Story Essence: It is extremely important to adjust your mind-set in circumstances that you can’t control. Instead of feeling that a situation is futile, you could turn it around and begin taking a different mind-set. Begin looking for how the situation can make you better. You’ll amaze yourself at how quickly you can transcend the futility purely through changing your mind-set.

Episode 6: The Power of Your Mind-Set

Story Essence: Helen Keller’s life teaches us that the process of finding meaning in suffering does not lie in feeling like a victim of your fate. Instead, it comes from overcoming your suffering by reaching out and helping others.

Episode 7 - Finding Meaning from Suffering

Story Essence: Although we don’t have to suffer to learn, the only way to take advantage of suffering is to work out what it’s here to teach us. In the supreme difficulties of the concentration camps, Frankl rose to the challenge of his suffering by refusing to give up; he chose to grow, even through the suffering.

Turn Suffering into a Challenge

Story Essence: If life is something we can lose, what have we achieved with our lives? Did we discover our purpose, our calling? Did we break through the fog of our own fears and fulfil our reason for coming onto this Earth?

Is Fear Holding You Back from Your Calling?

Story Essence: By realising how hard I was on myself, how I felt 100% responsible for the failure of my marriage, how I engaged in negative self-talk, berating myself in my inner dialogue, I was able to give myself the essential gift of self-compassion. Being harsh and demanding of ourselves makes life even more difficult than it already is. Instead, by freeing ourselves of the full responsibility that we often carry all too easily, we can give ourselves this essential kindness, a compassion for our own human frailty. We are just as we are. Embracing this is life-affirming.

Episode 10: Learning Self-Compassion

Story Essence: By bearing suffering with dignity, you can be inspired to lift yourself out of your immediate surroundings and sufferings.

Episode 11: Suffering can be an Inspiration

A sample of the short story: Belongings In The Sand - The Tale of the Red-Heeled Shoes.

A fictional short story. A tale of misadventure, from the desert between Dubai and Abu Dhabi and the journeys between. A journey like a Kafka joke, could this be real? Juxtaposition of ordinary and surreal. Would I be able to escape unharmed? What was to become of me? 

"Frightened, I stood, surrounded by my few belongings. I couldn’t help but stare at the sand covering the toes of my new shoes, black, pointy toed, with a flash of red at the heel. Like me–just a flash of the possibility of intrigue. The heat feels like 40 degrees. Cars careen by at outrageous speeds, but this is only in the periphery of my consciousness. There is nothing but sand and freeway and two individuals arguing in a language I can’t understand. Two cars parked at an angle at the edge of the bleak desert. My mind can hardly grasp the reality of what has happened. So far from home, I am frozen in the sand. Were I to see myself from above, I might look like a modern day gargoyle. All I can think in that moment of me staring is: “…oh, my new shoes are getting ruined. If only I had worn my black takkies.” Nothing else seemed possible. No running, no fighting would help me now. 

Royalty free music "Music: Song title - Bensound.com Cover art by Sabrina Gennari Read by James Blackburn Edited by Amber Knox and co-edited by Michael Robert Leask.

Sample Audio Belongings In The Sand - The Tale of the Red-Heeled Shoes

Day 1 of a 30 Day Programme: No matter how hard a situation is, know that it will pass. Everything changes. Really knowing that something painful will pass, deep in the very pores of your being, embracing this and taking it to heart, can profoundly change the way that you experience difficult situations. Our ability to choose our response is our freedom. Despite limitations, how do we transcend the constraints imposed by our environments?

This Too Shall Pass

Life Coach: life purpose and meaning coaching via Skype, as well as mindfulness training, now available. New 12-week psycho-education coaching programme available on Skype including mindfulness & discovering meaning. I am a personal meaning and mindfulness coach, eTutor and teacher, currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. My interests range from mindfulness meditation to discovering meaning and purpose, Viktor Frankl, and compassion.

CarolK

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