After every darkness comes light

No one can avoid struggle or hardships in life as it’s a part of life. Our day begins with a light and ends with a darkness to introduce us with a fresh and new light, with which we start our new day. In fact, many a time, we face hardships or such situations that even shake us to the core. Any this is how our life flows, and this is how we recall ourselves the true essence of life in its purest form, i.e. challenges bring celebrations and success, the loss brings learnings learning to us, and sorrow brings us a new hope of happiness.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

We indeed forget to realize that these hardships are in fact a gift from life itself. When we face any betrayal or any low point in life; be it illness, hurt, relationship breakdown or financial ruin, we dwell into the phase of darkness. But it’s actually an opportunity for the emergence of soul. These are the situations when your soul speaks to you and make you realize that you are not what you are presently due to such circumstances, but you something or someone far greater.

Every darkness always turns to light; every cry always turns to laughter. It's just a matter of choice how you take that sorrow or darkness in your life and how better you let the new beginnings, a new ray of light and hope enter into your life. Whenever you encounter darkness, always consider it as an opportunity to come out as a more shining star.

Most painful truths which ultimately help us grow in life

Before a thing finally comes to you, you certainly have to go through various life lessons in order to become the most deserved for the thing you desire to achieve in your life path. We learn various lessons in our life path, some of those bring out our true personality and are prerequisite & destined in order to help us grow in life and reach our sole purpose in life.

Let’s dig into few most painful truths of life which become major learnings of our life

1.       You are the only one who create the life you live

You are completely accountable for the life you live because you are only one who chooses the path of your life. Others can only persuade you, but cannot decide for you. They can accompany you in walking on your path, but not in your shoes. So you must make sure that the path you decide to walk aligns with your desires and intuitions, and don’t be afraid to switch the path or choose a new one when it aligns with your intuition, desire and makes sense.

Always be patient and remember that positive attitude can do wonders while you working hard for what you want to achieve or what you believe in. even when life teaches you the toughest lesson you are not ready for, let it be. If you have no idea where you’re going to land, at least be brave enough to take a step even towards an unknown path and listen to your inner voice, you heart.

2.      Our final destination is death and life span always seems short

We all are very well aware of the fact that death will eventually happen to all of us, still we get surprised, feel bad and cry when it happens to someone who is known to us. You wish to find one more day for yourself or a moment to balance yourself to do what you couldn’t while you had the chance to live.

So, knowing and accepting the fact, live your life to the fullest. Live your life as this might be the last moment for you to live. Don’t ignore death but don’t either afraid of it. Take actions, do what you love the most because the greatest loss in life is what dies inside you when you’re still alive.

3.       Some failures are most requisite before you achieve success

Mistakes are never a problem; the problem is when you don’t take learnings from those mistakes. Don’t be afraid to give it a shot, and don’t be afraid of failure. The difference between a successful achiever and a beginner is the successful achiever has tasted failures more times than the beginners have even tried. Behind every extraordinary success, there are thousands of failed attempts, but these attempts are simply intangible to us and we only acknowledge the success and cog nominate it as “luck”.

4.       Forgiveness doesn’t always require an apology

In order to move further in life and explore ample of opportunities & surprises life has stored for you, you must let the past grudges, regrets, miseries fall by the wayside. Life becomes way easier when we don’t wait for an apology to forgive someone. Be thankful for all positive and negative experiences, negative experience helps you learn and grow wiser. Practice forgiveness, forgive yourself, forgive the people, take positive learnings and move on with open arms and open heart to give and receive love, happiness, smile, peacefulness and unlock newer dimensions of life. Forgiveness is like freeing yourself from the burden of eternal victim.

5.       Loving yourself is most important in order to be loved by others

Before expecting from the world to love you, and before expecting from yourself to be nicer with the world, be nice to yourself and love yourself. Everyone is born unique in this world, and so are you. Always be thankful to God for making you the way you are, keep your worth even if the people don’t. Let someone love you the way you are, rather trying to be someone which other wants you to be. Despite being unattractive, not too beautiful, despite having ample of flaws, let someone love you the way you are, and begin with yourself, you have to be that someone and eventually the world will start loving you for the way you are.

6.     Things change, People change, Time change

You had a yesterday, you have today and you’ll surely have tomorrow. Accept it, time changes and life keeps moving on and so we are. Embrace changes because changes occur for a reason. You might not realize the reason initially, but at the end, you’ll realize that it is worth it. Sometimes even the smallest change in our life can change the entire direction of our lives. We all have been revolving and flipping upside down, sometimes for better, sometimes for the worse on the strength of an erratic event. However whatever the situation is good or bad, will eventually change; may be for long term betterment. So live every moment, do something good every second of your life and always live with a positive approach. Even a negative change will give you a long term positive result, so just hold on and accept what is out of your hands, because it’s in hands of God then.

Conquer your innermost fears

How many times have you turned away from a relationship or a great opportunity because you were afraid to take up the challenge and go for it? And how many times have you seen the other person taking the same opportunity and doing wonders? It’s not that you couldn’t do better by taking up that opportunity, but someone else is doing better today because he/she did not let the fear overpower his (her) self-belief, confidence and willingness. The stealers of our dreams are always around us who give a rise to our fears. As a kid, do we fear to fall when we start walking? We just enjoy the moment, but as we age; through our social circle, our parents, we start analyzing the good or bad, danger or smooth, etc. Although this is very much required to an extent, but fear somehow sometimes convene us that we can never accomplish our dreams, when people around us start discouraging us by saying it’s too difficult and you cannot do this. Everyone talk what they have experienced. Because someone failed in a relationship because of arguments, he/he would suggest you to keep quiet in an argument, and you begin to keep quiet to save your relationship and keep the grudges inside because you fear to lose the one you love. Because someone failed to crack IAS Exam, he/she would suggest you to not go to for that, it’s waste of time, it’s not that easy and somewhere you get convinced and fail to give your 100% out of fear and lack of belief. And you wake up when you see other people getting success in the same field or saving their relationship by talking or by arguing.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

Fear is not bad. Fear often gives us an early warning signal to protect us. But there is a huge difference between a fear that protects us from falling from a cliff and a constant fear that keeps us away from living a fulfilled life. Here are few steps that help conquer such fears and keeps you all set to take up the challenges and win the battles. Supportive companions, relaxation techniques, positive mindset, ability to face the fears, spiritual enhancement are some of the practical ways through which one can easily win the war of life while enjoying the struggles and challenges.

Positive social connection: We either tend to resist admitting our fear because we afraid that the other person will laugh, will not understand, think less of us, or we choose the wrong person to share our problems. Our mental stress turns into fears when we share with a person who has a negative approach towards life. So always find a good companion who supports you or encourage you for your dreams; could be a trusted friend brother or sister or supportive parents. They may show you a new light covered by your fears.

Spiritual enhancement: Have faith in the power of positive visualization, law of attraction, universe and God. Be truthful to yourself, ask yourself if you can do it or not, rather letting your fear suppress it, listen to the answer coming deep inside your soul that you can do it. Positive visualization will amazingly take your fears away. 

Relaxation techniques: Fear not only keeps us away from living a fulfilled life but often becomes a cause of many health problems. Hence, you must add some healthy exercise, meditation techniques in your daily schedule to keep the fear and unnecessary stress away and live with a more positive approach. Sitting for 30 minutes in the morning in silence with closed eyes, focusing on your breath and understanding your thoughts keeps your day stress-free and positive. When you are positive from inside, negative surrounding cannot harm you.

Face your challenges and fears: One must be wise enough to understand that fears are healthy in some situations and we should keep our safety on our top priority always. But if the threat is more to your mental status than physical, taking up the challenge is the best thing you can do to conquer that mental threat, otherwise, that fear will keep threatening you throughout. Start facing your fears in steps, supposedly you have a fear of public speaking, start it with addressing few people in a small room; may be with your family, colleague or any other people who are known to you, then gradually consider leading your departmental or group meetings to gain more confidence and slowly take a step ahead towards your ultimate purpose.

Love yourself

Be gentle with yourself, you are a child of Universe, nowhere less than any stars in the sky. In such noisy confusion of life, where everything and everyone have their own set priorities, do not ever forget to love yourself and do what is right for you. Universe demands us not to harm any other living soul, but never denies to think for one own self and be good to yourself. As long as you do what you love and love what you do, the rest will fall into place gradually.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

How to embrace forgiveness and prosper in life

Forgiving someone after a betrayal, hurt or abandoned is undoubtedly a very challenging task, but in order to get an access into healthy wellbeing and to attain inner peace, forgiveness is essential.  Although forgiveness never comes instant and it requires a lot of patience, positive empowerment, and self-examination. We only empower ourselves when we accept, examine and then gently release.

We cannot choose what happens to us, but we can definitely choose how to react to a situation. Your reaction during the hours of turmoil and miseries determines how long those situations stay with you until you grab your achievement once again. By keeping grudges in mind, the person whom we harm the most is our own self.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

In order to embrace forgiveness and let go the moment of betrayal, miseries or sorrows, one has to understand that everyone has free will. Everyone has right to choose and decide when to enter or exit from our lives, we cannot hold neither the person nor those negative or betrayed emotions. Yes, you cannot stay calm and feel glad after you gone through a break-up, you have to let those negative emotions and anger come out, and this is very natural. It’s like cleaning out our soul; you have to get it out in order to make progress.

Let’s dig into few tips for embracing forgiveness and cleanse your inner being:

Set a goal

Sometimes we have to be strong and make a stronger decision that we have to let go of the past emotions and embrace forgiveness. Make a conscious choice that you don’t have to look back now and just be open to receive what universe has to offer ahead.

Forgive yourself

There is a friend of mine who lost his wife in a car accident and he is still unable to forgive himself for not spending enough time with her and for not being present at that moment to save her. As long as you will not learn to forgive yourself, you will never learn to forgive the people around you and end up keeping grudges, sorrows, and miseries in your heart forever. You cannot project something onto others what you have not done to yourself.

Start with small

Forgiveness is a process. You cannot get over the hurt right away; it even takes years in many situations or cases. But one can always start the process with willingness and an ability to tolerate those intense emotions that make us want to run away from the situation. Do not run away, rather face it; let your anger, your deeper emotions flow out. Most of the people not even begin the initial process, as they think if they let go the situation, the person they are upset with will be proved right. Forgiveness is letting go of everything, no matter if the other person proves to be right or wrong.

Look at these losses as a learning experience and an opportunity for self-growth

Life has no guarantee; anything can happen at any moment. The miseries you face due to the people around you are because life wanted to put you in such situations to help you become wiser and experienced. You have to see the positive learning on the other side of the coin. Most of us only focus on one side; the accident which happened, but we never take it as an incident. The accident happened, put you in miserable situations, but it is also an incident on which you’ll look back later on and learn from.

What is meant for you always arrives on time

We always reach our destination at the predetermined time by Universe. So no need to rush, rather work hard to achieve your goal and enjoy the journey and feel the transformation you will experience while moving towards your ultimate destination. 

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

Benefits of having an open and free mind

Most of the people feel offended many of times due to various circumstances or situations life throws. But an open and free mind always stays detached from all the outer circumstances and knows that it is never the self which is offended, but it’s we and our mind which let us our inner self affected and make feel offended due to outer circumstances. If we don’t like an apple, that doesn’t mean the apple is bad, many other people love the same apple. So when someone insults you or doesn’t like you, that doesn’t mean you are bad, that simply means that the person has different choices. You know yourself the most; it’s an image of yourself to which you are attached, and that image doesn’t resonate with the image you form after or during an insult. Simply put, you highly affect your inner self and start believing on off put remarks by others on you, which even overpower your belief on yourself, and you start justifying yourself. But, if you would have been detached, if you would have kept your self-belief stronger, no offence would have been taken. Although, this doesn’t mean that you make your personality so stiff that no other person could help you become a better personality, which is against your growth and enlightenment. Criticism is always required, but self-evaluation is must. You must sit in silence, and evaluate your weaker areas to work upon in order to keep upgrading yourself and moving towards betterment and self-growth.  

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

Detachment doesn’t mean you isolate yourself from socializing or accepting others’ views. It simply means making you inner self and belief so stronger that no negative outer circumstances would affect your inner being.

The power to mold and adapt oneself with different group of people in different situations requires:

Tolerance, acceptance, ability to face negative situations with a sense of detachment, ability to forgive, ability to be a detached observer of people’s actions and situations while raising your right opinions in positive and calm manner wherever required, cooperation, right and positive communication, understanding others perspective, focus more on positive traits of other person rather criticizing them for negative traits, ability to empathize, show respect to other person and remain calm.

These abilities surely help one achieve success not only in professional front but in each sphere of life, either with the relationship with others or with self.