Life Doesn't Have to Be So Hard

Why does life sometimes feel so exhausting?
There will always be challenges, disappointment, loss, uncertainty and things we cannot control. 

But some of the difficulty we experience isn't actually coming from life itself, but from the way we are meeting what is happening!

In this episode of Pearls of Wisdom, I explore the difference between the inevitable difficulties of being human and the psychological struggle we can add to them.

We can become caught in expectations of how life should be, how other people should behave, what we should have achieved, and who we should be.
We compare, resist, judge, blame and fight against what is, and in doing so, create more suffering for ourselves.

Acceptance doesn't mean giving up or tolerating what isn't right for us.
It means starting from what is actually here, rather than fighting with reality.

From that place, we have much more freedom to choose.

We can change something.
We can ask for a different behaviour.
We can set a boundary.
We can leave.
Or sometimes, we can simply accept that this is how things are.

But when we stop adding our psychological drama to what is happening, life can become much lighter.

As Shakespeare wrote:

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Perhaps life doesn't need to be quite as hard as we sometimes make it.

Transcript

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We can't change something if we're not acknowledging it. That's where if we've always said yes and we've always pleased others and we've always lived up to expectations, we firstly have to acknowledge that we're doing it. Welcome to another episode of Piles of Wisdom. Today I'm going to investigate that life isn't necessarily hard, but that our resistance to what is happening can make it hard. So, most importantly, of course, I'm not suggesting that we don't have difficult things going on, that we experience grief and illness and loss and disappointments and injustice and all the things that make up the challenges of life. I'm not certainly not saying that there isn't a journey in life where we encounter all sorts of things that can be very difficult. And I've encountered many and you know, many of those things myself. So it isn't so much that, you know, or so it isn't at all that I'm saying that life doesn't offer things that we have to navigate, but really what I'm exploring is that we create an additional layer of suffering when our reality doesn't match the picture of what we think reality should be like or should be, basically. So it's more really asking, you know, we ask the question of why does life feel so hard? Because I experience a lot of people coming to me for guidance and help, and life's just so hard, and they find life very hard, and a lot of that actually is um can be put into it. I have to say, I um my dad used to say, Darling, when you realise that life is difficult and hard in earnest, it's going to be a lot easier for you because I was a very fun-loving person, and I and my mum's adage was very much, darling, have fun. Now, I mean, my dad's right, there were lots of things to encounter and difficulties, but I don't think of life as difficult and hard. There were things I had to encounter to navigate that were difficult and hard. But often people think life is difficult and hard because of what's happening to them. You know, whether it's um all the things that make up our life, you know, difficult relationships or jobs difficult, we haven't got enough money, um, our family are behaving in ways we don't want them to behave, they're they're difficult, people are letting us down, even the smaller things, people are always late, or all the things, you know, things don't go to plan because people like to have a plan, but um, and often often plans don't go as they kind of were expected to. But really and truly, my observation and my own way of um navigating life and also helping others is that it isn't life itself that's that's making life hard, more it's our relationship to what's happening and how we are um facing things, how we are in any circumstances, whether they're relationship or money or all the things that make up living, you know, our health, our body, the people around us, our our successes and um failures, and really and truly it's um I've always think there's the there's the image of the Zen master who can you know simply be tending his garden and has completely stopped demanding that life be different from what it is. So we have this image, there's often an image portrayed or an actual visual of the Zen master just literally happily in his garden at ease, and he doesn't need any drama or achievement or constant stimulation or all the things that the we often need in the Western world and the the mind wants to create. But in a way, the image of him just being in his garden or by the river or simply being is that it's just us being present with what is. So, therefore, the image of the garden it doesn't mean we'd go and sit on a mountain or by a lake and need that to be still, the image is there to let us know that we can be present within what is happening and that we can keep things more simple by being with what is, even if there is a kind of you know, a big drama unfolding or we're in the middle of big projects, because if we are living in the Western world with relationships and jobs and challenges, then it's a very different life to sitting quietly in a garden. But let's imagine we can sit quietly in the garden of life and be with all of the things that are going on around us, and really and truly, I think it is the that the thing that causes difficulty is us expecting things to be different to what they are. So if we do want to live a very quiet life, then we need to create that, we need to go and live somewhere where more in nature, more in quietness. But meanwhile, um whatever is going on in our life, it's better that we don't expect it to be different to how it is, because the starting point for change is to accept what is, and I've always said that with anybody I work with, whether it's they're wanting to change their body shape, that was a place I began, was as a personal trainer, and generally people were wanting to change their body shape and they weren't happy with how they were. So part of what I encouraged was them to accept where they were, accept themselves as they are now, because it's from the place of acceptance we can make change because we're coming from presence. So if we start with working with the internal picture that we have of how life should be, that you know, all the things people should arrive on time, that's often a big one, or they should answer our messages, or they should understand us. That's a really big one. I hear so many times no one understands me. Well, what if we just let that go and didn't expect people to understand us, and we just seek to understand ourselves, and um you know that our career should progress in a certain way, we should be going more and more and more, or we should be getting more and more money, or we should have more and more success, or people should revere us more and more, and we should, you know, come to certain pinnacles of achievement. Um, also that you know, obviously our relationship should look a certain way, people should behave as we want them to behave in relationship with us. They should again be on time, answer our texts, show up, um, all the things, you know, do certain things to show us they love us. I remember our birthday, um, and the same in families that that you know, you our children should behave as we want them to behave. So I'm laughing because um I was one of those children that was completely a complete confusion to my father because you know, he thought children you directed them, but I wasn't very directable. So um, and there's all this this by a certain age, we're supposed to have achieved a certain status, we're supposed to have got a house or a marriage or a you know, a career status, and that life should be fair, that life should you know work out exactly as we see it, and um of course that's what causes pain when what we're seeing in front of us doesn't match our internal script of how it should be, and then we suffer. And the the Buddha, you know, says that um pain is inevitable, which is what I was saying at the beginning. You know, we are going to experience loss, we are going to experience um change, disappointment, not not you know, things leaving, things going. It's um we are going to have some pain in our life, but suffering is optional, which is essentially the um the essence of what I'm exploring or investigating in this podcast, that it isn't the event itself that creates the struggle. Um it's the it's the kind of gap between what's happening and what we think should be happening, and that's really where the where the mind comes in, the mind comes in and um creates the pain because you know we we can when we can be with what is we can navigate it in a very different way, but you know, this goes on. I mean, big huge life events obviously they do have a process, a process of grieving, a process of adapting, but often they can be made worse by the way the mind addresses it, the way the mind doesn't accept it, the way the mind rails against it, it's not fair, why me? All of those queries. But it isn't only just huge life events that that create this suffering. People can get into incredible distress just when people are uh 10 minutes late, because with that comes a whole host of feelings about not being respected, not being important, your time not being valuable. Um, it can obviously throw out a day slightly because then maybe a rush to get to an appointment, a theatre, a train, all of those things. But um, yeah, people now we have texting. I encounter many, many people who get in such a lot of pain because they're waiting for a text reply from somebody they like or just needing to know what to do next because the person hasn't replied. Um when when people say something we don't like them saying, rather than being either just accepting what they're saying or recognising we may be interpreting it from our own mind in a different way, um people can get very upset when a hotel isn't what they hoped it was going to be, or the meal doesn't live up to expectations, or the wine, or um and and also, of course, love relationships are huge like in this area because there's still a quite a romantic view of the happily ever after. I see that, um, but inevitably people have to work things out, and I I do believe in the happily ever after. I think that we can make incredible relationships together, and I do a huge amount of my work, it's helping people to really find a way to relate that is very conscious and very well, it's love because it is listening to the other, accepting the other, um, working out together how you how you um I've said navigate a lot of times, I suddenly realised how you navigate your relationship. Um but the mind is the mind that creates the pain, as I said, you know, the things like this always happens to me, it's not fair, or or they don't respect me because they haven't replied or arrived on time, or you know, they should know better, and then this is where the psychological dramas occur because the feeling in the body that the stories start of you know, I'm not important, this isn't fair, why me? And then the body responds to that, so the body tenses up, there's pain in the tummy, in the heart, general stiffness can occur, headaches, all sorts of things. And I often refer to this, but in Hamlet, um in the play Hamlet by Shakespeare, Hamlet's talking to two of his friends, I've forgotten which two friends, but he's talking to a couple of his friends, and he said there's there's nothing good or bad in the world, but thinking makes it so. And obviously, there are things, I mean, it's not completely literal, because there are things that we don't, you know, when we experience, and they're very, very painful, of course, and harmful, but really it's just a doorway into the relationship between the event and our interpretation of it. And obviously, I see this a lot that two people can experience experience something that's really, really similar, but they have a completely different internal experience because of the meaning they give to it. And I remember actually years ago, um, I was in my 30s, and my very first client I was of in this work, so I was very early 30s because I was a PT. Um, I worked in the health and fitness business from when I was 17 years old to when I was 30. So all my original work was with people with their bodies, body mind, of course, because I did advanced mental training for sport and I was a top athlete, so it was still a holistic way of working. But then when I um shifted into the work with people as I do now, my very first client, she was I was 30, she was 45. I remember that. I remember my 30th birthday and her 45th, because we have we shared a birthday, but I remember her saying to me sometime in during not long after that, that I survived things that other people had a nervous breakdown for. And she said, as long as you recognise your strength and recognise that you you go through things and you obviously process them, but you have a uh a response to things that is different to other people, other people find things a lot harder, you'll be absolutely you know stunning at this work. And I always remembered that, and I remember just stay on the shoulder of people because I will guide people to process the thing they're going through, but also encourage them not to kind of create the psychological dramas that adds more meaning to it, and that can be the that can be the problem is that the thing itself needs to be addressed and needs to be worked through, but then we can create more pain by and suffering by our mind. And another thing that does actually mean that life's harder than it needs to be, is we need to ask, are we living our own life or are we living somebody else's expectations? So it can often be that people could wake up, come to, and just say, How did this happen? How am I living this life? Because I've I've worked with people who've kind of lived by default, they went to school, they went to university, they went into a job and came to in their 40s. I've I've had that had this experience quite a lot of working with somebody who says, I I I just lived out what my parents expected, I just lived out what my the peers around me were doing, what society expected. I didn't really question it, and therefore it can be a lot of this can be parental expectation or the conditioning we have, our culture, where we where we're born into, what what the social norms are of the expectation, and of course they're they vary over the globe, but they vary swell in um different times. I was talking with somebody yesterday who said that there was this pressure for 11A stars for GCSE, and I was like, goodness me, our generation completely different. The pressure that you're under was so huge because there wasn't that expectation, there wasn't social media that was sharing everything, and there wasn't any expectation of all those A's, and um no one really knew what results you got because I mean you're your friends near you and your parents, but there wasn't the same, and it was a very different world. And I do feel it's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of social kind of expectations, peer pressure, obviously, whatever um religion, religious influences you're born into that can bring up all sorts of guilt and feelings of of not worthiness. And I don't think religion's such a big thing these days, but again, I was brought up in the time where there was this one of the prayers we said every Sunday was with such miserable sinners, not so much worthy as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, and that does say, you know, not worthy, not worthy, and I don't think that that's the intention of um the consciousness god um energy, which is you know to shine bright, we should all shine, and um then of course there's political beliefs, there's all the media everywhere, there's the ideas people have about success, and then there's all the ideas people have about aging, and it just without even realizing it, people are kind of caught in these expectations. I actually said to somebody um that at the weekend um that we were talking about aging and everybody's ideas about it and things, and I said I had to work a little bit with feeling a little bit embarrassed um about my age, and she said, What do you mean? And I said, Well, because I'm not in step with my age group, because I'm 67 and I'm super fit and lively, and I mean there are any 67s who are listing who are very super fit and lively, there are a lot of people, but there's also quite a narrative as well of of slowing down, so there's a there's a range, actually, there's a range of people, but it was interesting for my own. I had to work slightly to with the slight feeling that I'm sort of letting the side down by being super fit and super healthy. Anyway, I can't so I cleared that out of my system, but that's why we need to recognise what is coming up so that we aren't adhering to just social norms and you know what relationships should look like, we should get married, we should do this, what we're supposed to be. Um, and there can be an awful lot what we're supposed to become, and then people wonder why why they're exhausted because there is such a lot of pressure, and I think it becomes very hard. I think life becomes hard if we think we're supposed to be a certain way, and as I said, I'm I've always been super aware, so even little trails of kind of thought forms like the one of feeling a little bit embarrassed about being super fit and healthy, seems madness, doesn't it? But the mind is a bit mad, and we are very can well, it isn't the mind's an incredible tool if we use it wisely, but it can be quite left to its own devices and left to just pick up on those things, it can be a bit a bit bonkers, really, and so really and truly we have to have the courage to well investigate, but also uh and also come back to presence, as I always say, come back to the breath, come back, so that we are centred enough to really be in a position where we do have the courage to perhaps disappoint people, because if we do live differently, even if we change our attitude and we start to not want to complain about things, not have the same stories of life being difficult and hard, or not want to complain about other people, not want to gossip about people, not want to complain about our colleagues at work or our boss, then or or start saying, you know, if we've always said yes to everything, start to say no, then someone somewhere may be disappointed because that you're not the same person as you were, because you're not joining in the the chat or you're not doing what they want you to do. And if we've always behaved in a certain way because it's pleased people, pleased our parents, gone along with society, not rocked the boat in any way, and if we suddenly start to become more authentic, people might resist. So that's something to just be aware with, aware of rather, because if we've always fulfilled a particular role, then you know, people want us to stay there if we've always done what they want, or we've you know, always been the person they can come and complain to or dump on, or all those things. So people often want us to remain where we are. So freedom isn't that that road to freedom doesn't always particularly feel necessarily that comfortable, but it to make life more simple for ourselves and to make it less hard for ourselves, it might be that it comes a bit uncomfortable for other people. Not all people, some people will probably create new friends and new people around us, and some people adjust, of course, and love it, and but we don't exactly know. Part of the path can be that it's It's a bit uncomfortable for others, but really and truly acceptance, it's acceptance, isn't it? Um in a way, I'm just yeah, we can't, yeah, we can't actually change something. I'm just reflecting on this. We can't change something if we're not acknowledging it. So that's where if we've always said yes and we've always pleased others and we've always lived up to expectations, we firstly have to acknowledge that we're doing it. And it's really accepting where we are. So I often say this as a mantra to people to I am where I am, and it's okay. So we need to come into the space of this is where I am, because from this place, and then really reflect on everything in every area of our life, whether it's our relationships, our money, our health, our attitude, to really be able to be honest, it takes courage to be honest and be reflective. Because if we don't, and then accept it, obviously, from this place, I am where I am, and real acceptance, whether it's the shape of our body, whether it's our financial situation, the state of our health, our relationships, but you know, I am where I am, because then we're not then one bit of the fight stops because we've got somewhere we're properly standing, properly looking out from this is where I am, because then we come back more to presence because that completely changes our experience. So we always come back to the breath because if we're fully, fully, fully here and now, we're not kind of living in the past, we're not living, you know, with all the things that happened yesterday, all the worries we've got ahead, or what should be happening now. Because that of course creates distraction because we're going, oh no, no, this isn't right, this doesn't feel right, and um, I don't know whether what I'm doing is right, or you know, I made mistakes yesterday. They're all distractions from being here. Because when we're here now, it's really good to bring ourselves back to the breath, conscious breath, deep into the tummy, and I'm here now, but not here um geographically or now, time-wise, it's just here now, and then that moment becomes simple, that moment becomes so much more profound than all the stories that we've you know we've built around it, all the pressures and expectations, and of course the present moment, as we know, can't carry any difficulty at all. It just can't, because if we're present, there is no thought. So then the mind's story disappears and then the stillness. So if we just take a breath now and just feel your body because the breath brings us back into the body, and the body can't be anywhere but the present, so take the breath, feel yourself in your body, and then just look around and you know what's happening actually right now, and it's really important, it's not what should be happening, it's not what happened before, or might happen, you know, as the day unfolds, but what's happening here now? And then it's important to just ask yourself, you know, where are you making life harder than it needs to be? Where are you making something harder than it needs to be? Are you making you know the situation with a relationship harder? Are you making the you know the training program harder than it needs to be? Is there something you're resisting, or something, something or someone that you're trying to make different, or an expectation that you're holding on to that is distressing you, um, or a role you're trying to fulfill that doesn't suit you, or are you stuck with a belief that you've inherited? Or what is the story you keep telling yourself? We did a workshop at the weekend, a two-day workshop, um, and it was we used the chakra systems, but it was called unconscious conditioning to conscious presence from from survival to thrive to thriving, and we worked with the stories that we repeatedly tell, and that's so interesting because they can be limiting. Some of them can be amazing and can be expansive. But what if we just stop fighting? Stop fighting the stories, stop fighting that it should be different, and just kept with coming back to presence, coming back to responding to what's happening rather than reacting. I know I I you know do say a lot, but really and truly working with reactivity is the the central work always that when we react to something, we can just reenact an old pattern. And when we react, we have an arrow to something, you know, an expectation, something from the past, some pain, and it just creates more pain and drama and makes life harder when we react. Whereas when we respond to things as they are, it's completely different because life will present us with challenges, challenges. The goal isn't to create a life where nothing happens that might ask us to stretch and ask us to go through something, it's actually to meet difficulty without any unnecessary suffering. And you know, we can still say no to things, we can still leave difficult situations, we can still ask for change, and of course, we can still grieve and we can still take action, but we can do all of this from presence, from the present moment, which is why using the breath, coming back to the breath again and again. It's it's not really anything more than saying, How will we meet each day? How will we meet each challenge? How will we show up? Can we really show up with presence and can we respond to things rather than reacting to things? And just querying or at least investigating that perhaps life doesn't need to be quite as hard as we make it. And although, you know, um I recognise nothing, not because you know everything is easy, because actually it's quite fun as well, having things that we have to stretch and grow through in the same way as we you know might challenge ourselves physically in a in a gym or a or a practice or something we're learning and we grow through it, so it so is that emotionally, because um really it's about though you know releasing the unnecessary layer, and that's the same in physical training actually, because when we go and train in the gym or train for running, often we'll put another layer of difficulty on and push too hard and make it harder than it need be. It's just releasing the unnecessary layer, and that is you know, that unnecessary layer is the resistance, um, the expectation, the judgments, the shoulds and oughts, and all those kind of inherited beliefs about how things should be, and also the need for the external to conform to how we think life should be. That that's one of the things that causes so much pain. And it really is coming back to the Zen Master, it's we have so much more joy and freedom when we meet life with presence, and that whatever's in front of us, we meet it with presence rather than resistance. And as life unfolds, as it you know, the the flow of life which is flowing out from us, actually, but when it as it flows out from us, we actually live it and respond to it, and we are it and recognize it as um as a space of uh of um experience where we can experience it ourselves in motion, and we don't need to make it hard, but we will often create the difficulty simply with our mind. And I mean essentially the main distinction is between facing things that might be, you know, um challenging, either because we've created them ourselves through a uh an effort physically or just a big challenge to create a business or whatever, or things that we weren't expecting, like the loss of somebody through you know, they leave us or through death or a change. But so life can contain pain, of course, and you know, people will lose people and things may fail, we may have to pivot our business and things change, but it's freeing ourselves from when the mind adds that it shouldn't be happening, that it shouldn't be like this, and the why me, or you know, I'm failing, and um you know, they shouldn't do that, or they shouldn't behave like that, and that's this second layer is where all the the struggle lives, and so really and truly it's recognizing how much we can empower ourselves by being present, living and being with what is, and not adding the resistance to what is, because that is where where you know, again coming back to pain is inevitable. We are going to have things that you know don't work out, or people leave, or people die, or things go on in life, but it's us adding that layer of of the why me, it shouldn't happen. Coming back to presence, coming back to um acceptance allows us to really, really, really process things and really become um ultimately free within this incredible experience of life.