How To Stay Strong When Things Go Wrong

As humans, we like to feel that we're in control of our lives. When the truth is if we sit back and assess a situation, we can very rarely control things that are happening outside of us. But what we are always in control of is how we respond.

Welcome to module two of the course, how to stay strong when things go wrong. In this lesson, we're going to start feeling into what's happening, feeling into our body's response. So emotions are moving. They are energy. And when you can start to feel them in the body, you can feel it as energy moving around and allow it to pass through you.

When you're faced with a challenge, when things aren't going the way you want, it can almost feel counterintuitive not to do that because that is what we're not used to. But if we become disembodied, we become disconnected from our bodies, it's only going to escalate and get worse. So once you're able to regulate the body and the emotions the mind will follow suit. The mind will calm down too. So in these situations it's good to start by grounding yourself.

We're going to look at reframing whatever's happened and finding meaning in that. Victor Frankl, who was a prisoner of war in the Second World War in the concentration camps, has written a very good book called Man's Search for Meaning. I'm sure most of us are never ever going to be in such a terrible situation as that, but even in the worst conditions ever, he was able to find meaning in his life and help others. And he noticed that the people who did that were the ones who were more likely to survive than people who simply gave up.

These habits and tools that you've learned in this course can become a daily practice. And as you've seen, it doesn't have to take very long. It can just be a few minutes a day, a few seconds even. But just these small amounts every day will have a big effect over time. So if you're going through a difficult time, there's no need to put more pressure on yourself. It's just taking those moments of awareness when you can drop into the body, feel the ground, connect to the breath, look out the window at some trees, and gradually you will find that you're responding more skillfully in situations, becoming less reactive.