Heartbreak, business failure, broken promises, or the ending of a friendship. Whenever one of these upsets touches you and you feel unhappiness, it is so very easy to get down, to become sad or to feel down.
It is what it is.
Your interpretation of an event is simply that, your own interpretation. You give meaning to everything. By default you can change that meaning or adapt how you see something by making the decision to do this. You have freewill and choice in the matter.
Here's the thing about accepting what is. You think you were wronged in a love affair or loving relationship that has ended. You think you were wronged this way because in your mind, you have told yourself that this really is what happened. Your mind conspires to create a story or to edit a drama in which you were made to be the victim in such a situation. It's your mind that does this so of course you must be right, therefore it must be true. I am taking some liberty and license with this in order to make the point. Please don't take this literally. I simply want to help you understand the concept that you can have a story about something in your mind, and if you want to, you can rewrite that story and take different meaning from it.
Accepting the idea that an experience is simply what it is, looking at it without judgement, is a powerful way for you to move forward from a place of hurt or upset and to recover the strength and magnificence of who you are. This approach doesn't mean you are giving something up or demeaning yourself at all in the process. But it does allow you to be free of those elements of self-judgement that can taint a scene from your past and add to it all type of negative meaning and often, with this, self-criticism. None of this is good for you.
Being aware is being mindful
Mindfulness is a way of approaching events, people and actions through the lens of non-judgement. In a book about decluttering, about letting go of the things which do not serve you, and the commitments and relationships that do not support you or make you strong or add value to your life, then adopting an approach of mindfulness will be of great help.
Each time you look at a conversation with someone that did not go the way you expected or at a relationship where you feel slighted, insulted or hurt, consider this. Might it be that the other person made those comments or took those actions without the same interpretation that you gave to those same words or actions? If you can see the sense in this or the possibility that this might indeed have been their completely different interpretation of the scene that played out, can you then see that there actually is no right or wrong? Can you see that your judgement and your perspective is just your judgement and perspective, nothing else?
By making a different story about what happened and how you or they reacted to what was said, can you find it easier to process the way you feel about the meaning you took from that event? Might it help you to explore this idea by applying it to some recent hurt or times of unhappiness?
Finding a way forward
In psychology and self-help books there is a very helpful phrase that comes from the super little book 'Love is Letting Go of Fear', written by Jerold Jampolski. I read this book years ago and always remember his assertion that 'there are only two emotions - Love and Fear.' At the time I thought that could not be right. What about happiness, excitement, humour, nostalgia? How about panic, terror, nervousness, awkwardness? But the more I thought about his statement, the easier it was to see that so many lesser emotions are simply symptoms of either fear or love and that he was right to say this.
Finding it difficult to let go of negative experiences and emotions is difficult because of all the fear that is contained within those same experiences. Put another way, if we were not so scared of what might come after we let go then we would let go so much faster and move forward. Look at this another way, we have a hard time letting go of our suffering because we feel safer hanging on to what is familiar, rather than stepping out into the unknown. Let this go. Get on with those aspects of your life that you love and represent who you are.