Embracing The Discomfort Of Commitment

“It’s like running from Boston to Dallas.”

Julie is a dedicated fitness and wellness professional, and as a personal trainer running has become important to her. She shared that this past week she set a personal record for miles run in a week. Annualized, that total would cover 1,768 miles, the distance from Boston to Dallas.

“That is crazy!”

I sense that people fully committed to meeting their goals encounter that word often. Crazy. Those who show up daily, driven, fueled by a vision others can’t see nor even understand, those with zero tolerance for excuses, those willing to hold themselves accountable for the commitments they have made, especially the ones they’ve made to themselves. Behavior like this is for the most part unordinary, dwelling outside the realm of what is considered “normal” which can then easily be categorized as crazy.

But it’s never labeled as such by others also honoring their own commitments. Because they know what personal commitment demands and they forge ahead anyway.

It’s never the easiest path.

Life give us a choice as to how we decide to live it. We can take what comes our way, or we can Continue reading “Embracing The Discomfort Of Commitment” →

The Greater Risk Is Not Being Authentically You

Authenticity sounds simple, right? To be yourself, fearlessly. Yet at some point for most of us we learned our authentic self expression was actually something to be feared.

Authenticity comes with great risk, a risk that who we really are won’t be understood or accepted in our most-important relationships. The fear of such isolation often leads us to suppress many of the parts of us which make us so beautifully and authentically unique.

So, to provide a perceived sense of safety, we dim our light for those who can’t handle our brightness, for we fear being left alone in the darkness. Our fear of abandonment leads us to abandon our truest self, an increasingly high price to pay the longer we choose to do so.

Conformity makes everyone comfortable. Except us.

In time we will be pained realizing the greater risk is in not authentically expressing who we are. And Continue reading “The Greater Risk Is Not Being Authentically You” →

Self Compassion Looks Good On You

Mom told us the day was coming, the day we would all stand before our Creator and be held accountable for the way we lived our lives. Awaiting us all will be either a stairway to heaven or a highway to hell.

Judgment Day. The ultimate exit interview. “Heaven or hell? What will it be?”

Many of us need not stand before our Creator at the end of our lives in order to be judged.

We already do this. To ourself.

And we can make our life a living hell in the process.

In a world which can be quite cruel at times, we, too, can be just as cruel. To ourself. Because we know who we really are, don’t we? We know our flaws and shortcomings better than anyone, and no matter how well we may hide them from the rest of the world, we will never be able to hide them from ourself.

And there is so much to judge, isn’t there? Our appearance, our weight, what we haven’t accomplished, what we haven’t become, what we drive, where we live, what we earn, the expectations we’ve not lived up to, both our own or the expectations of others. There is always something we’re falling short of if we just look a little deeper.

We can become quite good at paving our own highway to inner hell.

Sometimes we find ourselves embracing habitual patterns of our own emotional self-destruction without ever knowing why we do so. Sometimes we do so because we’ve simply Continue reading “Self Compassion Looks Good On You” →

Trauma, Healing, Compassion, & Empathy

Perhaps this would have changed everything?

Just a few right words spoken at the right time could have significantly shifted the direction of that life. Or those reassuring conversations which were vulnerably started yet were met with a defiant wall of silence, the desperately extended hand not grasped by one who could have pulled us to a space of emotional safety.

The seeds of our greatest possibility never watered, the weeds of our insecurities and fears never pulled.

As I sit here this early morning, I find I am reflecting upon some of the stories I’ve both witnessed and experienced, some deeply painful life trauma stories others have bravely entrusted me with and the painful ones I’ve lived through on my own.

Our deepest pains are personal and seldom understood by others. Or even our self. The screams are often silent, and we carry this heaviness alone, simply moving forward the best we can, sometimes in rather unhealthy ways as we try to numb a pain only we can feel. Trauma is alive and invisibly thriving within all of us at one level or another.

As I’ve worked with my own traumatic experiences I’ve come to respect their presence in my life. No longer do I attempt to minimize their impact upon me. No longer do I chastise myself for letting events and outcomes I did not control actually control me. The pain and its impact have yet to be fully worked through, and perhaps they may never be fully processed. But there is no longer anyone to blame, neither the ones who unknowingly inflicted a pain that would shape a lifetime, nor the recipient of the pain for letting it do so.

This is where my healing truly begins.

I often wondered what life would have been like had those few right words at the right time been Continue reading “Trauma, Healing, Compassion, & Empathy” →

Is It Safe For Me To Talk About Mental Health?

Life certainly has it’s share of pain, doesn’t it?

May is National Mental Health Awareness Month. One of the goals of NMHA Month is to hopefully provide a safe space for uncomfortable conversations around mental and emotional health. The unfortunate stigmas surrounding mental health often prevent any conversations from even getting started. That silence keeps us suffering…alone. Alone with the pain and the hurt and the anxiety and isolation we may be experiencing.

That silence, at times, can even end lives.

That’s how I lost my brother Steve.

As a man, I was taught to keep my emotions to myself. I think most men have been told or shown the same. Expressing emotions is a sign of weakness, they’d say. “Real” men simply “suck it up” or “deal with it” or are told to “man up”. Manhood and emotions don’t mix, I was told. Generational stigma often keeps us from even admitting that we are struggling, let alone actually seeking some help and guidance. And while I’ve only experienced this from my male perspective, mental health stigma is not gender specific.

Mental and emotional health challenges quietly impact every section of our society.

The silence perpetuates the stigma.

This stigma needs to end.

There are many of us dealing with the heaviness life sometimes forces us to carry…the loss, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the unhealed traumas, the emotional scars, the pressure, the unmet needs and Continue reading “Is It Safe For Me To Talk About Mental Health?” →

Compassionate Moments Of Self-Discovery

“What’s wrong with me?” Gretchen sang, quite painfully.

The high school drama club’s spring production this year was “Mean Girls”, a condensed musical version of the motion picture written by Tina Fey originally released in 2004. It retells the age old story of fitting in and acceptance in the high school environment. Gretchen was in the inner circle of the school’s most important clique led by Regina. In exchange for being somewhat accepted, Gretchen paid the very steep price of essentially sacrificing her authentic self in the process. A painful process which led her to painfully question her own worth and value.

Insecurity is a powerful force. It preys upon our perceptions of unworthiness. It preys up our need to be safely accepted as we are, even if we compromise who we are in the process.

It’s a rather cruel process.

We are exposed to messages of insecurity daily. Our economy needs us to feel insecure about who we are, what we look like, how much we weigh, what we drive, and where we live. Social media is littered Continue reading “Compassionate Moments Of Self-Discovery” →

Finding Your Own Sacred Space To Be You

I didn’t intend it to turn out this way.

But I guess it did.

It’s late 2008 and I’m highly annoyed. The world inside me and around me full of frustration and negativity. At that stage of my life I was quite good at complaining, easily adding my highly opinionated voice to the “somebody should do something” chorus knowing that I would not be the one to try and actually do something to change anything.

But for some reason something told me I should try and do something. My lack of qualifications as a writer was offset with a passionate conviction to try and give positivity a little more visibility in the world.

Especially mine.

15 years ago – April 20, 2009 – I anxiously hit the “Publish” button for the first time and this blog went live. I offered my faint voice of optimism into an increasingly negative and hostile universe.

Posting uplifting quotes gradually lead to me to actually attempting to post original content, again, driven by a desire to add my own voice and share some positivity, hope, and optimism into the lives of those who visited the site. And while the goal was to write for others, writing eventually became something I needed to do for me.

Turns out I needed the same positivity, hope, and optimism I wanted to offer others.

Writing these posts over the years has served as a form of self-therapy. Often posts are birthed out of my attempts to deal with my own frustrations, confusion, and pain life at times creates for us all. The Continue reading “Finding Your Own Sacred Space To Be You” →

The Magnetic Nature Of Expectations

The quote arrived in a social media feed.

“Expect nothing. Appreciate everything.”

The appreciate everything part…I can learn to do that. But the expect nothing part?

Is that even possible?

I’m not sure where my expectations come from, but they’ve always been there in one form or another. Expectations for myself as well as expectations for others. Especially the ones I had for others. Buddha warned that unmet expectations certainly can be a source of great suffering.

That’s exactly what they’ve been for me.

My problem with my expectations is they would often contradict reality. It was me not accepting What Is in favor of how it is I felt it Should Be. Or needed it to be. Forcing is a form of fear, a need to control that which is out of your control. Yes, a perfect breeding ground for a great source of suffering to flourish in.

Releasing expectations is a pathway towards peace, but for me it’s been a bit of a rocky road. Having no expectations means no one can disappoint you nor let you down, right? But many attempts to expect nothing proved to be nothing more than jaded, passive aggressive attempts to defiantly deal with my Continue reading “The Magnetic Nature Of Expectations” →

What Are You Saying To You About You?

I forgot I even owned one.

Going through a long-forgotten box in the back of my closet, and there it was. A Brother P-Touch label maker. Perhaps you had one as well? Simply type in the title of your label, hit “print” and out comes the custom label, right in the palm of your hand. It was rather addictive. I labeled just about everything. File folders, storage tubs, canisters of flour and sugar, even the wires coming out of the back of my computer.

I remember peeling off the back of the printed labels to reveal the sticky side of the tape. With large fingers, it proved to be a challenge from time to time, but once the labels were affixed to the surface they stuck for good.

Labels do have a way of sticking around.

Especially the ones we stick on our self.

As humans we are quite good at creating labels about who we think we are and what is possible for us. Have you ever listened to how you speak to yourself? How often do we reaffirm our limitations? How often do we reinforce a belief system which inhibits our growth and expansion? How often do we let life’s experiences define who it is we accept ourself to be, of letting our past determine our future? When we habitually tell ourselves we’re not good enough, talented enough, beautiful enough, strong enough…when we believe we’re unlovable, that we’re “too much’, unlucky, unworthy…those labels will keep us stuck exactly where we don’t really want to be.

These self-imposed labels greatly influence our overall sense of identity, and our accepted identity is our self-fulfilling prophecy.

The labels we willingly accept don’t even need to actually be true. We just need to believe they are true and our world will unfold accordingly. The good news is these labels are only permanent if allow them to Continue reading “What Are You Saying To You About You?” →

The Unexpected Wisdom Of Blueberry Pop-Tarts

My perfectly scheduled afternoon wasn’t running so perfectly.

An upcoming minor surgical procedure required me get a couple of vials of blood drawn ahead of the surgery. The plan allowed me time to get a quick bite to eat after my blood work which would still give me enough time to get back to my desk for a rather important conference call. When the blood work ran much longer than anticipated, eating lunch morphed into grabbing whatever I happened to have in my glove box in the car as I raced back to the office to make my 1:30 call.

In this instance, the only thing to eat in the glove box were Blueberry Pop-Tarts.

I can’t remember the last time I had eaten a Pop-Tart. I’d enjoyed my share of them over my younger years but they just don’t have a place in a more health-conscious food plan I have for myself. As a dad who often transports over-scheduled kids between their over-scheduled appointments, snacks can usually be found in the car to make sure the kids have something in their stomachs before jumping into their next activity.

Not having had Pop-Tarts in quite some time, it was like I was eating them for the first time. I re-discovered the crumbling texture of the crust, the sweetness of the artificial blueberries, the smoothness of the chemically-enhanced frosting on top.

I liked them a lot more before I grew up and knew exactly what I was eating.

When we try things for the first time we do so with a heightened sense of awareness. We notice all the Continue reading “The Unexpected Wisdom Of Blueberry Pop-Tarts” →

Peter Mis LivingHalfFull.com

Lessons From A Life Unfolding

Tag: mental health