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It's no secret that everyone faces struggles in their life. Hardships and adversities come and go as it's part of the human experience — and, how we cope and rise from them without being consumed by them is a journey.
Being able to come back from that struggle can be a challenge within itself as well, especially without the tools and mindset to help guide yourself.
Having faced tremendous loss and hardships through her life, bestselling author Neeta Bhushan understands what it means to feel hopeless and lost when experiencing the big sucker-punch moments of life. Here, she shares what it means to fly forward after getting knocked down.
Bhushan is a former cosmetic dentist and is the co-founder of Global Grit Institute and Dharma Coaching Institute, where she channels the knowledge she's acquired through the adversity she's faced. Through these partnerships, she coaches others on how to bounce back with audacious resilience.
After going through the process of a painful and abusive divorce, Bhushan admits to feeling like a failure. However, she credits the collapse of her first marriage to being the key to understanding two things that ultimately led to her success: her fear of abandonment and rejection, as well as her use of toxic positivity as a coping mechanism. "I just looked at what I've done to distract myself from all the heaviness I was carrying. I thought all of that outward success would actually mask what I was going through, until it didn't anymore and I actually hit rock bottom," she says.
A major component Bhushan endorses after overcoming past trauma is allowing yourself to fully grieve. Allowing the waves of heaviness and darkness to be felt. As she says, you "gotta feel in order to heal." Most of us numb, bury, and shove our "painful feelings" under a rug.
Yet, having healthy coping mechanisms is extremely important to the process of grieving. "Growing up, I was told you're supposed to be buttoning up your emotions and lightening up your feelings," she reflects, "I didn't allow myself to grieve, I kept myself busy and didn't fully feel. I had to learn to do that when I was picking myself back up after I shattered into a million pieces when I finally broke because I did not have that mental resilience."
She credits the use of methods such as chanting, screaming and singing as important to helping her process through her grief, a process she writes about in her newest best-selling book in defining emotional resilience, That Sucked Now What? How to Embrace the Joy in Chaos and Find Magic in the Mess. These practices open up the vagus nerve, which runs from the brain to the gut and allows for the regulation of breathing. Vagus nerve stimulation is a particular technique that can be useful for anyone. Bhushan cites it as opening up your throat chakra to communicate with clarity and without fear.
Bhushan stresses the importance of allocating time within your daily schedule to let yourself pour out any emotion that you may feel. For herself, she believes in practices to help process the often tough emotions, calling it an "emotional reset," as she has several of these practices in her new book to help adults emotionally regulate.
"I have all of these tools put in place for myself to set aside (during the darkest time of my life) 15 minutes a day, morning and night; to grieve, cry, and just to let it out and feel," she explains. The rage, the anger, the frustration, the sadness, the angst. Most often as adults, we have repressed emotions that may prevent us from moving forward harboring guilt, shame, judgement, and even resentment. Giving yourself permission to feel is a process of somatic healing, says Bhushan, and it allows your body to go through and fully express the emotions we often deny as adults.
Bhushan goes farther in depth on her journey of rediscovery after facing challenges in life in her bestselling book That Sucked Now What? How to Embrace the Joy in Chaos and Find Magic in the Mess and how you too can rise above those circumstances. She offers practical frameworks to strengthen your "Bounce Factor" so that you can build unshakeable resilience in your life, no matter what comes your way.