Take the following mental challenge:
1) Ask yourself “The Question”:
“Where you would like to be and have known you would like to be but aren’t?”
2) Be brutally specific and honest.
3) Now list why you are NOT there.
4) Next, identify the changes you need to make.
5) Then take massive action!
Don’t let another year go by stuck in the same place!
Craig Ballantyne
“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. Once you have determined the spiritual principles you wish to exemplify, abide by these rules as if they were laws, as if it were indeed sinful to compromise them. Don’t mind if others don’t share your convictions. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now.”
Epictetus
We all want to be happier, more satisfied with the lives we’re living, but what does that mean to each of us?
How do we make these lives of ours richer, fuller, happier?
A good place to start would be, rather than dreaming of a lottery win, or Prince Charming, or Princess Lovely riding up to sweep you off your feet to a new exotic life, to figure out what could make us happy right now!
So, what’s made you happy in 2013 so far?
What made you happy last year? What made you happy in the last 5 years?
What made you happy in your past?
Can you do any of those things today, to make this day you are now living happier?
I made a list of the things that make me happy now and those things that made me happy in years past, and here are some highlights from it:
And then, instead of a ‘to do’ list, I made a ‘be happy’ list, of the things I could do in a day that would raise my sense of wellbeing, general satisfaction in my life and all round level of happiness.
None of it costs very much, and when I do something from it, I feel great at the end of the day. When I miss a day, I really notice it and feel lower.
So, it’s now one of my daily practices to do at least one thing on my ‘Be Happy’ list. What will be on yours?
Oh, Sweet Baby Jesus, but this one is hard, so hard. But it really does hold the key to releasing all the pain, anger. bitterness, hurt, disillusionment and whatever other agonising emotion you’re currently held tight in the grip of.
Although Acceptance is hard, there is a process that’s even harder and I hesitate to name it but I must because there are parallels to them both, the relief they offer you and the work you must do to access it.
The other process is Forgiveness, Yep, I went there and you damn well don’t want to forgive do you?
I think that’s why Forgiveness is so hard, because we’re involving other people in our story, people who contributed to the injustice that happened to us and its hard as hell to let go of our sense of betrayal and our condemnation of any immorality we see surrounding the event that caused us great and ongoing pain and suffering.
And to be honest, it feels good to blame someone else for the FURBAR BUNDY* you’re now living.
Let’s take a step back from the presently inconceivable quest that would be Forgiveness and work towards Acceptance.
As I said, Acceptance follows a similar process as Forgiveness, however its all about you and you being able to consider the event that caused you calamity to be something that simply happened to you. Just one of those things.
Its not personal, its not the end of the world and now you can pick yourself up and learn to live in your new circumstance.
I said it wasn’t easy! What it is is challenging and incredibly powerful.
It is possible and it will give you relief from physical, emotional, mental and spiritual pain. I did say it was powerful!
I was knocked down in January 2014 while I was walking my dogs. It was wholly the driver’s fault, she wasn’t looking where she was going and she was driving too fast. She almost killed me and one of my dogs.
To make matters worse, she lied to the police about what had happened and tried to blame the accident on one of my dogs. BITCH!
Yes, I still hold anger towards her. Not for the accident as much as for the shameless lying she did afterwards, as if she hadn’t hurt us enough.
Yet, I’m happy to say my anger has lost most of its heat.
Surprised? I am.
Just after the accident, when the police informed me she was claiming I was at fault and that I could face criminal proceedings, I was beyond furious. I was filled with a hate fuelled rage and righteous indignation. As far as I was concerned this woman was dispicable, dishonest and had no moral decency. I trapped myself into being her victim and a victim of my own sense of injustice and injury.
I pretty much ate, slept, breathed anger, hate and victimhood and I was constantly in pain which fuelled the anger, which fuelled the pain. I had myself trapped.
I had to pull myself out of that downward spiral otherwise I’d have forever been a victim of that careless driver and the story I told myself about the injustice and unfairness of it having happened to me.
The truth is accidents happen everyday, and many people are left in much worse shape than me. I was lucky and I refuse to give that woman any more power to hurt me further.
I needed a few months distance from the accident and for the worst of my physical injuries to have healed. Yet before I gained Acceptance, I was still in near constant pain; because the story I was telling was still all about the accident and how this woman had done me wrong.
When I started physiotherapy in June, I started to turn it around. Partly because I was taking active steps to aid myself in my recovery, but there was something else too.
At the start of my physiotherapy treatment, my therapist and I were talking about how soft tissue takes longer to heal than a broken bone. And then he said, ‘The body always heals itself, the problem is we hold onto the memory of our injuries and our pain, even in our very cells.’
This comment triggered some long forgotten knowledge in my mind, something I’d read years before about the mind-body connection and the incredible influence each one has over the other and how little Western medicine understands and acknowledges it.
I went back to my books and did more research into the mind-body connection and found many scientific studies and personal accounts that all verified the claim that stress creates pain in the body and we can feel real physical pain long after the body has healed the original injury.
Stress causes pain and my thinking caused my stress. My anger, my disgust for this woman’s lack of moral decency, my sense of injustice, my desire for vengeance all were contributing to keeping me in pain.
I spoke again to my physiotherapist about my research and what I was feeling and I admitted that I found the idea of forgiving this woman impossible; not for the accident itself, that was easy, after all accidents happen all day, every day.
What I found impossible to forgive was that she hadn’t even gotten out of the car to see if we were okay when she’d knocked us down, it was other passersby who stopped to help and offer their support; that she never expressed any remorse for hurting me and my dogs; that she’d nearly killed my beloved Reilly and then blamed the accident on him instead of accepting responsibility for her actions; that she lied and continued to do so as the legal process grinds on.
You can tell I feel very justified in holding onto my injured feelings, just as I’m sure you’re equally as justified in holding onto yours.
So, for me, forgiveness was out.
Martin, my lovely physiotherapist told me that if I found forgiveness too hard and he could understand why, then could I reach acceptance with what had happened and its aftermath?
Could I?
Could I look at this life shattering event and say to myself, ‘Shit happens!’ shrug and move on?
I’m here to say that I have and so can you.
First, I made a conscious effort to change my story. When I meet people now, I stop myself from introducing the story of the accident, how it was the driver’s fault and her dishonest, dishonourable actions. I’m still judging her 9 ways to Sunday but I have stopped speaking of it and that has actually lessened its hold on me.
I changed my story and now I say that yes, I’m recovering from an accident however I talk more about the great relief physiotherapy has given me and how much my recovery has progressed. I talk about how I’m getting better little by little, day by day.
Changing my story has made a massive difference to my recovery. I’ve been able to manage pain better and found that I was able to reduce the medication I was taking. I’m feeling strong enough to walk the dogs in the park and I enjoy my time with them instead of worrying about whether I’ll fall and hurt myself again.
The biggest change was the relief I eventually started to feel from the negative stew of emotions I’d been boiling in. The poisinous brew of anger, bitterness and sense of injustice waned as I stopped living as a victim of what had happened and instead opened myself up to fresh feelings of hope, peace, happiness.
Yes, I still hold anger towards the driver of the car but I don’t go looking for it anymore, repeating the story and working myself into an emotional wreck. After all, she could easily have killed us.My dogs and I are alive, we might be battered and scarred but we’re still here.
You are still here too. You can still change your story, you can stop being a victim of whatever and whomever inflicted wounds on you.
Something happened, it was awful, and yet you survived. Change the story you tell about what happened and you’ll change your life.
*FUBAR BUNDY
FUBAR BUNDY is an ambulance term meaning fucked up beyond all recognition but unfortunately not dead yet.
Photo by Zuhair Ahmad
Whoa! Before you get all defensive and ready to kick my ass, ripping into me about how ‘I don’t understand what you’re going through’ and how the situation you’re facing is ‘the worst ever!’
I didn’t tell you to ‘get over it’, I’m saying Be over it. There’s a big, big difference.
Be over it, because in any real sense of the time you are in, you already are.
Yes, you are! You are over it.
I can say this quite definitely, because I know that whatever it is that you’re fretting about, you’re not in the middle of it right now, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this!
You’re over it, yet you’re still living it. What you’re doing is putting yourself back in pain, back in the situation that caused you pain or you’re putting yourself in a future disadvantageous situation, creating pain now for something that has not and may not happen.
You’re not alone in inflicting damage on yourself, nearly all of us do. But its time to stop it. Let it go and be over it.
Let me show you what I mean with a personal example. This summer, whilst I was recovering from my injuries caused by a fool driving a car and not looking where she was going and colliding with me, (self serving pity party – sorry), I was unable to work. And I spent all my time worrying about how I was going to heat the house this winter.
The sun was beating down outside and all I could do was make myself sick with worry about November, December, January and how cold I was going to be if I didn’t recover and get back to work.
I decided to be over it. I changed into shorts and a tank top and took the dogs to the park in glorious sunshine.
When our world seems like its falling down around our ears and we have no sense of control, we often then go to the worst case scenario in our heads and make it even worse, until it gets so big and overwhelming, its all we think about and we’re paralysed with fear.
That’s when we need to rethink what we’re thinking about.
Scientific studies have shown that worrying about an event, whether real or imagined, increases the intensity of your negative emotions and makes them last longer too.
We didn’t need science to tell us that but the confirmation gives me even more motivation and even justification to tell you to ‘Be over it’, because all that worrying is just making your feel worse.
The good news is that those same scientific studies have shown that there are techniques to reduce the impact of a life altering event, and one of the best is Reappraisal; looking at the event from a different perspective.
When times are tough, its time to lighten up and stop taking yourself and whatever is going on so seriously. To help, start looking at the big mess in your life, whether past, present or future, with a number of different perspectives.
Take on the view of an uninvolved bystander and replay the event from their perspective. Be an on the spot news reporter and give a blow by blow account from that perspective. Be Zeus or Athena or Aphrodite or whomever your favourite Greek God is. Be Superman or Catwoman or Wolverine. Be a school teacher. Be a zoo keeper. Be many different random people looking at the same event and see how many different ways there are to explain it, feel it, judge it.
The important thing about this is, the more different ways you can see the event that has so traumatised you, the less you can attach the meaning you originally gave it that disempowers you.
Its never the event that destroys your life, its the meaning you give to it. After all, every trauma and tragedy you’re suffered, someone else has been there too and survived and gone on to live a fulfilled life. So why not you? Its because of the stories you have attached to the event.
Imagine that you’ve been sacked from your job. This has happened to me, far too many times in the past 8 years than I feel comfortable telling you. At first, I used to think ‘Crap, what’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t have done that, or I should’ve been more like this’ and it spiralled down into, ‘I’ll never work again, my best days are behind me, I’m too old, too fat, too over qualified to get another job.’
You can see why this becomes a self defeating prophecy and of course it would get you down. But I hope you can also see that it wasn’t getting fired that stirred up my negative emotions and wreaked havoc on my equilibrium.
Whilst being fired may have been the catalyst, its the story being told about why its happened and what’s going to happen next that fires up all the negative emotions and has them churning away.
Take any experience in your life, good or bad, and examine it carefully so you can see the stories you’ve told yourself and the beliefs you’ve created; beliefs that you then assign to otehrwise everyday occurances.
Taking my example, many people start a job only to find they don’t fit in and either leave or are asked to move on, only the self defeating start believing they’ll never work again. Most people simply start a new job and find a better fit for themselves.
If its happened to anyone else in the history of the world, then you can be assured that there’s no global conspiracy to spite only you. Imagine your worst nightmare and google it, you’ll probably find someone has already lived through it happening to them and they went on to live an amazing life. You are not being singled out for particular punishment.
Start giving events which you have labelled as catastrophic, new meaning by seeing them with a different perspective.
I looked at losing my last job through the eyes of my boss and imagined her saying, ‘Wow, she’s too good to work here and we’re holding her back, I’m too small minded and our company’s too small for her to really shows us her skills and talents. I can’t hold her back and I’m so jealous because she’s so gorgeous.’
It made me laugh and took the drama out of the event.
I also looked at how my friends viewed it and saw that they were relieved that I was no longer working there because I’d been constantly undermined both personally and prefessionally. They all knew I would find a great job with a great employer who would value me and nuture my skills.
Seeing that made me realise my fear of never working again was totally unjustified.
Have fun with this when you are able to. I sometimes look at fraught situations from my dogs’ perspective and when I do that, there’s nothing remotely more important than my time with them, walks and dinner and treats.
Switching your perspective changes the story, which changes your belief, which changes how you feel.
Then you can work through whatever is going on and move on without carrying forward old pain and the stories that cause more. You give yourself relief.
Be over it.
Cynthia Curry 