Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~ Khalil Gibran
I was talking to a dear friend of mine recently and he was asking me who is the person I admire the most and why. The interesting thing I realized while giving him the answer was that the person I deeply admire is somebody who experienced a great deal of pain during his lifetime and what made me admire him so much was his attitude and how he always come out as a better not a bitter person from all of these challenges.
How many of us are really capable of dealing gracefully with pain, stress, anxiety, and many other negative emotions? What I want you to achieve is grace under pressure and even though it may seem like an impossible task to do, it really isn’t. There are so many other tips to share on the subject but today I will share these three things, and if you do them, believe me, your life will get better and better and you will manage to deal with life’s challenges a lot more effective and in a more graceful manner.
Just know that “the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”~ Helen Keller
Whether it’s you who is sad and blue or somebody you love and care about, acknowledging and acting upon these 3 things will help you feel a lot better.
1. Let go of the pain, this too shall pass
Things, people, events, they just come and go, nothing really lasts forever and the same with your not so happy feelings. What I usually do when I feel like my world is coming to an end, and yes, that happens to me too, it to think of a time when I was down, a time when I felt really sad and blue, a time when I felt like the whole world would come to an end, and I had no way to escape, and I use that as proof that what my mind is telling me is not always true.
It is so important to work on making your mind work for you and not against you, because you see, in order for you: “to enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.” ~ Buddha
2. Let go of the resistance – what you are against you strengthen and what you resist persists
Even though it may seem that you talking about the things that are going wrong in your life will help solve the problem and make you feel better, the truth is that it will not, and just like Carl Jung said it, and I have experienced this myself so many times, “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
Do you understand why that is? Every time you insist on the pain, and every time you insist on talking about how much you are suffering, to yourself and to those people who are there to listen, you are in fact contributing to the growth of that pain, you are feeding it and you are building more and more pain on top of what already is!
Just imagine that I gave you a clean sheet of paper and I asked you to draw a very small dot on that paper, right in the center. Looking from the distance, does the dot seem significant to you? I wouldn’t think so. But what if I asked you to take a magnifying glass and move closer and closer to that dot? You will for sure feel like the dot is all there is, it will seem huge, right? The same with your pain. It’s not that big of a deal, even though right now, in this moment you might think otherwise, it really isn’t. This too shall pass.
Do you want to focus on the things that upset you and work on increasing the pain, or do you want to focus on those things that make you feel good about yourself and your life? It’s just a matter of choosing where to focus your attention, shifting your focus away from what you don’t want towards the things you do want, from unhappy to happy. It is a choice, and it’s always your choice. So chose to always focus on what you want, not what you don’t want and move in that direction.
3. Change your attitude
If you ask me, a lot of our pain is caused because of our attitude, because of our perception on the good and the bad, because of our expectations on how things should be. When you expect something to happen and it doesn’t, how do you feel? You feel sad, depressed, you feel disappointed and you might even start telling yourself that you are a failure, that things will never go the way you want them to, that your end is near, and of course, you can add some other things to the list if you want, but that’s not really what we are after here, right? But then again, if you choose to argue over your pain, it will surely be yours.
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
The moment you stop and look at things from a different perspective, the moment you chose to change your attitude toward life, life will start to change it’s attitude towards you, and from that moment things will never be the same again, because you see, just like Wayne Dyer said it, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Everything changes the moment we decide to change and the whole world will start to revolve around us because you see, we do matter for the world, we matter a lot.