“Difficulty does not arrive to keep us trapped. It arrives to show us the way we are trapping ourselves inside a life we no longer want.”

Brianna Wiest said this. She said this on a day I really needed to hear it. The same day I received the following daily motivation in my inbox: “In the midst of difficult situations, we experience intense feelings and struggle to find our way. We feel scared of the aftermath.”

“When the uncertainty feels too overwhelming, focus on things you know for sure. Uncomfortable feelings will pass, this situation will change, and being calm will bring better results than letting negative thoughts consume you.”

How to stay calm in the midst of chaos? It’s by breathing, girlfriend. Yep, sounds like something you do in any case, but I can promise you that once I start spinning in circles, I don’t breathe. So, smell a flower: deep breath in through the nose. Blow out a candle: deep breath out through the mouth.

Margaret Paul writes that you can mindfully follow your breath to become present in your own body and embrace all of your feelings. “It’s about moving toward your feelings rather than running away from them with various forms of self-abandonment, such as staying focused in your head, judging yourself, turning to addictions to numb out, etc. All feelings are informational.”

Once you’re clear on exactly what your feelings about a situation are, you have to learn how to stick to the facts. Clinical psychologist, Alexandra Solomon, says that Buddhists explain suffering as two arrows.

“The first arrow is the unfortunate event that happened to us – a painful arrow outside of our control. The second arrow is the story we tell ourselves about that event – this suffering is self-inflicted. Self-love means not shooting ourselves with that second arrow.”

Sticking to the facts can really help you to accept the reality of a situation. Arlin Cuncic writes that radical acceptance can be defined as the ability to accept situations that are outside of your control without judging them, which reduces the suffering they cause.

“By accepting things for what they are, you can acknowledge your emotions without denying, avoiding, or ignoring the situation. It can be an effective way to process your emotions and manage difficult experiences,” Arlin says.

Clinical psychologist, Adia Gooden, writes: “When I work with clients, I see the majority of their suffering coming from a longing for things to be different from how they are. What we resist persists,” Adia says. This means that when you deny what’s happening, you’re probably going to start ‘should-ing’ on yourself: I shouldn’t have done this or that. It shouldn’t work out this way. This shouldn’t have happened.

Adia says that you’ll be better able to accept and move past the things you can’t control when you practice acknowledging your reality in non-judgmental terms: This is the state of affairs. These are the circumstances. This is what’s going on. The word ‘accept’ is significant here. And acceptance is not the same as approval, girlfriend. You don’t have to like what is happening.

My daily motivation says that you regularly have to clean the lens through which you see the world. “Judgments, biases, and assumptions distort our perception of reality. They keep you from embracing the vibrancy of life. Rather than jumping to conclusions, lean into curiosity and wonder.”

This will help you to break free from the shackles of “how it should be” and help you to face “how it actually is”. It will also help you to believe that whatever happens, you will be able to heal. Brianna Wiest says that the point of healing is not to return to a place where everything is perfect. Instead, it is to begin to develop the ability to respond to what’s imperfect.

“Healing is not a one-time event,” says Brianna. “It can begin with a one-time event – typically some form of sudden loss that disrupts our projection of what the future might be. However, the true work of healing is allowing that disruption to wake us from a deep state of unconsciousness, to release the personas we adapted into, and begin consciously piecing together the full truth of who we were meant to be.”

Girlfriend, it’s as Brianna says: “We heal when we learn how to adjust how we show up, not how we change what we show up to.” – Angie Kleijn