When Life Hurts, Celebrate! This is WHY

The job of our beautiful mind is to guide us, test us, and empower us. This I knew. What I didn’t know is that it’s here to teach me painful lessons when I’m too stubborn to learn them an easy way.

Painful lessons are here to shove our nose into the litter box whenever we pooped somewhere we shouldn’t have like kittens. And this is something I had to learn the hard way. The same way we all did or will do.

During my work as a therapist, I was often asked the same question. I would have a woman sitting next to me and she would ask, “Karolina, why does breakup hurt so bad? Post-divorce depression is killing me. Why did it have to happen in such a painful way? Why didn’t this lesson come easy?” My answer was the same over and over again, “You wouldn’t learn it if it was easy.”

This is why life hurts right now

In fact, if you rewind your life and pay close attention to the little hiccups along the way, you’ll see that those bumps were indeed the less painful ways your life was telling you to wake the fuck up, do the self-love work, leave that toxic relationship, ask for divorce because you were not staying for the sake of children but you were staying for your own sake, or slow the hell down and take a breather. But you chose to go on. You chose to indulge in delusions and false hopes “What it will be different this time?” Believe me, it won’t.

This is why it won’t work

How do I know? Because nothing will change unless you change something in the equation. Yet, you tend to shift things around the equation hoping it will create a strong enough ripple effect to miraculously change your situation. It’s like hoping that the sunshine will unpack the luggage that has been standing for weeks since you got back from the vacation.

What I also realized is that the purpose of our life is to uncover the concealed. It’s to ponder and appreciate what we don’t know. Yet we resist our purpose and then go to spiritual guides seeking an answer. What do I mean by this?

Surrendering is the answer

See, most of us hate uncertainty. We want to control everything and everyone. Control issues. Sometimes we don’t want to admit that we’re control freaks and instead, we say, “it’s not that I control things, it’s just I know EXACTLY what I want.”

But here is the trick. Knowing what you want comes from within. You trust your inner voice, intuition, and your guides. You need to build confidence for this. It doesn’t come from you not wanting your friend to be who she is or say what she wants. When you exercise your power over what other people do or don’t do you have already crossed this line of knowing and moved into controlling. As result, you’ll always find yourself in anger, sadness, loneliness, and hundred other emotions that negatively impact your lives.

Stop feeling like shit

So what do you do, you might ask? Recently I’ve been playing with the following exercise. At the end of each week or day, I take time to ask myself what emotions I experienced that week.

• I write them down.
• Then I see how many of them made me feel like shit?
• When did I feel them?
• What caused them?
• And how I contributed to their manifestation.

Then I decide what emotions I would like to have more of. I brainstorm reasons WHY these positive emotions are true in my life, so I can start feeling them right away. If I want to feel blessed, then I recall moments when my husband and I sit in the park enjoying ourselves, for example. This exercise has been a profound experience for me and my clients.