How To Get Through When Life Smacks You Down

North Star of Georgia

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. When I read an excerpt by Louise Erdrich in The Painted Drum, it’s truth  resonated deep within my bones. She wrote “And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” This concept is fundamental in what I teach in my sessions. To process fully you must first own your experience whether positive or negative. Allow the feelings to flow over you and let it embrace all of your being. Only then can you begin to make sense of why you are having these feelings, where they come from, and what to do with them next in a manner that is not pushing them aside or pretending they don’t exist. Remember, it is your experience and no one can define it for you. Give your self the permission to exist as you are while you are on your path to fully achieve what you are capable of becoming.