“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.”
Helen Keller
What are you learning from the challenges and hardships in your life right now?
I’m learning huge lessons in patience, compassion and acceptance.
A crisis has the potential to be a gift aswell as a diaster.
I can see that to be happy it is so important to continually live in the present and keep refining those skills all the time.
I love swimming in the ocean so it makes sense to explain it like this. When a huge wave comes at us in life we have two choices. We can struggle against it and be dumped and submerged- often ending up bruised on the ocean floor with lungs bursting for air- or we can accept that it’s coming and try to go with it.
A good surfer knows that when a huge dumper wave has got you in its grips you will lose too much energy and oxygen if you wildly thrash about and try and resist it. You could end up drowning or end up far out to sea. You have to let yourself go and let the wave take you until it passes over. This means you’ll make it back to the surface with enough air in your lungs.
Sometimes in life really big things come at you and you have to accept that’s what’s happening and let it pass. Being reactive and struggling angrily against it won’t help and will exhaust you even more. When we are faced with relationship struggles we can easily try and flail in that big wave rather than taking a moment to just breathe and feel. Just tuning into our breathing can help immensely.
A towering wave can make us feel powerless and paralysed with fear and anxiety. Learning to control and release those feelings can help us cope with the “big waves” of life, in a similar way a surfer tunes into their natural instinct and intuition to the rhythm and flow of the ocean. Experiencing trauma and abuse can keep us imprisoned in a reactive and fear based mindset. Learning to change this can benefit all aspects of our lives, including our intimate relationships.
What about you?
I wanted to reach out and let you know there’s always help.
Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about how be empowered by life’s challenges rather than swamped by them or if you want to live free of being a prisoner of anxiety, fear or trauma. I would love to hear from you!
I see my clients via skype, phone or in my therapy rooms in the Sydney CBD. Concession rates available.
https://creativesexpression.com/book-a-session/
Catherine O Dowd
