I have always been a daddy’s girl. My father was my rock, my support, my counselor and my guide. With two very strong clashing personalities in the house—my mom and me—my father was the one who navigated our family out of troubled waters time and again. A medical legend, he started his career with treating blood diseases in children, so it was weird to find that, at the height of his fame and career, he was diagnosed with an end-stage rare and very aggressive cancer that had found its way into his blood.

Despite the poor prognosis, he continued his work as a global advisor for public health and community health projects to national and international governments and non-government agencies. Ironically, he contracted the public menace—dengue—in his weakened post chemotherapy state, and passed away fighting the same diseases he spent a lifetime saving others from.

I had always read that grief has five stages, but you always think that these things are what happen to others. And then, I had to face them myself. Here’s what I learned.

How I Experienced the 5 Stages of Grief

Stage 1 of Grief: Shock

That moment, when the doctor walked out of the ICU to tell me my father had suffered a cardiac arrest, will be etched in my mind forever. Even as they tried to save him in vain, I stood by his inert body in utter disbelief. Three weeks earlier, he had been hale and hearty and his normal self. All kinds of hospital emergencies imaged from movies and TV serials went through my mind. I remembered those scenes where the doctor would tell the loved ones to speak to the patient, and the heart of the patient would miraculously start beating again. I tried cajoling him, pleading with him, shouting at him, even outright threatening him. But the heart monitor did not respond. I thought of scenes where someone would bang on the chest and the heart would start beating again. But no amount of CPR brought him back. In the end, I had to face the fact that he was gone.

It is a moment where different parts of your being seem to operate at different speeds. The past, the present and the future seem to collide in disjointed images, and the overwhelming feeling is that of shock and bewilderment. People around you tell you things, and you are both listening yet not listening at the same time. Perhaps this is the feeling of your soul being ripped apart, as part of you dies with your loved one. And yet, the rest of you is anchored in reality, where there are others to take care of and formalities to get through. And you plunge into a haze of activity as you try to banish your loss to the deepest and darkest recesses of your mind.

I had always read that grief has five stages, but you always think that these things are what happen to others

Stage 2 of Grief: Denial

No one is prepared for death of a loved one, whether it comes suddenly or after a long illness. But time doesn’t give you the luxury of grief immediately. In my case, I was immediately plunged into formalities—getting the hospital paperwork completed, making arrangements for the body to be taken home. These days you have mobile mortuaries that keep the body preserved at home till it is time for last rites.

I remembered my dad telling me stories of when my maternal grandfather had passed away and he had, with much difficulty, arranged for huge blocks of ice, that were salted to keep from melting, so that they could keep the body at home. And it hit me—I was already referring to Dad as a body. The thought seemed to freeze every molecule in me. This could not be happening. This wasn’t true. Dad was not… I could not even bring myself to say the D-word mentally. Someone asked me a question, and I shoved these thoughts away, again into far corners of my mind, in vain hope that if I don’t think of it, it won’t be true. And paradoxically I plunged into the next formality that needed to be completed. The body needed to be dressed properly because if you wait too long, the body goes cold and rigor mortis sets in. In this state, the body goes rigid and inflexible, and it is next to impossible to dress or re-position it. With the clock ticking, all these transactional activities kept me going, till we brought Dad back home, late at night, and there was nothing left to do till morning.

No one is prepared for death of a loved one, whether it comes suddenly or after a long illness

Stage 3 of Grief: Anger

As I lay down in bed, wide awake at 3am, all the thoughts I had been shoving away spilled over. This is the time when you should never be alone, even if the other person is sleeping or doing something else. The sense of loss, of loneliness, of all the things that will never be, hits you with a force that can take your breath away. Indeed, for a while, all I did was sit and count my breaths as time and distance warped in my mind. Snapshots from the past, his voice, his little actions, his idiosyncrasies all tumbled together in a kaleidoscope with what had been an expected future timeline with him, morphing to a timeline without him. And then came the rage, the injustice of it all. My dad, who had spent a lifetime saving others, had been failed by the very people he had taught. He, who treated and cured others, was lost to the very diseases that he had fought. Anger against cancer, against dengue, against the hospital, the doctors, against fate. Rage, disbelief and utter loneliness ripped through me night after night that first week, as sleep remained elusive.

Stage 4 of Grief: Bargaining

Surely it had not been his time yet. His own father had passed away just seven years ago. His own uncles were still alive. Dad easily had another 10 – 15 years in him. He was beyond particular about his health, waging war on salt, sugar and oil at home and at work. He meticulously monitored all his vital signs. When he passed away, apart from his blood report, every other report and organ was normal. He was a prime specimen for his age, even after cancer had decided to strike. In truth, he did not suffer much, as it had been just three weeks when we first discovered something might be wrong, and just one week from final diagnosis to his death.

The sense of loss, of loneliness, of all the things that will never be, hits you with a force that can take your breath away

Stage 5 of Grief: Acceptance

The last stage of grief is acceptance. There are moments where I feel I have accepted his absence. And then something triggers and I find myself back at one of the earlier stages. Sometimes I wonder if I really want to reach acceptance. Would it not be a travesty to not honor his loss? At other times, I tell myself, this is what he would want. To keep his memories alive through practising all that he taught me, and honor his life by living mine to the fullest, just as he did.

Conclusion

I don’t know what the future holds. I just know that I still expect him to walk through the door, with a smile on his face and a project on his mind. And if he saw me crying, he would just sit with me in silent support. In spirit, he will always be with me.

The post How I Experienced the 5 Stages of Grief appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

She narrates her own story of coping with a series of huge tragedies to drive home the point that the secret of being mentally strong is to give up your bad mental habits. Mental strength is a lot like physical health. To become physically fit, if you really want to see results, just exercising regularly is not enough; you even have to give up eating junk food. Likewise, to be mentally strong, you need good habits like practising gratitude; but you also have to give up your bad habits like resenting the success and happiness of your fellow beings.

Amy says that each of us possess the ability to build mental strength, but most don’t know how. She invites us to reflect on our bad mental habits that are holding us back, the unhealthy beliefs that are keeping us from being as mentally strong as we could be.

About Amy Morin

Amy Morin, a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, has been counseling children, teens, and adults since 2002. She also works as an adjunct psychology instructor.

Amy’s expertise in mental strength has attracted international attention. Her bestselling book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, is being translated into more than 20 languages.

Amy’s advice has been featured by a number of media outlets, including: Time, Fast Company, Good Housekeeping, Business Insider, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Success, Glamour, Oprah.com, TheBlaze TV, and Fox News. She has also been a guest on dozens of radio shows.

She is a regular contributor to Forbes, Inc., and Psychology Today. She serves as About.com’s Parenting Teens Expert and Discipline Expert.

As a frequent keynote speaker, Amy loves to share the latest research on resilience and the best strategies for overcoming adversity and building mental muscle.

The post Why you should give up your bad mental habits appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

But it happens. There is pain so searing that we do, indeed, feel as if the very depths of our soul have been shredded to pieces. It’s no wonder we use words like ‘gutted’, ‘harpooned’, ‘turned inside out’. We feel as if our lives will never be the same [they won’t] and that the hurt will never go away [it will].

Here’s the thing though: despite the way it feels and despite the common words used to describe it, your soul cannot be wounded.

Know that the soul is infinite

Your soul is the epicentre of unseen energetic selves that’s tied to an omnipotent, omnipresent, intelligent force. Some call it God, Allah, Yahweh. I call it Source. Like a child tied to its mother in the womb with an umbilical cord, we receive connection and sustenance through this tie between soul and Source. This connection and these energetic spaces are infinite by nature. No awful human thing could ever alter that.

What you experience as retching pain is not your soul being destroyed but the story of your life being unceremoniously discarded. Though not a ‘soul wound’, the annihilation of your story is excruciating. The pain is the feeling of loss of what was. It’s the loss of a story so intricate that you based your entire life on it. Your mind races, your body aches, and your emotions feel heavy, all pulsing to some version of: what am I to do and who am I to be? This pain is the process of letting go.

What you experience as retching pain is not your soul being destroyed but the story of your life being unceremoniously discarded

Your story may be shattered

When my ex-husband came to me one balmy August evening to tell me he was having an affair, it became the first and most severe of several blows that left my life in shambles. By the end of September, I carried a wound so deep it became the chasm into which I fell flailing and utterly broken for many, many months to come. I had no idea what life was without standing beside the man who had stood beside me for so many years. I simply had no framework for a life without him.

I ended up across the country in my sister’s basement with two suitcases and little more than determination holding me together. Eventually a few boxes were delivered to the house to add to my belongings, the sorry remnants of what was once a full life, a full story.

In the beginning, I drifted through the days, determined to put on a good face. From outward appearances I looked okay. But inside I was lost. I drifted about like a ghost with nowhere to land.

Learn to look beyond the pain

Unexpectedly, I found myself waking up to the world around me: the feel of sunshine on my face or of the soft fur of a dog. These sensory pleasures brought me back into myself and back into the world—where my story awaited. Eventually I realised that life was still happening and unless I took charge, I would end up living a life stuck inside the wound and drifting about in confusion. I needed to make some decisions. I needed to move on.

Unexpectedly, I found myself waking up to the world around me

What I decided is less a story about what I let go of and more about what I embraced. If you had told me to let go of my anger and sadness at that point, I’d have been upset. Asking me to do that was like asking a mother to give up her child. I would have thought, “I have lost so much already. How could you ask me to let go of anything more?” The story I held onto might have been painful but it was what I knew and it was familiar—even if it only existed in the past.

So I didn’t let go. Instead, I embraced what was coming at me. You see you don’t have to make the seemingly impossible decision to let go if you instead choose to embrace the pleasure that is right in front of you: the smell of food cooking, the sound of your nephew’s voice, the weight of blankets in bed.

Make room for new experiences

The pain will be there. You can’t change that. But you can choose to embrace pleasure. And to be open to anything you have to let go of something. It’s the law of the Universe: there must be space available to take in something new.

Imagine a child that has been playing in the yard. You call her in for dinner and she runs to the door with her hands full of dirt. She stands there wanting to come in but when you tell her she has to put the dirt down to eat dinner she stubbornly says “No”. Her hands tighten. You see the strain. You know she’s hungry but she won’t give up the dirt because it’s what she has right now. Even the promise of something good in the future isn’t enticing enough to let go of what she has now. This child is you, your ego that is defiantly attached to your story.

It’s the law of the Universe: there must be space available to take in something new

Now picture that instead of asking the child to let go of the dirt you offer her a bite of the delicious dinner that awaits her inside. Imagine her mouth watering, realising just how hungry she is. She realises the evening air has cooled. And something warm awaits her inside. Will she let go of the dirt to accept this meal?

This is what happens when you let in the pleasure of what’s right in front of you. It just has a way of taking over. If you keep leaning into it, embracing it, the pain slips out. There just isn’t room for all the pain.

Be patient with yourself

Remember this is a practice. It can take time to shift from a state of chronic pain to becoming pain-free. While your soul is infinite, you are still very human, so have patience with yourself.

Remember that your deep wounds are a rite of passage into a privileged state of human existence. It’s from grief that we gain the greatest insights and deepest connection to Source.

Remember that your soul is not wounded. Your soul is a source of infinite energy and connection to a greater Source. You can rely on this connection and draw on it for solace, healing and inspiration. The pain you feel is a tear in the story you’ve created about who you are and the trajectory on which you were. This is an opportunity to create a different story.

Lean into pleasure. Embrace what’s in front of you. The smells, sights, sounds, tastes and feelings that you come into contact with—embrace them. They will guide you.

And know that these wounds are opportunities to go deeper, learn more and expand beyond what you were and what you are today. Lean in.

This was first published in the August 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Marriage, kids, house with picket fence, those were on my to-do list and I accomplished them quickly and efficiently. Married at the age of 20, a mother by 25, I even managed to produce three children by the time I was 30, because I was such an overachiever. But at the age of 31, I began to live an unexpected life.

We all do, actually. I have yet to meet one person who is living the life they pictured when they were 10 years old. Life twists and turns until one day you don’t recognise the road you’re on anymore. You could be like me and one of those turns could include losing someone you never thought you’d live without. Or you could be like the billions of other people out there who have lost a job, dealt with a messy divorce, infertility issues or any one of life’s disappointments. And if you have, you know that the one question you stop and ask yourself when the dust has settled is this: Now what?

Becoming the answer you’re looking for

The solution is actually simpler than you think. Because the truth is, you have two options: you can move forward or you can remain stuck where you are.

As I was riding home from the hospital after saying a final goodbye to my husband, my mother at the wheel, my eyes blinded by the sun I hadn’t seen in three days, I remember thinking over and over again, “I will have a good life. I will have a good life.” Even in the beginning throes of grief, I knew there was a decision to be made: I could allow myself to spiral and surrender to the black hole of emotional suffering. Or I could find my way out.

The happiness habit

Of course, thinking something and making it happen are two different things. In the years that followed, I had more moments of self-doubt than I care to remember and nights when I would lie on the floor of my bedroom after putting my three toddlers to bed and
let the tears stream down my face and soak the carpet. But it became my personal mission to find happiness again and to even find the humour in the situation in which I found myself.

Because I knew that if I lost that, I would have lost more than my husband. I would have lost myself as well.

Finding joy was like forming a new habit and writing was a big part of that process. As I began blogging about my journey under the name “Widow Chick”, I made a deal with myself: Each entry would find the humour or at least a lesson in whatever situation I found myself. When my four-year-old son threw a temper tantrum in the parking lot of the movie theatre and removed all of his clothes except his socks, of course I found that mortifying in the moment, but hysterically funny when I wrote about it a week later. When I brought someone I was dating to visit my husband’s grave only to find that the cemetery had dug a hole next to my husband for a new occupant, at which point my date asked, “That’s not for me, is it?,” I found that mildly uncomfortable when it happened, but wildly amusing later.

As I moved forward into a life I didn’t recognise anymore, writing became a map of where I’d been that helped me see where I was going. Life curved again and again, as it has a tendency to do, and I was able to remind myself that it was all necessary—the good, bad and ugly—in order to shape the person I’m meant to become.

That in order to find myself, I had to live and live fully, find the joy and comedy in the midst of self-evaluation and move ahead with what I’d learned.

That gave me the ability to look forward when something happened that I couldn’t understand in the moment. By forming that habit, I knew that at some point I would be able to make sense of those twists—maybe even find the joke—and that gave me the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Expecting the unexpected life

Years later, when the seed of writing the blog blossomed into the book Confessions of a Mediocre Widow, I wrote something that I remind myself of every day: I’ll never have a moment when I’ve done something idiotic [which is daily] that I won’t wish that Brad could be here to share that laugh with me. But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped laughing.

Life is unexpected. Every moment we live is one we didn’t know was coming. One moment could be blissful, followed by an event we don’t know how to handle. And for a planner like me, well, that’s been a hard lesson to learn. But it’s a comfort to know that an unexpected life is something I have in common with each and every person I encounter.

And that my next joyful moment could be just around the next bend in the road.

This was first published in the October 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Instead, I’m suffering from chronic, long-term physical and mental illness, living with my father who cares for me, and am unable to step out of my home without having a nervous breakdown. As you can imagine, the PhD, teaching and partner route is nowhere to be seen on account of these unwanted tangents.

I’m disappointed. Actually, I’m gutted that my life has taken this unfortunate turn, especially when I worked so hard in my teens and twenties to lay the foundations for my future goals. This is not what I signed up for.

How do you cope when things move counter to your plans? How do you manage the disappointment felt when you invest your whole self in a project, idea or plan, only to see it come to nothing? I confess that until recently, I haven’t been coping that well. Disappointment made me bitter and hopeless. But this has had its advantages in that it has taught me what disappointment is, what it feels like and what it looks like when my mind starts to fight back.

Practices such as humility and gratitude may be helpful when broaching your disappointment but I’m not going to discuss those abstract things here. I’m going to smash the proverbial mirror we’re all taught to hold up to ourselves. We don’t need it because this is how we really cope with disappointment.

Be disappointed

Six years ago, I was able to walk for hours. I could wander fields and rural pathways with a small pack of supplies all day, with few problems. Today, I am mostly trapped in my home. I don’t walk like I used to because the illness I have has taken its pound of flesh and left me with weakened mobility. Walking was one of my favourite pastimes and now, I can’t go out for all-day rambles and scrambles. That’s horrible.

Coping with disappointment requires you to accept how you feel. It’s no good denying it and telling yourself, ”Oh I didn’t want that career opportunity anyway…” Yes you did. And now that it has fallen through, you’re annoyed and upset. You blame yourself and call it ‘failure’. That’s okay. Be disappointed and move on.

Coping with disappointment requires you to accept how you feel

Embrace fallibility

I have some amazing days—days where I can do more than usual because it’s as if my ailments have gone and I am healed. On those days, I unleash my drive, ambition and creativity and let them run wild. Nothing can touch me. I can write thousands of words, get my washing done, cook my own meals, go out for one of those elusive walks, promise the world to everyone. The following day, I’m in a heap of misery and pain. I curse myself for not being awesome as much as I curse myself for not knowing better and being careful. And then I observe myself and realise that I’ve not failed; I’m fallible. I can make mistakes and be okay.

So that moment where you blame yourself for failing? That’s okay, but not because you failed. It’s okay because you’re experiencing your own fallibility, your vulnerability. We’re not invincible; we’re human.

I curse myself for not being awesome as much as I curse myself for not knowing better and being careful

Get impatient

I’ve been trying to tie up some loose ends for near-on a fortnight and at every turn, I have met delays and resistance and most commonly, system errors. I’ve been waiting a lot and I am still waiting as I write this. Friends and family have told me to be patient, that the end I desire will come through and everything will be resolved one way or another. But two days ago, I got fed up with my ‘virtue’ and picked up the phone.

It turned out that another problem had arisen in my affairs and nobody had got round to fixing it yet. I spent the afternoon on the phone going through everything again and in the end, the problem was overcome. I’m still waiting for the final outcome of my efforts but the important thing is this: in being impatient, I cast off my disappointment of firstly having to wait and secondly, discovering I had to do yet more work, when all I want is resolution.

We spend too much time waiting. I like to think of waiting for others to get their self in order as wasting time and nothing beats disappointment than taking that ‘wasted time’ and turning your productive hand to it and getting somewhere rather than nowhere.

My three practical tips are not your typical self-help fare. A lot of you, reading this now, will wonder why I’m suggesting we focus on the seemingly negative, painful aspects of disappointment. I’ve chosen these things because they are at the heart of disappointment. They are its foundations and soul. I believe that you cannot carry out other methods of personal growth without facing the actual problem at hand and in this case, I am telling you – it’s alright to be disappointed and feel hurt; it’s good that you recognise your frustration and feel it; it’s important that you resist complacency.

Face it, feel it, free it.

How do you cope with disappointment when it comes knocking on your door? By all means, share your strategies. Everyone needs new ideas when it comes to picking themselves up from a blow of disappointment.

The post Coping with disappointment: Face it, feel it, free it appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

I was walking from my parked car to my office one morning, deep in a worrisome thought and not paying enough attention to where I was walking. Suddenly, I mindlessly stepped into a sidewalk of freshly laid wet cement—up to my ankles. And the inner reactions just started cascading one after the other: “How careless! Look what you’ve done. You’ll be late to work; you’ll probably lose your first client; you’ll have less income today.” I was just about to fall into an all too familiar rabbit hole of berating myself for always being so stupid when another inner voice piped up: “Wait a minute!  So I was pre-occupied! I’m sick and tired of winding up feeling lousy about myself when I was just unconscious for a moment. For once I’d like to just deal with something and not make it all about me being stupid.”

I stood there in the cement, noticing all these different reactions rushing through me, and realised that I did have a choice about how I was going to handle this. I picked up my feet and stepped onto dry land as construction workers headed over to help me. As I picked my shoes out of the cement, I tried a little bit of compassion for myself. “Shit happens. I’m probably not the only person on the planet who made a mistake today because they weren’t paying attention. And this probably isn’t the only mistake I’m going to make today. Sure, I’m a little embarrassed in front of these guys, but that doesn’t mean anything more about me except that I just wasn’t paying attention.”

I took a couple of deep breaths, gave myself a quick little hug, and walked over to a faucet conveniently sticking out of a nearby apartment building to wash off my shoes and feet. As I began to have some hope that I might even save my shoes [I did!], I noticed also some pride emerging that I was coping—with the outer event and with my inner reactions to it—as well as I was.

By the time one of the construction workers gave me some paper towels to dry my shoes and feet, it dawned on me: “Yes, shit happens. Life is happening this way to me in this moment. But shift happens, too.” I could open to the lesson of the moment: choosing to shift my perspective had allowed me to cope resiliently right there, right then. The experience also taught me, right there, right then, that shifting perspectives and responding resiliently is possible in any moment, any moment at all.

The capacity to cope

It’s the capacity to shift gears, to move from automatic reactivity to more flexible responsiveness, that is the hallmark of resilience.

Resilience is the capacity to cope with the disappointments, difficulties, and disasters in life with flexibility, bouncing back from life’s setbacks with skill and adaptability, even grace. We are all called upon, every day, to cope with disruptive, unwanted changes in our lives—losing our wallet and car keys, discovering mould in the bathroom, leaving our laptop on the plane, dealing with the washing machine going on the fritz or the car needing a new transmission.

Occasionally, we have to respond with grace to greater troubles and tragedies: infertility or infidelity, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, losing a job, placing an aging parent in a nursing home—things we never asked for, things we deeply, deeply do not want. Resilience is what allows us to cope with the pain and suffering inherent in the human condition by staying open to our experience and skilfully shifting gears.

Capacities of resilience are innate in the brain, hard-wired in by evolution. Some are unconscious and automatic—we don’t have to ‘learn’ the survival responses of fight-flight-freeze in the lower brain. They happen automatically without any need for conscious choice or processing. Other coping strategies are learned from interactions with other people, especially early on in life. We learn to withdraw in the face of criticism; we learn to walk out the door in tight-lipped anger when we feel insulted. These strategies can also operate unconsciously; 80 per cent of the time they do. But they can be brought to conscious awareness and rewired to become more resilient.

It’s the capacity to shift gears, to move from automatic reactivity to more flexible responsiveness, that is the hallmark of resilience

» Learning to be resilient

Because of the brain’s neuroplasticity—its lifelong capacity to grow new neurons and create new neural structure—we can also learn new more resilient coping strategies and rewire old, less adaptive ones, when we know how.

Modern brain science is illuminating how the brain ‘learns’ its patterns of response to life events in the first place so that we can learn to change them now. Any experience, any experience at all, positive or negative, causes neurons in the brain to fire. Repeated experiences will cause repeated neural firings. “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” strengthening the connections between them, and creating new neural pathways, even new neural circuitry.

We’re learning how we can rewire our previously learned responses [“How stupid!”] to more flexible resilient responses [“I’m not the only person on the planet today… ”]. This rewiring allows us to shift from the reactivity of the lower brain [very fast, but its range of options very limited] to the responsiveness of the higher brain [s-l-o-w, but very comprehensive in its range of options]. This shift in brain functioning allows us to shift our state of mind from a ‘poor me’ victim stance to an empowered ‘I’ and sense of agency, thus shifting our behaviours to be more and more resilient.

Skills needed to bounce back from adversity can be learned; resilience can be strengthened in the moment, over time, eventually becoming a way of being.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptive to change.”
—Charles Darwin

I’ve organised the experiential tools to rewire the brain to become more resilient into four intelligences below; all of these tools create new experiences for your brain which, when repeated over time, help the brain learn how to shift gears and bounce back.

Somatic intelligence

When the body-brain senses danger or life threat, it releases the stress hormone cortisol to mobilise us into action. We respond to an external stressor with an internal stress response. Cortisol works; we move. But it can also hijack the functioning of the pre-frontal cortex—the brain’s centre of executive functioning, which I call the CEO of resilience. We literally can’t think straight. In the long term, cortisol also damages brain cells in the hippocampus, the brain structure we use for learning and the installation of long-term memory. Cortisol also severely impacts the immune system, compromising our physical health.

The fastest way to down-regulate the stress response and reduce the flow of cortisol is through touch, because warm, safe touch activates the release of oxytocin, the hormone of safety and trust. Oxytocin is the brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol. It returns our body-brain to a state of physiological equilibrium and brings the functioning of the pre-frontal cortex back online.

» Hand on the heart

One technique, powerful enough to calm down a panic attack in less than a minute, is called hand on the heart. When you notice distress or discomfort:

1. Place your own hand on your own heart centre [the warm touch begins to activate the release of oxytocin]
2. Breathe deeply [activating the parasympathetic or calming branch of the nervous system]
3. Breathe a sense of peace or ease or goodness into your heart centre [restoring the heart’s coherent heart rate variability]
4. Then, take a moment to remember an instance when you felt safe, loved and cherished by someone. This someone could be a partner or close friend; it could be a spiritual figure or beloved teacher; it could even be a pet.

Scientists have found that being held by someone we feel safe with, even being physically near someone we feel safe with, remembering someone we feel safe with, even imagining being with someone we feel safe with, is enough to release the oxytocin that will restore our physiological equilibrium, bringing us back into a state of calm and trust from which it is possible to be resilient.

My client Andy reported during one session that just two days earlier his wife Lisa was in a high state of agitation while running late getting their recalcitrant four-year-old son to pre-school. He was afraid that saying anything would make matters worse, so he simply stood in the doorway where Lisa could see him with his hand on his heart. Lisa caught herself, stopped, met his gaze, and put her hand on her heart, too. Andy took one step toward Lisa; Lisa took three steps toward him. They melted into a 20-second, full-body, ‘tend and befriend’ oxytocin-releasing hug, and then calmly got their son to school—on time—without further upset.

We can also use touch in the form of hugs, head rubs or foot rubs, and massaging the back of the neck. [The brainstem, accessed at the top of the spine near the base of the skull, is loaded with oxytocin receptors.] We can “keep calm and carry on.”

The hand on the heart technique is powerful enough to calm down a panic attack in less than a minute

» Using your body posture

Another tool of somatic intelligence is to use the posture of the body to shift our emotional state. You can experiment by placing a pencil between your nose and your upper lip; the posture of ‘frowning’ will actually cause you to feel a little disgruntled. If you hold the pencil between your teeth, the forced ‘smile’ can shift your mood to one of more joy or happiness.

My client David used his entire body to shift his state. He showed me the body posture for feeling depressed, then he shifted his entire body into a more expansive, upreaching stance. He went back to the first posture, then returned to the second more open stance, then allowed his body to return to a posture somewhere in the middle. When I asked him what he noticed about the various postures, he said he had thought the opposite of depression would be joy or happiness. To his surprise, it was reverence. David’s experience of reverence helped him be more flexible and resilient in coping with his down moods. From this bodily experience of moving through depression to reverence, he also knew that he could choose to rewire his emotional state.

You can apply this technique of using the body to shift your emotions through a technique called power posing. By simply standing tall, feet planted firmly on the ground, chest and head lifted up, perhaps arms raised straight up over your head [very similar to the mountain pose of yoga] you can generate a feeling of strength and stability in your body that helps you feel empowered before you walk into a business meeting or a confrontation with a boss or angry client.

If you hold a pencil between your teeth, the forced ‘smile’ can shift your mood to one of more joy or happiness

Emotional intelligence

Our emotions are body-based signals to take action. Anger is a signal to protest an injustice or betrayal; fear is a signal to move away from danger or toxicity; sadness is a signal to pull in comfort and support; joy is a signal to connect with others in celebration.

The challenge with managing and expressing our emotions is the built-in negativity bias of the brain. We are evolutionarily hard-wired to notice and remember negative and intense experiences far more readily than positive and subtle ones. You can experience 10 positive interactions with people in the course of a day, but you’ll remember the one negative experience of someone frowning at you over the dinner table. This negative bias is how we survive, as a species and as individuals, but this bias can lead to avoidance or withdrawal from experience rather than openness, curiosity, engagement with life events and other people.

Neuroscientists have discovered that concentrating on positive emotions—kindness, compassion, generosity, gratitude, awe, delight, love—triggers what they call a ‘left shift’ in the brain, meaning more neural activity in the left hemisphere of the brain than in the right. For reasons also based in evolution, the left hemisphere has more of an approach stance toward experience. When we concentrate our attention on positive emotions, we antidote the negativity bias of the brain and stay more open to learning and growth.

Focussing our attention on positive experiences is not meant to bypass uncomfortable feelings, not at all. But, focussing our attention on positive experiences does shift our perspective from the contraction and restriction of our survival responses to perceiving more options, more possibilities.

Over the last 20 years, researchers in the positive psychology movement have documented substantial benefits to the daily practice of positive emotions over time: less anxiety, less depression, less loneliness, more friendships, more collaboration with others, better sleep and better health, as well as more optimism, more creativity and more resilience. It’s quite motivating to know that resilience is a direct cause-and-effect outcome of focussing our attention on positive emotions.

We are evolutionarily hard-wired to notice and remember negative and intense experiences far more readily than positive and subtle ones

» Melissa’s shift

My friend Melissa and I have walked the ridge trail near our homes almost every Tuesday for the last eight years. One Tuesday last fall, about five minutes into the walk, Melissa tripped and fell onto the trail. Having broken her left arm just six months previously [which required two surgeries and still implanted-pins], and having heard a ‘crack!’ as she fell, she was understandably cautious and concerned. She rolled onto her back and began testing movement in her knees and ankles, felt the soreness in her left foot, and began to think her way through—going to the emergency room, cancelling clients, cancelling plans for the week.

About two minutes into her worries, Melissa suddenly said, “I need to shift my attitude!” She began doing a gratitude practice; she began noticing the amazing patterns in the clouds from her unusual vantage point lying on the trail. I lay down on the trail, too, and we snuggled together in the early morning chill, holding hands, both of us beginning to laugh at the predicament but also rejoicing in the friendship that was going to get us through the predicament.

On the way back to my car I commented on how resilient Melissa was, how quickly she had come to the realisation that she needed to—and could—shift her attitude. Melissa acknowledged she knew she had a choice and she made the choice to come out of worry and into an optimistic view again. It turned out that Melissa had indeed broken a bone in her ankle; she would be wearing her walking boot for about a month, but she would still be seeing clients and still going to her beloved opera on the weekend.

It’s easy to begin a simple daily gratitude practice: jotting down in a journal or e-mailing a friend three things you’re grateful for, every day. Knowing that you’re going to be writing or e-mailing experiences you are grateful for helps you notice them more as they happen during a day.

Resilience is a direct cause-and-effect outcome of focussing our attention on positive emotions

» Taking in the good

Taking in the good is another a practice that allows you to install those experiences you’re grateful for into your long-term memory:

1. Notice a positive experience in the moment, or remember one from the past
2. Feel the sense of gratitude for the experience in your body
3. Focus on that sense for 10-20-30 seconds, long enough for the brain to encode the experience in your long-term memory.

Because the brain rewires itself from repetition of experience, if you remember one experience six times a day [30 seconds six times is just three minutes of practice] you will have created a resource of support and resilience you can call upon forever after.

Relational intelligence

Researchers have found that the greatest de-railers of our resilience are the internal messages we carry around of “not good enough,” or “I’m a loser,” and the internalised experiences of inadequacy, failure, or shame. We all can be blocked in our resilience by the inner critic or inner judge. Brene Brown, pioneering researcher on the impact of shame, says, “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Shame erodes the part of ourselves that believes we are capable of change. We cannot change and grow when we are in shame, and we can’t use shame to change ourselves or others.”

The cure for shame is acceptance, both self-acceptance of who we are, exactly as we are, and the acceptance of others when we can feel safe enough to be exactly who we are with them.

» Richard’s inner critic

My client Richard had set out driving to his best friend’s engagement party in a pretty good mood. His job was satisfying: he was climbing the ladder as a regional division manager of a biotech company. His body was strong and healthy: he was one of the fastest swimmers in his master swim class. The tomatoes were ripening robustly in his garden. And he was making good time travelling, despite the crowded mountain highway. He was happy for his friend Toby, who was getting married to the woman he adored.

Suddenly, Richard felt a pang inside, as if someone had opened the door to a dark room. He could expect some teasing by a mutual friend at the party about his two failed marriages. Why couldn’t he get it together? Richard began to slip into a cascade of misgivings and self-doubt. Should he have tried harder? Was there something wrong with him that caused two women to leave him? Would everyone at the party know he was a failure? The hope he harboured, of meeting someone new at the party, having another chance, began to fade.

Even though Richard tried to switch the channel and think of something else, or even remember the good things about himself that he was recounting earlier, he began to sink into a black hole. His inner critic was relentless. Who was he kidding? He’d never be good enough to meet someone at the party today. In his fog, Richard didn’t notice that the car in front of him had stopped abruptly. He ‘woke up’ too late to put the brakes on and rear-ended the car in front. No one was hurt, but he totalled his small car and seriously dented theirs.

Even though a friend quickly came and rescued him, and everyone at the party was understanding and concerned about the accident, Richard found it impossible at first to take in their love and acceptance. He was sunk in a swamp of shame.

We all can be blocked in our resilience by the inner critic or inner judge

Shame has been called the ‘great disconnector.’ The best way to crawl out of the swamp of shame is to come into connection with another person who loves and accepts us exactly as we are, even if we sometimes have to conjure them up in our imagination, and then to build on that love to come into our own love and acceptance of ourselves exactly as we are.

Richard managed to find a few moments alone at the party with Toby and told him what had really caused the car accident. Toby had been Richard’s friend since college, through all the dating, getting married, getting divorced, trying again, and ‘failing’ again. Toby knew Richard’s deep-down goodness, his sincere intentions to be kind and loving, and his willingness to learn what was getting in the way of those intentions. Toby also knew Richard’s tendency to collapse into a ‘poor me’ attitude rather than an empowered feeling of “I can do this.”

As they talked, Toby reminded Richard of all the trust, affection, and respect they had shared with each other over the years. Richard could begin to listen as Toby framed Richard’s longing to be in a healthy relationship as itself a healthy sign. “Look man, after all you’ve gone through, you’re still willing to take a risk again. I’m betting my money on you for sure; it will happen.”

At the end of the conversation, Toby suggested that Richard join a men’s group that he knew about, which was focussed on connecting in healthy relationships. Because Richard could take in the sincerity of Toby’s acceptance and affection for him, he could see the possibilities for healing and awakening in the suggestion. He was able to come out of his shame swamp and rejoin the party. Within a few weeks he had joined the men’s group and began, in effect, hanging out with emotionally healthy brains. He also enrolled in several workshops on being authentic in intimate relationships, learning to focus on being his true self and seeing the true selves of other people.

After six months in the men’s group and those workshops, learning many skills of healthy relating and accepting himself as a good enough potential partner, Richard hit it off with Lucy, the sister of one of the guests at Toby’s wedding. They have now been happily married for 11 years.

“There is a natural and inviolable tendency in things to bloom into whatever they truly are in the core of their being. All we have to do is align ourselves with what wants to happen naturally and put in the effort that is our part in helping it happen.”
— David Richo

Here are two tools of self-acceptance we can use to rewire our sense of self, in the moment of de-railing and over the long haul.

Self-compassion break

Evoking some kindness and care toward ourselves exactly at the moment we are experiencing stress, pain, or discomfort doesn’t yet solve the problem; it simply shifts us into a brain state from which we can solve the problem.

1. Pause and notice the experience of the moment. [The awareness helps bring the functioning of the higher brain back online.]
2. “Ouch! This hurts! This is painful.” [Acknowledging the experience of the experiencer primes the brain to be receptive to activating our own care-giving system.]
3. “Oh, sweetheart! I’m here. I care.” [Activating the care-giving system releases oxytocin in the body-brain, returning us to a sense of safety and trust.]
4. Say gently, quietly to yourself:
   May I feel safe.
   May I be aware of this moment, exactly as it is.
   May I accept myself, exactly as I am, in this moment.
   May I be kind to myself in this moment.
   May I give myself all the compassion I need.

These phrases of loving kindness and care help

Acknowledging the experience of the experiencer primes the brain to be receptive to activating our own care-giving system

» The positivity portfolio

When I taught this exercise at a workshop at a local public library, someone came up to me afterwards and said that when she was a teenager, there was one winter when times were hard and her mother told all the children there wasn’t enough money for Christmas presents that year, so everyone was to give each other cards with appreciative comments on them. She said that when she read the card from her brother, that was the first time she ever knew that he loved her.

You can create quite a resource of appreciation for yourself, too:

1. Ask 10 friends to send you a card or an e-mail with one or two sentences of acknowledgement of what you mean to them or appreciation of who you are.
2. Assemble all the phrases onto one piece of paper.
3. Tape the paper to your bathroom mirror or your computer monitor or carry it with you in your purse or wallet.
4. Read the 10 items on the piece of paper three times a day for 30 days. [Repetition!]
5. You will rewire your sense of your self.

Reflective intelligence

Mindfulness helps us see clearly what’s happening in the moment—and our reactions to what’s happening in the moment—which allows us to disentangle ourselves from previous patterns of response, shift gears and make a different choice in the next moment.

1. Pause, come into a sense of being present in the present moment—this primes the brain to be receptive to the experience.
2. Notice—and name—the experience in the moment. Both noticing and naming activate the higher brain with its capacities to reflect rather than only react.
3. Step back from the experience, view it from a bird’s eye perspective. Un-coupling what’s happening from our sense of self; recovering a sense of agency and choice.
4. Look at the experience from different perspectives, different angles—activating the brain’s capacity to shift gears.
5. Discern available options—creating a choice point in our behaviour.
6. Choose a wise course of action.

“Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
—Viktor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist, survivor of Auschwitz

» Shirley’s automatic reactions

My client Shirley told me this story about preparing her taxes last spring. She began early in the morning, and, within thirty minutes, got caught in an old mindset: “This is confusing; this is overwhelming; this isn’t workable. I don’t know what I’m doing; I never was good at numbers; I can’t do this!”

Because Shirley had been practising a form of compassionate reflection for more than a year, she noticed her state of mind. That noticing broke the automatic pattern of her reactivity. She noticed her annoyance at her state of mind. She quickly realised that being caught in this state wasn’t helpful. She also realised that she didn’t have to stay caught in the old mindset now.

Shirley took a walk around the block to clear her mind, came back to her desk, and took another five minutes to create a different mindset for herself.Could she use preparing her taxes as an opportunity to practise? Shirley brought her mindful empathy to bear on the issue, noticing every moment that she stayed in her wise mind—open-minded and curious about how her mind was responding to the task of preparing her taxes. She noticed and named moments when she was learning something new—a changed rule about depreciation, a better way to categorise her expenses. She also noticed and named moments when her mind began to contract in the face of something she didn’t know.

She did call her neighbour Tom, a retired accountant, for advice three times that afternoon, but she managed to finish her taxes by dinnertime. She also noticed her sense of pride in mastering the task that had threatened to overwhelm her that morning, enjoying the deepening trust in herself and her practice; she noticed her gratitude that she noticed her initial patterns of response and took them as a cue to practice. The noticing and naming kept her prefrontal cortex functioning well and brought her out of confusion into clarity.

» Finding the gift in the mistake

This practice of ‘catch the moment; make a choice’ allows us to turn a ‘regrettable moment’ into a ‘teachable moment.’ Then we can find the gift in the mistake:

1. This is what happened
2. This is what I did
3. This has been the cost
4. This is what I learned
5. This is what I would do differently going forward.

Recovering and strengthening our capacities for resilience through these four intelligences allows us to more easily shift gears and bounce back from life’s setbacks, both in the moment and over time. Eventually, resilience becomes an ongoing way of being.

The post Becoming super resilient — Learn how to emerge stronger from any crisis appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Contentment

An important lesson for us is redefining certain words such as horrible, terrible, miserable, exhausted, devastated, unbearable and disastrous. The smallest of events in our life are enough to trigger-off feelings of misery and depression. We use exaggerated and catastrophic language almost for any minor happening.

I had to type extra reports in the office, had to have a very lunch late, the train back home was delayed by an hour — “I had a terrible day.”

My husband reached late for our anniversary dinner party — “I was devastated.”

We don’t get water in our taps from 2pm to 7pm — “What a disaster.”

Everyone around me has a career and I have to sit at home and watch the baby — “Life is in the pits.”

After observing and listening to the stories of the quake-hit areas, we need to think twice before using such catastrophic language to describe everyday happenings in our life. This therapeutic shift in our expressions while describing events in our life will give rise to greater contentment, and also reduce the risk of hypertension, heart disease and other stress-related diseases, the use of tranquillisers, the number of interpersonal conflicts and the expensive visits to psychiatrists.

Gratitude

Another important lesson is to be grateful for the little things in life — which may seem little when you have them, but seem a lot when they are taken away. Just the fact that you are alive and breathing is enough to feel grateful. After coming out of a catastrophe of this kind where the survivors have literally touched the doors of death and come back, everything seems a bonus; sleep, food, clothing, shelter, family, friends and a job. Now why don’t you count your blessings? I assure you that you will never fall short of things to be grateful for.

Trust

One of the survivors when interviewed said in a very matter-of-fact manner, that she had surrendered herself to God in trust. She was rescued from under the rubble after several hours but was positively calm and peaceful. There was a radiance of trust on her face.

Man tries his level best to secure his life and the lives of his beloved from all calamities — both natural and man-made. But a calamity like an earthquake has demonstrated that those that came to rescue were not necessarily family and friends, but strangers who reached out and helped. These strangers came from far and wide, crossing all geographical limits, just responding to their inner calling to help. There have been so many instances of gallantry where strangers have risked their lives to rescue and help those who were trapped in the debris, using every ounce of their strength and determination. So many angels have touched so many lives.

Complete trust in the divine does wonders making the survivors, all living testimonies of his love and might. But don’t wait to meet such calamities to experience his love, instead submit yourself absolutely into his hands and seek his guidance every single day of your life.

Humility

Confronting death on such a large scale has a humbling effect on all. There are stories of large scale devastations where entire villages having been flattened and wiped out from the map, interspersed with miraculous rescues of people who have been buried under the rubble for days, with barely more than dehydration and a few bruises, and of course, the pregnant woman who was rescued unscathed from under the debris with both her and the unborn child doing perfectly well. These stories speak loud and clear about the powerlessness of man against nature and the divine will. Witnessing the divine sanction functioning in its fullest glory in a natural calamity of these proportions brings a sense of sacredness to the entire experience. We can merely do our best, but then we are required to leave the rest to the divine sanction. “Thy will be done.”

Purpose

Being confronted by transitory nature of life in such a stark manner as the earthquake, every individual is challenged with questions concerning the meaning and purpose of his existence. The reality of death puts life in perspective. How would you spend today if you knew that your life was going to end tomorrow? This reminds me of a song, “Where is the time to hate when there is so little time to love?”

Petty quarrels, long drawn out conflicts and resentments, ego clashes; suddenly they all seem so futile and a complete waste of the precious gift of life.

Awareness of death makes you go about quickly accomplishing the purpose for which one was put in this world. Every person must find out and clearly define what his role in life is. And the most important aspect of this role is, to forgive and love one another, to help one another in times of need, to bask in the glory of life, being grateful for every breath and using it in an optimum manner, and furthermore, to connect to our higher selves and help others connect to their higher selves and fulfil their purpose in life.

Turning within

Every human being is conditioned to assume that the real world is outside, that the way to live life is by contact with an external reality, by seeking input, physical and mental, from without. We would rather explore the far side of the moon or the bottom of the ocean than the hidden depths within ourselves.

Man is subjected to a series of events in his life. Things happen that we do not want; things that we want do not happen; and that is the story of human suffering. Eventually we must all face the suffering of death. Buddha discovered a way to gain insight into the reality of his own nature and to experience true freedom from suffering. He explained that the only way to experience this liberation from all suffering is to look within, to observe the reality within, and thus come out of suffering.

In order to solve our problems, we are required to see our situation as it is and to observe the suffering objectively. If we can learn to observe the pain and the suffering with detachment, like a doctor examining someone else’s pain, we find that the pain no longer overwhelms and controls us. Perhaps it goes away quickly, perhaps not, but it does not matter. We do not suffer from the pain anymore because we can observe it with detachment.

This can be achieved by the systematic development of insight by witnessing in meditation. This reminds me of a story narrated by Osho.

A Zen master was invited as a guest. A few friends had gathered and they were eating and talking when suddenly there was an earthquake. The building that they were sitting in was a seven-storey building and they were on the seventh storey, so life was in danger. Everybody tried to escape. The host, running by, looked to see what had happened to the master. He was there with not even a ripple of anxiety on his face. With closed eyes he was sitting on his chair as he had been sitting before.

The host felt a little guilty, he felt a bit of a coward, and it did not look good that a guest was sitting there and the host was running away. The others, the other twenty guests had already gone down the stairs but he stopped himself although he was trembling with fear, and he sat down by the side of the master.

The earthquake came and went, the master opened the eyes and started his conversation which because of the earthquake he had had to stop. He continued again at exactly the same sentence—as if the earthquake had not happened at all.

The host was now in no mood to listen, he was in no mood to understand because his whole being was so troubled and he was so afraid. He asked the master, “We all tried to escape. What happened to you? What do you say about the earthquake?”

The master said: “I also escaped, but you escaped outwardly, I escaped inwardly. Your escape is useless because wherever you are going there too is an earthquake, so it is meaningless, it makes no sense. You may reach the sixth storey or the fifth or the fourth, but there too is an earthquake. I escaped to a point within me where no earthquake ever reaches, cannot reach. I entered my centre.”

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