Finding Your Inner Zen

Life’s demands and busyness can weigh you down even with the most resilient resolve. It may seem impossible to find peace amid an internal storm with your inner turmoil growing from life's sudden twists and turns. Your ability to adapt and bounce back depends on finding your inner Zen.

What exactly is your inner Zen? The term Zen originated in China. It is also associated with the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures. Zen means self-restraint, meditation, and mindfulness - it is a habit of connecting with the mind. Daily practice builds your resilience in dealing with stressful situations. It also enables you to control your emotions, feelings, moods, and behavior.

Here are several ways to cultivate your inner Zen.

Be True to Yourself

It is never okay to ignore, suppress or deny your thoughts and feelings. Purposefully avoiding your feelings affects your psychological wellbeing. It leaves you increasingly anxious, depressed, and agitated. Taking yourself out of your feelings never solves the underlying problem. It only invalidates their significance.

Emotions and feelings are internal pointers. They indicate the root of the problem. When you bottle them up, you never find a resolve. They build up and wait for an opportune moment for them to erupt.

Pent up anger, resentment, sadness, and frustrations usually come out as extreme, irrational behavior. They also impact your physical health. The stress from emotional suppression triggers cardiovascular conditions. Eventually, avoiding your emotions leads to a phenomenon known as the rebound effect, where you end up mulling over the situation.

• Identify and acknowledge those thoughts, feelings, and
• Analyze the sentiments
• Let those sensations lead you to the root of the
• Find the resolve to your Accept the situation, confront issues, forgive yourself, find solace and anything else that brings healing.

Resist the Urge to Numb Your feelings

A period of intense stress can deplete your emotions and feelings. When you are numb, you dissociate yourself from your experiences, feelings, and emotional state. It is a maladaptive behavior to stress.

• Find your Zen by talking to someone you trust about the stressful

• Writing down your feelings in a journal or even a napkin can help. Getting them out of your head means you’re acknowledging

• Identify the triggers to your numbness and face them head on. Triggers can be loss, trauma, bullying, abuse, illness, etc. You can find interventions with the help of a counseling psychologist or anyone you feel comfortable talking

• Engage in mindful activities like self-soothing, distraction, and meditation techniques to keep from rumination or engaging in other self-destructive

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness has many positive habits that are beneficial to your mental health and resilience cultivation. Being mindful helps us to slow down the mind and stop overthinking.

• Meditation - look within, analyze, focus, and prioritize the things that
• Focus on the task at hand without attaching any unnecessary feelings and
• Live in the If you are eating, savor the flavors, notice the food texture, and enjoy the meal. Do not eat rushingly thinking about your next task.
• Listen to uplifting music, podcasts, or entertainment. It helps frame your mind toward the
• Purposely sidetrack your mind with a distraction. This is anything that takes your mind away from negative thoughts or feelings, even for a few minutes.

Resist Self-Pity

One way to throw in the towel is to indulge in self-pity. Although initially it feels like you are being empathetic, self-pity is destructive. Self-pity drains your mental strength. It keeps you in a cage of expecting failure, rejection, and trauma.

• Instead of believing in the permanence of your problem, see the opportunities it brings. You have learned lessons and are better for
• Resist self-pity by doing the opposite. Instead of giving up, try one extra time. Hand in that proposal or ask for that raise. Nobody knows the outcome. You will never know unless you
• Cultivate gratitude. Indeed, you deserve better, but you also have some things going on. Celebrate your milestones. Do not let the closed doors define you. You are so much more than a moment of failure.
• Keep going. Self-pity is a stagnation pit waiting to suck you in. It blinds you from the progress you’ve made, ripping the positivity out from under you. Take the next step no matter how hard, regardless.

Learn to be Sensible

Even the most positive mindset requires a dose of reality. So long as we are on earth, bad things are bound to happen. Instead of stressing about when disaster strikes, you can strengthen your mind to deal with those dreaded times when they come. Bottom line, don’t worry twice.

• Exercise - it really boosts your mental fortitude and improves your cardiovascular

• Prioritize your relationship - you are not an island. You need people to thrive mentally. Build authentic relationships. Remember, it is quality and not quantity that

• Take care of your Embrace healthy living because your diet, rest pattern, and physical activities also impact your mental health. It can be hard, yes… Baby steps.

• Help others. Aside from releasing feel-good hormones, lending a hand helps you process life through a different It keeps you grateful, gentle, and humble.

• Deal gently with yourself. Do not over criticize or condemn yourself to eternal doom. You are alive today - that is another chance for you to make things

Finding your inner-Zen can be challenging at first. It’s a habit to build upon, one small step at a time. Remember, self-restraint, meditation, and mindfulness. The Zen way of thinking will help you gain a better control of your emotions, feelings, moods, and behavior, making it easier to handle stressful times in life that we all go through. : )