✓CONSCIOUSLY LIVING WITH CHANGE✓PART 2 Author: Portland Halmich Quite recently I wrote about the stages of change, today I want to finish with useful tools for living through them that you can use yourself. So how to live through the inevitable waves of change with greater grace, resilience, faith, skills and self-compassion? This is possible with the help of invaluable tools that will help relieve physical and mental stress, reduce the need to manipulate and control your experiences, switch to a non-judgmental awareness of self-observation, which leads to radical acceptance of change, through which we are so often afraid to go through. Here's how it works ⤵️✨Breathe. Breathing brings us back to the present moment, helps reduce cortisol levels, and our muscles relax. Therefore, this is the first thing to remember when panic arises, breathe deeply ✨Relax. Deep breathing certainly helps you relax. And relaxation not only releases tension because the muscles relax, but it also softens the mental constructs we put on the situation, i.e. our harsh prism of perception and the emotional pain it causes ✨Feel. We cannot avoid this step. I want so badly not to feel the pain of loss - that pain at the core, the increasing heartbeat of fear that I will be alone forever, the grief I feel because I miss the sound of his voice. But if we don't allow ourselves to feel that pain, we may replace that pain with less than healthy behavior, risking returning to the habit or situation we want to break. Watch. Observation is self-observation without judgment. It is the ability to witness, to notice, and to develop the ability to be mindful. By observing our thoughts, actions, words, beliefs and reactions, we train ourselves to be present in our experience with an open heart✨Allow. This is perhaps the most difficult thing. Stop trying to somehow change this situation, make it different. Allowing is the practice of surrendering, turning off control, manipulation, expectations and the need for something to be, look, feel a certain way. Allowing allows intuition to emerge and life to flow. We give up attachment to the outcome and allow our experience to be exactly as it is. These are tools to deal with the emptiness that I'm sure I'll feel tonight. When I want to pick up the phone and call him, I need to take a deep breath. When I feel how tense my shoulders are and how my stomach is tightened, I consciously relax my muscles. When I feel tears coming, I need to let them flow. When I want to escape my feelings by distracting myself from them, I need to instead sit on my pillow and observe my thoughts or write them down in a journal. And when I stretch my brain, imagining how I could heal this relationship by saying or doing this or that, when I want to text him, tell him something, and he will do this in return, I need to practice letting go of attachment to the end result of these changes. Sick attachment takes a lot of our strength.