S2 EP277 – Navigating Life’s Challenges

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m speaking about how to lovingly manage some of the more common challenges we have in life. One of the challenges that I often work on with my clients is when to end a relationship.

I am often asked “How do I know when to end a relationship?” Most people end relationships much too soon. If your physical or emotional safety is being threatened, then you need to leave as soon as possible. However, other than when there is abuse, you may have much to learn before leaving is loving to yourself.

I tell people not to leave when they are unhappy and blaming their partner for their unhappiness. We take our fears, beliefs, and resulting controlling behavior with us into our next relationship – so leaving does not leave these behind. Leaving before doing your own inner work is a waste of time regarding your personal growth. Your issues get triggered within a relationship, so why not stay, learn, and grow – as long as there is no abuse? If you want to be in a loving relationship, then you need to heal your end of your dysfunctional relationship system before moving into another relationship. I have worked with couples for 56 years and have seen over and over that people create the same dysfunctional system with multiple new partners.

Other than when there is physical or emotional abuse, the time to end a relationship is when:

• You have healed your own fears of rejection and engulfment.
• You are no longer reactive to or taking personally your partner’s unloving, controlling behavior.
• You are able to stay open to learning in the face of conflict.

When you are able to keep your loving adult present in conflict and take loving care of yourself without violating your partner, you will find yourself feeling happy and peaceful within. Happiness comes primarily from how we treat ourselves and others, not just from how others treat us.

If once you have achieved this, you still feel no connection with your partner and your partner is not open to learning, growing, and healing with you, it may be time to leave if that is what you want to do. It is highly likely that once you have done your own healing work, either your system with your partner will heal, or if you leave, you will draw in a new partner who is open to learning and sharing love.

When to end a relationship is just one of life’s common challenges. What are your current challenges and how are you dealing with them?

No matter how evolved we are spiritually, life will continue to present us with challenges – because that’s life. Our journey on this planet is about learning and growing in our ability to love ourselves and others, and it’s our challenges that offer us the opportunities to learn and grow.

While we don’t have control over what life presents to us, we do have control over how we meet these challenges. 

Each one of us has challenges. What are yours? Here are some of the life situations that currently challenge many of us, and of course, this is not a complete list.

• You and your partner are having serious relationship problems.
• You are having problems with your children.
• You are having problems with your family – with parents or siblings.
• You are having serious financial problems.
• You are struggling with poverty.
• You are homeless or facing homelessness.
• You are having work problems with your boss, your employees, or your co-workers.
• You are very unhappy with your work.
• You’ve lost a loved one to death – a partner, child, parent, friend, beloved pet.
• You are in the midst of a hard divorce.
• You’ve suffered betrayal by a person close to you or a person in authority.
• You are struggling with a serious illness.
• Someone very close to you is struggling with a serious illness.
• You are struggling with an addiction, such as with food, alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, porn, video games, TV, work, talking, and so on.
• You can’t find a partner and you are very lonely.
• You keep picking the wrong partner.
• You’ve been in a serious accident.
• Someone you love has been in a serious accident.
• You feel anxious, stressed, sad, scared, depressed, angry, guilty, shamed, needy and/or empty much of the time.
• You can’t find you passionate purpose, and your life feels empty and purposeless. You don’t know the point of life.
• You feel alone in the universe. You can’t seem to experience a spiritual connection.
• You keep gaining and losing weight.
• You are losing your eyesight.
• You are losing your hearing.
• You are in physical pain much of the time.
• Childhood abuse keeps affecting your life.
• You keep trying to heal but you feel stuck.
• You struggle with self-loathing.
• You suffer from panic attacks.
• You can’t sleep and you are always tired.

I encourage you to make your own list of your challenges, 

How are you dealing with your challenges?

There are two very different ways that people deal with challenges. Which are you doing?

• You move toward your challenges – embracing them with courage and kindness toward yourself, with compassion for your feelings, and with an open heart. You meet what life offers you with a deep desire to learn and grow – even when it’s very hard.

Or,

• You move away from your challenges – judging them, avoiding them, denying them, numbing from them, turning to various addictions to not feel the pain of them. You feel like a victim of your life challenges.

We’ve all met or known of amazing people who have courageously faced very difficult life challenges, such as the untimely loss of loved ones, financial disaster, severe illness, or paralysis. Or people like Nelson Mandela who spent 27 years in jail and never lost his compassion and caring.

Those who come through strongest are those who have moved toward their challenges in order to learn and grow from them.

I hope you courageously move toward your challenges and open to learning about what these challenges can teach you. I hope you don’t allow life’s inevitable trials to make you bitter. I hope you don’t allow yourself to be a victim of life. Remember, we are on a spiritual journey of the soul’s evolution, and all our challenges are part of this journey. It is possible to turn your challenges into opportunities.

One of our facilitators, Shelley Riutta, who expanded her work into helping people who have a holistic business, wrote the following article on turning challenges into opportunities, and I’m including her article here:  

What do you do in the face of challenge and uncertainty?  Do you get immobilized by fear and sink into negativity? Or do you look at challenges as a springboard to opportunity and growth? 

Our mindset in the face of challenge will dictate our experience of the challenge.  It always amazes me that in just a brief moment we can shift our perspective of a situation and completely transform the experience.  How amazing is that!  Such power we have moment by moment to shape our experiences in life.  No one has this control to create this shift but you. 

If we look at your reaction to the economic changes–what perspective are you choosing?  Is it fear based – “The world is falling apart and it is just going to get worse – I am unsafe”  or “We are going through a huge transformation and I know wonderful things are going to come from it – I am excited to see what good will come from this.” 

One of my favorite Workshops that I conduct is “The Joy Workshop” One of the ideas that I talk about in the Workshop is how challenging people or events around us can be opportunities to practice staying in our own emotional state.  So many of us let situations and others around us determine how we feel moment by moment.  

Instead we all need to determine how we want to feel throughout the day and stick with this–NO MATTER WHAT.  To put it simply – do you want to be a Thermometer (mirroring the temperature of those around you) – or a Thermostat (putting your setting where you want it to be)? 

Now more than ever this is something you can be practicing.  Decide what perspective you would like to take on what is happening in the economy – a fear perspective or a faith perspective. 

One of the opportunities of this current transformation is that we can start to get more deeply that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.  Money and material items do not create safety and security for us.  

Our security is in the truth that we are eternal spiritual beings who are always safe each and every moment.  Harm can come to us on the physical level – but we cannot be harmed or destroyed on the spiritual level – this part of us lives on.  

So what if what we are going through is a transformation – a spiritual awakening – an opportunity to connect more deeply with who we truly are.  Those that open up to this will have an amazing experience and those that resist the opportunity will continue to struggle.  We are all called right now to step out of our stuck patterns of trying to create safety with the patterns of our wounded self – and asked to move more into the light and love of who we are.  

I remember attending a Workshop where the presenter gave this quote “Most people think they are drowning in an ocean of water – when in reality they are just in a wading pool.”   

So don’t buy into the current belief that right now we are all drowning in an ocean of crisis – instead remind yourself and others that we are in a wading pool – and we are capable of navigating this calmly and successfully! 

It’s very interesting to me that Shelley wrote this in 2008 and it still applies today!

A common life challenge is that of being a single parent.

One of the greatest challenges for those of us who are parents is to be loving role-models for our children, showing our children through our behavior how to take personal responsibility for their own feelings and needs. Our children need to learn from our role-modeling how to nurture themselves within and how to create a sense of safety in the world. In families where both a mother and father are present, both parents can participate in nurturing the child emotionally and taking care of the child in the world, and both parents can role-models, if they have done their inner work, what it looks like to do this for themselves.

Single parents have a far greater challenge – they need to be both mother and father to the child. Mothering is that loving energy that nurtures, while fathering energy loves by protecting and taking action in the world – earning money, setting boundaries with others, speaking up for oneself. While our society often defines women as the nurturers and men as the protectors and wage earners, obviously both men and women are capable of nurturing, protecting, and earning money. 

For a single parent to successfully be both mother and father, he or she must have learned how to be both mother and father to their own inner child. In other words, we need to have learned how to nurture our own inner child – how to take responsibility for our own fears, pain, anger, hurt, and disappointment, and how to take care of our inner child in the world – earn money, set boundaries, and so on. There is no way to successfully teach our children these skills until we are doing them ourselves, which means that each of us needs to be in a process of learning how to do this.

Practicing Inner Bonding enables us to care for and nurture ourselves, while also loving others. Inner Bonding teaches us how to become a loving adult to our own inner child and to our actual children.

Inner Bonding defines our inner child as our feeling soul self, who we are as a soul when we are born – our natural creativity, intuition, playfulness, imagination, talents, feelings, and ability to care and love. Our loving adult is everything we learn about loving actions after we are born. Our wounded self consists of all the false beliefs we absorb from the time we are born – and sometimes, even in utero. 

What are you role-modeling for your children?

We start learning how to be an adult from the moment we are born through watching our parents and other caregivers, but too often the role-modeling we receive is from the wounded selves of the adults around us: role-modeling self-abandoning behavior, such as anger, compliance, resistance, withdrawal, judgments, and addictions. Few people had parents who role-modeled being spiritually connected to a higher source of truth and love. It is our unhealed wounded self that causes us problems with ourselves and our children and might be even more challenging as a single parent.

While all parents need to be in a process of healing themselves, it is particularly important for single parents to be in this process since they are the primary role-models for their children. The more you heal the fears and false beliefs of your wounded self, the more loving you will naturally be with yourself and your children. Learning to utilize the six steps of Inner Bonding throughout the day, especially in times of anger, fear, anxiety, irritation, and stress, will eventually lead to loving yourself and being a loving parent for your children. I hope you accept the challenge of learning to be loving to your children by learning to be loving to yourself. While this is important for all parents, it’s especially important and challenging as a single parent.

A major challenge that many of us need to face is learning to manage conflict in ways that create resolution rather than distance. This challenge can come up between partners, with family members, with friends, and at work. Conflicts can be opportunities to learn and grow, or they can end up being deal brakers. 

If you are in a relationship, do you get into conflicts over your differences? If you are not in a relationship, are you looking for someone just like you?

Annie asked:

“Since separating from my husband, I am working on myself, but I realize I still like and attract people similar to him. After eight years of marriage, our relationship came to an end. He is a person driven by intellect and I am more driven by feelings. He wanted me to be more intellectually and career oriented, and I wanted him to be driven by family values and to be emotionally available. As I heal, does it mean I will attract different kinds of men, or will it just mean I will be better able to cope with differences?” 

Differences are what adds spice to life – provided that both people are open to learning from the differences.

This is the key to seeing differences as opportunities rather than deal breakers.

Let’s take Annie’s situation as an example. If she had been open to learning with her husband, she would have valued his intellect and career motivation and might have been open to embracing more of these ways of being into herself. If Annie’s husband had been open to learning, he would have valued her family values and emotional availability. He may have been motivated to examine his values and explore his blocks to emotional availability. Both could have learned and grown as a result of their differences.

So, although Annie states that they separated due to these differences, I disagree that this was the reason. I believe they separated because one or both were not open to learning from the differences. The fact that Annie stated that she still likes and attracts people similar to her husband further supports my belief that it was not the differences themselves that created the problems. Annie might continue to be attracted to men like her husband because she needs to learn and grow in the areas of developing her intellect and her career.

Annie asked if she will attract different kinds of men as she heals, or if she will be better able to cope with the differences. As she becomes more emotionally available with herself due to her Inner Bonding practice, she might attract more emotionally available men. But they will still all have their differences, and unless Annie is open to learning with them and they are open to learning with her, there may still be what seems like irreconcilable differences. 

We all need to learn to accept the challenge of accepting differences, since they will always be here.

The more Annie heals, the more she will be able to accept and value the differences, rather than end a relationship over them.

The differences between Annie and her husband are very common ones between men and women. Instead of ending a relationship over them, why not consider getting some help in learning from them? This might lead both partners into understanding the real issue, which is the intent to control rather than learn with each other.

The most important thing to find out about your potential partner is whether or not he or she is open to learning in conflict. This is why it takes time to get to know someone – it takes time to get into conflict. Conflicts and differences offer us wonderful opportunities to learn and grow – when we have a true intention to learn about ourselves and each other.

The same holds true for relationships with friends, family, and work relationships. Conflicts are always challenging, but we can learn from all conflicts when we are open to learning. 

This is the primary issue in navigating life’s challenges. We recently had a huge challenge when our office burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire, along with the home of our admin assistant. What a mess that was! But by staying open to learning with our guidance about what was in our highest good regarding the dozens of issues that needed to be addressed and resolved, we have been able to untangle the mess that was created and actually come out better than before the fire.  Challenges become opportunities when you put your higher guidance in charge and show up as an open-to-learning, spiritually connected loving adult, rather than put your young or adolescent wounded self in charge. The more you practice Inner Bonding, the more you develop your loving adult and the easier it is to lovingly manage life’s challenges. 

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from all of our books and courses and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.