If you feel you have lost everything in life, you MUST READ THIS !
“I only wanted to be loved” – by Stuart Howarth. A book that touched down the deepest layers of my soul.
It is a story of a man who just wanted to be loved but he writes about how he went through the immense trauma and abuse in his life that changed his life forever. He writes his story in some bold and powerful words that took me intense courage to read. It was scary and confronting.
He describes how he made his past a self-pity story which he kept on repeating to himself and others until one day he met someone who made him realise that he was only consistently feeling sorry for himself and the only thing he could do if he wanted to live healthily was to change himself.
And then at some stage, he finally decided to take control over his life before his life started to turn around for good.
Sometimes when you read a heart touching story like this you realise that how a loss of any kind whether physical, material or emotional has the power to turn you 180 degrees and has the capacity to transform you into a much stronger person at the end.
As I was reading this book, I kept wondering how hard it would have been for someone to put their difficult and traumatic life on paper in the most painful but truthful words just the way he did.
But then at the same time, I do understand a hard reality of life that no fear binds you anymore once you have lost everything in life. This man had also lost everything dear that he had in his life before he discovered what he needed to do with his life- a truly inspiring story that explains how he had put all his efforts with care and diligence in himself, his relationships and his career before he transformed himself into a successful entrepreneur.
I truly believe that nothing can stop you from moving forward when there is nothing left behind that you care about or nothing left to be lost. When you lose all the precious things in your life to the last dot, then the only thing left is to move forward and finally ‘win’. And that brings the strongest of the hopes in all.
Bearing the pain of loss
“Losing”. Losing is a draining game which starts with the excitement of not knowing what the outcome will be. At the start, there is always a hope of winning. The whole journey is filled with the excitement of what the outcome will be.
And when at the end of it you lose, you are nothing but absolutely drained.
You are drained to the core of your soul. You feel like there is nothing left in you anymore. Nothing feels like making sense anymore and you start to question the whole purpose of your being and this game from the very beginning. And without doubt, I am not talking about any of the child games here or neither am I talking about the fun sports.
I am talking about the bigger stuff in life. Those things that you perhaps have not imagined your life without. They may be your goals, your job, your successful business, a friend, your partner or any other important relationship or anything else that you may hold very dear to your heart.
Dealing with the grief of loss is surely not an easy process. It brings along a lot of pain and trauma with it and a strong feeling in yourself of not being ever able to come out of it.
Sometimes, when we lose things, we lose all the hope to be ever able to recover or survive the pain. It is hard. It surely is not an easy journey. Any person who has been there and done that knows exactly how it feels. It is very much close to impossible to even put this in words in front of someone who has not beared the intensity of such losses.
All I can say is that it is an indescribable pain that only keeps breaking you into pieces until you forcefully decide to break the cycle and put enormous efforts in picking and joining your pieces one by one.
The ‘Victim Zone’
The very first thing that happens after going through any kind of a loss is the negative wiring in our brains. Our mind gets so conditioned to feel and behave like a victim for 7 days of the week up until 365 days of the year.
When we go through those painful and rough patches in life, we fall in what I am going to call a ‘Victim Zone’; a place which brings ease to our mind because that is the precinct our mind knows and honestly speaking it feels just comfortable to be there. Without realizing a lot of times, one starts to enjoy their own suffering in their sub conscious mind by behaving and choosing to stay like a victim. I know it is surprising but it is true.
I personally have been a victim to some of the life’s cruellest circumstances and have experienced the painful pleasure the mind gets being in this place so I am adding my own experience to knowledge as I am laying my words out on paper.
Honestly, I do agree that during these times, you lose all your enthusiasm or any motivation to fight back the situation and to close the ghostly doors behind you. As time moves, it only gets harder for us to come out of these patterns because with time the habits keep getting stronger. Our thoughts become even more deeper.
During these times, it is important for us to understand that there is a very strong need to break our mind patterns and to teach yourself to break the cycle of behaving like a victim. Most of the times, there has to be a forceful breaking of this pattern as being in your mind’s comfort zone, it is just plain easy to stay there just like that.
But, the only way you will be able to heal your life and remove all the suffering from your life is by first starting to accept that the past has already happened and that there is no point feeling sorry for it or feeling guilty about it forever. No matter how much amount of guilt and energy you invest in this, it will only make our sufferings bury deeper in our hearts.
Changing the Victim Mind Set
How many of us would have seen people around who truly enjoy their suffering? I am sorry to put it in this way but it is a reality that does exist in high proportion on our planet.
Somehow there is something in that attachment to the ‘feeling ‘of being in that victim zone.
To my understanding, perhaps it is the sympathy that we get from people when we show them our misery or share with them our pains. A lot of us unfortunately do like to get sympathies from other people and therefore they go on and on crying over their stories without realising how many times they end up repeating the same story with the same lyrics to the same people.
The important part in the process of recovering from grief from loss of anything in life is to first acknowledge that there is no point feeling sorry about the past.
Whatever had to happen and was destined has already happened and there is nothing that you can do about it and nothing can change the circumstance. It is all cast in stone. The only thing you can now change is your own mindset, your own behaviour, your own thoughts and patterns and just YOU as a person.
The only way you can come out of the pain and grief is by accepting that fact that it is YOU who has now to take responsibility and change your life for a better and a brighter future.
Changing and Breaking the cycle
Once the acceptance comes, the next big challenge is how to change this ongoing cycle?
At least once you know that the change has to come within you and has to start with you, then you can start to work on your journey of self-recovery.
Every time the past comes and stands in the way of your future, you have to learn to send gentle reminders to your brain that you (and only you) are going to create your own destiny moving forward. The past cannot be changed so each day and each moment you feel down, remember to make a promise to yourself that I will not let my past come in the way of my future happiness. Personally speaking, I have always been successful in keeping those affirmations and promises that I have ever made to my own soul. We tend to break the promises we make to others, but I feel promises made to our own self our much stronger because those have no intentions to be fake and are more genuine.
Slowly and slowly the patterns do start to change. During your journey, make use of anything that you have access to in order to take control of happiness back in your hands.
Simple things like taking yourself for a walk, going for a yoga class or meditating will start to make a difference.
The one thing I always put emphasis on is that even though your mind says that the change will never happen and you will never heal, just do not listen to it. Let it do its own self-talk but you still continue your effort to do things anyway. This is the only way you break the patterns of your mind slowly and start to take control over your mind than letting the mind having control over you.
In my personal healing experience and just like in Stuart Howarth’s book, if you do understand that after losing the only next way is to start winning, then your healing and recovery becomes faster.
It is just like knowing and trusting that after the night, the day will come and the sun will arise no matter what. The same thing applies here too when we are telling ourselves with all the faith and trust in the universe that things will just work out at the end. Understand that if one side of the coin is losing then the other is winning too.
Nothing in this life is permanent. It is the nature of all things to change.
Human mind’s only problem is that it becomes attached very strongly to the one thing.
When we are happy, our mind gets attached to the feeling of happiness or material things and we start to believe that this will stay permanently which is why the moment something happens in life which is beyond our capacity to handle, we are all over the place.
Similarly, when we are sad, or things are not so right in our life, by simply having a knowing that this too shall pass, makes things easier for us to handle.
Most significantly, I also want to add that knowing is definitely not enough. Accepting it and believing in it is what is more important. If you do not believe in what you are saying, most of the things will never work. Just start to make your trust in the universe stronger the same way you trust the timing of your next breath.
If you believe that you have lost everything you possibly could, that should in itself bring a kind of relief to you because this is when all fears drop. All your fear of the unknown is vanished. All the major fears of your life are associated with some kind of loss. And when you know there is nothing more left to lose, you start to win automatically.
You do not have to make any effort. All you do is have that trust and faith in the universe and things do start to join together in the puzzle of your life.
The journey of life looks hard because it brings with it a lot of suffering. But if we all understand that unless it is physical and bodily suffering, everything else is originating only in our mind space.
If we train our minds enough to live our lives positively and we do learn the support mechanisms we can have during stressful and tough situations, we will start to enjoy life more fully and joyously and that too without any external help. Because the true happiness is what comes from within and it comes when you are with yourself without any physical support by others.
Make your journey easier, peaceful and more joyful by making meditation a part of your life every day and connecting with the supreme power. All suffering ends once you start to sit still, embrace your own silence and fall in love with your own company.
“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you”. – Buddha
WRITTEN BY:
Kajal Soni
Comments
Post a Comment