5 Ways to Let Go of Pain - Be Free!

                                                                                Written By Sterling Mire

Giving something up can be the way to having everything.

Let’s face it – life hurts. There is no human being on the planet that hasn’t experienced emotional pain and/or trauma.

It’s an awful experience. Yes, agreed.

So, there is pain and what you do with pain is what is most important. Wouldn’t you rather be living your life fully again? Enjoying all that is wonderful and awe-inspiring or be stopped by the past incident that cannot be undone and continue suffering over it? No one truly wants to suffer so let’s explore the alternative.

Putting the blame on others is a seemingly easy enough way to handle the situation. We feel like someone let us down or did us wrong and we are owed an apology. We think they need to “own up” to what they did.

Blaming others and not taking responsibility for ourselves is the fastest way to being powerless in our lives and leaves us stuck with anger, resentment and no resolving of the pain we feel. Yes, you have valid feelings. It’s important to acknowledge them and express them fully but put a limit on how long you feel them. You can even say to yourself, “For the next 15-30 minutes I am going to cry my eyes out, write in my diary or say out loud how I feel and feel it 100% and then I am going to move forward with my day/night”. Getting into the habit of indulging in your grief is a vicious cycle. Remember, you are the one hurting more than the other person if you continue to “live” your pain over and over. It’s a balance. A balance of embracing what’s there for you to express and putting it away for the rest of the day or preferably resolving it and moving on.

5 Ways to Move Through Pain

The pathway to happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction in your life is to make room for it. If you are full of sadness, anger, bitterness how can the opposite show up for you?

1. Make a choice to let go

Things do not resolve themselves without you choosing it. If you avoid making a conscious effort to move on you could be setting yourself up to continue to keep the pain alive and drag it around in your life and even effecting your outer world in a negative way.

Choosing to let it go also means you are accepting that you have the choice to do so. You can decide to stop playing the story over and over in your mind every time you think of that person.

2. As mentioned before, an important step to moving on is expressing your pain. Find ways that are satisfying and healthy. Experiment with the tips mentioned above. Find a great listener, someone who you look up to.

Even though you may not have had the same amount of responsibility for the pain you’ve experienced, look to see what you are responsible for. What can you learn from this experience and do differently in the future? Choosing to be less free and trusting is not necessarily a great choice versus being more aware of what is actually being communicated before all hurt broke loose. Learn to really understand and get to know people before “jumping in”. The most successful relationships were built as friendships where mutual respect and admiration can grow. Consider taking communication classes. Ultimately, will you choose to become wiser from the experience or a victim?

3. Don’t choose to be a victim, choose to be a winning warrior

Being a victim can feel pretty good. We don’t have to take responsibility or take a good look at ourselves. But being a victim is like donning a costume of a decrepit zombie and that is just not who we authentically are. Your feelings are worthy but when we allow ourselves to wallow in them it becomes at the expense of everyone else in the world and we all matter – equally.

The good news is that we have a choice in every given moment. We can continue to feel bad about someone else’s actions (or lack of actions) or decide to feel GOOD! Taking responsibility for your own happiness is power and giving your power over to someone else to determine how you feel is absurd. No amount of obsessively thinking about a painful situation has ever fixed a relationship issue. So why choose it?

4. Be Here Now – In the Present Moment

Do you really know what it feels like to be powerfully present in the now? How liberating, freeing and just good it feels? Here’s an exercise that will help you get related to reality – now.

Either out loud or in your head notice 5 things you hear (if there are not five you can repeat something). Now, 5 things you see and 5 things you physically feel. Repeat the same exercise working your way down to 1.  5-4-3-2-1. When you’ve completed the exercise notice how you feel, your surroundings and your thoughts. Suddenly reality has taken over your imaginings.

5. Forgive Them as Well as Yourself

Perhaps we won’t forget someone’s poor behavior, but everyone is deserving of our forgiveness, including ourselves. Sometimes getting trapped in pain makes it occur like forgiveness isn’t an option, yet it is. Forgiveness is empathy and empathy connects us to the beauty, love and laughter in life. Accepting “what is” doesn’t mean you are agreeing with what happened. That it is ok to happen again and again and again but that it is ok that it happened once. Forgiveness is a true sign of strength because that is actually where strength comes from.

Forgiving yourself is just as important. Identify what you said to yourself about yourself after the breakdown occurred. That is what you want to forgive yourself for. For inventing and taking on a lie as if it is truth. Anything disempowering is inauthentic to who we truly are. Create something new, the truth, to live by.

Although letting go takes an effort. It requires us to be courageous, to be committed to our happiness and health. Everyday you hold on to pain is another day lost to it. Go ahead. You can do it. Choose to implement these exercises in your life and set yourself, and everyone else, free!

* * *

Acceptance vs. Agreement

                  Knowing the difference makes ALL the difference.

“Some of our greatest successes come from unconditional acceptance of all aspects of life.” ~Sterling Mire

My clients often ask me, “How can I possibly accept something if I don’t like or agree with it?” My answer is simple: Avoid resistance. I’ll explain. The reason why avoiding resistance is the solution to the problem is because what we resist will persist. If we resist what is so in this particular moment we will be giving energy to that which we would like to change. We feed the beast. Stop feeding the beast and that beast will disappear.

I am a fan of Eckhart Tolle. In his bestselling book, “The Power of Now”, he describes acceptance as this. Imagine you fell into quicksand. Your first instinct is to resist it by flailing your arms wildly to get out. The only thing you achieve by resisting is frustration, panic and exhaustion so you end up sinking. If you just accept what is so, “Ok, I just fell into quicksand. I accept that. It is what is so.”, this frees you up to begin to create a way out – and you do! Acceptance is not agreement. I must stress this. Accepting is acknowledging and allowing something to just be. Once we have done just that, then we can began to move into a solution driven direction with ease. Answers to our questions are free to come to us – physically and mentally. We are an open channel for guidance.

Life is fluid. It can occur as if what is happening to us in the moment is permanent. We are stuck and we begin to get resigned in life. If we remind ourselves that it just appears that way BUT is actually is not the truth, it is a step in the right direction for finding the change we seek.

Life is also unpredictable. If we can accept that as part of the beauty in life then we can create the ability to embrace what ever comes along, even if it is painful.

Life will bring many challenges, such as the loss of someone we love, and it is truly challenging to embrace “what is so” when we are suffering. Yet, if we start cultivating acceptance in our lives right now, we will cope with future crises in an empowered way finding the positivity in the situation. It really is a powerfully effective way to live. Begin today to just BE with what is so. Notice how life is different and notice how you respond to undesirable things as they show up and how insignificant and manageable they become. You will be amazed!

WRITTEN BY: STERLING MIRE

Embracing Differences Makes a Difference

Written by: Sterling Mire

Accepting how people are different from ourselves can benefit us and heal the world as a whole more than we realize.

We are all unique. We’ve been raised by different people, with different siblings and friends, sometimes even in different countries with different cultures and within different generations. Yet, we all have the same basic wants and needs. These differences don’t have to result in disconnect or friction in our experiences of one another.

Each of us is the result of a completely individual miraculous design. We all have different talents, skills, points of view, ideas, perceptions and experiences to share with the world creating a contribution unique unto us and providing something different from others contributions. Human beings want the same things in life yet may go about it differently. We all want love, security, acceptance, and to make a difference in the world we live in. We are all moving in the same direction yet coming from and going about it in different ways.

We are here to learn from our choices and the consequences of making those choices unconsciously or consciously. Granting each other grace, forgiveness, love and support along our journeys in life help us to grow for the betterment of the world. Having a level of compassion when interacting with others helps others to grow in a way that serves the planet in a constructive versus destructive way.

No one likes to be criticized or ostracized by others. When we give up judging or criticizing others taking into account that we don’t know what it is to live their lives or what they may be challenged with at that moment not only helps others but helps ourselves too by creating space for positive growth. Accepting differences allows us to unite with one another, forge a bond and gives access to cooperation towards the fulfillment of peace, love and happiness.

Sometimes people can frustrate us especially when it is someone we are close to and care about. Maybe we see them being self-sabotaging or being destructive and suffering needlessly. If we can accept that what is happening is part of their learning process, their journey, individual to their independent life path we actually create room for transforming the situation for the better versus resisting and fighting the situation by making it wrong. What also helps is stepping outside of our own world and moving into others lives bringing with us the intention to understand and accept “what is” so we create a space for transformation.

Ultimately, we are all experiencing the result of the choices we’ve made in life. In other words, the consequences of what we consciously or unconsciously choose give way to the experiences we have. All human beings truly want is to feel good, even if they are not sure how to do that. Choices and consequences are great guides to helping us learn our way. Everyone learns differently and in different time frames. Respecting those differences help move the human race as a whole to a place of peace, love, fulfillment, and unity.

Time Out For YOU!

Sometimes we just need time to ourselves to regain a balanced sense of ourselves before continuing on our journey called life.

Most of us feel a little imbalanced from time to time. Times of high stress, living in the big city, can make us feel like we are out of whack. We take care so many people, places, things, work and general life obligations we forget about taking care of ourselves. We’ve been taught taking time out is a luxury versus a necessity although science has proven that if we take more time out to just be we would not only be more productive and effective in life but less stressed. We have to draw a line and say “enough is enough”, stop the merry-go-round of life and get off for a while to reflect, let go, rediscover ourselves, and revive ourselves for our future.

I have found a good way of getting in touch with what I truly need at the moment is I imagine having a magic genie in a bottle and that genie asks, “If you could do or be anywhere on this day what or where would it be?”. Maybe the answer that shows up  is laying on the sands of a Caribbean beach, receiving a massage, taking a hike in nature, unplugging for the day and reading a book in a quiet and beautiful place, driving to a place you’ve yet to discover. Let’s say if the answer is the Caribbean but you are living in Los Angeles and you only have a day to yourself then take yourself to the Pacific ocean, perhaps to a stretch of beach you haven’t been to before. If a full-body massage doesn’t fit your budget how about an affordable foot spa or the local nail salon where they offer chair massages? The point is to expand yourself and get in touch with what is missing in your life right now. Balance is key to optimal health.

Ever visited Europe, such as Italy, or any other exotic destination? Have you noticed people seem less stressed? It’s because they are. They work to live, not live to work. Even if you live in the U.S.A. you can still adopt a more European life-style right here, right now.  Your happiness, health, quality of living and productivity depends on it! Create a consistency to taking time out for yourself. Imagine taking 1 very special day a week to yourself or a 2-3 day weekend vacation once a month. You can do it on a budget if need be. Out of 31 days in the month, taking 3-5 days for just yourself is very little and will not negatively alter taking care of business on the other days.

The truth is, taking care of ourselves is not actually a luxury, it is a necessity especially if we want to be our best for our work, our lives and others. I hope you’ve gained perspective from my share. Start now. Plan time in your schedule for yourself as soon as possible. If you are crazy busy at the moment, even more reason to do it now versus later.

Questions? Call for a free consultation.

Do People Really Make Us Happy?

It appears that people can make us feel a range of emotions; happy, sad, angry, frustrated, euphoric, disappointed, depressed and the list goes on. The truth is this is an illusion. We live in a society that has convinced us that happiness lies outside of us, within our environment and through the things we accumulate. Here is a perfect example of how we have learned this way of understanding life’s happiness. A mother sees her young child crying. The mother enthusiastically offers the child a cookie. The child then seeing his/her mother smiling (happy) makes the association with the cookie as an object that possesses happiness. We could take it a bit further and look at how the cookie has an effect on the child’s brain reinforcing the idea of where happiness lies. Let’s look at the effect of the sugar in the cookie. Sugar is known to light up the reward pathways and cause a surge of feel-good hormones, like dopamine, to be released. As a result, we feel good and “happy”. The child easily confuses the cookie, or any other thing the child learns to associate with happiness, as where happiness lies.

People’s Energy DOES Have an Effect On Us

True. We are all energy. We transmit energy. We receive energy. Yet, energy changes all the time so if someone’s happy and we feel the effects of it we begin to associate thatthat is where happiness lies. We begin to confuse, once again, where happiness lives. “That person makes me happy!” or “That person makes me upset”. It may not be that we consciously want to blame or hold someone accountable for our state of being. It could be that we simply are confused as to where happiness truly is.

Taking Responsibility

Taking responsibility for how we feel is one of the most valuable lessons we can learn in life. Choosing how we feel is a conscious action. We must be fully aware to make this choice. Noticing how we feel is the first step. To choose how we want to feel in a way that is authentic and actually works is to first allow what is so to be. To simply allow it to exist. Allowing is not agreeing. Allowing is allowing. Once we allow what is, then we can make a conscious choice to choose how we want to feel. Once you choose an empowering emotion, take a moment to connect to what that feels like. Experience it fully. Maybe think of a happy memory and relive it. Embrace the feeling and let it wash over you and sink in. Then proceed with your life. It is quite simple but where people go wrong in choosing their emotions is leaving out the acceptance, allowing something to be as it is. What is surprising is that whatever undesirable emotion was being experienced will simply take care of itself and disappear.

True Happiness

Happiness is our birthright. Happiness is a skill. Like all skills, it must be practiced. When you have true happiness within, you are totally fulfilled and the things you engage in are not perceived as a pathway to lead you to happiness but an adventure you can embrace fearlessly with joy and out of the sheer excitement of being alive!

To discover more about happiness, I recommend a current documentary on NetFlix simply titled: “Happiness”. Filmmaker Roko Belic travels to more than a dozen countries, searching for the meaning of happiness.

Sterling is a celebrated professional life coach and a nationally published author. She works with clients all over the world. Her practice is located in Beverly Hills. For more information, please visit: www.intuitivelifebysterling.com www.getyourlifenow.com