You’re Not Doing It Wrong—Some Things Are Just Hard

I want to give you some encouragement today. 

Maybe you are doing all the things: meditating, exercising, connecting with loved ones, drawing boundaries, feeling your feelings, practicing gratitude, getting time outdoors, repeating the mantras, getting 8 hours of sleep, doing allllll the self-care… and what you’re going through still feels hard. You’re asking yourself what you are doing wrong because you can’t find a way to make the experience easier! 

I’m here to tell you that perhaps what you’re going through feels hard because it IS hard, not because you’re doing anything wrong. Often we tell ourselves that if the conversation feels tricky or if we’re struggling to access the motivation for something or if we’re experiencing heavy emotions and crying frequently that it means we aren’t ‘doing enough.’ We think that because life feels hard it means we just haven’t found the *right* mantra or we didn’t practice yoga for *long enough* or we are *missing* some perspective on the situation that if only we could see the missing puzzle piece this would all get easier.

Take a deep breath, give yourself a break, and remind yourself that hard things feel hard precisely because they are (you know where the end of this sentence is going by now)… hard. So the invitation is to not make the hard even more difficult by piling on the guilt or the self-condemnation for not figuring out how to make it easier. You may have heard the term “radical acceptance” before. This is where we can put that into practice by simply accepting that hard things are hard. And perhaps, paradoxically, accepting that something is just plain tough may just lighten the weight of carrying it.