By focusing on deriving our happiness from our outer world alone, we are actually setting ourselves up for unhappiness. Why? Simply put, we have very little or no control over those things, yet our inner peace and happiness are dependent on the outcome. When we focus too much on our outer world, we give up control over our own mental state. Think about it like this. When you are in a relationship and you’ve made your partner your end all be all, you’ve essentially placed all your happiness in their pocket. What happens if they decide to end the relationship? What happens if, God forbid, they are in a horrible accident and pass away?

On the other hand, people who feel happy are happy because they are building their inner world. Their inner world is one that they have control over. And as it so happens, when you are focused on building your inner world, your outer world begins to attract positive things that support your inner world.

Our inner world is one we can control, and our outer world is contingent on things we cannot control. This is why many unhappy people blame their outer world. They develop a victim mindset and relinquish their power. Their happiness is tied to things they cannot control, which will inevitably lead to disappointment and sadness. 

Last year, I wrote a post about how a bird sitting on a branch is never afraid of it breaking because her trust isn’t in the branch. It is in her own wings. Her survival isn’t dependent on whether or not that branch breaks from a big gust of wind. It is on her own ability to fly away to safety. She is internally focused and doesn’t worry about what the branch does.

If you find that you are a little too focused on your outer world, here’s how you can begin to build your inner world.

1. Confront your insecurities. Insecurities are normal, and we all have them. But they also damper our everyday lives and can be cumbersome if they rule the brain. So, examining these insecurities is a great place to start building your inner world.

You’ll likely need to dive deep into the abyss to place their origin, and its possible old wounds could resurface. But don’t let that scare you away. Healing can be done in this phase if you’re honest with yourself and willing to acknowledge and face your insecurities head-on.

2. Be responsible for your physical well-being. Science has proved that diet and exercise can significantly help your mental state. When you make healthier choices, you see improvements in mood, thinking patterns, and overall well-being.

Let’s be realistic, though. Is it possible to do this work while vegging out on the couch eating a juicy cheeseburger now and again? Of course! However, implementing a good diet, getting quality sleep, exercising, and hydrating adequately go a long way in improving your inner world. These small, basic things that you can do every day, makes a huge difference in your mindset and how you approach things.  

3. Meditate often. Meditation assists in calming and relaxing your being so the good emotions and ideas can flow through. Incorporating mindfulness into your daily meditation helps you learn how to stay present in the moment. It also helps you learn how to notice your feelings without judgment and let them go.

4. Build a support system. Once you start progressing, you’ll begin to see and feel shifts. You’ll notice changes in your perspectives, ideas, habits, routines, and emotions. And no matter how grand or small the changes, you’ll likely encounter people within your circle who don’t agree with your progression. And that’s okay because not everybody adapts to change well.

But this is why you will need to develop a stellar support system. Find people who see your improvement, are proud to support you in becoming a happier person and who you can give that support to as well.

5. Go into the wild. Nature can be highly therapeutic, and it can be as simple as taking your lunch hour to go outside for a walk or sitting on your back porch listening to the birds.

As a society, we’re constantly tuned into something, scrolling away on our phones or typing furiously at our jobs. So, stepping out among the trees and wild animals can help disconnect from the information overload we experience daily, and reconnect you to your inner world. For me, this is where my soul is nourished.

6. Make your home comfortable. Too much clutter anywhere isn’t good, and to work through these steps, you’ll want to land in a spot where you feel comfortable and relaxed. My husband and I have this ritual when we are done working for the day, where we make our home “homey”. This entails lighting candles, putting on fairy lights that we have on trees in our living room and lighting up these little geeky Pixel Pals we have sprinkled through our bookcases. It sets the vibe for the night and just feels…like home to us.

7. Practice gratitude. Practicing gratitude can bring light to your positive emotions, reduce stress, and help you on the journey to discovering your inner world. It doesn’t have to be a grandiose display of gratefulness. It can be something minor, like being thankful a butterfly landed on your hand or saying, “thanks” to someone holding the door open for you. Every day I like to write down at least three things that I am grateful for. For me, when I have gone through difficult times, looking back at all that I am grateful for has helped me feel hopeful about the future – even when it is uncertain.

It is okay to fall into the water. You can even stay in it for a little while, treading water. But if you choose to stay in it for a long time, you will drown.

Grief and loss can be overwhelming and make us feel like we are already drowning. Moving on from it, is truly a process and sometimes it isn’t linear. I know for me, I have moved through the five stages of grief, only to come back again to another step in the process at various times.

The 5 Stages of Grief

1. Shock and Denial. This might be the death of a loved one, a betrayal of some kind or news of a medical illness. It might be the loss of your job. Nonetheless, in this first stage, we don’t want to believe it is happening.

Before I was officially diagnosed with cancer, I was convinced that there was some mistake in my scans. Maybe what looked suspicious on the imaging was really benign. Maybe there was some kind of mix up with the biopsy report at the lab. I was definitely in denial. I had zero symptoms and was happy. How could this be happening? Plus, I was so young! This had to be a mistake……right?

2. Anger. Now that you can no longer deny that this is happening, you feel waves of anger about it. And understandably so! While it might be unfair and unjust, it is happening. And it’s okay if you’re mad about it.

3. Bargaining. It is natural to want to attempt to bargain your way through trauma. It is here where we may seek to change the circumstances of the situation causing us grief.

Before my grandmother passed away when I was a teenager, I pleaded with God for her to live. I promised to be a better person, etc. She was like a mother to me, and I felt like I still needed her guidance, comfort and presence in my life. I had no idea how my life would be without her in it. Bargaining is part of the process because it allows us to have a sense of control when we feel helpless in the situation.

4. Depression. After going through denial, anger and bargaining and finding no change in the outcome, we feel the full weight of the sadness we feel over the loss. It is normal and okay to feel depression when grieving. It is important to keep an eye on these feelings, though. Sometimes depression from a loss or traumatic event could lead to clinical depression or PTSD. This article can help you understand the difference between situational depression and clinical.

5. Acceptance. This is when you come to terms with the loss or situation. It doesn’t mean that you’re “over it” or no longer feeling grief. You may even experience waves of grief from time to time. It also doesn’t mean that you are okay with what happened – because you never may be. What it does mean, is that you have chosen to accept this new reality as it is and are choosing to moving forward the best way you can.

Grief looks different for everyone and like I said earlier, it isn’t a linear process. I spent a lot of time bouncing all over the first four stages when I was diagnosed with cancer. No two journeys through grief will be the same.

The only way out of something is through it. If you stay in steps one through four for too long, it will consume you and you will drown. Know that choosing acceptance and moving on doesn’t mean you don’t care about what happened or aren’t still hurting. What it does mean is that you are choosing to live your life, despite the hurt and pain you may feel. You know that you are here for a reason and still have a story to tell. And you never know…your story of how you overcame this situation, may become someone else’s survival guide during their times of grief.

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, has been wrongfully convicted of killing his wife and is serving time in prison. One day he is chatting outside with another inmate, Red, who is played by Morgan Freeman. Red is in prison for life for murder and by his own admissions, has become institutionalized. Andy talks about what he wants to do when he gets out of prison and Red discourages him from thinking about what life will be like on the outside. Andy wants to go to Mexico and Red tells him that Mexico is far away and that Andy is in prison and that’s just the way it is. Andy says, “Yeah, right, that’s the way it is. It’s down there and I’m in here. I guess it comes down to a simple choice, you know? Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

When things feel hopeless and we feel stuck, it can be easy to give up and just make peace with where we are in life, even if we don’t like it. But the truth is, you never know when the tide will turn. It is usually when we are on the brink of giving up, something miraculous happens.

Andy Dufresne teaches us that even in the moments of our deepest despair, we can keep busy one of two ways: spending our time accepting our fate that causes us to feel like we are dying inside, or we can focus all that energy and effort on working towards something that we want – even if it’s a long shot.

You never know when the odds will change and be in your favor, so keep going and don’t give up hope. If you are a fan of the show The Amazing Race, we see this theme play out in every episode. During the legs of the race, contestants get delayed or get held up at different roadblocks and detours and sometimes even get lost on their way to the pit stop. You always keep racing because you never really know if you are in last place and in danger of being sent home. You might be ahead of someone who got lost. If you just believe and accept that you are going home, you won’t put forth the maximum energy and effort that might keep you in the game.

Another way to look at this quote is, are the things that you are doing daily support your dreams and the life you say you want? Or are they keeping you stagnant or moving you away from that? Either way our time is passing, and we are here for a limited time. How are you spending your time?

In Batman Begins, a young Bruce Wayne falls down a well and he fears the bats inside it. His father is lowered down into the well and brings his son up to safety. As they are walking into Wayne Manor, Alfred says that he took quite a fall. His dad is carrying Bruce and says, “Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

His dad sees this as an opportunity for Bruce to learn how to pick himself up and it is such a great lesson. The truth is, we are all fall at times. We struggle with addictions, unhealthy thought patterns and memories that haunt us. These things happen so we can learn how to navigate through them and get back onto our feet. It doesn’t matter how many times we get knocked down, either. What matters is how many times we get up.

If you are feeling tired of being knocked down, watch this:

Can I just say that as a fan, my favorite story within the Star Wars universe is The Mandalorian? It’s even replaced The Empire Strikes Back, although it is now a close second. Creator, director and executive producer of this series, Jon Favreau, did an incredible job of creating this storyline. It’s incredibly hard to create a compelling character like Mando, when for almost the entire series, his face is masked and he is heavily armored in Beskar Steel. But Mando is strong and has a moral code that requires him to do the right thing – at great personal expense.

One of the catchphrases that Mando and his fellow Mandalorians often say is, “this is the way”. This phrase sums up a code that the Mandalorian live by and is kind of a religion. They are bonded by their commitment to their core beliefs and loyalty to one another. For the most part, they stay out of sight, live underground, and uphold very specific set of rules and guidelines for living.

For the Mandalorians, their way of life is all they have. Most of the Mandalorians are bounty hunters and highly skilled fighters. But prior to what we see in The Mandalorian, the Mandalore were nearly wiped out by the Empire in the Great Purge.

The lesson here is that it is so important to stand for something in your life. As the saying goes, if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for everything. When we deviate too far away from our core beliefs, we are susceptible to losing our way.

This quote has been used in many movies, but it is most attributed to Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. There are consequences for both taking stand for what you believe in and compromising yourself. If you choose to live on your feet and not submit to the powers that be, you may sacrifice your life for the cause you believe in. This quote means that it is preferable to do that, than to submit and spend it subjected to injustice just to preserve life.

Here is a clip from the 2014 movie, 300: Rise Of An Empire where this quote is used:

While the exact quote isn’t said word for word in 2007’s The Kingdom, a variation of it is said and it is illustrated very well. The FBI Director, played by Richard Jenkins, tells the Attorney General, played by Danny Huston, that he put his job on the line when he decided to make a stand. He said when you realize that life is finite, the end doesn’t matter as much. But what does, is how do you want to go out? On your feet or on your knees?

It is important to know what your non-negotiables are. What hill are you willing to die on?

Imagine that you were wearing an empty backpack, and someone came along and dropped a small stone into it. The change in weight would be so minimal that you wouldn’t even notice, right? Now imagine if someone added an additional stone every day. For the first 10 or 20 days, the added weight would still be manageable. But what about after 60 days, 90 days or 120 days? Over time, that backpack would start to become uncomfortably heavy and cumbersome. Even so, because of the backpack design you could still carry it for a time, but it would probably begin to cause you some pain eventually.

These stones are an apt analogy for the burdens we carry throughout our lives. Many of them seem so small individually that they hardly make a difference, but as they continue to add up over the years, they can interfere with our ability to truly enjoy our lives.

Are you still carrying a collection of heavy burdens that are weighing you down and preventing you from moving forward with a sense of lightness and freedom? These heavy burdens might be old hurts that you haven’t yet released, or past mistakes that still make you feel angry and ashamed. Even if you have learned how to adapt and carry them well, they might still be weighing on you more than you know.

A good way to start releasing them is to choose one burden each day, one memory, one old hurt, one regret. Take it out of your backpack and hold it in your hands. Allow yourself to feel the feelings connected to it, and relive the memory in your mind, just for a minute or two. Then express your intention to release it permanently. “I choose to let go of this old burden. I no longer need to carry it with me. I turn it over to the universe to be healed and transformed.” Then imagine it dissolving into a ball of light and evaporating.

Some of your burdens might be easy to release, but some might be heavier than others, and for those you may need to repeat this process a few times to fully release them. Surrender to the process and allow it to take as long as it takes.

You may also have some burdens that are not from the past, but rather things that you are struggling with in your life right now. For those, you obviously might not be able to release them quite yet, but at least express your intention to release the struggle connected to them. Say something like this: “I surrender this challenge to a loving universe. I let go of all struggles and I invite a sense of ease into this situation.”

Then do your best to truly let go of it for the moment. If you begin to feel weighed down by it again later, repeat the process until you feel lighter in the moment. By continuously doing this with your burdens, both past and present, your energy becomes much more light and open, which makes you more receptive to fresh new beginnings in all areas of your life.