Transformations only happen when there is a challenge of some kind involved. As Pema Chodron teaches, there's a balance to life - a yin and yang . Life will include pain, and that we actually agree to that pain by just living. But often we think we don't want the pain and challenge to be there. We want it to go away. We just want to be happy. But when we really take a look at it, that's not completely true.
We want there to be pain so that we can experience the contrast of the other side of pain. It’s the contrast that motivates us to evolve, to grow, and to transform. It's also the contrast that helps us define and understand what's on the other side of that negative emotion. Listen in as I explain a concept called the 50/50 of life and how we want to be open and accepting of both sides, the good positive 50 and the hard negative 50. In this episode you'll learn:
What is the 50/50 of life.
Understanding that we all agree to pain and why it's so important to open up to the challenging parts of life.
Why happiness all the time isn't the goal of being human.
What's truly possible when you open yourself up to allowing and processing the negative, hard emotions that we feel.
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You're tired of the pain and misery of divorce. It's hard, it's overwhelming and just for once you wish that it was your ex that felt any pain and heartache, instead of you. This thinking can seem important and useful, like it's going to move you through the pain of divorce quicker, but what's really happening is resistance of what is. I can teach you how to lean into what's going on, teach you to process the negative heavy emotions so they don't hurt nearly as bad and you actually create forward movement instead of feeling completely stuck where you're at. The first step is scheduling a time to talk to me and we'll come up with your individual plan. Click here to schedule your free discovery session with me.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome back to Becoming You Again. I’m your host Karin Nelson. I’m a certified divorce confidence coach and this is the podcast where I teach you how to reconnect with yourself, create emotional resiliency and live a truly independent life, so you can have an even better life than when you were married.
Hello my friends. Welcome back to Becoming You Again. This week I’m not going to lie, has been kind of a rough one for me. I’ve been feeling a lot of very uncomfortable emotions this week. Sometimes during this week I’ve really opened myself up to processing through them and other times I have not. I’m just going to lay it out there for you. Sometimes instead what I’ve done is opened myself up a Milka bar and tuned out everything that’s happening inside of me and turned on Hulu instead. I just wanted to tell you that because I want you to know that even though I am teaching you all of these tips and tools and things that really help you step into living your best life and being your best self and processing through emotions, it’s not always easy and I’m not perfect at it and I know it’s hard for you sometimes as well and I just want you to know that it’s okay. It’s okay to be human and to make mistakes and to not show up in the way that your perfect version of you would because we’re not perfect and we are not always going to do it right or do it the way we know we should.
So I want you to know that it is okay, number one. We can love ourselves through these moments and I also want you to know that even when I was going through this kind of rough week, emotional rough week, I also turned to my coach and she has been helping me work through this kind of funk that I have been in this week and I struggle with my thoughts just the same ways that you do and I struggle with wanting to try and avoid my emotions, especially those heavy kind of hard ones like shame and guilt, things like that. And this week has kind of been a little more challenging for me and it is okay and I am going to love myself through it because I know that I can always lean on me in that way.
Because of this it’s really been on my mind, this idea of a concept called 50/50 that I really want to introduce to you. I think I have mentioned it here and there in previous podcasts, but I want to dig a little deeper so that you have a better understanding of what this means and how this shows up in your life and if you will be open to it how I can really transform you as you move through your divorce.
There is this concept of life being 50/50 and when we can understand that and accept it, it will help us to be able to move through our divorce and not only through our divorce but using this concept and really leaning on it if it feels good to you can serve you for the rest of your life. It can allow for moments of a really deep growth and development for you.
Pema Chodron teaches a lot about this, right, she teaches about the balance of the life, like the yin and the yang. And she teaches that our life will include pain, and that we actually agree to that pain by just living. By having a life. By experiencing things. And we actually want there to be pain so that we can experience the contrast of the other side of pain. Because it’s in that contrast that motivates us to evolve, to grow, to develop and to transform.
I really want you to think about this. It is in those moments of pain and hurt and challenge where our growth actually come through. I often think about my divorce. If I hadn’t gone through that challenge of my life I really don’t think that I would be where I am today. I really don’t think I would be coaching. I mean for sure I wouldn’t be coaching other divorced women because I wouldn’t have that challenge of knowing what that feels like and what you go through when you go through a divorce to feel confident in coaching other women through it.
But I don’t even think that I would be an entrepreneur in the way that I am, in the way that I have showed up in my life if I hadn’t have gone through that challenge and how it molded me as a human being. How I have had to show up for myself, learn to love myself, learn to create confidence, learn to have my own back in so many ways that I didn’t know how to do before I went through my divorce. And so this is kind of that whole idea of pain is what molds us and shapes us and those challenges that we face in our life and so we want those to be there, even as painful and hard and you know as terrible as they are when we are going through them, we want that to be a part of her life, to be a part of our evolution, to grow into who we are becoming throughout our life, the better version of ourself if you will.
If our lives were always just happy and perfect and we always felt loved and everything was great all of the time, that would give us no reason to transform or evolve. It’s that contrast that opens us up to wanting and receiving something new, something different. Because if your life is always already complete then what is the point of trying to grow or evolve or expand, right? If there’s no negative emotion; then there is no point to wanting something new, something different, or seeking some kind of growth for yourself.
So this is where the concept of thinking about life, about your experiences that you’re have as 50/50; meaning 50% of the time life is going to be glorious, and amazing, and happy and feel really good and 50% of the time life is going to be hard, and it’s going to be negative and it’s going to suck. This is a concept that I learned from my mentor, but it’s just another way of saying that there is a yin and yang to life. There is opposite in all things. There is no happiness without the sad. It’s the actually the sad that makes happiness possible. And I believe that the more willing we are to accept the 50% that is negative when it shows up, that’s where the growth will happen. That’s where your transformations are going to occur. Because we often don’t want to accept that pain or that challenge or the hard stuff. Right? It’s so much easier to just wish it away. It’s when we can accept it and allow it in and roll with it that we create our transformational path forward.
I mean for me that has been this past week and it has happened many times throughout my life and I’m sure that you can see those things happening, those challenges happening for you throughout your life as well if you take a look back.
I was feeling a lot of negative emotion, a lot of shame, a lot of dread and for many of the days I really didn’t want to accept that it was there. I was really trying to pretend that wasn’t there. I was checking out with Hulu and opening the chocolate and eating the chocolate and trying to take a nap and trying to just check out in as many ways as I possibly could because I did not want to feel that negative emotion. I didn’t want to let it in or accept it. And because I didn’t open myself up to just processing through those negative emotions that I was feeling, and instead of creating growth I felt very stagnant and I felt very stuck. Instead of allowing myself to accept this is part of the crappy part. This is the 50% that’s negative in my life and if I can just open myself up to that and accept that, it will move through me. I will be able to move through that negative emotion and allow it and moved to the other side of it. I’ve said this before but negative emotion is like a tunnel and the only way to the other side is to go through the tunnel. It is to allow the negative emotion to be there. I wasn’t allowing myself to feel the negative part but I also wasn’t allowing myself to feel the other side of the negative emotion, the 50% that is positive, right. In my trying to avoid that negative 50% I was also keeping myself from being able to feel the positive 50%. So I just want you to see how when we kind of pull away and resist that negative challenging emotion we are also actually keeping ourselves away from feeling the opposite which is the good 50% as well.
So I want to talk about this idea when it comes to divorce because I think it will be really helpful for so many of you as you move through the divorce process. When it comes to divorce there is going to be pain and heartache. Right? That’s kind of a given. For most of us. I’m not going to say every single person is going to feel this but for most of us there’s going to be pain, there is going to be heartache. And there will be a need to feel and allow the pain of divorce.
I talk a lot in my podcast about allowing the pain to be present because I know that divorce is painful and I also in see so many women really trying to get out of feeling the pain. They don’t want to feel it anymore. They don’t want this experiences. They just want to be happy again. They want to go back to the way things were. They want their ex to take some of the pain they’ve been feeling. They feel like their ex has not felt any of it. And they are tired and they just want to give it away. They wish that it wasn’t here. They don’t want to experience it anymore. Which makes sense. I am not saying none of this makes sense for you shouldn’t be thinking these things. They 100% make sense. Negative feelings don’t feel great. So why am I telling you that you should accept them and allow them? Because the more we resist them the longer they stick around and the heavier and harder they get.
So when I have women coming to me and they are like I don’t want to feel this any more, when is it going to go away. I wish that it was my ex instead of me. Why can’t I stop feeling this way. That is not actually allowing these motions to be there. That is not being present with this negative 50%. All that tells me when you are having thoughts like this is you are resisting that emotion. You are resisting the negative 50% of life.
There is a lot of resistance to needing it to stop and wishing it would go away or wishing things were different. Because when we allow the pain, and the sadness and those negative emotions to be present that is how we heal from it. That is how we move through it. That is how we go through that tunnel. So allowing this part of our life experience to be part of the negative 50%, what that really means is that we are accepting that part of life and that there is part of our life that is going to be hard. There is part of our experience that is going to be challenging and that acceptance will create growth within you and it will help you move forward and create what you want for the next part of your life.
So how do we get to this place of acceptance of the 50/50 of life? Well we first have to realize and recognize that the goal of our human experience is not to be happy all the time. It’s really not. I know that there’s going to be some pushback on this. I know that there are going to be some people who are like what are you even talking about? Of course that’s what the goal of life is, to just be happy. Why else would we be here? But let me explain why the goal of our human experience is not to be happy all the time. I’m going to break it down because I think this will make sense to you and help you.
So I have clients who will come to me and they will say something like, “I just to be happy. I just want my kids to be happy. I just want us to be happy again” And that it’s great to have a goal where we want to create happiness. There is nothing wrong with that. But being happy all the time does not make for an amazing life. Even though we wanted to. We really want that to be the end goal, it really doesn’t make any sense, especially when we can understand this idea of 50/50.
So there’s a couple of things that don’t support this desire to be happy all the time and I’m going to point those out to you and explain it a little bit deeper. So first of all if you choose or if you decide that you want to be happy all the time, then that means that you have to choose to be happy about things that most of us are not going to want to be happy about. Things like divorce. If you want to be happy all the time you can choose to be happy about your divorce. 100% you can make that choice. Things like death. You can just be happy about death. Things like war, poverty, childhood illness, childhood cancer, things like rape, things like murder, things like abuse and other social injustices. All of those things most of us aren’t going to be happy about. We don’t want to be happy about those things. We want to be outraged. We want to feel negative emotion about those things and yet we tell ourselves we want to be happy all the time. But if that is the goal, to be happy all the time, then we have to be happy about all of those things as well. And we don’t want that. Right? So that’s how I really want you to see that being happy all the time, living a happy life all the time is not the goal of being a human. Because there are things in our human existence that we don’t want to be happy about and it’s okay to not be happy about these things.
And the other thing that doesn’t feed into this narrative of wanting to be happy all the time is one that I mentioned before, and it’s this idea of needing the contrast to truly experience the emotion. Without sadness we literally cannot experience the joy of happiness. We don’t even know what happiness feels like when we don’t have the contrast of sad to go against it. To kind of define what those two things are for us. Without loneliness we won’t be able to feel and understand deep connection. And we can do this with literally every other contrasting emotion, the negative one versus the positive one. Without that negative emotion we don’t understand or feel deeply the contrasting side and the positive side of the emotion. And that is the beauty of being a human is allowing ourselves to feel the whole gambit of all of the emotions that we feel as humans so that we can have the contrast. We have the lows but we also have the highs and it is so amazing to feel those highs, right?
So the goal of our human experience isn’t to be happy all the time; it’s to be human and that means that we experience and we allow all of the human emotions. We open ourselves up to that 50/50 of it all. And that means that knowing that our life is going to include a lot of contrast on purpose. And that it is okay to contrast.
Something that I like to teach my clients when it comes to their divorce that this often will bring a lot of peace to people is being open to this part of this being the negative part of my divorce and it’s going to be hard and it’s going to be challenging and it’s okay that it’s there.
Now I don’t want you to get too caught up on the actual breakdown of the 50/50. I have some clients who like to think about it as spread out over their whole lifetime, like probably if you were to look back after you died, right, you could see that probably about 50% of your life was really hard and challenging and probably about 50% was pretty amazing. Or there’s people who like to break it down by the week. Oh this is just the 50% of my week that is really crappy or by the day, this is the 50% that is hard, this is the 50% that is amazing.
But sometimes this isn’t very helpful to divide it by the actual numbers, right. Sometimes we can get really in our heads about this concept and we can actually use it against ourselves. I don’t want you to do that. The goal of thinking about it in this way is to help you be okay with the positive and the negative and to be open to all of it.
So if you hear this concept of 50/50 and you’re like, I’ve had a really hard life so far, I was abused as a child and that abuse continued into my marriage so where’s the 50% of my life that’s good? I promise you number one that it’s there. There are going to be some contrasting times if you can kind of look for them. But also if breaking it down in this way and looking at it in this way isn’t helpful for you, then think about it in a different way. I want you to know that everything that I teach you, they are just thoughts. They are just ideas. They are tools that I am offering to you to help you think about things in a different way and if they don’t work for you, then don’t use them. You totally don’t have to use anything that I’m trying to teach you if it doesn’t feel good overall.
And so some people like to think about it instead of the 50/50 they’ll just think about it like okay so some days we’re going to have good days and some days we’re going to have bad days. Or it’s okay to not be okay or whatever works for you. What I really want you to take away from learning this concept is the allowance of, and being open to the negative parts of our life. Because when we can do that, that’s where all the growth is going to happen.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being on a podcast called “A Gift From Adversity” where the host, Juri Love, she talks to people around the world about diversity. The adversity that they have faced in their life and how they handled it and then what gift their adversity gave them, like how did this mold and shape your life into what it is today. And so she invited me on. I came on and told her my story and the things that I used to kind of move through that challenge and that adversity in my life and the gift that it gave me in my life. And it’s basically this idea that life is going to throw us hard challenges at when we’re open to them and we allow those challenges to be there, we will grow and we will evolve from it and we will create a transition to something that is more human, more full, more expanded than what we had before.
So even though your divorce is hard and difficult and you really might be struggling, I just want you to know this is the 50% that is hard and there is another 50% on the contrasting side of that is going to be amazing. Be open to both because they both will evolve you to the next version of you.
Can you be willing to accept and open up to your divorce as being the negative 50%? When you can answer yes to that question, that is when you will make space for the expansion of you. You’ll be stepping into your own growth which is really going to lead to a better version of you moving forward.
Alright ladies, that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I love you. I will talk to you next week.
If you like what you heard on today’s podcast and you want to know more about working 1:1 with me, you can go to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com and schedule your free consult to find out more. That’s www dot Karin nelson coaching dot com.
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