How to Be Less Anxious About Things You Can't Change

a post by Benjamin Fishel for the Tiny Buddha blog


“One of the happiest moments is when you find the courage to let go of what you can’t change.” ~Unknown

Over the last few years, I’ve had to deal with a frustrating problem.

It’s something that’s not uncommon, but it can be debilitating, and it has affected me every day. Some days have been incredibly tough, and they’ve tested my tolerance and my patience.

The problem is chronic back pain.

Every day I get up, knowing that throughout the day I’m going to have a discomfort that could oscillate between a mild annoyance and an intense burning. At some point, it’s going to distract me. Either while I work, while I eat, while I meditate, while I exercise, and sometimes while I sleep.

You’d think by now I would’ve gotten used to it, that it would’ve become the unwelcomed friend that I’d learned to live with. Unfortunately, that’s only the case sometimes.

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Understanding the Cycle of Pain: How to Transmute Anger into Empathy

a post by Joshua Kauffman for the Tiny Buddha blog


“When we get angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget … When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

There is so much to be angry about every day because life is unfair.

My own situation right now is infuriating. I left my job and my home country in large part to return back to the US and help my mom care for my father. During that time, my mother’s frustration with her role as caregiver, along with the emotional stresses and practical limitations it placed on her, often boiled over into rage directed at me. This situation persisted for ten months.

Immediately after that, she herself became terminally ill, and now my role is caregiver. My whole life plan has had to change as a result, so my hopes of going back to my old life now need to take a backseat to my mother’s illness, which was brought about by her own behavior (smoking). For so many years I had asked her to quit, to which she reacted—you guessed it—angrily.

When it was clear she wasn’t doing well, I encouraged her to see a doctor. She got angry with me.

While in the hospital, she was frustrated at being confined to a bed. She took her anger and frustration out on me for that too.

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How I Got My Spark for Life Back: 5 Practices for Healing and Happiness

a post by Bethany Fullerton for the Tiny Buddha blog




Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free. ~Robert Tew

In 2014, I was drowning in unhappiness. I had moved to Palestine five years earlier, later met my husband, and decided to remain in one of the most conflicted countries in the world.

There I was, living in a different country far from the comforts of home that I had always known. My marriage was rife with conflict and pain, and I had nobody to turn to.

I had no family nearby, and with the high turnover of internationals in the country, many of the friends I’d made had left to go back to their home countries, leaving me behind.

My fear and shame around the difficulties in my marriage kept me from sharing my struggles with the few friends that remained. My friendships felt shallow, and I felt more and more isolated and alone.

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Art therapy improves mood, and reduces pain and anxiety when offered at bedside during acute hospital treatment

an article by Tamara A. Shella (Arts and Medicine Institute, Cleveland, OH, USA) published in The Arts in Psychotherapy Volume 57 (February 2018)

Highlights

• A chart review, of the impact of art therapy at the bedside, with patients (N = 195) admitted for acute care at a large, urban, teaching hospital.
• Analysis of results demonstrated significant improvements in pain, mood, and anxiety levels within all patients regardless of gender, age, or diagnosis.
• Art therapy may be a safe and cost effective intervention as an adjunct to traditional medical management.

Abstract

Art therapists can engage medical inpatients in the creation of art to encourage emotional and physical healing. Utilizing a chart review, the impact of art therapy sessions at the bedside with patients (N = 195) in a large urban teaching hospital was reviewed.

The sample was predominantly female (n = 166) as more women than men agreed to participate in an art therapy session. As a routine part of regular clinical practice patients were asked to rate their perception of mood, anxiety, and pain using a 5-point faces scale before and after an art therapy session conducted by a registered art therapist.

Multiple diagnoses were included in this chart review, making this study more representative of the variety of medical issues leading to hospitalization. Analysis of pre and post results demonstrated significant improvements in pain, mood, and anxiety levels of art therapy sessions for all patients regardless of gender, age, or diagnosis (all p < 0.001).

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How We Can Break the Cycle of Pain

a post by Joshua Kauffman for the Tiny Buddha blog

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” ~Gandhi    

Pain is and isn’t just like energy. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed but is merely converted from one form to another.

For example, the light energy from the sun can be harnessed by plants, which, through photosynthesis, convert it to chemical energy. Plants use this energy to grow fruit, which we eat. We store this energy for when we need to exert ourselves, when we convert it to kinetic energy. The energy never disappears, but is instead just displaced.

Pain is in a sense the same, creating a parallel to the first law of thermodynamics which I call the cycle of pain.

The manager is belittled by his boss because the boss was frustrated with the latest quarterly results, which disappointed because the customers were unhappy with the product. Upset, the manager comes home and mouths off to his wife, who is carrying her own tribulations from work.

The wife and mother then loses her temper with her son, who is hurt by his mother’s outburst. In pain and having witnessed a bad example from his mother about what to do with frustration, the son then goes to school the next day and causes a fight in the classroom during the teacher’s lesson.

His plans in tatters with the class disrupted, the teacher then exacts collective punishment on the whole class, who then each go and act out the negativity in their own separate ways.

The form of the pain changes, but it doesn’t go away – it’s spread out and perpetrated on new victims in a seemingly endless cycle of pain.

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I have included more than usual from this post as there was no point at which I could stop the story of the cycle of pain. However, the rest of the post is much more upbeat so do, please, read it. All the way through to the end. Each of us has the power to stop someone’s cycle sometime. If all my contacts on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ele Friends etc) stopped just one cycle each year think what a power for good we could be.

Love to all and, for those who are not offended by my posting this, may God bless you all.

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License to Hurt: What We Really Need When We’re in Pain

a post by Jan DeBlieu for the Tiny Buddha blog


“We’ll light the candle together when she’s ready. For now I’ll trust the darkness for us both.” ~Terri St. Cloud

Over breakfast one morning recently, Jeff and I started reminiscing about past years, and something was said that brought back a painful memory for me. My boss at the time had been unimaginably small-minded. He had hung me out to dry. “I still can’t understand why he did that,” I said.

Jeff looked at me levelly. “You need to get over it, Jan,” he said. “It was years ago.”

Wise advice, without question. The only problem was that I didn’t want it just then.

Why is it that we are so seldom allowed a few moments just to hurt? After a serious heartbreak like the death of a loved one, sure, we’re given all the leeway we need. But the run-of-the-mill slights and small, persistent sorrows are treated as something we should quickly move past, even when they’re deeply painful.

Jeff, poor guy, was just trying to help. I couldn’t fault him. I knew I was being a bit ridiculous. But what I longed for was someone to acknowledge my outrage, let me sit with it, live into it for a few moments – and then gently remind me that it’s time to get over it.

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My husband is like Jeff with his “that was a long time ago”. However, whilst acknowledging the irrational thoughts that come into my head whenever I hear a certain person’s voice, I can only manage those thoughts by getting as far away from said person as is possible. If I was crying over my father’s death he would be all sympathy although that was more than 50 years ago, but being terrified of someone who threatened to throw a brick through my head and also to have me locked up because I was a loony is a matter for ridicule.
I guess that is life!

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