I didn’t welcome the pain that came along with heartbreak.
I would have done anything to stay together just so I wouldn’t feel the soul-crushing breaking of my heart. I had never experienced profound loss before and didn’t think I could take it.
So, I avoided feeling the heavy, overwhelming and life-consuming pain.
For some time, I pretended the breakup wasn’t happening. Later, I imagined that it was all a bad dream and I would wake up from it soon. I wanted to disappear from the world all together so I wouldn’t have to face this heaviness.
Little did I know that I waiting for me in my life’s greatest pain was my life’s greatest lessons.
In my heartbreak was the peace and freedom of my untethered soul. In Michael Singer’s book, the Untethered Soul, I learn that my inner thorns were really the guide and source to inner awakening.
You can remove the prick of the inner thorns and learn that it’s acceptable to feel inner disturbances. In fact, getting through the pain and landing on the other side is the key to freedom of your innermost being.
Here are 6 practical and actionable from the Unthethered Soul to melt the pain and embrace your inner freedom
1. Know that you have two choices.
Just like being pricked by a thorn, you have experiences which prick and disturb you. This thorn is a constant source of disturbance and your choices are to make sure nothing touches the thorn to avoid all pain or to take out the thorn.
If you do nothing about it, the thorn will run your life. You will have trouble sleeping because of it, you will have trouble staying focused on your job and trouble with everyday interactions. As people, we have so many sensitivities that can be triggered at any time. One way to go about life is to make sure that no one triggers these sensitivities.
“If you’re lonely, you must avoid going to places where couples tend to be. If you’re afraid of rejection, you must avoid getting too close to people,” Singer advises. Of course, this becomes life-consuming and takes work!
The alternative? You notice this inner disturbance and realize that YOU and the inner disturbance are not one in the same. You don’t want the weakest parts of you running your life.
Realize that your consciousness is separate and that you can be aware of these things.
2. You are not your pain
“Wake up and realized that you are in there, and you have a sensitive person in there with you. Simply watch the sensitive part of you feel disturbance. See it feel jealousy, need and fear,” Singer suggests.
As you experience pain, become aware of the pain without interfering with it. See it, feel it, pay attention to it and observe it. You are having the experience of a human being when you experience this pain.
“If you pay attention,” Singer counsels, “you will see that they are not you; they are just something that you’re feeling and experiencing. You are the indwelling being that is aware of all of this.”
Once you realize that you and your pain are separate, you will start feeling a different energy within you, called Shakti or spirit.
This deeper, wiser part of you is the inner wisdom or the greater divine, what you decide to perceive it as. It is your inner being who realizes that it’s not the same as the pain that’s passing through your body.
“Once you learn that it’s okay to feel inner disturbances, and that they can no longer disturb your seat of consciousness, you will be free.”
3. Your pain is temporary.
A way to see that you and your pain are not one, is to see pain as something transient that will pass through your body.
You can view pain as a temporary shift in energy.
You are pained every day in small and big ways. You are pained by your heartbreak and you are pained by seeing your ex with someone else. You are pained by loneliness and you’re pained by your favorite ice cream flavor being out of stock at Movenpick.
So many things can cause you pain on a daily basis. It becomes less of a problem when you realize that pain passes. It’s a temporary feeling that you’re experiencing.
You can actually learn to get comfortable with it. All the feelings that come up are just feelings. You can handle feelings that are a normal part of life.
Feelings are just things that are passing through your system like a cold, for example. You notice the cold, you experience the cold and you know that once your body processes the col, you’ll be relieved of the cold.
Have fun with the temporariness of your feelings.
“Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don’t be afraid of it. It cannot touch you unless you touch it,” Michael Singer writes in the Untethered Soul.
4. End the addiction to your mind.
Your mind is a great contributor to avoiding pain and being a misleading guide to safe places.
Your mind is always telling you something isn’t right, how to fix something or how to do something differently the next time so you avoid pain. It concocts a book to read, a course to take or a life change you need to make. It tells you it’s the external things that matters.
“That is why people have so much trouble with relationships,” Singer explains. “You begin with a problem inside yourself, and you tried to solve it by getting involved with somebody else. That relationship will have problems because your problems are what caused the relationship.”
If you didn’t have neurotic, continuous replaying of thoughts inside your mind, you could live and experience life without thinking about what’s wrong.
Singer makes a funny and outrageous claim that we have to end the addiction to our minds. You have to stop listening to all the problems it comes up with, which don’t really exist.
Stop asking your mind to fix what’s wrong. Don’t even ask it what the problem is!!
“The mind is simply a computer, a tool. It can be used to ponder great thoughts, solve scientific problems and serve humanity. But you in your lost state, told it to spend its time conjuring up outer solutions for your very personal inner problems.”
Get quiet and watch the mind do it’s mental gymnastics, trickery and quackery. Watch your thoughts. Don’t become aware of the thinking mind but observe the thinking mind.
“You are just in there, aware that you are aware.”
So when someone doesn’t say “hi” to you that you know or you don’t get invited to a party, don’t allow your mind to hijack your being and your life. Watch the melodrama of your mind instead of becoming an actor in this bizarre movie. Your mind doesn’t need an Oscar!
Don’t let your mind drive you crazy over nothing.
5. Welcome in pain by opening your heart
No, not welcome in pain like you would welcome a stroll down the Champs Elysses in Paris or a weekend of skiing in the northern Sierras.
Welcome in pain so that you’re not afraid to experience in. No one likes pain but doesn’t mean you have to spend your life running from pain.
Your heart regularly wants to pull away and avoid the pain once you’ve been hurt by something once.
“If life does something that causes a disturbance inside of you, instead of pulling away, let it pass through you like the wind.”
You might want to avoid feeling anger, fear, insecurity and embarrassment. You might want to run away from heartbreak or the sadness from losing a loved one. You might never want to feel rejected again so what do you do?
Run. Avoid. Build walls and keep the pain out. You tell yourself that you’ll never ever do x,y, or z and stay far away from so and so.
As your heart is trying to push all this away, do the opposite of closing your heart. Relax and release towards the unthethered soul.
“Stay open and receptive so you can be present right where the tension is. You must be willing to be present right at the place of the tightness and pain and then relax and go deeper.”
“Let go and give room for the pain to pass through you,” suggests Singer. “It’s just energy. Just see it as energy and let it go.”
6. On the other side of pain
If you can endure, experience and feel pain, without running away from it, you’ll become free.
Everything you want is on the other side of pain: ecstasy, peace, freedom, joy, beauty, love.
As the pain goes through you, you could feel hot and uncomfortable. You might feel breathless and experience unwanted feelings.
Yet, you go through this pain, by relaxing into the energy, knowing that there are good things coming out on the other side.
This is how the work of spirituality becomes a reality. This is what the works look like. This is what freedom of the untethered soul looks like.
“When you are comfortable with pain passing through you, you’ll be free…You will then be able to walk through this world more vibrant and alive than ever before.”
There is an ocean of love under the pain. Getting through the pain is how you reach this oasis that’s waiting for you of the untethered and free soul.
On the other side of the pain is the life of freedom and awakening waiting for you.
You keep hoping that things will improve but it doesn’t.
Everyone seems to be getting ahead but you seem stuck in the past. The catastrophic breakup or divorce seems to be holding you back and you can’t seem to shake it.
You want to come up for air but you feel like you’re just pulled in too deep under water.
Life doesn’t seem fair.
You just want to disappear and give up.
What’s the point after all? Some people are lucky and get what they want. Some people live their dreams, travel the world, marry their soulmates and have smart children.
Life can be so frustrating for those of us who are waiting on the sidelines of life. We watch the game of life passing us by while everyone we know is doing so much better than us.
Others making their families proud.
Others doing what they’re “supposed” to be doing with their lives.
Others are achieving success and recognition.
It can be frustrating and demoralizing to be behind and to wonder when life will fall in place for you. When will life push you ahead?
When will you meet the man of your dreams? When will you have children? When will you buy your dream home? When will you bring home a fury companion? When can you post a happy moment on Facebook?
When can you feel joy and happiness again?
It’s been a long struggle. It may seem like your entire life has been a struggle. Why is it so easy for some people and so difficult for you?
I get it. I know it. I hear every word you’re saying because I’ve traveled the same path as you.
So, how do you keep going when you want to give up?
Well, first take a deep breath and then another. Take another breath. Breathe in and breathe out. Don’t let the unfairness or injustice of life weigh you down. As heavy as it is, a simple breath can help you feel lighter. A simple breath can release the tension and help you get more present. Take as many breaths as you need to relax.
Next, remind yourself of where you’ve been. You’ve gone through some hard times. Unlike many others, you’ve struggled and come back from places others can’t imagine. You’ve grown as a person, you’ve learned lessons, you’ve gotten life experience that you can’t pay for or buy.
While it may seem like you’re drifting backwards in the ways of the world, you’re actually a lot further than you think. You may feel like you’re behind your peers and family but look at how far you’ve come.
You’ve stood strong in the face of hardship and challenge. You got up and left the house when you didn’t feel like it. You showed up at work when you didn’t want to. You got out of bed when you feel like you couldn’t. You helped others when it felt like you couldn’t help yourself. Value these small steps you’ve taken.
No, you may not have love and family. No, you may not have achieved your careers and dreams. No, your life may feel unsettled and uncertain but here’s what you do have: self-knowledge, self-resilience, wisdom, compassion, kindness, empathy and understanding. You have skills and tools that people will never acquire in their lifetimes.
Because you’ve gone through struggle, you know how to be there for someone else who is suffering.
Because you’ve found yourself on the bathroom floor, you know what it takes to get up from your life’s worst moments.
Because you’ve sat in church pews wondering if there was a God, you know where to find truth and wisdom. You know how to access the divine.
Take some time to count the small blessings that you do have in your life. Yes, your old life is gone and the past you cherished no longer exists but what have you welcomed in? Did you find freedom? Did you find resilience? Did you find achievement? Did you find spirituality? Did you find friendship?
Look at all the small things in your life that you’re grateful for. Be thankful for home, warmth, food, family, neighbors, work that pays you and transportation to get you there. Be thankful for small acts of kindness, big acts of courage and giant acts of love that you’ve shown over the years.
Acknowledge how far you’ve come as a person – how you picked yourself up and became a new “you”.
You have fallen so many times and fallen hard but unlike many others, you’ll bounce back. You’ll rise each time you fall. Remind yourself how many times you’ve done it. Take comfort in your resilience and find courage in your strength. Yeah, you did it! You got back each time and you know how to get back up every time life throws something worse at you.
Life takes time, sometimes much longer than you would have ever wanted it to take.
Instead of demanding life deliver for you or blaming life for not coming through, trust that your life will fall into place at the right time.
Remember the story of the rabbit and tortoise? The speedy rabbit hops off to a promising victory only to be passed by the steadfast tortoise who puts one leg in front of the other and keeps going until she crosses the finish line first.
It may feel like you’re inching away at your life but you’re going to get there. Slow and steady patience always wins the day.
You’re not going look around you and see what others are doing with their lives. There’s no point in comparison and you don’t win by playing someone else’s game. Focus on how to keep going until you win your game.
Society defines success for everyone in the same way. You don’t have to play by those rules of success.
Success doesn’t have to be marriage by 30, having kids a couple years later, buying a house a couple years later, and sending your kids off to college even a few more years later.
Yes, that’s the story they tell us but that isn’t the story you have to live.
You can create your own story. You can remain true to yourself. You can show up in the world as who you are. You don’t have to compare yourself to others or strive to be someone you’re not.
Take a deep breath
Remind yourself where you’ve been
Count your blessings
Be patient
Trust life
Surrender
Ignore those around you
Don’t play by society’s rules
Stay true to yourself
You’ve done this so many times – over and over and over.
Walk on your own path. Take your own time. One day in it’s own way, life will smile down upon you.
In an instant, you will see your scars as the very thing that prepared you for your success.
Your success may come next year or the year after.
You just have to treasure this moment in front of you.
* Looking for more inspiration for 2017? Check out my books on Amazon here.
Do you ever wonder if you’re being lied to by society?
Does it feel like you’re being hoodwinked to live a certain kind of life and it just doesn’t feel right to you?
I sure did and when my life fell apart after my divorce, I was able to wake up and come out my deep metaphorical coma.
I came to the profound realization that my whole life was premised on societal expectations. Everything from work and school to relationships and what I should be doing with my life was created by society’s demands.
This past year, I put all my thoughts about this topic into a book called, Seven Sacred Promises.
Why do I call these promises sacred? What are these promises? What will living these promises mean to your life?
If you’d like to hear more about the book and my first podcast interview with my friend, A.G. Billig, check out the podcast below.
Pick up this book to learn how to build up courage, discover your calling, find your courage and live your truth. Read this book only if you’re ready to wake up and start living from a sacred space.
If you’re interested in reading the Seven Sacred Promises, you can pick up the e-book on Amazon here or pickup the paperback book here.
Life on the outside can seem like you have everything going for you.
You could be a professional in a lucrative dental practice with speaking opportunities all over the world. You could have a six-figure Bollywod wedding and a million dollar dream home.
Your life appears to be sailing along exactly as your high-expectation Asian parents would have wanted you to live it.
Yet while the external parts of your life are going well and it appears you’ve achieved worldly success, your life could be completely falling apart.
Neeta Bushan’s story that the world couldn’t see is one of pain, challenges and loss. Specifically, losing both her parents and one of her brothers through separate health issues by the time she was 19 years old.
As a child of Indian-Filipino parents who grew up in the U.S., Neeta found herself having to deal with high expectations and academic excellence which took her to dental school and a successful dentistry practice.
Yet, 3 members of her immediate family (including her parents) passed away in her teenage years and she later found herself getting divorced after a physically and emotionally abusive relationship.
For someone who has experienced so much pain and overcoming what seems like insurmountable life experiences, Neeta has captured her life lessons and shares her wisdom in her book, Emotional Grit.
While the book is focused on leadership and building emotional grit in the workplace, I was able to pick out nuggets of wisdom on how she overcame loss, divorce and suffering in her own life.
Here are 5 ways to help you build emotional resiliency when you’re confronting your life’s biggest struggles:
1. Understanding and accepting your emotions.
So much of your life is spent on running away from your emotions because your emotions make you feel uncomfortable and you have been taught to suppress them your whole life. To move forward, you have to be willing to recognize, affirm and apply emotional intelligence to the emotions you’re experiencing. You have to learn to process emotions and learn tools to master the feelings that show up when life challenges that come your way.
2. Positivity and gratitude.
Neeta encourages you to surround yourself with positive messages and daily reminders. “From cards and magazines to picture and clippings, fill your surrounding with images and words that inspire your confidence and enrich your soul,” she writes. Not only does positivity help with keeping your perspective in life but so does gratitude. Waking up to another day is a gift that you can’t take for granted. Remind yourself every day of all those things that you’re grateful for in your life. There are many small and wonderful things in your life that you’re likely not noticing. Wake up each morning and take stock of what you’re thankful for.
3. Be proactive with your mental wellbeing.
In addition to your emotional wellbeing, your mental health is just as important to your wellbeing. Being able to manage stress and being proactive about your mental health are important. You can’t take care of yourself or others when you’re in mental turmoil. You can’t move on or move forward in your life without clearing the mental blocks you face. Reach out to a team of professionals like therapists and counselors if you need one. Otherwise, have a solid community and friendships to listen to you and create space for you.
4. Forgive and Release
Forgiveness may be difficult for you but it’s essential to be able to move forward. Forgiving is saying out loud that you’re letting go of the emotions you’re holding about a particular person or experience. When you forgive, you release all the pent-up energy and emotions about the person and gain your power back but as you know, forgiveness is no easy task. You have to find the courage to forgive and remind yourself of all the benefits of forgiveness. Forgiveness contributes to healthier relationships, less stress and anxiety and higher self-esteem. Not forgiving is like moving through life with a ripped and heavy paper bag, which keeps ripping and things fall out. Forgiveness is putting down the bag and moving forward with more ease.
5. Choose Courage
When you confront difficult circumstances, your fears and anxiety about the past pop up. There are patterns that you grew up with that cause you to act a certain way when dealing with new or challenging circumstances.
“When we choose to be ruled by fear, and specifically when we allow the not-yet-happened to subsume our personal power, we’ve given up the only freedom we have: the freedom to choose,” writes Neeta in the chapter about having the courage to feel your fears.
The way to practice courage is to be more aware your patterns of fear. She encourages you to write down the things that scare you each day and then write down steps to unmask or deconstruct that fear. Even the tiniest of steps in breaking through your fear can lead to more steps of courage.
While emotional intelligence and courage can be helpful in facing personal life challenges, it can also be helpful to your work life. Much of Neeta’s book, Emotional Grit, can guide you to be more authentic, courageous and emotionally resilient in the workplace.
Neeta Bhushan is an emotional intelligence advocate, speaker, and founder of the Global Grit Institute. You can follow her blog here and pick up her book, Emotional Grit here.
You’ll ask why God isn’t listening to you and wonder if God even exists.
Actually, some of us tend to ask these questions and then end up writing books about them! I wrote Is God Listening?asking these types of questions (you can find it here).
While writing books may be productive and helpful, asking disempowering questions of yourself is not. There’s no sufficient answer as to why this is happening. If this was a natural disaster, a tsunami, or an earthquake, what can you do? What answers will satisfy you?
Tragedies, natural disasters, and yes, even divorce, happen. Yes, divorce involves feelings and people, but ultimately they occur. Relationships start and end. It is a natural cycle of life. In all of life, we want answers to questions so we can understand the world better. “Why me?” you may ask.
It’s natural and human to ask questions like this of ourselves, but it is not healthy or helpful to healing. A couple of different ways to think about this is to believe that things happen, and sometimes for no reason at all.
There’s no positive result that comes out of repeatedly asking why certain things are happening to you because some of these questions won’t have answers.
The divorce happened because you weren’t compatible, because you married the wrong partner, because you didn’t put the time into the relationship, because of an affair, etc.
It happened for any number of contributing reasons, but the big question of “why you” has no answer.
Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people.
No point in holding the universe responsible or blaming life itself for a sequence of events that resulted in divorce. You’ll just keep swirling negative thoughts in your mind, and wasting emotional and mental energy trying to understand why this happened to you.
One way to view your divorce is that nothing happened for this to happen to you.
Your divorce happened for any variety of reasons, but there will be no answer to why it’s happening to you. Like rivers and oceans and life for billions of years, nature and human experiences is just running its course. There is no reason or explanations needed.
You didn’t cause it, your karma didn’t create it, and God isn’t after you.
Sure, you might have done things that contributed to the divorce in your life, but there’s no good answer to “why you.” Divorce happened like it rained yesterday afternoon; there’s no rhyme or reason other than possibly it’s the rainy season.
There’s no particular reason why you were singled out in life to experience divorce.
Your sixteen-year-old son wants to back out of the garage and drives into your house instead.
Natural disasters and life happens.
It’s not fate, karma, voodoo dolls, or anything else that has it in for you. Life happens like nature happens.
You’re a tiny speckle of the universe who has come into it for eighty-some years and will be leaving it.
Demanding to know what your role is in the universal scheme of things or having the knowledge of why your divorce happened as it did is not going to help any.
If you look at it from a billion-year view or take a meta-view (step ten thousand feet away from your situation), your divorce is just one set of events that unfold.
It’s a small part of a much larger picture. It will be a small part of your life when you look at it globally.
You don’t have to know why it happened.
If you insist on knowing why it happened, choose this message: Your divorce is happening for your greatest good. It’s happening for your spiritual growth. It’s happening to help you become the best version of yourself. It’s helping you become the person you’re capable of being so you can attract the right partner into your life.
If this isn’t a sufficient answer for explaining why you are divorced, then I challenge you to ask yourself more empowering questions instead.
Don’t ask yourself why this happened; instead, ask yourself what lessons you can learn from this experience. What is the divorce trying to teach you? How is this going to prepare you for the future? What is this teaching you about life?
If you start viewing the end of your marriage as a teaching experience and a period of growth, your mind will start focusing on more helpful and empowering answers.
You’ll be looking for lessons and insights to help improve your life.
Another way to focus on the situation is to think about what you can do now. Yes, this happened, but now what? What’s in your control? What can you change? How can you move forward? How can you rebuild a new life for yourself?
By letting go of one set of questions and focusing on more positive ones, you’ll help focus your mind on empowering questions that will lead to growth, learning and moving on.
Don’t like my answer? Want to know where God is and if God’s listening to you? Click here to pick up my book, Is God Listening?
I help people overcome their devastating breakups and divorces and find love again. Instead of visiting the Himalayas, sign up below and join me. I am taking a writing break but will be back soon.
This guide is free. A ticket to the Himalayas is $2000. Your move.
