Moving Through Rejection

Rejection of any kind hurts, but instead of running from the pain, we can learn from it. In this meditation, we'll take a closer look at how rejection can influence our lives and investigate ways to use it as a guide for growth and increased self-awareness.

Transcript

Welcome.

Thank you for choosing to sit with me today.

We'll be doing a meditation where we take a closer look at rejection,

How it shows up in our lives,

How we get stuck in rejections from the past,

And how we can move through all of it.

So if you haven't already done so,

Find a comfortable position and close your eyes and just check in with how you feel right now.

Are you tired?

Are you restless?

Is your mind busy with thoughts?

Or do you feel relaxed and at ease?

Just see how you are in the moment and what you need to take care of yourself right now.

And now check in with your whole body and see if you're holding any tension,

Maybe in your jaw,

Your neck,

Your shoulders,

And try to soften those areas.

Just let it all go.

So I wanted to talk about rejection today because it's shown up in my life.

Well,

It's always been in my life.

But now I'm trying to figure out how to work with it,

How to learn from it,

To move through it,

And get to the other side.

And I'm not just talking about the romantic kind.

Well,

I am because that's what I faced recently.

But also rejection when you get that cold shoulder where you put yourself out there and are left feeling less than.

That rebuff that makes you question who you are and what you really have to offer.

I think rejection is the great equalizer because it happens to all of us at some point.

Maybe you've been turned down by job after job,

Or you threw out a creative idea and were met with criticism,

Or you reached out to a friend for some help and were met with disinterest or apathy.

I'm talking about any kind of rejection where you open yourself up and afterwards you wish that you would not.

It fuels your self-doubt and can dampen your self-confidence.

And the thing is,

Most times that rejection just gets piled on top of all the other rejections that came before.

This new rejection isn't any worse than the ones before,

But that whole pile finally comes crashing down around you and you feel like you were just kicked in the gut.

I'm saying all this because this very thing happened to me.

So I've been asking myself,

Why did the rejection from a guy I spent 45 minutes with having coffee completely knock me off balance?

Why did that rejection cut so deep?

And I think what I've come to realize is that all at once I began to mourn a lifetime of rejection.

The layers of hurt,

Fear,

Self-doubt,

And inadequacy crested over me like a gigantic wave.

And it's because I had never really processed all that old rejection.

I just stored it away,

But now here I am swimming in all those painful memories and feelings as they start bubbling to the surface.

So when this happens,

When we find ourselves here,

What can we do next to take care of ourselves?

How do we make sure this rejection isn't cemented into the belief that there's something wrong with us,

That we're flawed and should pull back rather than push through these feelings?

And the answer that I've come up with is by turning inward,

By sitting and feeling it all.

That's what I did.

And that does not come naturally to me.

But the more I do it,

The easier it gets.

I can laugh about my experience now,

But when it sunk in that my date unmatched me as he was driving his car down the road,

Like literally a mile down the road,

I was hit with the urge to change the way I feel as quickly as possible.

Maybe you know what this feels like,

Wanting to escape,

To hide,

To numb out.

But this time instead,

I decided to just sit with the feelings to let them wash over me and be truly felt.

To do exactly what I do on my best days when I'm listening to all the wise advice from my spiritual community and actually putting it into practice.

And that's what we can do.

We can sit,

We can turn inward,

And we can also allow ourselves to grieve a little.

You can hold yourself as you would like to be held with unconditional love,

Knowing that no matter how messy this gets,

You are supported and there is nothing wrong with you.

Maybe you can think of a time recently when you face some sort of rejection.

It doesn't have to be a monumental one.

Just an instance where you put yourself out there and then wished you would not.

Can you sit with any troubling feelings that arise surrounding this situation?

Can you hold yourself with some compassion and understanding?

Can you sit in this stillness and allow your heart to speak?

There's a quote by the author Elizabeth Lesser that sums this up perfectly.

She says,

When you feel yourself breaking down,

May you break open instead.

May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart,

Expands your understanding,

And leads you to freedom.

Difficult experiences like rejection can teach us.

We need to listen to their messages.

And when we do,

They can ignite that spark within us that's necessary to begin or continue with our inner work.

And they'll shuttle us down that path of self-discovery so we can start to better understand why we act and feel the way we do.

We've all experienced heartbreak in some form or another.

Our hearts have been punctured,

Poked,

Broken.

But through all that pain,

I think there's also the possibility of being cracked wide open so we can begin to heal old wounds.

As the Sufi poet Rumi said,

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Inside that pain and hurt,

There's a message,

A lesson to be learned.

That lesson cannot erase the pain,

But maybe next time you are faced with rejection,

You can take what you have learned and recover your footing that much sooner and come out the other side more centered and wiser and confident.

This morning I was listening to an interview of Jack Camfield,

Who is the author of the book Chicken Soup for the Soul.

And he was talking about how one of the biggest wounds we must endure as humans is being rejected for simply being our authentic selves.

Just by being who we are,

Sometimes we are discarded,

Cast aside,

Forgotten.

And his advice was to continue being who you are,

But to be all of you,

To show all parts of yourself because nothing is wrong with you.

When you were rejected in the past,

You had done nothing wrong.

You just opened yourself up and were met with resistance.

Please keep opening yourself up.

Please keep putting yourself out there because you're worth it and you deserve to be seen.

I'm so honored that you chose to sit with me today and investigate rejection.

I hope that next time you are faced with this type of difficult situation,

That you'll be able to provide yourself with some comfort and come out the other side,

Maybe a little bit wiser and more at ease.

I hope to sit with you again soon.

Take care.

Reviews

Thank you! I've been rejected by a family member who feels uncomfortable with how I show up in the world. I'm afraid there will be no way to compromise.

I really like your energy and ease of presentation. I will be exploring more of your work. Thank you.

Timely and so helpful for me. Thank you for this.

This was beautiful and really resonated in so many ways. My heart still hurts but I truly appreciate all that you shared. Thank you.

Beautiful and impactful

Very powerful. Thx u for your vulnerability using a real life example so many have experienced.

A great talk and reflection through processing rejection. I appreciated the various quotes, including the one from Sufi about our wounds being where the light enters.

Thank you!

Lovely reflection. Hopefully there’ll be a guided meditation about this soon 🙏🏼