Week 5: Working Through the Pain - alternativeSOHO

I’ve been steadily working away at my goals and if I do say so myself, was making excellent progress. But then something unexpected happened — life.

I found myself nauseous often and suffering from headaches. At first, I tried to push through the pain so I could keep my steady pace and accomplish my goals on schedule.

I found out the hard way that when your body is in pain, it is trying to tell you that something’s wrong. This should be painfully obvious common sense, but c’mon — how many of you stop working simply because you don’t feel good or still go into work although you know you’re coughing, sneezing, hacking, etc. - raise your hands, don’t be shy.

As if getting sick wasn’t enough, I had to bring a family member to the hospital for surgery which added a great deal of stress to the situation, and if that didn’t beat all, even more personal problems found its way into the mix. All of this in just a week and a half’s time.

I wanted to give up. That’s right, just yesterday, I finally had to come away from the computer because my head was killing me and as I lay in bed, I wanted to just throw in the towel, claim a foul, and just stop trying at everything. Then my mindset just shifted.

I don’t remember exactly what caused the shift, but in the back of my mind I remembered something I read a while ago. This was something that has been said in so many different ways and in so many different books and manuals from the Kabbalah to Joe Vitale’s Attractor Factor — we create our experiences. I knew that I needed to step outside of it all and put everything in perspective. I needed to change my internal tension into internal peace.

The world that we consider real is really just an illusion. An emulation of what’s inside ourselves, our thoughts. Everything in existence was once a thought before it was “real” - from the computer that I’m typing on to the highways that we drive on.

I needed to figure out why I was creating this tension and what the real fear was - failure, success, something in between? Once I figured out where the resistance was and why I was resisting, I didn’t feel like giving up any more. I woke up this morning feeling much better and excited to get back to work.

Week 5 taught me some valuable lessons. If you’re in pain, stop what you’re doing and tend to it. Don’t just slap some aspirin on it and pray that it will fix itself. When faced with adversity, don’t lament it - instead, embrace it and find out the lessons you need to learn from it.

So as I work through the remainder of week 6, I will be working on my priorities, my mindset and becoming clear in what I want to accomplish. I will be taking some quiet time today to allow myself to heal and get my mental affairs in order. Just because I felt better today doesn’t mean that I’m out of the woods yet…