The Center for Integrative Health and Healing

By: Jennifer Adams, NP

With the financial situation at a crisis, health problems on the rise and the experience of time speeding up, most of us are living in a frenzied environment. We often find ourselves at the end of the day exhausted and overwhelmed only to get up the next day to the same thing. In many circles there is a saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again and expecting different results.” I am going to assert that this insanity we keep creating is less about what we DO and more about what we THINK, which brings forth who or how we are BEING in the world.

We often so quickly want to fix a situation by DOING something- but the true test comes if we can sit with ourselves long enough to watch it pass and possibly reshape or remold us on the inside. If we are able to master this, then the outside world will accommodate according to where we are internally.

Be A Witness in the Moment

The challenge for most of us is to be able to sit with our pain, sit with our happiness, sit with all of it and learn to simply be a witness to all the beauty and the burden that life has to offer us rather than being the target of every incoming missile that heads our way. It does not mean that we will not have challenges that we need to overcome, but the challenges will be more a reflection of cultivating faith in the joy and gratitude for what we do have in our lives on a moment to moment basis. Then the situations that appear “negative” will only be a test for where we are in our process of learning and growing and developing as spiritual beings on this earth.

There are many ways to cultivate this. One of course is meditation. Another would be prayer. And yet another is just being mindful. Many tools can be used. Support groups, church, journaling, index cards with positive reminders on them. The reminders should help us remember how magnificent we really are. I believe we can never truly get enough of these kind of reminders, offsetting a “de-programming” of the negative belief that so many of us have bought into that lead us to thinking, “ if only I had a different body, different career, different husband, different family then I would be OK”. What about the idea that we are OK now, in this moment and there is nothing to do other than grow this truth deeper and deeper within ourselves, helping us to find our inner strength and wisdom.

There is a paradigm shift taking place in our world today. I would encourage all of us to be a part of the solution and play a bigger game than what we have ever played. Love ourselves more, embrace ourselves more, give more and more.