Something’s just not right in your life and you’re looking for a little bit of healing help: perhaps you’re already on medication or in therapy. There’s no good reason to ditch your doctor’s orders, and this isn’t about that; It’s always a good time, however, to look inside yourself to see if your emotional and spiritual health – or lack of it – is affecting your physical and mental health. Studies are now showing with increasing evidence that ‘stress’ affects your physical and mental health. ‘Stress’ is the catch-all term for when our emotional or spiritual health isn’t robust and vital, because when our emotional and spiritual health is on the rise, we’re not just resilient instead of fragile – we’re antifragile. We take shocks and strains as challenges and opportunities. When we’re antifragile, we let the very things that might have torn us down build us up instead. So, here are a three steps to increase your own antifragility. I use them myself, over and over and over again.
1. Meditate.
Meditating does a lot of good just on it’s own – which is to say that just by attempting it you’ll be increasing your level of antifragility. But one of the aspects of meditation is that you become the master of your own mind – your thoughts stop running absolutely amuck and you can tame them, direct them, let them flow or make the pause. Incidents of creative inspiration and breakthroughs increase in people who meditate. Why might that be? Our mind works more efficiently when we learn its operating manual – so when we ask it for inspiration, it cooperates.
One of the easiest ways to meditate is to focus on the breath as it moves in and out of your body. When thoughts arise let them float past as if they were a boat on a river. Don’t go swimming after each boat, just let it pass you. Five minutes a day, regularly, does wonders. Five minutes when you’re really upset may do miracles.
One of the things meditation can do for you is create a calm internal space so that tips 2 & 3 work even better…
2. Ask for help.
Your higher power really wants to help you out, and wants you to be healed. Your higher power wants you to live a full and vibrant life – so ask for help. Now, if you’re asking for help in sabotaging someone, help in getting revenge, help in bringing more negativity into the world, don’t be surprised when your higher power is silent, or when something else entirely answers.
Do ask for help in bringing more calm, more peace, more joy into your life. Do ask for help in being healed, and in forgiving others. Ask for perspective. Ask for understanding. Ask for guidance. Ask for help.
It’s really useful to do a bit of meditation before this to clear your mental space because your higher power will always answer, but will you hear it? If you don’t, don’t worry – the answer is being saved for you, held in reserve until you’re ready to listen. But why not prepare to listen now?
3. Get ready for change.
Yep, change can be hard to do. Actually, change is impossible if you refuse to do it. That is, no one changes against their will. What’s more, change is usually kind of unnerving – both for you, the person who changes, and for the people around you, who might be a little slow on the uptake. The people around you make take some time to realize you’ve changed and act according to who you are becoming, not who you used to be.
Healing will always involve changes, and that is one of the reasons healing is so difficult to accept by the one who asks for it. But these changes don’t need to be scary. In truth, change is all around us, all the time: trees change, depending on the season. Lakes and rivers change, depending on the rains. Our children change rapidly, whether or not we choose to keep up with them. Friendships change. Our bodies change.
It can be hard, to embrace something like a change in diet. It can be even harder to embrace a change in attitude. To become a more cheerful person, to become a more grateful person, to become a kinder person, to become a more peaceful person. But if we are willing to change in response to the gentle nudging of our higher power, the change doesn’t need to be painful at all. It might be scary, but when we try it, that change will actually end up being the most natural next step we could possibly take.
One step closer to healing.