How to Survive Difficult Periods

Audio version read by Rev. Steven Lane Taylor, B.Msc.
“How to Survive Difficult Periods in Your Life”

You can survive difficult periods in your life. The probability is that you already have. Difficult periods in our lives seem to be a natural course of how life unfolds in the human panorama of events. These challenging phases may include health, income, career, family, friends, spouse, and love relationships.

In other words, just about anything of major concern may be affected. Your emotions during such periods can run from mild to deeply intense. If it is a truly difficult stage in your life, it is likely that the emotions you are experiencing are deep-seated.

Some demanding periods can be life-changing and challenging. A death or transition of someone you deeply love can provoke a devastatingly difficult phase. Similarly, divorce can be like a death to one’s way of life and can bring on an extremely hard interlude. The reality that one comes to know, as one goes through life, is that there will be difficult periods, but how will these hard times be handled or survived? When your emotions are taxed to the limit, which can set up a negative chain reaction affecting you in numerous ways, how do you best survive all that is taking place.?

You can survive in one of two ways. One avenue is by relying on your personal ego. Note that depending on your personal ego is placing a self-imposed limitation on yourself. Your personal ego is limited in its capacity to see you through your difficult period in the most positive manner possible.

The other option is to survive a difficult period by turning over what is happening entirely to God. A portion of God’s universal mind presence is within you at the center or nucleus of your mind. It wishes to help you because you are God’s Creation and, as such, are loved by God as a child of God.

As perhaps God has already been there for you during a rough stage in your lifetime, God is right there, within you, to help you through any current or future difficult periods. Yes, people have survived difficult times in their lives without seeking God’s Presence. But, when they do, there can be a weakness within the personal ego to use negative or unfavorable methods. These may include lying, deception, or manipulation to free themselves of the challenging situation.

On the other hand, if you rely on God’s presence, you will survive and overcome a trying circumstance with your soul still intact and unmarred by personal ego defects. Therefore, whether now or in the future, during any difficult period, turn to God’s presence within you.

Especially during challenging phases in your life, you should recognize the power, wisdom and will of God working through you. When you turn a stressful situation over to God’s presence within you for handling, you automatically begin to invoke God’s power, wisdom and will. Above all, you are invoking God’s love and healing, which are necessary to survive any tough times in your life in the most positive manner possible.

During difficult periods, recognize that the same presence and power that created the entire universe is at work within you and through you to bring closure and healing to the problems you are experiencing. Recognize that God’s divine wisdom knows what is best for you to survive in the most positive way. Recognize that where the personal ego-will might bend, break, or retreat, God’s Will can continue to work through you to carry you forward.

A daily practice of meditation can help you survive such energy-draining periods. Whatever mental, physical or emotional fatigue you may be feeling can be eliminated, or, at the very least, greatly reduced through a daily practice of meditation. Whenever you meditate, you tap into healing, renewing and regenerating energies of God’s presence at the deepest level of your mind.

Meditation greatly activates this self-contained natural energy within you to have that extra reserve of energy while surviving a difficult period. Meditation can also bring you into contact with what I call the peace center within the deepest levels of your mind. The Bible refers to this as “The peace that passeth all understanding.”

Such spiritual peace, frequently experienced during challenging phases in your life, can make an enormous difference for good in your survival. Meditation, in good times, can offer you so much, and therefore, should definitely be practiced during difficult times. When meditating in good times, you accelerate the good you are experiencing. In difficult times, you soften the harshness of any condition and quicken its conclusion.

Don’t get buried under an avalanche of negative thought energy memories during a difficult period. Realize that every thought, feeling and action can become a memory-energy in the personal subconscious memory level of the mind. If you allow negative energy to accumulate there, it will lengthen the duration of a negative cycle you may be experiencing.

You should, therefore, acquire and maintain the mental habit of continually releasing all negative experiences as they occur, or no more than a moment after they do! Do not allow such negative energy to recede into your subconscious mind to fester there. Remember that your survival during a difficult period is at stake. Therefore, monitor your thoughts, feelings and actions carefully, and take immediate action to neutralize the negative and its input on present and future cycles.

Of any good that may come out of every difficult period in your life, it should be that your personal relationship with God has been strengthened. Out of necessity, the conscious mind and heart draw inwardly closer to the divine mind and divinely loving heart of God within. As a result, you can make even greater strides in positive cycles every time they become activated in your life following a difficult period.

Dr. Paul Leon Masters

Reference:

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How to Survive Difficult Periods in Your Life

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