This is often a time of year filled with many mixed and juxtaposing emotions. It seems that this year this is extremely heightened due to all that we have endured during the last almost two years. The challenge and frustration of feeling both so close and yet so far away from our collective, personal, and interpersonal desires. Many of us are grieving (for various reasons), healing, feeling challenged to the extreme (pushing beyond what we thought were our limits), growing, evolving, and learning. Due to this, I want to talk about the concept of rising up to our challenges and what that truly entails. Often it seems that when we envision rising up to our challenges we think of:
- A marathon runner crossing the finishing line.
- Celebrating being cancer-free.
- The person who becomes valedictorian after being diagnosed with learning challenges etc., as a child.
- Climbers at the top of the highest peak.
This is often the end result of all the times that rising up looked like breaking down. Grieving, healing, feeling, and learning how to deal are integral to creating a resilient response. We often don’t have a breakthrough without a breakdown. The breakdown is the hard part. All of the experiences of feeling heart-wrenching pain, crying, yelling, screaming, feeling debilitating fear, and each time we find it deep within us to keep going, to keep showing up, to finding the slightest glimmer of light in the darkness.
In our breakdowns, we are building the foundation for our breakthrough, our rise up when we…
- Admit that we need help, guidance, and support.
- Look for and find a support team (professionals, therapists, doctors, friends, family, etc.).
- The people who support us, hold us, sit in the uncomfortable silence and stillness with us, create a safe space for our emotional reactions, and sometimes even share with us the hard truths that we don’t necessarily want to hear, but we need to hear.
- Allow ourselves to receive the support.
- Practice active acceptance- acceptance of where we are and learning how to name it, claim it, to better deal with it.
- Our willingness and commitment to finding ways and people to guide us, as we learn approaches to hope, cope, and deal.
- Being open to finding creative solutions to our challenges by learning problem-solving skills.
- Learning new tools, techniques, and strategies, to feel our real raw emotions and to embrace the hard sh**.
We get to choose how we respond in every given situation even and especially the challenging ones. We can choose to be bitter or we can do everything in our power to be proactive and committed to doing the hard sh** of diving into the depths of our emotions, swimming through and wrestling with the mud & muck, and continuing onward again and again.
Each time we do- we are building our resiliency muscles, we are setting ourselves up for the comeback! Every time we step up and out by making the choice to not give up, while also allowing ourselves to give in to: love, guidance, self-care, self-compassion, and support we are building our resource ladder to get to the beautiful vista at the end of the challenging climb. Committing to the challenging process is what gets you there. Keep going, you’ve got this- your vista, your marathon victory, your life, your dream is awaiting YOU!!
