Why Your Inner State Outweighs Outer Circumstances
This week a client said, “I’ll be happy again when this deal closes.”
Who among us hasn’t made an agreement like that with life? I’ll feel better when this busy stretch ends.
When I earn the degree.
When I find the partner.
When the book is published.
When things finally calm down.
We’ve been taught, relentlessly (and often unconsciously), to postpone well-being. To wait for external circumstances to give us the permission slip to feel okay.
But here’s the truth we rarely admit: no circumstance comes preloaded with meaning. We’re the ones who assign it.
In other words, what shapes our experience isn’t the event itself, but the story we’re telling about it… often a story we started telling long ago, for good reasons.
I’m not talking about bypassing real stress, grief, or frustration. Those deserve to be felt. Why would we come built with emotion if we weren’t meant to experience it?
But there is a moment when honest emotion turns into extra suffering… when the same narrative loops so often it becomes the lens we live inside, rather than something we’re aware we’re carrying. (And can let go of.)
We all have stories like that.
At that point, the question isn’t: “How do I fix myself or my life?”
It’s gentler.
And more powerful: What story am I feeding right now… and is it still serving me? Or is it time to finally let this one go?
Maybe one of the stories ready to be shed is the belief that you can’t hold grief, sadness, or pain and still know the well-being that’s always here.
Peace and flow don’t disappear just because sadness is present, just as the sun doesn’t vanish when clouds roll in. It’s still there beaming just as brightly as always.
We don’t change stories through bypassing, force, or positive thinking.
We change them through awareness, compassion, and choices made at the nervous-system level.
So maybe today’s invitation isn’t to wait for life to line up, but to notice the well-being that’s already here and see what happens if we allow just a little more of it in.
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