Hey there, you fantastic Friday folk. It's bonus episode day. Five minutes to get your weekend off to a good start.

Whatever the world is throwing at you right now. I've been a therapist for long enough now to know that we all feel pain in different ways.

Buddhist teachings were all about the idea that pain is inevitable,

but suffering is optional. But that doesn't mean that the pain of life isn't real,

especially when so much of it's outside of our control. Sometimes the waiter in your life

is going to bring your things that weren't even on the menu.

And it's hard to deal with these things.

Loss, rejection, unfairness.

There might just be a part of life, but it can still overwhelm you to the point of thinking you could just give up.

But it's in these moments that we have to really dig

deep to keep moving forward, rather than going over what has happened or how things could be

different, even though we know it's how we deal with these things, rather than the things

themselves that make it so that we either crumble or become

stronger. There's a great quote by Muhammad Ali, the boxer, when a reporter asked him, how many sit-ups

he could do? And he said, I don't know. I don't count all my sit-ups, he said. I only start counting when it starts hurting

because they're the only ones that count. And it's the same for emotional growth as well. No growth

comes from staying in any comfort zone. Going through those bad experiences is the only way to grow the part of you that can handle it.

And once you realize this, then every bad experience gives you the option to figure out how to

deal with it, to take responsibility for finding out how to change it rather than getting

caught up in the emotions of the experience.

Now, a majority don't. Most people give in to the feelings. They wallow in it, drown in it maybe,

until it becomes depression. And when we're prone to that, we really do need to dig deep.

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