Finding Meaning In Struggle

In today's episode Kristina discusses how to navigate moments or even seasons of struggle without delaying life or subconsciously feeling like its on hold or that the moment needs to be rushed through or quickly pushed past. In the episode, you'll learn the best strategies for how to find the value in difficult circumstances and how to use them as opportunities to grow. This includes:

• How to understand yourself differently
• How to find the lessons within the difficulties
• How to meet each moment as if it is one still worth living...because it is. 

In addition to today's episode, check out these helpful resources to support you along the way:

My Instagram! Every post is full of valuable information about how to live better, feel better, and be a better version of yourself: https://www.instagram.com/kristina.furia

The Anxiety Masterclass, it's free and will teach you everything you need to know about nervous system regulation, whether you struggle with anxiety or not (we've all got a nervous system and most people's end up dysregulated by adulthood): https://www.kristinafuria.com/anxietymasterclass

The Emotional Mastery Playbook, my e-book on how to healthily process your emotions which can come in very handy as it relates to creating meaningful moments spent alone: https://kristinafuria.thrivecart.com/emotionalmasteryplaybook/

The Heal Anxiety Course, my upcoming 30-day program that will guide you through a transformative process for healing your nervous system and upgrading your anxiety-driven thoughts. It's currently available on pre-sale: https://www.kristinafuria.com/anxietycourse

Limited availability, Book a Coaching Session with Me: If you'd like more support on these subjects or any related subject, schedule a private, 1:1 coaching session with me here: https://www.kristinafuria.com/booknow

Transcript

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Welcome to the Worth Living for Podcast. This podcast is about what makes life worth living and how to remove everything that stands in the way. And it'll be a perfect fit for you if you're currently in process with how to find more meaning in your life, if you're trying to make meaning out of struggle, or if you know there are certain things standing in the way of life feeling more meaningful, and you're looking for a new perspective or some practical guidance on how to get beyond them. Let's begin. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am really excited to share today's episode with you because it speaks to such an important subject matter as it relates to what makes life worth living. And that is all the stuff that stands in the way. And obviously, there are many things that can stand in the way of life feeling rich or feeling meaningful. And as the podcast goes on, we'll keep addressing them all. But a really big one, the one we're going to be talking about today, is those moments of life where things are just not working out, or they just feel too difficult or too uncomfortable, or for one reason or another, you are just struggling to go about life in a way that naturally feels like it has value to it, or that naturally feels like it has richness to it. And these are the moments that we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about how to navigate those moments and also how to still find the richness that is available to you in those moments or even in those seasons of life, even when, as you're in them, it can feel really, really easy to just simply want to rush past it. How do I, as quickly as possible, get past this moment? So this episode is about how to shift your thinking, how to shift your perspective, so that rather than just wanting to rush through it or skip over it, if that happens to be possible, which a lot of times it isn't, but sometimes it is so tempting that we want to try anyway. So this episode, again, is about how to, even in these difficult moments, even in these difficult seasons, how to come into the present moment, how to re-enter the present moment where we can realize that life really still is happening, even if it's not totally ideal, it still is happening, and we can still find the worthiness in it. If you're anything like me, you know those moments where it feels like life is testing you. Those moments where you don't understand how you ended up here, or how what felt like a perfectly good life somehow started going wrong along the way, or not fitting together quite right anymore. Or maybe it's that you got hurt, you lost someone, or got broken up with. And it's also true that life can't always feel exactly that way. But rather than realizing that though, I think most of us tend to engage with these types of circumstances in very particular ways. We do things like practice avoidance. We try to avoid how we're feeling. We want to turn away from it, or cope with it by doing things that make us feel numb to it. Or we want to distract ourselves from it. How do I stay busy? How do I avoid being alone? How do I just do anything that I can do to be distracted from how life is feeling to me right now? And of course, I think it's important to understand as we think about this that when we're distracted from what's really happening in our lives, we're again, we're not fully present to it. What are some of the other things we do in these kinds of moments? We try to solve the moment. We try to rush through the moment, we try to jump into the next experience, into the next season, into the next thing that feels better to us. And again, on one hand, that's just completely natural. Why would we not want those things? Why would we not want to find ourselves in the next moment that feels good? Of course we would, and we do, and we can want that. But something that happens when you try to move too quickly, when you try to rush, when you try to solve, rather than trying to move through something, is that you miss what's there for you along the way. You miss the lessons and you miss the emotions that can be worked through, the things that you can process within yourself, the things that even that you can learn about yourself as a result of moving through the emotions, as a result of actually even choosing to consciously look for the lessons, right? I think that's something that a lot of us don't think to do. How can I find the lesson in a difficult moment rather than just aligning with the challenge? Rather than just seeing only the challenge, only the struggle? How can I consciously choose to look for the lesson? We'll talk a little more about this in just a couple of minutes here. How can I look for the lesson? How can I choose to be with an emotion? How can I choose to notice what's going on inside me, even if I have to look a little bit deeper to find it and move through it, move through what's there and allow myself to feel something that actually might feel difficult to feel. And what makes this so important is that once you start doing this, once you start realizing you can make different choices, you can notice yourself navigating a difficult moment more and choose certain things within it, you start changing what's happening on a subconscious level, which to me also changes something on an energetic level too. It's like the story that I am sending out, the signal that I am sending out just into the world, into the universe, even, it starts to change. Because when you feel that life is only, when you subconsciously feel that life is only really truly happening fully when it's good, that is a very limiting signal to be sending. That is a very limiting subconscious belief to be holding. And then what starts to happen? We start to find ourselves feeling more of that limitation. We start to find ourselves living from that as truth. We start to find ourselves living from, again, the subconscious perspective, the subconscious belief of life cannot possibly be worth living. Life cannot possibly be meaningful and valuable, or dare I say it, in some way, still rich, if it does not feel just overtly good. And again, and this is possibly obviously something that can be, I think, like difficult to fully grab onto, but the idea here is to start to move yourself in the direction of being able to believe that life still has value, even in the moments where it's not amazing, even in the moments where it's not feeling totally comfortable. So, how do we, in a way that feels realistic and that honors the fact that there might be some resistance to really being able to fully embrace this, find the meaning in the moments that do feel like they're testing us too much, or that feel like they are too uncomfortable or too difficult or too painful. The first way is to bring awareness to the moment. So we talked about this a little bit a few minutes ago. What can I do to consciously notice that I am, in fact, having this experience and that this experience can still have value? A lot of times something like this is actually quite simplistic, even if it's difficult. In other words, there is not a lot of effort or even depth of not quite comprehension, but skill that's required to be able to do this. It's just actually the literal choice to choose to bring consciousness to your experience, to choose to notice, wow, I actually am really having a difficult experience right now. I actually really am having a difficult time in life right now. And I am going to choose to one, notice and two, notice that I can be an active participant rather than a resistant participant. In other words, I can choose to, to the very best of my abilities, try to navigate the moment with as much participation as possible. But again, not just for the sake of getting out of it as quickly as possible. That might be part of it, but also for the sake of getting all of the lessons out of it. Also for the sake of processing through all of the motion, the emotions that need to be felt. Also for the sake of understanding more about myself as I move through this wherever possible. Now let's take this a little bit deeper. How do you look for the lessons when you're in the midst of the experience happening? I think sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly how to approach looking for something like this because we're so in it, it's one of those moments where it feels like we can't see the forest through the trees. But there are always ways. You just have to know what they are. So, first of all, if you continue listening to this podcast, if you ever take one of my courses, if you work with me in any way, you will always hear me say that intention is so very powerful. Intention changes so much. So a lot of the times, just simply holding the intention, setting the intention to find the lessons supports you in actually doing it. Just simply realizing and noticing that you have a desire to find the lessons will literally bring you to some of them. And again, there's still that ongoing experience of, well, because I am really so in this right now, I can't see everything. I don't have that bird's eye view or that hindsight view that I'm able to take so that I can really perceive everything that is available to be perceived. And this is where kind of a cool little trick comes in handy. And that is pressing the fast forward button on your perspective. So, what I mean by that is jumping ahead in thought form only, because as we discussed, we obviously can't jump ahead in life. We have to move through everything. So jumping ahead in thought form to imagine a future moment of your life where whatever you're going through, whatever difficult thing you're navigating, whatever uncomfortable experience you feel like is never going to end, just whatever it is that you are going through, jumping ahead to a future moment of life where it actually already has wrapped up. You are in a new moment, a different moment, things feel different. And then trying to find the lessons from there. So if you can do it, you actually can, maybe not fully, but partially, make kind of like informed guesses about how life might be different. Okay, so when I'm past this particular difficult thing, obviously it now wouldn't be happening anymore. So what would be happening instead? And you might be able to put some things together. Well, instead of this current thing, it would be this other thing. Instead of X, it would be Y. And as you do that, you start to just kind of naturally piece together how you might have gotten from this to that, from X to Y. And that brings in things like, for example, well, I may have asked someone for help. Or I may have had to make a big, bold decision so that life would change. Or I needed to go to therapy. And basically from there, the things that you needed to do, the lessons that you needed to learn, they start showing themselves to you because now you have gone forward to then look backwards. The hindsight view that would otherwise not be available to you temporarily becomes available. And then connected to that is the ways that you can start understanding yourself differently as you move through the process, both the process of gaining lessons and learning the actual lessons, and also the more general process of just simply navigating the moment with more consciousness and more awareness. And in these moments, I think the greatest way we can understand ourselves better or differently is by observing the ways that we are distinctly struggling as we start to bring more awareness to our choices. Because what happens is when there's no awareness, everything feels like a struggle. When you bring the awareness in, only some things continue to feel like a struggle. And so when you start looking at what still feels difficult to me here, that's where you start understanding more. That's where you start realizing, okay, this is the area where I actually do have some work to do on myself. This is the area where I need to develop a little bit more strength or resilience or patience with myself or patience with someone else. And it starts helping to pave the way to that different understanding of who you are, but also that different understanding of the work that you still have left to do. And in some cases, even the way in which you need to do it, because so much information suddenly has opened up for you that now you have inspiration for how to become that next version of yourself, how to become that different version of yourself, whatever that might look like, whether it is strength and resilience or patience or something else altogether. And then the final thing, and again, this is something we're just going to keep really, really simple, is noticing that life is happening right now. And again, this is a choice. It's a choice to either bring this piece of awareness into the light of day or to not. But noticing that life is happening right now. Life isn't on hold until it gets good again. It isn't on hold until whatever circumstance or situation or problem that you're having gets solved. Life is actually happening right now with all of its potential, with all of its possibilities. It's happening for you still right this very moment. So if you are in a struggle moment right now, I hope that you have found this episode valuable. I hope that you will be able to bring with you certain things forward into your experience and that you are able to use them and integrate them. And I hope that most of all, you find your way through this moment with as much richness and value and transformation as you possibly can.