The Five Gifts by Laurie Nadel

Author:Laurie Nadel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: discover;discovering;hope;healing;strength;disaster;strikes;Laurie Nadel;gifts;The Five Gifts;five
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Reframing Crisis

Power questions speak to the creative unconscious, the part of the mind that can synthesize data and ideas into new patterns of understanding. The creative unconscious deep-dives into paradox, seeking new perspectives to help us find the light in painful realities. Learning to mind-shift determines whether you live in hell or are living through a crisis that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

After a disaster, life can become so overwhelming that you want to give up. “But let’s not give up hope,” says Dr. Pattakos. “If you can’t change what you observe with your five senses because those are conditions out of your control, you can shift your own position as the observer. This is not to marginalize or minimize the value or the suffering you might be enduring. If we can get out of our mental prison, so to speak, we increase our likelihood that we might find a solution to our dilemma.”

Author Deena Metzger shows us how in her brilliant reframe of sickness:

“A sacred illness is one that educates us and alters us from the inside out, providing experiences and therefore knowledge that we could not possibly achieve any other way.”

The same principle can be applied towards the event—or injury, as it is sometimes called—that wounded you.

Empathy and Meaning

Viktor Frankl used to say, “The meaning of life is meaning.”

“What that means is that it’s a process, a journey of self-discovery,” says Dr. Pattakos. “It’s not something that basically has a destination to it. Meaning can come in the form of moments of joy.”

When you find yourself facing a tragic event that is not of your own choosing, try to take a step back and ask yourself, “Where in this situation are the seeds of meaning?” This will show you a different path through the post-disaster landscape, one that will give you more wholeness, integrity, and a sense of purpose. Having learned something by shifting your perspective, you might be surprised to find that the third gift—empathy—naturally moves you to reach out and help other people find their way along with you. Whatever the circumstances, there are seeds of meaning in every moment, up to our very last breath.

Soul Vitamins

Soul vitamins are moments when you feel that you are fully alive. You can experience them in survival situations, through vigorous exercise, or by shifting your attention from the outer world of people, activities, and things to your inner world of concepts and ideas—where you can reflect, regroup, and regenerate an optimistic mindset. Maybe the best you can hope for now is “cautiously optimistic,” but that state of mind still works to inch you forward.

Just as you would not pressure a baby bird that fell out of its nest, this is not a time to pressure yourself with a major self-improvement program. Nor is it the time to stop smoking, lose weight, get married or divorced, change careers, or move—unless extreme circumstances demand it.

Soul vitamin time can be a few minutes where you consciously give yourself permission to relax fully.

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