What We’re Missing Lies In Our Struggle.
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As an engaged reader and writer in the online wellness world, I frankly am struggling to click on another self-help article featuring a fast-track list of a number of ways to find enlightenment or to find your soulmate or to raise your vibration enough so that your poop stops stinking.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am frustrated with these fabricated panaceas packaged into trendy articles because I used to turn to them thinking I could find that next insightful, esoterically psychological nugget that I had been missing all along, so I’ve had my fill.
Any of us could eat homemade panko-crusted salmon in a wasabi sauce with oven-roasted asparagus three times a week for a few years and be fed up.
My squabble isn’t with the quality of these articles or with the content. It’s with what is lacking.
For most of us, it’s a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward game with points in time being five-or-fifteen-steps-forward, and other times being twenty-two-steps-backwards.
It’s not a steady incline toward healthy, but so many of our wellness moguls of today market their strategies as heal-all salves and one-way roads to enlightened and vibrant living.
The target of truly helping people gain more insight, find relief and comfort in Aha, you too! moments, and empowering individuals to seek growth, has been swapped for the target of gaining popularity.
Unfortunately, this new trend is being swept along by the overall trend of social media: featuring our brightest, most positive, and strongest moments, and forsaking the darker spectrum of humanity, the stuff that asks us to grow.
The stuff that makes us real and relatable, and inspires others to face their inner struggles not with a Band-Aid in the form of another green smoothie or fitness regimen, but with a revamped attitude and altered sense of self-worth, rooted in and moved by self-love.
We try so hard to only contemplate the lovely, positive, and redemptive quality of life, not just as readers and writers and wellness-seekers, but as humans.
Doing so is necessary and good and healthy if done so moderately, but it it is also healthy to lay our troubles out with full acceptance and compassion, embracing them as an equal part of existence.
The world can be rough and tough, and pretending that the happy and shiny things in life are the means to transcending our individual inner demons does not help anyone find wellness. The happy and whole and healthy moments of our lives are the rest and rejuvenation from the harder times.
There is still work that has to be done, and we are dismissing the existence of struggle in the pursuit of the façade that we always have everything together. This disconnects us from the meaning of struggle, and isolates those who feel lost in it.
Accepting struggle with integrity and a spirit that is true to its current condition provides the joy that we so often fake. Joy does not grow out of dismissing parts of what is. It exists in the moments of total surrender to what life is: heart-warming, heart-rending and heart-filling.
Joy is rooted in our ability to share ourselves vulnerably with our community — hardship, successes, pain, healing, all of it.
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Rebekah Kolbe, aka The Moonchilde to her equally eccentric friends, is a writer and newb Yoga teacher in the Michiana area in passionate cultivation of a consciously loving and creative lifestyle. When she isn’t writing sassy and sappy personal essays or exploring esoteric psychology, adoring her loved ones, practicing Yoga, cooking, making music, or walking in the woods, she is working for the creatively philanthropic company called MudLOVE. To get connected to more of her musings, go here.
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