The Art of Being Human: A Sneak Peak

This is an excerpt from my new book The Art of Being Human, coming soon. To join the waitlist, leave a comment at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

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Every experience is an opportunity to grow yourself as a person. You can mine for gold in the worst set of circumstances and you will always find it because there is always something to grow from. Since life is based in dichotomy — that intoxicatingly stark contrast between polar opposites — and we can't avoid the bad that inherently balances out the good, then at least we can learn how to embrace it all and make the best of it. Own it and use it.

You win when you look for the growth. It's there, always.

The truth is, your soul came here to experience both the hard times and the good, however extreme those turn out to be. With regard to emotionally challenging experiences, the more it has impacted your life, the more you're meant to experience it. The harder it is, the higher your jump to a new level in your life once you adjust your mindset. If you can't change what is happening, run straight at it and jump in with both feet. Living this way requires a willingness to feel things that are unpleasant, to hurt (deeply), to sit with emotional discomfort. It takes practice. Little by little, this is how you train your nervous system to accept that scary things aren’t always life threatening.

Have you ever noticed that certain situations and circumstances seem to repeat in your life? You may repeat similar habitual patterns which cause the same results to reoccur in our experience. These patterns could be a result of trauma or unprocessed emotions, your nervous system guiding you towards safety as a result of the past or its projected possibilities for the future. One thing stands true; you are never meant to stay stuck in those patterns forever. Life will keep handing you similar experiences until you learn the lessons embedded in those experiences. These lessons are the keys to your healing. Change your patterns of behaviour and heal through that change. Grow forward. When experiences or results repeat, it simply means there is growth that you have not yet extracted from those experiences. Pay attention.

The question them becomes how can you overcome these patterns. The answer? By developing a mindset of emotional resilience.

Lean into discomfort when life hands you something uncomfortable. Lean into it even harder if it’s unbearable. It sounds nauseatingly cliche to talk about silver linings when your heart has been ripped out and stomped on by something horrible. However, in the end, the truth is that unless you face it and actively take your growth from these challenges with your bare bleeding hands, your nervous system will store it away as unhealed energy and some of your personal power will always reside with that experience and not with you in your present moment.

Life is an unavoidable rollercoaster of unexpected events. Good and bad, the highs and lows, successes and setbacks. The challenges are just as important as the wins. Hardship is critical to your experience. That said, its tempting to label the so-called bad or undesirable experiences as personal failures or mistakes. But what is failure really? I want to focus on failure right now and get this concept out of the way.

Failure is nothing more than a set of experiences that ended up different than what was planned or expected. It means that things didn't work out, or went completely sideways or ass backwards.

Here’s your reframe: No matter how things turned out, you still got the experience along with the chance to learn, grow and improve from it. Where there is opportunity for improvement, there is never true failure. In essence, all failure truly is then is giving up before you have extracted your personal growth from that situation.

Here’s the magic: Every bit of personal growth that could have been garnered from any past situation still lives in your memory. That means you have been carrying this growth around with you and these opportunities haven't been missed. They’re always there, all you have to do is reach back and grab them.

At any point in time, you can reframe your past, heal, and move forward. This is within your power at every moment. Let that settle in for a moment. If you have left your power somewhere, it’s not gone. It still belongs to you. It’s yours. You are an incredibly powerful being. Unhealed traumas, hard memories, protection mechanisms, mistakes, none of these are any match for your capacity to heal and overcome because this is how you are built. You can reach back in time and use any point of pain or discomfort to empower yourself. Every single experience you live through carries with it something that can benefit you. In order to see it, you have to develop the belief that you are strong and capable enough to wade through that discomfort and get to the heart of it, no matter how dark that water is.

Here is one powerful tool to use to help you practice reframing the past and taking the bite out of an emotional situation when it happens.

The Forgiveness Game

Through all of your interactions with others, all you are seeing is about 10% of their current experience. Turn that around, and all other people know of your experience is 10% of what you are going through. They see what you choose to show them. They don’t see your emotions, thoughts, memories, or depth of experience. The mind is very creative and does not like unknowns. Therefore, it has potential to make assumptions about others, for better or for worse.

For example…

It's easier to assume the guy who just aggressively cut you off in traffic is a selfish jerk. He must be, he's driving erratically in an aggressive-looking lifted black pickup truck with big knobby tires. He must be late for his date with the mirror. However, let's play the Forgiveness Game.

Twenty minutes ago, maybe he received a phone call at work. That phone call was the hospital.

His mother had taken a fall and was transported by ambulance, only for doctors to find she was bleeding internally. She was 96. The Selfish Jerk dropped his coffee on the floor. He ran. He was a considerate person gripped with panic, who would normally never cut anyone off but would merge with a friendly wave every time. Except today. He had so much to say to his mom before she slipped from this world. Every second counted. Swerving through traffic, the remorse he felt was nothing compared to his breaking heart fearing the worst.

He isn't such a selfish jerk now, is he?

It’s not about making excuses, but rather broadening perspective. We can think we know why people act the way they do. In actuality, we are all acting on our own past; traumas, things we learned, experiences we've had, and our assumptions about the world. It's not always simple.

The Forgiveness Game can be played in the present moment to open your heart and stimulate compassion for others. As you practice compassion for the world around you, you will also be more inclined to show yourself some.

Now take this one level deeper and understand that it can also be applied to the past. This game is particularly powerful when it comes to reframing past situations in which you feel someone has done you wrong. Remember, they were acting on their past, and maybe not thinking clearly when an emotional response to one of their traumas keyed in.

I played the forgiveness game very, very frequently. VERY frequently. It was one of the few ways I could process my intense anger around my situation and all the people involved in it. I had some extremely heavy thoughts and feelings about those who were working against me; the insurance companies I had relied on, the doctors who were supposed to know what was wrong, the people who didn’t understand because they couldn’t see that I was broken. I was so angry at them all.

Forgiveness is deep. It’s hard, heartbreaking and raw. It takes a lot of character. But it’s everything.

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If you’re eager to read more while you wait, you’re welcome to dive into some of my other work: