Believe that your struggle is valid

The worst thing you can do is tell yourself that your pain is not important. 

That your struggle is not valid. 

Come, now. Have some respect for your own suffering. Give weight to what happened to you. And if at all possible, find safe places to share it. Find ways to use your pain in a way that benefits other people. 

Because the other destructive lie we tell ourselves is that we have nowhere to turn. 

And it’s simply not true. No path in life is entirely free of suffering. Regardless of how big or small or traumatic or innocuous our pain might feel to us, we have to believe that our struggle is valid. We have to remember that there are hundreds if not thousands of other people in the world who have experienced the exact same thing as us. 

People who have a parallel language to something we are already feeling. 

Gilbert put it best in her book about the joy and struggle of the creative process.

Pain renders our life narrow and thin and isolated. Our suffering takes this whole thrilling gigantic universe and shrinks it down to the size of our own unhappy head. 

That’s what the struggle does to us. We become so alienated that we forget we’re not alone. 

And so, we owe it to ourselves and to the people in our lives to go out of our way to honor the part of ourselves that is not satisfied with a life of estrangement and isolation. 

Thinking back to every support group, mastermind meeting or discussion meetup I’ve attended, the takeaway was always the same. 

Sometimes all we need is an ounce of not alone. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…  

What networking of human healing is your anchor during painful times?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Buy my latest devotional! 

A Year in Hot Yoga: 365 Daily Meditations for On and Off the Mat. 

Now available wherever books are sold.

Namaste.