Keeping Safe Through Difficult Times

When we're in the middle of intense and challenging times, it becomes even more urgent than usual for us to have compassion for our selves: for us to be tender and loving toward our frazzled, stressed or feeling-stuck selves. It is especially important to remember that we each have our own rhythm and style with which we process crises and impasses. It isn't okay to use anyone else's way as a standard against which to measure our progress. Click to Continue…
  
It's important to remember that what look like detours, avoidance, and running away may simply be ways we are taking exactly the time that we need in order to get to the next place. When change is accelerating and everything is moving very quickly, it helps to try living in the very thinnest slice of now that we can define. It helps, as well, to remember that pulling the covers over our head and feeling sorry for our selves can be very relieving and helpful respite. It's one sure way of taking a rest before we go back into the fray.

Choose the card below that speaks to you in this moment.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Not Rushing

Staying with our selves in the middle of (rather than rushing away from) difficult emotional processes, we dare to feel, release and organically come out the far side of those processes.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Forgiving Before It’s Time

Finding permission not to push our selves into forgiving those who have abused or wounded us when such forgiving feels like it re-violates our tender, wounded selves.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

When Others Criticize You

Understanding that as we practice becoming fiercely protective, unconditionally loving mothers to our selves, our view of our selves becomes more independent of others' opinions of us.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Measuring Your Self

Learning not to measure our selves against what others are doing or what the culture prescribes; coming to trust that our own process of unfolding is the right one for us.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Others’ View

Recognizing the importance of listening to our own inner knowing place, even in the darkest times: a story of enmeshment and emergence from an emotionally abusive relationship.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Feeling Sad

Honoring our right to claim all the time and space we need to make it safe to feel our "dark" feelings, to uncover the knowings, wisdom and truths in their depths.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Being Exactly Where You Are

Giving our selves permission to be just where we are while we're there so that we can be fully present to these trying, challenging, difficult times and can learn what we need to from them.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Feeling Unsafe

Practicing becoming a consistent and fierce protector for our vulnerable selves, trusting that we must act from what is so for us in the moment, not from what is supposedly "really so.”

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Surrendering

Honoring the active, empowered and empowering process of giving up the struggle of resisting what-is-so without forcing our selves to give up our feelings about what-is-so.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Angry Feelings

Recognizing that angry, nasty, mean-spirited feelings are signals that something "not good for us" is going on; listening inward to discover what that something might be and what we need to do about it.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Mistakes Are Opportunities

Claiming mistakes as a normal, unavoidable part of the process of life that can offer us opportunities both to see more deeply into and to grow our selves.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Comforting Our Selves

Recognizing that most often it is our own comforting for which we are yearning; then giving our selves permission to apply our exquisitely honed nurturing skills to our very own wounded selves.

Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22 Kristen Ruth Smith 5/26/22

Owning Our Fears

Claiming our right to our own fears: listening to them, taking them seriously, honoring them and taking good care of our selves in the middle of them.