How to Surf Life’s Waves
I'm Dr Victoria Ranade, a clinical psychologist, and I want you to know there is something inside you that is incredibly beautiful, more breathtaking than any sunrise or sunset. No matter what darkness you're facing, there's always light to be found, and this space is here to remind you of that, to remind you that you're not alone.
I've been reflecting on stability lately, because everything seems so crazy and chaotic lately, and it's just gotten me thinking, where do you find stability? What is true stability, and how do we access it in our lives?
Stability is something really interesting, because I've struggled with it my whole life.
When I was a kid, I would get really upset when a parent or an adult would suddenly come and tell me, we're going to go do this now, or we're going to drop this person off now, or we're gonna go grocery shopping now, and as a child that felt completely out of the blue, because I was given absolutely no warning. Perhaps you can relate to this, but it felt really bad as a child. Just an edict from somebody, suddenly out of the sky, “we're gonna go do this now”. I found it so upsetting as a kid, to have that complete lack of stability in that way, that I’d have tantrums and want to tear myself into 1000 pieces.
As a teen, stability felt like not being bullied, like keeping up with all the kids on what to wear and how to be. This morphed into different manifestations of what stability I needed or wanted or craved.
When I was older, maybe in my 20s, stability meant building a career making money so I could have some kind of like financial stability. Success seemed to equal money. I was very obsessed with money in my 20s, but really it was an obsession with stability.
But the funny thing is, the more I chased money or external indicators of success, the less stable I felt because I had to just keep running on what felt like a never ending treadmill to keep those things.
I'm Chinese, and I'm quiet, more soft spoken. I feel like my culture is not as verbal as American culture, so it's always been a struggle for me to adjust to how eloquent people are. In the workplace, I’ve always struggled with being able to articulate myself in a way that felt like I should be able to. I'd stumble over my words and feel self conscious–so stability to me felt like being white, like I need to make myself white in the workplace.
Of course, that led to a feeling of instability, as a fear of being discovered as an imposter, because obviously I'm Chinese and I'm not white. So all my chasing of stability actually was always associated with some feeling of instability.
In my 20s, I was diagnosed with something called bipolar disorder. The best way I would describe my own experience, is that it has made me very sensitive to different moods and stressors. It's kind of like I’m in a snow globe and just being constantly being shaken up by life all the time. How do you find stability in that situation? When you just constantly feel shaken up, or like things around you are triggering? For me, that has been one of the most difficult things to figure out how to manage.
On a personal level, of course, I've helped people with stability in this question, and it's different for everyone, but it's interesting because there are similar patterns we all have. We all struggle with stability. We all want stability–because stability is a sense of security, of safety. So how do we access that and cultivate that within ourselves when life is constantly shaking us up like a snow globe?
I'm going to share with you a breakthrough that I had in my early 30s that really helped me and it’s something I share with my own patients.
For a year, I spent time outside every day, hiking along the same trail along the Potomac River in Virginia, bird watching. There's this beautiful trail where it goes along the water's edge and ou can see all the trees and the sunlight streaming through it; sounds of water with birds flying through the sky. I would go on this same trail every single day, the same same route, for a year.
And what happened throughout the course of the year was I saw that even though I was walking the same trail, everything around me was just in a constant state of change.
The trees would change, the water levels would change from day to day in the river, flowers would grow, and then they would wither away. The rocks on the trail would shift slightly from people hiking on it, branches would fall. Constant change every day. And I realized that it was actually an illusion for me to think of life as something that shouldn't change. I was thinking stability is when things don't change. But, if everything around me is changing, why am I expecting myself to be any different?
If the levels of water in the river are changing every day, it would also make then sense for my levels of energy to change from day to day, or my motivation or my productivity. And maybe what the error or illusion was, was actually the expectation on myself to always be the same inside.
If life is a state of change, then I can give myself permission to honor the changes within me too.
I think that's why nature is one of our greatest teachers, just to spend time in nature and to observe life and its processes just can reveal deeper truths about life–like realizing the only stability in life is that there’s no stability.
There's this quote by the meditation teacher, one of the big founders of the meditation movement, Jon Kabat Zinn. He says, “You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."
I think that's one of the most powerful teachings for me and hopefully for you as well; that we can't stop the waves of life. That's just life. The waves are always coming and they're always going to come. But what we can do is we can learn to surf. And the waves coming is not actually a sign of instability, it’s just life, and to expect otherwise would mean not totally understanding the nature of life itself.
I’d like for you to reflect on if it's helpful for you in thinking about stability this way; of embracing life and surrendering to what's there in front of us, flowing with it and using it as an opportunity to learn to surf and grow.
Stability is not something that we get externally. Everything we see, everything we experience in our lives, absolutely everything is impermanent. True stability is accessing something from deep inside you. It is how you respond to everything going on around you.
Today, may you move in rhythm with nature, honoring your cycles, your seasons, your needs, and may you remember you are not behind. You're not lost. You're simply learning to surf the waves of your life.