Facing Challenges

We’ve all had challenges and disappointments, and also blessings and triumphs. Life presents so many opportunities to get to know ourselves, teaches us how we relate with others, and how to recognize we are all part of the world and cosmos.

Some of us love challenges and see it as a fun problem to solve or a game, while others find it really hard and well, “challenging”. Our lens and our mindset frames our reality and our reality shifts when our lens and mindset shifts as well.

A simple google search on mind and reality turns up well over 5,000,000,000 results! When you look even deeper into it, you will find reality is an illusion and that everything is just energy. When considering emotion as energy in motion we can begin to understand how that’s true. After all, it’s our emotional response to an event that creates the outcome or “reality”.

Becoming Fully Present

When it comes to facing challenges, we face it spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. If any of these areas are out of balance, it could create a block in one or more of these fields and you would then experience the event more as a spiritual challenge, mental challenge, emotional challenge, or a physical one.

It points to where the healing needs to happen to restore balance, clear blockages, and get back into the flow. Flow is what comes when body, mind and spirit are aligned and functioning as a cohesive team and emotion is in its natural state of peace. It’s a beautiful thing when you can be fully present and immersed in the here and now.

Finding Peace in the Here and Now

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk suggests we, “Make each moment an occasion to be deeply, happily in peace”. I actually have that quote on a wall hanging in my home to remind me of that. Sometimes facing challenges means turning away from the drama and trauma and take refuge. Creating space to tune back into yourself and your own natural rhythms. Giving yourself a chance to regroup and for your nervous system to restore itself.

Another Key to Facing Challenges: Rest and Digest

There are several natural ways to stimulate your vagus nerve which is a key part of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system. Some ways to activate it is diaphragmatic breathing, tightening and releasing muscle groups, meditation and mindfulness, positive thinking, singing or chanting, and being in a calming, natural environment.

You could also try massage or acupuncture to help bring your nervous system back into balance.

Another way to keep calm, cool and collected is to practice patience. Let go of struggling or trying to force solutions. The ego wants to control everything and this constricts your progress and restricts you making you feel tense, rigid, and tight especially on the physical level. Instead, allow things to unfold naturally, leaving room for peace and grace to enter. This allowing cultivates trust and strengthens your inner knowing.

Facing Challenges with Grace and Dignity

Recognize challenges are only temporary. Accept this is just what is happening in your life right now. The more you can lean into it and be present with it, the easier it will be to move through it.

As you cultivate resilience, you build the capacity to recover more quickly and easily from hardships.

You begin to establish spiritual sovereignty. Spiritual strength is gathered each time you move through change. You expand into something greater than your fearful self could have imagined. You learn more about what you are capable of, what abilities you have and with that, rise to any challenge. It’s been said that God doesn’t give you a challenge that you don’t have the ability to handle.

Remember too, that along with those challenges come blessings and triumphs. More growth and expansion happens as you wake up to greater possibilities, knowing you were not as limited as you once thought you were. There’s a huge sense of accomplishment when you reach higher limits and move beyond your comfort zone. You become elevated, elated, and full of gratitude for meeting a challenge. You realize just what you are capable of and this builds momentum for living life more fully, finding deeper satisfaction along the way. Let’s face it, life is a challenge! How you decide to approach it, makes all the difference.