Support Groups Blog

Last week we talked about how uncomfortable we are with silence, but over the last week, the topic of how necessary silence is has been repeating in our thoughts. When everything is going wrong, a quiet space is the perfect way to find your way again. When your anxiety and stress is off the charts, quietness and solitude are soothing and healing. When you are supporting someone in pain, being quiet and listening is perhaps the best gift you can give. Silence, while often uncomfortable, can be a space where healing, calmness and peace settle like a balm.

The other day, completely out of my comfort zone, I went on a “hike and yoga” morning get together, knowing no one. Having recently started following a particular yoga teacher on Instagram at the recommendation of my yoga instructor, I see that they are doing a hike and yoga session at a park near my house. In these situations my go to is to try and find a friend to go with me. No luck, so then I go back and forth, go, not go, go. So I wake up early, recheck the date and time and decide to do it.

Like a lot of you, I share in the feeling that life sometimes hands you lemons. So many lemons and I don’t want to make lemonade thank you very much. I am too tired, I just want to walk away and add this to the pile of things I talk to a therapist or a friend about. Lonely childhood, check, divorced parents, check, loss of family that meant the world to you, check, and the list goes on. I am finding that the more people I talk to, our stories are starting to sound frightening familiar, have you noticed that on our site too?

We all get into this mindset from time to time where we panic and see our life through whatever the opposite of rose colored glasses is. We see our life through a cracked and chaotic lense and we just freeze, we are terrified that this version of this particular time of our life, is permanent. How I am feeling now is forever, I am never going to fall in love, I will never be a parent, I will never be able to handle this illness or care for the person I love, I was not meant to be a caretaker... and the worries spiral until we are seeing our life as a broken, unfixable mess.

Change is hard, there is nothing harder than doing something different after you have done something a certain way forever! We hem and haw about making a change, we go to therapists, doctors, religious leaders, we read self help books, we look up articles online until our eyes are bleary and it all comes down to this, about any issue or problem you are dealing with, change is needed. But as a whole, we as humans are adverse to change, we like our routines, even if they don’t actually work for us. Our routines are comfortable and comfort is exactly where we like to be in life.