The Vortex, I call it.

Everyone has one in their life (at least one)- a time when you are tested in seemingly insurmountable ways and things continue to go wrong, and you spiral uncontrollably downward.

In life, you always have a choice. Be weak or be strong.

Who you truly are as a person is best revealed by who you are during times of conflict and crisis.

Basically, you’re either growing into a bigger, better person or shrinking into a lowly, bitter person.

What is growing?

Putting in the emotional effort to improve who you are as a person

– facing your core pain –

and working to stretch yourself to become your strongest, wisest, highest-level self. Yes, I believe the greatest reward out there is actually not OUT there at all. It’s all inside. The greatest reward is knowing that you are refusing to settle for being anything less than you can be.

The 5 stages of grief:

If you want to heal rightly from a crisis, be ready to tolerate more pain than you thought you could ever feel.

Thankfully, if you learn to sit with, feel, and tolerate this core pain, it will get smaller and smaller, until it ultimately disappears.

During this time, I’d be walking around, feeling just fine, and then SUDDENLY, like a tidal wave, the floodgates would open.

The unbearable sadness I’d been evading finally had caught up with me and grabbed me by the throat so I couldn’t breathe.

If you’re going through a challenging time, it’s essential you recognize that it’s your choice to:

1. Sit with the pain now

OR

2. Avoid the pain now and feel even greater pain later, thereby delaying the healing.

Pain is part of life. By accepting it, its intensity is reduced. Do no resist it. Resistance to pain brings tension and anxiety, anxiety leads to fear. Fear of pain is worse than pain itself. This pain will pass.

Stories, or “self-talk”, can either enable you to persist in the face of failure or disable you and make you downright miserable. Pessimists, who generally don’t bounce back easily from bad times, see setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal.

Optimistic people, in contrast, tell themselves that setbacks are temporary, confined to that one situation, and are usually about the other person, not a character defect in themselves. They tend to assume that bad events are an exception, and good things will continue to happen.

Successful people are not people who never fail.

They’re people who know how to fail really, really well.

If they fall on their faces, they use that leverage to push themselves up higher.

Bill Gates actually relishes the lessons of failure so much, he purposefully hires people at Microsoft who have made mistakes. “It shows that they take risks”.

                                         I asked for strength…and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.

 In Buddhism, huge difficulties are thought to be a compliment. A sign that you’re an old soul being tested to see if you’re ready to rise to the next level toward enlightenment.

The Law of Karma also suggests that whatever happens to us in this life is tailored specifically for us as lessons to be learned. And although many of our life exams might feel very difficult at times, the universe knows what it’s up to and never gives us more than we can handle learning.

People who cultivate the Habit of Zest are those who regularly take a lively interest in the most mundane of everyday moments and see the extraordinary in the ordinary.