“It’s okay.” – my favourite self-soothing mantra, the one I repeat to myself every time I get bogged down by plans not working out the way I want or when I feel heavy emotions welling up …
Not to fix anything, not to make it go away, I say this to simply allow things to be as they are, right now, in this moment and to acknowledge that that’s okay.
I don’t mean to say “just think a positive thought and all will be well”, far from it! I just know from my own experience that it’ll help no one, least of all myself, when my thoughts go “I’m such a bad person for flipping out like this, I should do/know/behave better, I feel so lost and don’t know what to do”.
So I let it be okay. It’s okay to feel utterly lost sometimes and to be ungrateful. It is okay that sometimes I behave in ways I actually don’t want to, but it happens and it’s okay, I can learn from it.
I have found that this kind of self-acceptance creates a sigh of relief in my body. And then I can feel into what needs to happen next.
So here’s a little reminder to myself, may it serve you, too:
It’s okay, love, it’s okay to be human!
It’s okay to be ungrateful at times, to feel like a failure, to feel overwhelmed with the whole the situation or overwhelmed by the little things in life.
It’s okay to be angry at the world around you and angry at yourself, it’s okay to fight with your partner or be frustrated and shout at your kids although you don’t want to – it is as it is right now and it’s okay to be human.
It’s okay to question everything, even to question what the hell you’re doing with your life and why you’re not moving forward at greater speed. It’s okay to be afraid of not making progress.
It’s okay when your emotions change from the highest of Highs to the lowest of Lows in a second, in the blink of an eye, for no apparent reason.
It’s okay when you’re fed up with the news, when you feel fed up with the tasks on your to do list, when your to-do and to-be lists seem to become longer the more you tick off them.
It’s okay to feel like a failure, to feel like you don’t belong, to just lay down and cry.
It’s okay to feel like you suck at this thing called life because the truth is, everybody just stumbles through it, however much they try to make you believe they have a clue.
It’s okay to feel desperate because you don’t know what you want your life to look like, in which direction you want to go, to be sad about the state of the world, to feel like you’re letting everyone down, most of all yourself.
It’s okay to feel at the mercy of everything around you, to feel frustrated that things aren’t going as you planned.
It’s okay, you’re okay, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s okay to be human!
It doesn’t mean things need to stay this way, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, it doesn’t mean you have to change anything right now – it’s okay for things to be the way they are. Because only then can we open up to a different future.
As long as we don’t want things to be the way they are, as long as we don’t accept what’s happening right now, we resist and keep pushing, we fight against it and that creates suffering – albeit, only for ourselves.
And it’s okay to feel resistant, too! It’s okay to feel all the range of our human emotions.
It’s okay when your thoughts are running wild, when the fears are creeping up, it’s not comfortable, but it’s okay.
You are strong and you can lead yourself through it.
And it might not have been the way you’d have wanted to behave, but it has happened, and it is okay. You can learn from it.
Without the deepest Depths, we can’t know the highest Highs. And it’s okay to be who you are, where you are and feel what you feel in this very moment.
I love you!
