How do we navigate through tragic events that are beyond our control?
Today I want to speak from the heart. I got a call last night from a dear friend who told me something that’s just incomprehensible. If this happened to you, you would feel the horror of it just as I did. She lost her niece, whom she was very close to, in a tragic accident. She had just begun her second year at college when she was run over and killed.
So I started to think about everything that comes to mind when something like this happens. It affects so many people in so many different ways. In most cases, it becomes the source of deep stress in their lives. If you are a close relative such as a parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle like my friend, you’re going to experience this in one way, and if you are her boyfriend, you will experience it in a different way, and if you’re a friend such as myself, you hear about this and experience it in a different way.
So, each one of us will hear about this tragedy and we’ll have different ways of perceiving it: a shock to our whole system, a heart-dropping throb in the chest, a lurch in the stomach, a feeling of being knocked off balance. “Why did this have to happen? Is it my fault in some way? What does it mean?” Questions swirl through our disbelieving minds. Chaos reigns in our minds, emotions, and body.
How to handle tragedies and minimize stress?
So I want to talk about when tragedy strikes, how do we handle it? How do we cope with the emotions and the insane thoughts that start buzzing in our heads when we’re confronted with something so beyond the norm that it’s just impossible to grasp? How do we minimize the stress and anxiety brought about by these tragedies?
Looking at it from a spiritual perspective, as I always do, this is what I find very reassuring: it may sound strange or even cruel in some ways, but my spiritual practice teaches this — you come into this world with a script to play out. And you are the director, the producer, the writer, the costume designer, and every part of your script. — However, you as an individual, did not write your script.
Digest that for a moment and let me take a step back. In a nutshell:
We are all spiritual beings having a physical experience, as Teilhard de Chardin famously said.
As such, we are all part of one Creation, the Allness, Heaven, like the facets of a diamond, integral to the whole. It encompasses everything that we can conceive of. So, there is really no separation between us. Or, put another way, there is only one Mind containing trillions of thoughts. This earthly plane is a group of thoughts that aggregate into the individuals we experience ourselves as being. During the aggregation process, we receive our script.
So, we have our scripts, and those scripts are woven into our daily life. They’re not written in concrete in the sense that every single step of every single day that you walk the earth, has already been decided. It’s not like that. As I understand it, we have a framework. We’re going to be born into a certain family, in a certain country, at a certain time. We’ll have certain relatives, certain mental capacities, certain major life events that we will have to handle; things that sometimes bring us stress and anxiety.
We can decide if we will be stressed or not.
Now how we handle those things is where we have what many people call ‘free will’, where we can decide what we want to do in a given situation; if we want to be affected negatively or not. This is what I teach in my metaphysics classes and why I find it so important to show people how to develop “spiritual ears.”
Your whole life changes when you learn that you have the answers that you need for the situations that arise in your life, with you all the time, so that you can handle them without going off the deep end, without getting stressed and anxious, and without getting into all kinds of problems.
We all have an Internal Guide. It’s that part of the mind, which is connected to all of creation, as I said before, because we’re all part of the same Oneness. And that part knows what you need as a human being at any given moment. It’ll guide you, it’ll give you direction, it’ll ease your mind. It’ll help you feel in control now, so you don’t go off in a frenzy, trying to figure out how to deal with the situation.
Start your spiritual journey to better handle stress and anxiety.
So how do you get to that place where you can in fact know this, and trust that that guidance is with you, and actually be able to listen to it and follow through on it?
There are steps along the way that you need to learn and it’s part of the course that I’ll be teaching later on in October. It’s necessary that you take these steps in order to walk through life feeling peaceful, more confident, and certain that you can deal with whatever life throws at you.
Keep in mind that being spiritual doesn’t mean you’ll never have problems, and you’ll never encounter stress and anxiety. Everybody who comes into this world is going to have issues to handle. But how you do that, of course, will depend on your mental state and how you decide you want to live your life. You will need to make a decision. Even when you don’t decide, you’ve made a decision, right?
It’s not a good decision to avoid making decisions. When you don’t dream, don’t even give a thought to how you want to travel through your life, and you just let things come at you, you are making yourself a victim of circumstances that will end up causing you unnecessary pain. Yet it takes awareness to realize what you are not doing!
Reduce stress by learning to communicate with your Inner Guide.
Wouldn’t you rather be a lover of life? Have a purpose and a sense of meaning in what you do? To have those things, you must create a belief system that is going to bring to you whatever it is you need so you can activate those beliefs to better handle the stress that comes your way.
I encourage my students to learn how to communicate with their Inner Guide: to listen and hear and follow through on the instructions they are given. That last part of the process is significant because a lot of times we hear the guidance (the hunch, the intuition, the gut feeling) that says, “Do this.” And then we think, “Yeah, no, I’m not gonna do that. That’s silly.” That’s how stress starts to slip in.
You just discount it. You get the guidance, but you don’t listen. You haven’t developed trust yet.
I’m writing a book right now about this topic: What problems are, and how we can relinquish them. It will be available soon to continue my quest of sharing with the world the spiritual way of managing the times when tragedy strikes.
Peace and Love Always,
MarciaGrace
