone who finds comfort in organization and are feeling like you need to have more control in whatever way you can find it in your life, you can expend energy into creating a more organized and beautiful environment. Those moments can be very restorative as you lose yourself in the task of cleaning and putting things in place, and the space you’ve created can help you heal by providing you with a safe and loving environment. Just be mindful of your energy level and look within yourself to see what your needs are.
Music can also be very restorative. You can use music to take you to another place. Whether you like hard rock or soulful jazz, find music that lifts your spirits and takes you to another time and place in your life that feels more comforting and joyful. Music is incredibly healing, and it can also be a catalyst for you to feel the feelings that you need to feel, whether those are anger, rage, or even sadness or joy.
And by all means, if you need to cry, do it! I know a lot of people, including myself at times, who try to hold back their tears because of a variety of reasons. One of the things that I’ve discovered is that at times, having a good cry is exactly what you need to just allow the feelings to come and to be able to fully experience them so that you can let them go. Of course, when you’re in the midst of the really hard times in your life, often you need more than one really good cry, but it can be helpful to just give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you’re feeling so that you can process it.
Create space for yourself within your life. If you have children, perhaps this is just time at the beginning or the end of your day when the demands on your time are not so great. Or if you can get away, treat yourself to a quiet retreat where you can just be who you need to be for a while. Creating sacred space is vital, as you need time to reflect, to heal, to process, and simply to be with yourself so that you can start to make sense of what’s happening in your life.
One of the other things I have personally found to be transformative is to get into nature. Go somewhere for a walk in the woods, or go sit on a beach somewhere quiet. There’s something about nature that can really lift your spirits when you are feeling the challenges of such difficult times. Nature has a way of taking us outside of ourselves, reminding us of the beauty and wonders of the world. It simplifies things to watch how naturally and seamlessly nature operates. It can make us feel connected with the world in a way that grounds us.
Meditation can also be a very powerful restorative tool. It can be challenging, particularly if you’re not someone who has meditated before, but it also can be very rewarding. Especially during those times in your life when you feel unfocused and you have too many thoughts running through your head, taking time to quiet your mind can provide the peace momentarily that you need. Those small moments can lead to greater clarity and promote a greater sense of well-being.
If you are a religious or spiritual individual, prayer is another way to ease the pain. Prayer can help people feel more connected to God. Especially during those times in our lives that we feel lost or alone, praying can help us to feel our divine connection and enable us to feel moments of grace just when we need it most.
Moving your body can also help lift your spirits and make you feel better. Whether you are able to just go out for a walk or whether you have the energy to go work out, whatever you can do to stimulate yourself and get your body moving can help.
There are a lot of studies on the benefits of working out, particularly when you are having a stressful time in your life. Getting your body moving can energize your mind and enable you to think more clearly. It’s also a tremendously healthy way to work some of the stresses out of your body.
I believe that part of what the challenging times in life are for is to teach us how to not only pay attention to what we are feeling but to honor those feelings. Most often, we find ourselves in those situations in our lives because something traumatic has happened that has essentially kicked us off the path that we’ve been on.
At times, those events come on the heels of other events that have been causing us pain, smaller situations that have been in our lives that haven’t felt good but about which we haven’t known what to do. Other times, we can find ourselves in tremendous grief over the loss of a loved one. Regardless of how we come to find ourselves in those dark moments of our lives, we must learn to honor whatever our feelings are so that we can process them.
What I’ve discovered about those times in life is that when you don’t allow yourself to fully feel what you’re feeling, when you don’t allow yourself to truly live within the experience you are having, you simply delay learning what it is that experience is there to show you.
The experience may be there to show you that you need to make a change in your life, or it may be there to show you that you have more internal reserves than you thought you had, or perhaps it’s there to show you that you do have within yourself all that you need to get through difficult times in your life.
The bottom line about these transformative times in your life is to listen to what you need to do for yourself. There is a still, small voice within each of us that tells us what feels right and what doesn’t, even during those times in life when we feel that we’ve lost our own internal compass.
You just need to allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you’re feeling, create an environment in which you can heal even if it’s only for a few minutes a day, and give yourself the space and time to fully work through the issues that you are having.
If you need counseling, by all means, find a resource in your area that can help. And although these periods of life challenges can be full of pain and anguish, focus on the small moments you can capture in your life to make yourself feel better.
You may not come up with the full solution to whatever your issues are, but if you start by focusing on just one minute—what you need to do for that one minute to make yourself feel better and then expand to bigger periods of time as you are able—you’ll learn that you can create joy in your life even when things seem very unfamiliar and scary.
~posted by Christine, 10:15 AM
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