How to Begin Rebuilding Yourself when Life gets Lifey (1/3)

I was such an expert on bouncing back from adversity, all my tools ever in-place. But I suppose that confidence (perhaps overzealous-ness?), needs to be tested in order to be truly stable.

After losing both my grandparents (my Grampa died essentially the day after my Grandma’s funeral – for seemingly no other reason than he couldn’t go on without her), soon after I was hospitalized with a serious life-threatening infection… and then found myself face (heart) first into the ending of an 8 year relationship, I had found the closest thing to my absolute limits. Every time I picked myself up again, over and over (and over), I became more exhausted at the process, and eventually just gave up everything I knew about getting back in the saddle of life. Things I had been posting about for years: Habit building, meditation, nutrition, my “inspired” routines, fuck it all. I had to let it all fall apart. Rebuilding was what was killing me, that is – until the storm had truly passed.

I had to accept I was no longer that person I was used to being.

This time around the spiral I couldnt “snap” into it, after mastering the snap for years when I slid off my horse. Even then I would of course occasionally slip off – but only a couple times a year, instead of… the daily/weekly I had been experiencing at this stage.

Because of the magnitude of my compounding life events (which I own are relatively common first-world problems, but hey – everything is relative), I saw this was more of a long transition than I was used to: every time I tried to snap back into Inspired Living, I quickly was met with “failure” and disappointment. So it became a practice in patience, self-trust and self-compassion (which it always was, as you’ll learn in future blogs, just more acutely at this point in time).

(It’s funny, that last paragraph was written in present tense, I had to edit it to make it past tense. That feels… Empowering. One of the benefits of journalling, right there.)

… (You’re going to see I like asides in brackets – apparently.)

So where did I start? With the absolute bare minimum. Because of the angle I take in my professional practice, I have many tools at my disposal to give me an advantage here (almost as if life had been preparing me for this, perhaps?), which I’ll be sharing in the next series, but to begin, I learned I had to set the bar loowwww. And master the most seemingly silliest basics. So let’s start there.

There were days where even 10 pushups seemed impossible. And ten minutes of meditation? Yeah right. “But come on…” I told myself, “I have no excuse why I cant do ONE pushup, and one minute of meditation”. The voices in my head agreed (you know the ones). So that was my bar.

Another example, I’ve been writing out several hundred blogs over the past… Decade… (I knew the name of it would be “Spiral Journeys” fifteen years ago…), all of which were scattered across personal journals & my personal research and in point form. The first step here was the task of consolidating everything. Get organized. Prioritize the absolute essentials. Then bite off the tiniest chunk possible. In my case, simply format one paragraph. And repeat. We’ve all seen what one tiny snowflake over and over can do.

So how did I do it? Or rather – How am I doing it? This current blog was clearly more written like a journal – stay tuned to my next one for the step by step process.

OVER TO YOU: What are the absolute most ridiculously small goals you can set now, instead of “someday”? And I mean as small as putting on your gym shoes & walking around the house for 10 minutes in them. What’s a fundamental brick the voices in your head can even agree is achievable? (They don’t need to know your secret plan is to build a castle…) Comment below!

Cant wait for the next article? Instead of waiting for my personal take, why not sign up for my free top-quality five part Inspired Living e-Course now…