Find Your Center in Challenging Times
Posted on November 05, 2020 by Tammy Goen, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Creating balance and peace even when things in life are overwhelming or seem out of control. Change your mind, change your life.
Things right now may seem unprecedented and extreme, but the reality is…there’s always something going on that we can feel stressed or overwhelmed by. So how can you make it through challenging times without adding to that stress, or even reduce it? You can Find Your Center.
What does that mean, to find your center? I’m referring here to the idea of accessing your inner strength and creating and maintaining a sense of balance and peace. We all have the innate ability to know what’s real, what matters, and release what doesn’t.
In our crazy-busy world we tend to go from one thing to another and get caught up in the doing, rather than being. The media inundates us with negative, fear-based information, looking for a reaction…and often getting it. We can react to things without really considering the reality of the situation, becoming mired in the emotions about it, rather than the actual experience. At this point the ‘fight or flight’ part of our nervous system completely over-runs our ‘rest and digest’ mode and overwhelm sets in.
When we anticipate a future event, there are various statements we tell ourselves, and thus begin to believe, even though we can’t know what will actually happen. “This horrible thing is going to happen,“ “If this happens, it will be awful,” “I won’t be able to handle the worst case,” etc. If things occur in the worst case scenario, how are we to handle it if we’re already on hyper alert and overwhelm when we receive the news? And if it isn’t as bad as we’re expecting, it’s little consolation, because we’re already in that overwhelmed mode.
Our nervous systems don’t know the difference between the past, present or future…they just go by what we believe. Worrying about what’s coming, and telling ourselves how horrible it’s going to be, is just as stressful to us as it actually happening. So, if that challenging thing does come to pass, instead of dealing with it once it’s here, we feel the stress for days or weeks or months beforehand, even though we couldn’t do anything to change it.
How do you prepare yourself, then? How do you end this pattern? You work to find your center, to maintain that balance and create resilience, so if something challenging happens, you can cope, and if it doesn’t, you’ve not spent any extra time in a state of worry and apprehension. If you give your body the opportunity to ‘rest and digest,’ to let go of heavy emotions and the urge to try to control what can’t be controlled, you’ll be better able to handle what comes.
Since we can’t control the past or future, focusing on the present is in our best interest. To be more centered and balanced, we need an ongoing healthy dose of self-care and the ability to let go of beliefs which don’t serve us…all of the doomsday, fear-based statements running rampant in our current society. If we breathe deeply, focus on the present moment and then shift our self-talk to neutral or positive statements, we shift our energy and break the old pattern.
There are things we absolutely can’t control. There always will be. What we CAN control is how we respond to those things. Even if they seem worse than feared, we’ll get through them as long as we don’t tell ourselves otherwise. We give our power away when we focus only on the negative and the things we don’t like. We can actually experience challenging situations AND be otherwise happy, and still enjoy other things in life. If you can find your center, you can handle anything.
