How To Deal with Challenging Circumstances and Keep Going in Life [Episode #699]

Today’s solocast topic is: How To Deal with Challenging Circumstances and Keep Going in Life

In one way or another, we have all dealt with adverse challenges in our lives. It could be the smaller everyday challenges such as having flights canceled or delayed, or just having really bad traffic to deal with all the way up to having unforeseen layoffs at work, or your company suddenly shuts down or challenges with your family or breakups, losing loved ones, dealing with grief, having natural disasters in your area like hurricanes or floods.

There’s a million things that life throws our way. And there’s also a lot of things that happen in the collective. We’re going through a lot of political turmoil as a country, if you are American and also in the world. And also just a lot of things that are out of our control and things that don’t feel so settling, so to speak.

Today in the show, I want to leave you some tangible tips and tools that you can apply to your own life so you can really deal with whatever is coming your way. We’re not in control of all the circumstances of life, but we have a greater sense of how we can handle what’s coming our way and then continue to keep going and keep thriving in life. And we keep growing, we keep evolving and we become stronger. We have more grit once we’ve integrated these experiences, we realize that we are far stronger than we ever knew we were. And so it’s really important to not give into fear, to not resist, and to just feel and know that confidence, that we have actual tools in place that will help us.

Topics Covered In How To Deal with Challenging Circumstances and Keep Going in Life

#1. Why it’s important not resist and allow the shadows in the darkness 

#2 Developing a deeper sense of trust through your voice of intuition

#3. Going deeper through stillness practices and meditation 

#4. Building confidence and connecting with your inner circle to share and give breath to whatever it is that is troubling you

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

I love Namaste and welcome back to our Monday solocast podcast, where today our topic is How To Deal with Challenging Circumstances and Keep Going in Life. And in one way or another, we have all dealt with adverse challenges in our lives. It could be the smaller everyday challenges such as having flights canceled or delayed, or just having really bad traffic to deal with all the way up to having unforeseen layoffs at work, or your company suddenly shuts down or challenges with your family or breakups, losing loved ones, dealing with grief, having natural disasters in your area like hurricanes or floods. There’s a million things that life throws our way. And there’s also a lot of things that happen in the collective. You know, we’re going through a lot of political turmoil as a, the country, if you are also American and also in the world.

And also just a lot of things that are out of our control and things that don’t feel so settling, so to speak. So today in the show, I wanna leave you some really, um, tangible actually for tangible tips and tools that you can apply to your own life. So, as I mentioned in our topic, you can really deal with whatever’s coming your way. We’re not in control of all the circumstances of life, but we have a greater sense of how we can handle what’s coming our way and then continue to keep going and keep thriving in life. And we keep growing, we keep evolving and we become stronger. We have more grit once we’ve integrated these experiences, we realize that we are far stronger than we ever knew that we were. And so it is really important to not give into fear, to not resist, but to just feel and know that, um, to feel that confidence, that we have actual tools in place that will help us.

Fan of the Week

So before we go deeper into our topic today, I wanna give a shout out to our fan of the week. Her name is Megan Finn, and she writes divine intervention. I stumbled across this show, stumbled or divine intervention, and, oh my goodness. I am so glad that I did. I feel this is exactly what I’ve been needing. So eager to learn more about these principles and work on all my four cornerstones. Well, Megan, my love, thank you so much for your review. And thank I am so grateful, so honored that we are connected and like you, I do believe in divine intervention, I believe in a higher power. I believe that there is a greater intelligence beyond just what we see with our physical eyes. And as much as we try to plan things out, I do believe that we are intrinsically connected. And so the more open we stay things, resources, helpful.
People come across our path almost serendipitously. And so I’m just so grateful that we are connected on our journey. And thank you so much my love look forward to connecting with you more.

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Solocast: How To Deal with Challenging Circumstances and Keep Going in Life

Okay, let’s get right into our topic today, which is really how do we best deal with challenging adverse circumstances in our lives? How do we keep going? How do we keep thriving after we feel like something’s been thrown at, out of left field, how do we best roll with the punches of life? And so this is something that I’ve been contemplating myself lately. There have been many challenges in my own life, bigger ones like losing my mom suddenly, which I’ve shared with you openly. And I detail in the new book, in the love chapter and having a relationship end with the father of my first child and many other things that happened delays. And I mean countless things, right?

You just think about life and it is not something that we can control. So the first tool that I wanna share with you is we need to stop resisting and we St we need to start allowing life to come in. And what I mean by that is re remind yourself, or, or feel into the sensation of being in the ocean. And we spend a fair amount of time. My family spends a fair amount of time in Hawaii. We’re very grateful and, and humbly, just so, um, happy that we can go back and forth between Hawaii and California, where we live. And so if you think of any time you’re in the ocean and the waves are quite strong in Hawaii. So think about, if you try to stand in the wave and it comes and you just try to dig your feet in, you get knocked over and it can really hurt, and you can actually fall on the back of your head.

It can, you can be tossed in the under toe, and it is a lot more painful. In contrast, if you try to sink with a wave, you do a duct dive underneath, or you just loosen your body and kind of go with the flow and you roll along. There is no resistance or far less resistance. And so there’s an easier experience. And so when something starts to come towards us, that we don’t want, let’s say, it’s the signs. If someone wants to break up a relationship with you, or let’s say it’s signs that the work situation that you’re in in is coming to a close or something shifting. If we try to dig in and resist or control circumstances, somehow we end up having a far harder experience.

So let’s say we try to hold onto that relationship. It may go on for longer, but it ends up just fizzling out with more wasted energy and more effort, more drama, more crying, or we hold onto, we try to hold onto that job. We end up being drained. And so it’s so important that we realize that resistance gives us this false sense of control. And we don’t have that much control. We let’s face it. We don’t know that much about life. So it’s the same thing from a food standpoint, if we are, uh, resisting and controlling and trying to hyper manage our diets, we end up usually bouncing from one extreme to the next. We end up going off the rails. We have a lot of cheat days, and then we try to go into restriction and cleansing and fasting, and then we kind of go back and forth. And that resistance to a natural flow of eating can really tamper with our metabolism. And it can actually hinder, sustained healthy weight for the long term.

So what we wanna do is we wanna start to allow more, and this is akin to the, um, to the Dow day, which I just wanna read a passage here. This is, um, passage or, um, stanza 27, if you will. This is from the translation of Steven Mitchell and the translation reads a good traveler, has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving a good artist, lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is thus. The master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything. This is called embodying the light.

So this is about being in flow and side note. If you’re interested in this topic more, this is our theme this month in the Solluna Circle and I invite you to join us. It is our online community. We meet every month on zoom. We have a daily chat, there are meditations and recipes and um, journal prompts. There’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a beautiful rich program and you can get information about it over on our Solluna app, our free app, if you’re interested, but this idea of not resisting life is part of being in that flow. So just as this passage of the Dow res and this beautiful treaty, if you will, that was given to us by allow zoo thousands of years ago, about how to live this really beautiful life is about flowing. And so as this passage reads, it means we don’t have fixed plans. Fixedness means rigidity. It means we need things to be a certain way. And this is echoed in the, in the bug of ATA, which is about non-attachment,

Which is where we stay open to the path of life. And when things come our way, we don’t resist. We, we become that wave. We integrate, we duck dive, we roll with it. And then we learn that in some way, this is for my greater good. This is part of the plan and the hardest things that I’ve dealt with in my life. The first being of course, the loss of my mother, I think about the strength that’s come from that. I think about the deepening of my heart’s compassion. I think about appreciation and how much gratitude has built in my life. And of course I wouldn’t have chosen to lose her at such a relatively young age in life and far earlier than I thought I would, but I can see this acceptance growing in me. And with that, as I mentioned, a really deepening of strength, which leads me to the second principle that I tried to live by more and more in my life.

And this was echoed in a service, a meditation service that I went to last weekend at the self realization fellowship, which is Paramahansa Yogananda’s meditation based organization, which teaches principles for right living. It goes deep into his teachings. His teachings have had a profound influence on my life. He is my spiritual guru and his teachings are highlighted in the new book. You are more than you think you are. And the monk was talking about how to really live this blissful life. And this podcast is actually partly inspired by that because he was talking about how exactly what we’re saying here. You do not get to control all of life’s circumstances. And so he said a core principle to adhere to is I will be done. So that’s put in very Christian terms and you know, our spiritual growth principle is not about religion per se.

It’s about this self connection, but sometimes I like to refer to the world religions. I re respect them all. And there is this underlying unity, this oneness through spirituality and this idea of surrender and trust. And so that will be done to me echoes this idea that we have to trust in the will of the universe in this higher intelligence that knows far more than we know about life. That sees things in a cosmic exponentially, bigger picture. So we don’t understand the meaning of why things happen all the time. And especially not in that direct timeframe. Things may play out over many years, decades and beyond before we can really understand. And in the yogic belief system and the Hindu system of reincarnation, we can even say they play out over different lifetimes, many lifetimes before we understand, and there’s this aspect of karma. And so we, the more we can trust, the more we can flow and the more that challenging circumstances come our way, of course, there’s the human part of us.

#1 Tool: Don’t resist and allow the shadows in the darkness

That’s going to feel that like, oh my gosh, this knocked me on my feet, but we don’t wanna stay down. We wanna get back up on that horse of life, so to speak, we want to keep going. And so part of that is developing a deep sense of trust of life. Trust is the opposite of fear and the more fear comes in. The more rigid we become and like our first tool that we just mentioned, the more we resist, we wanna push away. We wanna control. And so life starts to feel smaller and smaller and in many ways harder and harder because there’s so many things that we try to block and we don’t wanna let them in. And so there’s a lot of energy in pushing things away and resisting. And so it’s really important that we develop this deeper sense of trust. And so the trust comes through in the voice of our intuition, the intuition that arises from within what Yogananda calls, the infallible voice of the inner council and the intuition is there to guide us and soothe us and remind us that you’re gonna be okay.

Ultimately, this is really hard moment. This is a hard time, but you’re gonna be okay. And so that intuition may not be based on hard facts because you can say, oh, well look at this. And my salary is going to be severed in two weeks, or I still have to figure out how to pay rent or this was supposed to be my life partner. And now this person left me the facts and the fear are very easy to point to, but over and beyond that, it’s the trust and the intuition that gives us this deep reassurance.

#2 Tool: Develop this deeper sense of trust through your voice of intuition

And so the next question is, well, how do we develop intuition? How do we develop that inner voice? And as Yoon instructs us, the number one way to develop intuition is through meditation. There is no shortcut. It comes from the inside. So we can Google as much as we want to make ourselves, try to feel better. We can take as many actions as we want. We can go on all the job searches. We can go on all the dating apps, but beyond that, we wanna, we need to develop this

Me, our meditation practice, because that is what is going to develop the voice inside of us. And so another passage that I wanna read in the, from the Dow, which, um, we will link in the show notes to this translation. There are many different translations of the Dow. So there are, um, so many, so many ones out there. This one I am partial to because it’s very simple. And I like it very much. Again, this is by Steven Mitchell, thus the master travels all day without leaving home. However, splined the views. She stays serenely in herself. So this leads to the third tool that I wanna highlight, which is the inner anchor. So you can see everything’s flowing along. We started by talking to not resisting life, being the wave, letting life flow. And that becomes easier when we exercise the second principle, which is trust.

And that will be done really starting to develop in a, in a spiritual sense that there is a greater intelligence, whatever word you wanna use, universe source, spirit, God, higher power, whatever resonates with you. Sometimes we, we connect with certain words and we reject, or we move away from certain words. I personally resonate with the word God, but of course it’s whatever feels right to you. But the more we develop that deep, deep trust, the more it becomes easier not to resist. So the trust comes from intuition and the intuition then comes from meditation.

#3 Tool: Go deeper through stillness practices and meditation

So then the third part third tool that I wanna highlight here is the inner anchor, which is based around meditation and around this deep connection, which means that no matter what’s going on, no matter what adverse challenging circumstances are thrown our way by life, we do not flinch so much because we know that security comes from inside of us. So of course, again, we are human. There’s going to be that there’s going to be that initial reaction. And that’s the human part of us, of course. But then we want to be able to get back on our feets on our feet. <laugh> feets. We wanna get back on our feet and we wanna be able to keep going. And so we aren’t knocked around, like when we try to resist that wave for longer than we, than we need to, we need time to process. We wanna give our save space.

We all need that with challenging circumstances, but then beyond that, we wanna be able to move on gracefully. And so the more we develop this inner anchor, the easier that becomes. So the inner anchor comes from daily meditation. It comes from spending time in nature. It comes from spending time alone and stillness. So welcoming the moments that we can carve out for ourselves, whether it’s a quiet night to take a bath, or instead of scheduling a dinner with friends, we wanna balance that sometimes that’s great, but sometimes it’s just sitting alone and reading or taking a morning to go for a walk by yourself. And sometimes of course, life is busy and I get it and I have two kids. So I really have to carve that out consciously, but I do grab those moments. And when I do, I find it deeply nourishing and fulfilling.

I read scripture, I read passages, I sit I process and I find it truly an essential part of my self care. So as far as the meditations, I do recommend meditating as soon as you wake up or as close as possible to waking up and also meditating in the evening sometime where you have that space for some of us that’s before dinner. For some of us, that’s closer to bedtime, which is my case after I put both my kids to bed. So it’s this consistency that develops the anchor because we don’t really have a connection. We don’t have an anchor unless we develop it consciously and consistently over time. So it’s really important to do that. And just a reminder, also on our app, besides the section for the Solluna Circle and our online community, you can also find our, um, library of free meditations available to all, if you wanna get started, there’s a starter bundle. There’s some thematic ones like groundedness and amplifying your energy and so on and so forth. So please check them out. They’re about seven minutes. So you can queue one up and listen to it in the morning and to get into your regular meditation practice, which is incredibly, incredibly beneficial.

#4 Tool: Having confidence and your inner circle that you can rely on to share and give breath to whatever it is that is troubling you

And then the fourth tool, which is the balance of course, to this alone time, is to have your confidence and your inner circle that you rely on. We don’t want to suffer in the sense that we feel that sense of aloneness. Like we have to hide things. Sometimes we’re embarrassed by certain circumstances. So for instance, it really took me a while to share about my breakup because I did feel a sense of shame that I was going to be a single mom and this relationship had so called failed

And things have gone, gone off the rails. So it’s really important that we don’t go into that aloneness. And we don’t cause ourselves to suffer in that way, because just as we wanna balance self care time, we also wanna balance sharing and community, which is a really important part of the human experience. And so it doesn’t have to be this big thing where you have to share with all your friends, but having a couple people that feel like they’re clear mirrors or clearer mirrors that can reflect back. Um, this is what we do in the circle. By the way, I’ll invite you again, is we, it’s an invitation to share and to have space held. We don’t, there’s a part where we go around and we share a word, or we share a part of what the theme or the prompt is, but it isn’t an invitation to comment or give advice unless that is specifically asked for and warranted.

And so it’s great to have those in the inner, in your inner circle that will listen and hold space for you, but not necessarily say, oh, here let’s fix this. Let’s come up with a solution because when we’re going through challenging circumstances, we don’t wanna always rush into, oh, I need to do this. And this part of processing is being in it, being in that darkness, feeling like you’re free falling for a minute and starting to be comfortable with that because that’s part of life. If we’re always trying to move on and patch things up and move ahead, we don’t always process the deeper feelings. So they stay lodged in there. It doesn’t allow us to fully let go. So sometimes we have friends or family members that maybe well meaning, but what they do is they just wanna come up with a solution. And so we wanna pick in our inner circle, those that are really great at space holding and listening, which is such a wonderful skill in friendship, of course, is this listening component.

So again, I encourage you to seek that person or those persons out, and the Solluna Circle is there for you as well. If you’re looking for a supportive community in this regard. And so that’s really part of healing through these challenges is not feeling that you’re alone and that you have to bear this cross, so to speak by yourself.

In Closing

So let’s review these, um, tools one more time. So let’s say, you know, whatever it is on a micro level or a macro level, it could be the traffic. It could be a change in your schedule for that day. Something got canceled that you were really looking forward to on a bigger scale. There’s, there’s a setback in your relationship or in your work or in your health or in a family

Member’s health journey or whatever it is. We don’t resist. We let life in, we let the shadows in the darkness, we bring our light to it. We breathe, we don’t try to control. We let it in because we know that the more that we resist, the harder it becomes. So instead we, we start to integrate, we let it in so we can flow with it. And so we become stronger eventually. And we forego this, this fallacy that we have more control over life. It’s the resistance that makes these circumstances more challenging in the end number two. And by the way, it doesn’t mean that we, we manifest them. It doesn’t mean that we call them in, of course we take every precaution that we can, but sometimes we’re blindsided by an illness or something happens again, someone doesn’t wanna continue in a friendship or relationship.

And so we can’t control it. We need to rise up to that and not resist. And number two, this becomes easier. The more we trust life and we trust the flow and we go into this very Dow, like concept of the water flowing through life, the way that water is so powerful, because it doesn’t have this sense of resistance. It shapes around boats and it, uh, shapes along the river and it flows around rocks and, and boulders. And so we want to trust more and more. And that comes from intuition and intuition, that there is a bigger plan that things are gonna be okay. And that intuition is born of our third tool, meditation developing the inner anchor. If we’re always busy, we’re always on social media, we’re on the news. We’re on the surface of life. We don’t have a strong sense of the inner anchor.

And so it can feel really scary out there. We can feel like we’re being tossed around a lot, and that’s why we don’t wanna stay on the surface of life. We wanna be able to dive to this deeper place. And so the deeper place comes from the stillness practices and the meditation. It comes from connecting inside. And so we have so many tools and practices for you to go deeper in this. So check out the app, check out the new book as well. It’s fundamental, it’s powerful. And the number four, we rely on our confidence and our inner circle to realize that we, and through sharing, there is part of the process that allows us to sometimes just giving voice to something, giving breath to it. Even though there isn’t an immediate solution. It’s not about that. Sometimes we need to sit in the darkness and the pain for a bit. It allows us to share and to realize that we’re not alone in this human experience and the love and the sharing can really help us process things. So I feel really grateful for my confidence and my inner circle. And I encourage you to create that for yourself or to identify it. And again, if you’re feeling like you don’t trust, or you don’t wanna share with your current circle, remember that the Solluna Circle is there for you with like-minded beings that will always be there to support you.

So please check out the show notes for more resources. I know life is not always easy, but it’s here for us to grow. It’s here for us to continue to evolve. And so it is possible to find that inner sustenance, that inner stability and security and joy from the inside. So the forced positivity, the forced happiness, no matter what’s going on can feel really draining and depleting. But instead when we realize that we can be less attached to the outside and find more solace from the inside, the more life starts to open up and flow. And we just feel more okay through these very challenging circumstances that of course can rock us, but they don’t have to derail us forever.

So with a, with a very full heart, with so much love and so much compassion and so much gratitude for you, I look forward to connecting with you more and supporting you more. Remember that you can always ask questions, submit them online for our Thursday show. Find you in cyberspace as well. Online on social media at underscore Kimberly Snyder, sending you lots of love. We’ll be back here Thursday for our next Q&A podcast till then take great care Namaste and peace.