Finding Serenity in the Midst of Challenges and Change

Finding serenity in the midst of challenges and change, well, is challenging. Serenity is defined as the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. In these times when challenging events continue to escalate, serenity would certainly be a welcome guest. The Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr, is well-known in 12 Step Groups for this reason. It addresses acceptance, empowerment, and faith to face each moment and day with a greater sense of balance and fortitude. This article will give you ideas about how it can benefit you, and your relationships to change your experience in the world in the midst of these challenges.

Serenity to Accept The Things You Cannot Change

Living in a world where there are overwhelming simultaneous events that signal the need for change, this prayer is especially helpful. It is as if all of the material below the surface is coming up into our view at the same time. This material begs the question: “How deeply are we able to address the muck or sewage coming up everywhere?“

In your personal life and relationships, the invitation is to look at where we are pointing our fingers. We are part of a larger collective. Our blame and anger buried into the numbness within the chaos create alienation from our needs for safety, nurture, kindness, respect, sharing, and focus. These are essentials to creating a life that is not only sustainable for ourselves but for all of us.

When you believe that you have control over everything in your life, this ironically can lead to feeling completely out of control. This can lead to sometimes carrying burdens that are not yours to carry. You cannot change other people by carrying their responsibilities or burdens in life.

In a Resonance Repatterning® session, the process works with your inner limiting beliefs, thoughts attitudes, and orientation to life. These are all influenced by your history and the underlying material. When we ask someone else to change to meet our needs, we are reliving patterns that ask for inner change. Blame is often a resonance with something within us that signals agitation or charge with the energetics of the material we dislike. In some repatterning sessions, we look at how the blame of another is a component of ourselves asking to be healed. If I believe that someone is dishonest, we look at how the charge and energy devoted to this are within us. We check for “I am dishonest.” In whatever way this energy is playing out within yourself it is projected into your field and into the world of relationships.

In fact, this dance of dishonesty between you and others might be one that has been going on for generational family patterns. Whether you have a charge around someone else being dishonest or are truly angry about the issue of dishonesty, it originates within you. How is dishonesty affecting your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations?

Here are some questions you might work with related to this topic, “ How am I being dishonest with myself? What truth am I not living? Where am I not completely ready or yet able to confront my fears or need for more truth about something?”

Accepting people where they are in their lives is a way of giving them respect and dignity. It allows you to give responsibility to others and authorship back to yourself.

Empowering Statements for Greater Serenity

• “If someone’s behavior is unacceptable to me, I cannot change it, but I change my interactions with that person.”
• “it’s no one else’s job to meet my needs. I am responsible for taking care of myself. This is a good thing because it gives my power back.”
• “It’s not my job to control other people, however, I am in control of my reaction to them.

Serenity to Change the Things You Can Control

.Feeling like you cannot change anything can stem from blaming yourself even when there is nothing you can do about a situation, or you resonate with having absolutely no control over anything in your life. This happens when you believe that you do not have the ability or power to make a difference. In other words, the situation or person has power over you. The inability to start or create can result from an unresolved traumatic experience where you are stuck in freeze mode. You might find yourself procrastinating or feel a lack of authority or power due to abuse, chronic stress, grief or overwhelm. Resentment, depression, anger, and fear over time can create a feeling of disconnection from yourself. This means that you are unable to use your body sensations, and your ability to respond to what is happening around you in a life-energizing way with self-care. This impacts your ability to pace yourself or conserve your own life energy for your own benefit.

Empowering Statements for Creating Greater Serenity

• “My past does not define me, I am always able to make decisions for how I will think and behave today, and into the future.”
• “Being perfect or having no flaws would not solve all of my problems, make everyone approve of me, or make it certain that I always get what I want.”
• “It is inevitable that not everyone is going to like, agree with or approve of me all of the time. It is more important for me to be authentic and approve of myself than it is to try to please others to earn their approval.“

Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Serenity to Know the Difference

Either an excessive state of having to control everything or resonating with having no control is extreme. Being able to acknowledge these states creates a realistic way of accessing what you truly do have power over. Having unconditional love for yourself, others, and the circumstances that surround you lessens the struggle to accept life as it is in the moment even if it isn’t what you desire or even demand. This means that you can then begin to gauge what is in your sphere of influence and what is not.

Some great examples might be the following: While you cannot control the economy or politicians, you can control how you spend or save your money, and how you vote at the ballot box.

You might not be able to control another person, however, you can choose how you respond to them. You can choose to respond coherently in a way that promotes your greater peace. You have choices about how to think about the situation. You do have influence over how you feel and respond.

This also applies to your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. Shifting limiting beliefs about yourself goes a long way to transform underlying material so they can be woven into new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the world anew.

In the transformation process of creating greater serenity, some belief statements might include:

• “No matter what is happening around me or in the world, I always have a choice about what I focus on, how I judge the situation, and how I react or respond to it.”
• “No matter what happens in life, I know I am capable of finding a solution and that everything works out in the end.”
• “Sometimes life’s disappointments and challenges can lead to wonderful new possibilities that I never would have known I wanted.”

Serenity arises when you embrace the messages, lessons, and opportunities that the challenge presents to you. Getting to have choices with the material that the upheaval brings into focus is a wonderful reason to work with what feels unfamiliar, unsettling, and upsetting. It signals the potential for your readiness for substantial change in your life. By doing so, you give serenity and peace a chance!

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Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning®practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.

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