The world is on fire in so many ways.

Hope seems to be dwindling, both on an individual level and collectively.

There’s a lot that is scary and a lot that seems hard.

However, the human spirit is resilient. And the imperfections of our world shouldn’t stop us from living the life we want.

The challenges might make the path to achieving our goals seem longer, but the difficulties can’t erase the dream entirely.

We might have to get savvy and become clever in order to navigate the obstacles and rapid changes of our world.

With persistence we will get to where we’d like to go. And with trust and humility we’ll get to where we need to be.

Our right place is within our reach, but between the rock of patience and the hard place of humble persistence.

The life we want to live won’t look exactly the way we originally imagined, but it is still worth striving for.

Keep moving forward and your heart’s desire will lead you through the fire.

“I’ve hit rock bottom” one might say.

This kind of statement usually means that they have come to a difficult place in life that might feel like a dead end. No outlet in sight.

Unlike that of being “caught between a rock and a hard place” might feel like less of a challenge than hitting rock bottom.

Once you figure out how to wiggle out from the hard place and roll the rock away then you can move forward. Right? Seems a bit easier to find a way out from between two difficult choices.

Reaching a place of rock bottom might bring a feeling of hopelessness. It might seem like all aspects of one’s life have stopped.

What’s a person to do?

What if rock bottom was not a dead end?

What if that hard surface you sit on could actually help you move forward?

What if rock bottom was the chance you needed to reinvent your life and become a version of yourself that you were afraid to embrace?

“What version of myself?” you might ask.

The deeply authentic version of yourself. The version of yourself that is confident and unwavering in your wholeness. That version of yourself.

Hitting rock bottom could be the springboard you needed.

The hard surface of this place will not give you an extraordinary lift. You will not be able to jump over the challenges and catapult into the stratosphere of reinventing oneself. However, that is good.

When we move too fast, we missed the process because we are anxious to get to a polished product. Nothing can be properly polished or fully formed when we rush the process.

The hard surface will allow for a solid reinvention of life as we knew it. Nothing in this process will be missed. There will be a deep grounded transformation.

Through erosion of what hasn’t worked for you and the slow movement through the process, like tectonic plates, that is where your springboard begins.

Rock bottom could be the best thing that has ever happened to you.

Here’s to reinvention and the process of grounding oneself in the beauty of wholeness.

When I was younger, I found the reactivity of my loved ones a scary thing.  

I was attached to them. I wanted them to be my safe place. I had no confidence in myself to feel like my own safe place and as a child I would rely on the adults in my life to help with most things.

But when a challenge arose and the going felt difficult for them a reaction was usually inevitable. Most of the time the reaction was that of anger, frustration, pure rage.  

To me their reaction felt like an erupting volcano. The anger that spilled out seemed to fill the room with hot ash and fire. My safe place was no longer there. And I lacked the tools and wherewithal to put out the fire myself. I could not save my loved one and I could not save myself. We were both just dancing on flames.

Others had a different kind of edge to them, but the reactions would still feel all consuming. Ice and heavy snow would come at me from an angle. As I tried to climb out of the freezing snow, a few sharp icicles would keep me pinned in the cold. Once again, my safe place seemed to vanish, and I had no way to rectify the situation. Feeling impaled by daggers of ice I grieved the safe place I wish I could have.

Eventually, I grew older. I learned that no one could really rescue me. Although more importantly, I realized that my loved one’s reactivity were only moments in time. Underneath all the volcanic anger and icy remarks was a person expressing a feeling.

At the end of the day, that’s all we are. We are just people feeling things.

 We tend to grow up convinced that we must be more for others. Or that others must be more than they are for us. We feel guilty or ashamed in our bad days. And can often push too hard and burnout on our good days.

Thus, our ego roars its ugly head even when we trip. The slightest mistake gives the ego something to chew on. Our blood starts to boil or grows cold.

Then the one part of our day that we wanted to be easy feels impossible. We feel like we failed. We feel useless and good at nothing that we become reactive.

In the heat of the moment, it’s all we feel we can do is react, to express loudly, to blame something.

Though, when the adrenaline fades and we assess the situation, we may realize that our moment of reactivity wasn’t a good look and there was probably a better way to respond.

But we’re all just people. We are people working through the unknown challenges and our big feelings all at once.  We are all trying and growing in our own time.

It felt challenging to see the reactivity of my relatives, but it was a relief to understand that they are people.

I always hated being a person. I was always embarrassed of having human emotions and every mistake I made felt like a serious blemish on my character. I tried to be some kind of superwoman robot. Somehow the vulnerability that I tried to avoid seemed to leak out of me and therefore made me look twice as human as I wanted to.

While we have breath in our bodies and hearts that keep a beat, we should give ourselves some grace.

Slow down. Take things really slow.  

Enjoy the moments that we are able to pause, to breathe, to take in our surroundings while remaining connected to our own well-being.

We must let ourselves and our loved ones be human.

By doing so, we save ourselves a lot of heartache and it’s the most loving thing you can do for another.

It is easy to feel defeated, especially during challenging times. The human mind and heart can often be fragile and easily wounded.

Although, feeling wounded is a momentary thing.

The human mind is keen and when seeing a situation from a detached, clear standpoint it becomes easier for the mind to move forward. Thinking becomes less scattered.

The heart has its own version of this.

The wounded feeling only lasts for a short amount of time. Although, one must choose to move through the wound and then move away from it. Then the heart can recognize the situation from a similar detached standpoint.

Though feelings still float and percolate inside, particularly fear of the unknown, the heart manages to move forward.

This is courage.

When the heart and mind detach from the hurt together and move forward without solutioning the unknown that is the process of resilience in action.

One starts with what they know and takes steps that are within their control.

I haven’t always felt like an expert in this area. Resilience is not something that I feel comes naturally to me.

In my experience resilience was developed over time. It was a character trait that I had to adapt to within myself and each challenge I faced seemed to require a leveling up of this character trait.

I had to become a resilient person. If I didn’t then the wounded feelings, the hurt, the sorrow, and all the rest from the injured mind and heart would have swallowed me.

I could not let the feelings and the thoughts that swirled from the challenges take me under.

So, while I still felt the feelings deeply, and struggled to ignore the scattered thoughts, I moved forward through the challenge. I did not think much about resilience of any kind.

In fact, most of the time I did not feel strong, and my mind was so unkind to my heart.

However, what got me through each challenging moment was to choose to not be swallowed. Though there was a storm that raged inside me, I refused to let it take me.

I have come to realize that a resilient person still feels all the feelings and still has an active mind. There is still a storm of challenge going on, but the difference is that somewhere within them there’s a small part that remains upright.

There may be bruises, or smashed pieces, but somehow there’s one area of the person that stays standing.

Resilience lives in the part of the person that refuses to be swallowed by the storm.

There is a well inside me. This well inside me opens wider and becomes deeper each passing year.

How to close this well and keep it from swelling? I don’t know.

This well is one of an aching heart and swirling mind. If I could stop the aching heart and stop the swirling mind, then perhaps the well might close.

Or so I used to think.

I’ve come to recognize that maybe by softening the ache and calming the swirl, the well won’t close completely, but instead it will find a deep stillness, one that has been much needed for a long time.

The well is good. The heart and the mind are good, but they have been treading water, struggling to stay afloat for some time.

The ache and the swirl have been left alone, untamed.

Somehow from this the heart and mind were hijacked and forcefully tamed from all that came naturally to them.

As the out-of-control ache found the steadily being tamed heart, the well inside me turned. The waters became dark.

As the out-of-control swirl found the steadily being tamed mind, the well inside me churned. The waters became cold.

Soon I saw the well and then myself as a sea of ugly good-for-nothingness. Inside and outside I felt like horrible black ice.

Hope was lost. Joy was no longer. Peace had vanished.

As I work now, to heal the ache and swirl from my heart and mind. I see the goodness the well has.

The well is empathy, love, creativity, and much more. I don’t know when the well inside me will be completely restored, but I see now there is a well inside me. It has been in turmoil for some time, and I have only known the turmoil, not the well itself. This well inside me is not the turmoil.

I am not the turmoil that the ache and swirl often created. The well does not need to be fixed or closed. It needs to be filtered of all the past aches, and swirling thoughts that have swarmed its waters, making it an unhabitable place for many years.

Decades of only seeing the turmoil that the untamed ache and swirl had unleashed, instead of seeing the beauty that the heart and mind contributed to the well was detrimental.  

The heart and mind were never meant to be tamed. Taming the heart and the mind, I see now, creates more turmoil than good.

The heart and mind must remain untamed. Purified of any aching or swirling.

What must be tamed is the ache that comes from ruminating about the past, the ache that comes from holding on to hurt feelings, the ache that comes from unresolved feelings.  

What must be tamed is the swirl that comes from fearing what the future will bring, the swirl that comes from constant stress worrying about everything, the swirl that comes from trying to resolve other people’s circumstances.

Nothing does more damage to the soul, the well of the person, than keeping the ache and swirl alive.

Filtration is the most important process for you to keep the well inside and to keep yourself seeing, feeling, and being as purified from that which is not you as you possibly can.