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Now Stop Struggling: Right this second your life is a whole new ballgame! What do people mean when they talk about Struggle? There are varying types of struggle, first there is physically struggle: This is the superhuman stuff; you know when you’re so tired you’re ready to drop but insist the washing has to be done and the bathroom cleaned. This is the working three jobs and trying to raise a family. This is pushing your body to its limits and then some. This is often being too proud to ask for help! The Physical Struggle: When your life has been tossed upside down, regardless of how it has happened, you are very likely to find yourself struggling with the fact you don’t have the physical strength to keep doing what you have always done. I have had people say to me that when they got the news it was like being punched in the stomach, and they could feel their strength in their muscles just disappear. Shock of any kind is likely to have a physical effect upon you, its natural and it’s to be expected. The feeling of powerlessness can and does interfere with how we are able to function in a physically demanding world. Any news which shocks the body shocks also shocks the psyche, and the shock can be so profound that the person being influenced becomes uncoordinated and unresponsive to surroundings. Then there is Mental/emotionally struggle, when feelings overwhelm you and thoughts consume you and you can’t sleep, can’t think clearly and act impulsively and often irrationally. It’s sitting in front of the computer at work and not doing anything but cry, its being with other people but being totally absorbed and lost in the chaos of thoughts in your head. It’s feeling alone, feeling like every cell of your body is screaming non stop. “Stop the pain; I just can’t take any more.” On this level it’s only when we have a conflict of interests that we have a mental tug of war going on. Struggle is only possible if you’re having a mental argument with yourself about what has already happened! When you mentally struggle or have arguments going on in your own head, the result is you lose energy. It’s like the vital life force gets zapped out of you because of the emotional helplessness. Both Physical and Mental-Emotional struggle have effects upon our body’s ability to perform. Sudden change, unexpected change, even change that we have seen coming all bring with them physical and psychological challenges. One way I could explain the first stage of starting over is - it’s like feeling numb – like you’re here but not here, almost robotic. When someone leaves you, they die suddenly or, a marriage breaks up, when fate shows its hand and your life is stripped in the flash of an eye the person, or people involved take the power of your reality with them. What I mean by that is someone else has made a decision, or something that has happened to someone close to you has influenced and affected your life, and you have no control over the outcome/ or /their decision. Change especially sudden change brings with it enormous confusion AND self evaluation and self blame: This is natural, as what ever existed yesterday no longer applies today, its like driving down the highway thinking your going north, and then all of a sudden finding your actually on the freeway driving west, and you don’t have a map. Life has forced us onto new territory, and whether we like it or not we are about to do something in life that we don’t know how to do. Make the choice to change your perception so you begin to see this life upheaval as a learning curve – nothing more – it’s just a new experience that you can and will master! Confusion brought about by circumstances depletes our ability to function normally, and this is normal – it happens to 99% of the population. This is the way confusion affects our lives; when we have clarity it’s like having a whole new lease on life, and with that the strength comes back and it’s far easier to move forward. REMEMBER; you can’t change the past and it’s important for you to understand there are three stages of Grief are Anger, Denial and Acceptance. All of which you will feel over and over and over again until the grief has passed. I just want to point out here that Grief doesn’t only apply to death! It applies to loosing a home, a business, a job, and a friend, custody of your children, your grandmothers’ picture or wedding ring! It can apply to anything we associate with our lives, our safety or our well being. You can’t change the past, the only thing you have any control over is how think about it! Whether you choose to think constructively or destructively, whether you maintain dignity or lose all dignity. Tears and grief are totally appropriate when tragedy strikes, but you can’t live there forever. Life goes on, but then again that’s your choice, isn’t it? Back to Dealing with the Grief: People can tell you that getting mad about what happened is a waste of energy – but you’re still going to get angry. It’s natural to get angry and want to punch holes in walls, but are you going to do it? No, I hope not. So what are you going to do with that anger? Are you going to use it to give you strength? Are you going to use it to give you motivation? Can your anger help you change things? Right at this moment you need to draw upon all the energy you have use the anger to draw upon to give you strength to keep going. If you carry bitterness into your future you’re the only person who it will really damage! It’s so important that you understand the past is the past and your cant fix it, you can’t change it – it happened ACCEPT it and as my mother would say – get on with life. Make your actions count – towards building your life back up again. When your in the early days of Grief its easy to find yourself going through the entire encyclopedia of if’s and’s and buts in the world, trying to make things different, and I hate to say it but its not going to help one little bit. What’s done is done, and can’t be undone no matter what. In relationship, trust to me is always like fine china, once it’s broken no matter how much glue you use you can’t put it back together like it was originally. It will always have weakness; it will never be perfect again. We all have a history, we all have sad stories to tell and that is life. Every person on this earth has a story, everyone has a measure of sadness and pain, it comes with the human condition we call life, but, more than that we all have so much happiness, and good memories, and hopes and dreams of the future. Feel what your feeling, don’t deny it because someone says it’s not appropriate, but be careful what you do with that energy! All you have control over is how you respond/react to the circumstances; you can choose to have an empowering attitude to help you get through. After a time it will be easier to look for the positives, and to reset your compass to steer towards a new future. It will be visible to everyone how much your journey has strengthened you, developed your compassion for others and above all you will come to peace with your experience, if you use the energy to strengthen yourself and your wisdom to guide and help others. Peace comes from having a clear conscience and is the result of self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and ultimately from letting go of the struggle of how we think life should be. Peace about knows you have done the best you could with the skills and knowledge you had at the time, and from always believing in your self and that the future holds all good things. First is peace then we begun to work of understanding that empowers constructive behavior and decision making. Watch your mind chatter! ~ don’t wallow in self abuse! This does not mean you become control freaks to try to get life back on track, this means you look inside and you make the choice to do the right thing, instead of doing things right – OK! Which are two totally different things? Tragedy does not choose its victims, it is like a random generator, and things just happen and bad things do happen to good people. At the end of the day, when you look in the mirror, all you need to know is that no matter what happened you’re a good person and you made your choices based upon your skill understanding and knowledge you had at that time. That is unless you deliberately lied, cheated or did something you know to be wrong. If this is the case your conscience is surely going to give you a hard time until you remedy and come to terms with your actions and forgive yourself for your errors in judgment. Conscience: Every person on earth has one; it’s comprised of our values, morals and ethics, it’s what we believe to be right action. To me, it’s my inner guidance system. It keeps me honest with myself, and I know if I don’t listen to it then I will pay a price through the experience, which follows. So if you made choices that lead to bad situations/learning experiences then you can just as easily choose to do it differently next time. It’s not hard to have the courage to look honestly at your self; the hard part is not beating up on yourself when you don’t like what you see! The most important message of all in all of this is that one day, may be not today, may be not tomorrow, but I can guarantee one day that you will want to start over and you will find inside yourself the strength and the courage to grow and for life to keep on living! When you’re ready to take the next step there are a few more things you need to remember. Firstly AGAIN~ resist the temptation to keep telling your sad story. Make the choice to step out of the drama. When you keep on telling the story you keep on creating emotional muck that you then have to spend days trying to escape. When you tell your story be aware your about to take a giant nose dive right into your emotions. If the event is recent you can guarantee - it’s like diving into a pool of mud. It makes sense that if you want to get back on top you don’t need all that confusion which accompanies those emotional mud baths. Self Check List:If you find yourself continually telling the sad story asks yourself.Why are you telling it? Are you really looking for sympathy? Is it because you want people to help?Is it to justify your actions?Are you looking for validation?Look at your motivation, what is it you want from people?I’m not saying ignore how your feeling, by all means acknowledge the feelings, but don’t live there 24-7. Set yourself 10 minutes a day to worry and beat yourself up if you must, but no longer – life is too short! Remember: Regurgitating the story what ever it is only drains you of energy and leaves you feeling disempowered. Positive thinking, is constructive thinking, imagine your situation solved, imagine your life back together happy and healthy, use your imagination to help your spirit define a path to the future. What we think our energy follows, so if we think of unhappiness and failure that is what we will keep drawing to ourselves, this is a time where you are being challenged by fate to understand and master the use of will. Willpower or wont power it’s up to you. Now I never said it would be easy, and you’re going to have to dig so deep inside yourself to find the hero! For life won’t settle for less, you can do it; you can turn your situation around through changing your perspective on the situation. And that’s the honest truth! Dealing with well meaning friends and family can be an issue, especially if you’re a little fragile and still trying to pull yourself together. The grey area, where you slip and slide, one day your fine and the next you’re a basket case is a very valid part of grief and the grieving process and it certainly isn’t helped when someone turns around to you and says “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself!” Well when this happened to me I wanted to punch the stuffing out of them! Well-meaning crappy statements such as that just raise the blood pressure and leave you dissecting yourself into oblivion while you try to work out what the hell do they mean anyway? Those sorts of statements in my experience your head spin, your heart pounds and you want to punch holes in walls. They have the effect of completely undermining any sense of empowerment you had left. I found myself in a tailspin questioning every thing about myself – what am I doing? What can they see that I can’t? I felt so helpless and useless and disempowered and I cried and cried feeling totally worthless and that I must be the biggest idiot on earth. I could not understand how these people who claimed to love me could keep on belting me over the head with their well meaning unsupportive well meaning, ignorance. Today the qualities I look for in people who become my close friends is firstly to accept me as me, second is their ability to be non judgmental, compassionate, and empathetic to be honest, trustworthy and ethical. A sad fact of life is that I have personally witnessed a lot of well meaning people from different “groups,” seemingly thinking they all have the answers and in ignorance feel they have the right to use their beliefs or knowledge like a sword when a person is down. Sadly this often happens in the spiritual arena and can be associated with some religious groups who have a holier than though attitude. Every day of my life I have always tried to empower people’s lives, lifting their spirits pointing out the positives. The world damages people enough without me doing it. Statements like God is punishing you for your sins, or that what’s happening now is a result of the karma from another life, or that their charkas are blocked and out of balance are terrible things to say. Keep away from well meaning people with small minds! Remember when your feelings are fragile and damaged beware that you have your soft little vulnerable belly showing: and for sure there is someone close bye just waiting to give it a whack. So be careful you don’t expose yourself to be harmed by what I call the well meaning un-evolved. Now getting back to the statement: “You must stop doing it to yourself.” The ultimate end of struggle only comes when you have clarity of self, who and what your life is about. The powers of the universe or God won’t settle for less, it will keep challenging you and challenging you until you find the courage to be yourself. Because in denying your deepest truth – in being what other people want you to be – you are ultimately not aligned to the power of manifestation. It is possible that because of being blinded by grief you could be subconsciously sabotaging your efforts to rebuild your life by being overly emotionally needy. That grief could stem from a day when you were 5 years old, and something happened to shake your faith in your own self worth. Sometimes it’s the small things that hide behind reactions which plague our lives the whole of our lives. I used to run from facing emotional challenges, just pack the car and run, only to find I ultimately had to come back and face the very thing I didn’t want to face.
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