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Article Summary: Life often throws unexpected challenges our way, shaking our foundation and testing our resilience. In such moments, techniques like the SOS breath can help calm the nervous system and bring clarity. We can transform these challenges into opportunities for growth. Great souls have walked through tremendous obstacles and emerged victorious by not giving up. By rising to the occasion with a courageous heart and a creative mind, we can turn even the toughest situations into victories. Our problems, whether personal or global, can become stepping-stones to compassion, brilliance, and strength if we meet them with presence and love.
From Struggles to Success: Turning Challenges into Victories
by Nicola Amadora PhD.
When your world is shaken, where to stand? We tend to react to overwhelming or shocking instances with primal survival instinct.
Panicked we freeze, fight, fawn or flee. And fear increases by shallow breathing and rapid thinking as we disconnect from the body, our environment and the present moment. When we don’t have enough oxygen our brain shuts down. Contracted and cut off we usually attack, jump into the defensive, tighten up and tend to make bad decisions when confronted with a difficult situation.
What to do instead when your world is turned upside down and you are frightened to the bone? Use your body and breath as an anchor; this is most effective. Stomp your feet to sense the ground below you and let your body weight drop down. (This too anchors you.)
Look around your environment and focus the mind on what feels safe in the moment. This can be a tree, a picture in the room, a friend. Use the SOS breath. This helps you become present.
SOS Breath:
Put your hands on your belly. Breathe in through your nose down into your belly, count four beats, hold the breath for four beats, and breathe out through the mouth four beats.
Do this for at least three rounds. It will calm your nervous system, and offers you grounding.
Acknowledge what you feel
Neither stuff your feelings down nor let yourself get carried away by them. Ask in your own words for guidance, “Show me the way.” Follow your senses and intuition, trust and act on them. We don’t have time to sit on a meditation cushion in an emergency, but taking valuable seconds to become present and to connect, makes all the difference.
At some point we encounter those famous losses and sudden turns for the worse in life. Sounds fine on paper that challenges are part of living here on planet earth, but how do we actually travel through tumultuous and hellish times?
At a time when I did not know what we would eat the next day, the practice which usually worked, “breathe into your belly and relax,” was as far away from my mind as the earth is from the sky. Many thoughts sang in a chorus of shame. Questions like, “Why did this happen?” or “What’s wrong with me? How did I create this?” “What is the meaning in this?” only made matters worse.
I was resisting something I had no control over. The only option I had was whether I would rise to the occasion or not. Whether I would resist, shut down or respond by walking through this dark period of my life with my head high in the sky and feet on the ground, to let my heart break and listen to wisdom within me, as my boat was entirely sunk and I was paddling for dear life.
Everything looked bleak; my light was drowned somewhere hiding in a storage unit where an entire life was packed up in boxes. I was a forlorn human, whose life had just gone south. But I had to find a way, with no clue in sight showing me what to do. Move to Italy, sell flowers and read poetry out loud? Tempting. Instead, I kept praying: “Show me the way through.”
There was no answer, but to be alone in stillness in nature, to climb to the top of the mountain and surrender with arms wide open.
Miracles happened
Life did turn around after I had kissed the dirt plenty of times. I could tell you stories all night long, if you had such a patient ear. During the years of this marathon ride of hardship, I was severely stripped and tested. It was far from easy, but I plunged into a power and depth I did not know I had, and found freedom right smack in the challenge. Liberation not from something, but being free in the midst of it all. Care arrived from kind people, and truth guided me on the narrow path— straight through hell into what can never be taken, destroyed or die.
Life is impermanent; this is a basic truth. One day we may own a beautiful home and luxuries of every kind, and the next, due to some unforeseen event, we lose it. We try to find security in our outer circumstances: the job, the house or relationship. But, the reality is nothing will stay the same; change is a constant of this dance on the material plane. We do not know what life will throw into our path, how the world will look when we wake up tomorrow, nor what we are made of, when we encounter a trial by fire.
We live in a society which has a hard time with challenges. Storms occur in everyone’s life: earthquakes happen where I live, economies collapse in many places of the world, poverty exists, conflicts arise between people, and fear visits every person.
Great Souls, Tremendous Obstacles
Great souls often encountered tremendous obstacles on their path. How they walked through them is what made them outstanding.
A girl in Afghanistan with a horrific background of abuse rallied girls to make a stand to receive education, whilst facing adversity on all fronts she never gave up. Gandhi probably had more than one challenge on a daily basis. Ammachi was abused as a child. Christ was nailed on the cross. Mary Magdalene was named a pertinent sinner and whore, cast out and degraded for centuries. Martin Luther King, Jr. dealt with threats all the time. And women across the world, who paved the road to freedom for us, encountered harsh resistance from a male-dominated paradigm.
Their greatness emerged because they did not give up, but did rise by walking through challenges victoriously. Their lives serve as an inspiration, alive today, even if they may have already departed long ago.
Rising to the occasion
Trials are part of living in this world. Whether we grow the capacities to rise to the occasion or not is the primary question. We may meet obstacles like a king or queen, a spiritual warrior, who engages with a courageous heart and a creative mind infused by the power of spirit, through which we can turn even the worst situation into a victory. Our difficulties turn into opportunities, if we meet them as such.
Our problems, whether personal or on a global scale, if worked with, can bring forth a triumph for compassion, brilliance and strength... a new invention or creation. When applied in tough situations our capacity for love grows.
If we are busy running from difficulties, however, fear soon drives our life. Sure, it is not easy to see the light at the end of the tunnel, to recognize the opportunity in the awfulness we may experience. It takes gumption to stay present, when the mind and society tell us to hide or run, but we are far more empowered when we face what is showing up—even if it means to feel it all and walk wide awake through a nightmare that seems to have no end.
It’s empowering to seize the opportunity, to relate directly to the hardships on the road. To drop below the story and to lean into the direct experience, to feel what’s there, to breathe, to touch it with presence and love. Something unravels, opens. We may discover a valuable learning, a gift, a need for healing, a softening, or a quality emerges in us we did not know we had.
Often when we have no way out, pressed against a wall, an awakening dawns. Life uses anything to show the way. If we turn toward the difficulties they turn into stepping-stones on the path and boulders crumble to dust, as we touch them from a deeper power inside of us.
From challenge we move toward opportunity and victory may await. Instead of asking, “Why did this happen to me? What’s wrong with me?” let’s turn to wisdom with an open question.
What is life calling forth in me to meet the challenge?
A conflict pushes you to cultivate understanding. Maybe a challenge urges us to make a stand for an important value we may have disregarded before; or a repetitive situation asks to take a wiser turn in life. Or quarreling over the same issue with your mate presents a call to hear what’s really being said. If we deny the issue of racism playing out in our school, life will push us to grow courage and speak up.
Many of the difficulties lie within ourselves. We have old habits that follow us around, even if we have had awakening experiences, read every self-help book there is; as soon as you look away, it comes back up from below. We get triggered and play our favorite patterns from long ago.
It is here that healing, integration and growth are needed, for the shadows will arise over and over again, asking to be seen and transmuted into gold. The pain we experience as a constant companion, the suffering we see at every street corner staring at us through the eyes of strangers, the anguish of a disconnected society, all can be met and tended to with presence and love. Our heart IS big enough.
What is it that you are avoiding or are running from? A discomfort, a conflict, an unpleasant situation? Whatever it is, take a moment and consider what opportunity is presented within this.
Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission.
Article Source:
BOOK: Love Unleashed
Love Unleashed: How to Rise in a World on the Edge
by Nicola Amadora Ph.D.
Urging us to plunge into the depths and heights of love to turn the tide in our lives and this world, this book unleashes a grounded, enlivened path of spirituality for these wild times. You are invited into true adventure stories, refined practices and juicy wisdom teachings.
Guiding you to realize and embody the fountain of love's presence in the muck and beauty, here on Earth and with each other now. For the sake of all beings - savor deeply, connect intimately and live the greatest love story ever told!
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Nicola Amadora PhD. teaches a refreshingly real and embodied way of spirituality to unleash love for the great turning in our lives and this world. For three decades she has been guiding thousands of people as a Spiritual Teacher, Psychologist, Author, and Speaker worldwide. She is the Founder of Living Connection and The Deep Feminine Way and the author of ‘Nothing but Love,’ truth poetry straight from the heart.
When she isn’t teaching, she loves to write and rides horses in the wild. If you want to know about her labor of love find Nicola in one of her books, on the web, or in the streets of this world smiling at you with a twinkle in her eyes.
Visit the author's website at: NicolaAmadora.com
Article Recap: Turning challenges into victories is an empowering journey that requires courage, resilience, and an open heart. By facing difficulties head-on and using them as opportunities for growth, we can transform our lives and emerge stronger. Life's obstacles are not just hurdles but invitations to discover our true potential and inner strength. Embrace the challenges, stay present, and let them guide you to a path of victory and personal growth.
