How to Make Your Tiring & Painful Inner Work a Bit Easier

There are answers you just have to be willing to hear them.

Sometimes you feel like nothing is worth your time anymore. Your energy is exhausted and everything you have worked on still hasn’t shown its results.

The patience it takes to keep working is almost as exhausting as the work itself yet is much harder to keep consistent.

We don’t work on ourselves solely to heal past wounds and to create a new healthier pattern of behavior but we do it to ease the emotions we no longer want to feel. However, that last part is normally only done by the strongest people because they are willing to fight the biggest emotional battles in order to overcome them.

However, what happens when the inner and outer work gets too tiring and you still feel the same way? How can you keep doing something that seems to get you nowhere?

How can you continue to accept and feel the pain you feel and still utilize every possible piece of yourself to fix that pain and make way for the best outcome?

How can you sit productively yet (seemingly) unproductive at the same time when the one thing you are healing for still hasn’t clicked into place?

There are a few answers to all of these painfully honest questions. There are three I want to focus on — patience, self-kindness, and playing the long game.

Patience

It is extremely hard to have patience when you are going through tough times and are working hard for something that feels like it is taking forever to come.

However, even though it is hard to have, patience is extremely helpful during these times. This is because with patience you are able to let go of a time frame and any expectations on a specific result occurring within that period of time.

Additionally, patience is similar to the process of letting go of something. In this case, letting go of the desired result at the desired time. When you allow your mind to have patience you can let go of the need to control when something happens.

As a result of having patience and letting go, the end of your tough time will come sooner and a version of what you are working towards will appear.

On the other hand, the more the push for something to happen the less likely it will be to ever come to you. Even if you do the work for it, your mindset has to be in the right place and patience does not come from fighting without letting go. It comes from fighting while letting go at the same time.

Self-kindness

One of the most loving things you can do for yourself and others during times of intense pain and inner/outer work is being kind to yourself. Being kind to yourself doesn’t just mean saying you love yourself or that you accept yourself but it’s also about giving yourself the grace of being imperfect in the process.

No one is perfect, no matter how hard one tries to be; the more perfect you try to be the more imperfect you feel. Being kind to yourself is about accepting your imperfections, loving them, forgiving yourself for the hate you had towards them, and then healing the unhealthy parts.

Not all imperfections need to be healed, most of them are actually quite great for us to have. The parts that need healing are the ones that create negative patterns and cause harm to you and/or others, such as defense mechanisms. We all have defense mechanisms (because we are imperfect) but they can be healed with self-kindness and hard work.

In addition to accepting your imperfectness, self-kindness also comes from easing the criticisms that you have about yourself.

This is similar to what I talked about with the imperfections, however, easing your criticisms must be switched to kind thoughts. Thoughts that are forgiving and loving, not hurtful and pessimistic.

To learn more about how to ease your inner criticisms read this article: https://skylarrae.medium.com/reframing-your-negative-thoughts-into-positive-ones-1e19347aac71

Playing the long game:

When we get frustrated that we aren’t seeing the results of our work and our unwanted emotions/circumstances are still there it’s often because you are playing the short game.

The short game is looking at things on a short-term scale rather than looking at the big picture or the long-term goals you have for your work. In this short game, we are focused on how we want to feel now so we end up forcing quick results so we can ease those negative feelings.

Furthermore, coupled with the short game is that impatience that limits our ability to make any progress. We are impatient for quick results and pay little attention to the results we want in a year or a few years.

Playing the short game is just as harmful as impatience because it creates that mindset of forcing an outcome in a certain amount of time rather than letting it play out without any attachment.

Therefore, instead, we need to play the long game by allowing the process to take its time and trusting that it will work out in the best way for you.

Whenever we work hard on ourselves and work hard on reaching a goal it is easy to lose sight of the patience you need to let that work do what it needs to.

It’s not impossible to reach your desired outcome but it is if you force it when it’s not ready to happen. Even if you think you’re ready there may still be unknown parts of the process that need to fall into place so you can get to your endgame.

The reality is, we don’t always know every detail of every journey that is necessary to happen for us to receive what we are worthy of. That unknown is what creates impatience and frustration. However, if we can accept it, we can be more aware of the beauty in the process and let go of expectations.

From now on, during hard times, tiring times, and times of seemingly endless pain, work on having patience, being kind to yourself, and pay attention to what your long terms goals are.

This slight altering of your focus will make a difference over time and until then take it day by day. Allow it to work itself out while you give yourself the gift of working with love, not with a rush.

❤️🌻 Thank you for reading!
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