*Bonus Blog* 13 Rabbits and 5 Tips

For What To Do When Life Falls Apart

We’ve all been there. That sickening feeling when our worst fear comes true, when life pulls the rug out from under us with no warning. The dizzying sensation that the world is caving in under our feet while the sky falls on our head and we know life isn’t going anywhere near as planned. Chances are, we are realizing how little control we really have over the external world, and that we actually have little idea what life will look like from this moment on. Worse, what ideas we do have aren’t doing us a lick of good!

Maybe it’s losing a job just as life seemed peachy and you’ve committed to a mortgage for the very first time. Could be a relationship irretrievably broken when it was the one thing you counted on, or anything that seems an insurmountable problem you can’t even begin to know how to overcome. A monstrous bill from the car mechanic when your bank account is on empty, a tax bill instead of a refund you were counting on to get you out of debt.

Life throws us all a million challenges that may leave us feeling intimidated, even powerless. From small irritants to big issues and bigger dramas, it isn’t always about size but about how it hits us just so, in the softest part of our underbelly, in the most vulnerable and frightened part of us. What flattens one person may be just a bump in the road for another. Or maybe it’s about how many occasions we have had to rise to in a short amount of time, what some people refer to as reaching 13 Rabbits.

The concept of 13 Rabbits is accredited to Warwick Schiller*, an accomplished horse trainer, after a student came to him and complained her horse was stupid. After all, it hadn’t cared much about the first 12 rabbits they encountered on a recent trail ride, but when the 13th rabbit hopped onto their path, the horse spooked, bucked and ran home, leaving the girl to walk home with a sore and bruised body. As Schiller explained to the girl, the horse was not in the least bit stupid, he had simply reached his limit. Each rabbit had added to the stress levels of the horse, until, like a worry cup that’s been filled to the brim, it finally overflows.

Fans of the concept now explain their ‘state of being’ in terms of rabbits; I’m at 7 rabbits and holding steady. I swear, one more rabbit and I’m going to blow. It’s a 10 rabbit day and I’m going home before it hits 13.

If you’re having a 13 Rabbits kind of day, there’s plenty of help to be found online, so much so that it can become overwhelming and end up feeling like another massive challenge just to decide which is the best strategy for you. To help cut through the information overload, here are five of my favorite tips to remember when things fall apart, in the order I generally apply them to myself and whatever circumstances I’m dealing with.

Tip #1 Wait a Minute!

In fact, wait three whole days. Mary Morrissey, life coach and the tour de force behind the Brave Thinking Institute, recommends hitting the pause button when disaster strikes. Catch yourself before you panic, inviting all the worst case scenarios to play out on the inner screen of your mind. Pull yourself back from the fear and painful feelings as best you can, put them on the back burner and give it three days. Three days in which you keep giving the situation the benefit of the doubt, and invite the best possible outcome to manifest. Three days in which you continually ask: “What good might there come from this situation?” Three days in which you get curious about the possible answers to that question, and write down the answers that occur to you.

More often than not, things turn out better than expected, sometimes way better than if the apparent disaster had not occurred, and people begin to speak of Kismet and serendipity, thinking nothing of the adversity that opened the door to such miracles.

A classic story to illustrate this point is the old story of the Chinese farmer. His fields are the envy of the county due to his and his son’s hard work, and their one old but excellent plow horse. But one day, a band of feral horses sweep through his farm, taking his horse with them. The old farmer’s neighbors wring their hands in sympathy and tell him how awful it is for him to have lost his only horse, but the old man just shrugs and says: “Good or bad, who can tell.”

A few days later, the old horse returns home, several of the wild horses willingly following him into the old man’s barn, where he and his son swiftly herd them into stalls and begin to feed and train the new but half wild horses. The neighbors exclaim with envy and enthusiasm that the old man is indeed a very lucky man, to now have so many horses. The old man simply shrugs and says: “Good or bad, who can tell.”

The son, eager to make himself a riding horse, picks out the biggest and prettiest horse but soon gets thrown from the horse and breaks his leg. The neighbors wring their hands again to see the old man work the fields on his own, but the old man simply shrugs. Within a week, the military descends upon the village, forcing all able men into service for a far-away war, but leaving the farmer’s son alone, useless as he is, in bed with a broken leg.

The story goes on and on, the farmer always placid in the face of both luck and adversity, knowing full well anyone’s circumstances can change at the drop of a hat, and things are rarely as good or as bad as they seem at first.

As we say in Danish: “Nothing is ever so bad it isn’t good for something.”

So when adversity bursts onto the scene of your life, overcome the panic and tell your fears to take a backseat until further notice. Take a deep breath, hit the pause button,  and shrug serenely when friends and family bemoan your bad luck and tell them – good or bad, who can tell.

Tip #2 Recognize That Your Potential…

…is always bigger than your problem, says Michael Beckwith, founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, and that within the apparent problem lies a solution you may have never even dreamed of, a solution that will present itself when we tap into the greatness that lies “…within our seeming weakness.”

Perhaps the most challenging task set before us when adversity strikes, is to rise above the feelings of doom and gloom, to instead create a feeling in our body that raises our vibration to the place where we begin to lean into our potential. A feeling of joy and expansion in the face of adversity, where our awareness of untold possibilities allows us to feel that we can, in fact, overcome and become more than this set of circumstances. As Beckwith points out, no one ever solved anything with worry. Enter instead into the field of holiness, confidence and joy, and see the problem solved in ways you had never imagined.

It is a principle that is at the forefront of Beckwith’s teachings, that not only does change come from within us, it is entirely up to us to take charge of our thoughts and energetic state to open the door to the life and state of being we envision. Mary Morrissey often tells the following story of Beckwith to illustrate the point.

When a woman approached Beckwith begging for a complimentary ticket to his April event a few months away, citing her lack of money and her willingness to learn from him, Beckwith firmly, but kindly, rebutted her. Instead of catering to her sense of a diminished and powerless self, Beckwith asked her if she, a child of God, was really planning to be poor in April.

So take a deep breath, put panic on hold, and while acknowledging the validity of these painful feelings, ask yourself if you, a child of God, are really planning to maintain this state of useless worry and fear indefinitely? Or are you willing to surrender them to the infinite field of possibilities, raise your frequency and sense of connection, and go meet your solution in that place of joyful confidence in the unknown?

Or, as Beckwith calls it, to go “…from sense to soul.”

Tip #3 Understand That Life Is Not Happening To Us…

…it is happening through us, says thought leader, Derek Rydall. Author of Emergence: Seven Steps for Radical Change, Rydall suggests that adversity is not necessarily a sign that you are on the wrong path, but rather, it presents an opportunity to dig deeper and become stronger. Encouraging a radical shift from victimhood to empowerment, Rydall reminds us that what we may feel is missing from our lives, is in fact something we ourselves are not generating.

Encouraging his students to overcome the temptation to fall into a ‘woe is me’ attitude of despair, Rydall insists that we in large part manifest and create our own conditions based upon our beliefs and attitudes, which filter our perception of, and reactions to, outer stimuli, which in turn determine our actions. What really matters then, are not our outer circumstances but rather our inner conditions. This can be a bitter pill to swallow in the throes of pain and despair, but what we find on the other side of that choice, is a sense of freedom, empowerment and infinite possibilities.

The good news in all this, is that we have a powerful tool available to us that will allow us to notice, analyze and make the appropriate adjustments for a better approach to handling our crisis. That tool is called metacognition, the ability to separate yourself from your thoughts in order to observe and choose your thoughts, as well as where you put your attention. As Rydall likes to say: “Where attention goes, energy flows. What you think about, comes about.”

In other words, if you strive to maintain an overall happy and hopeful attitude to life, expecting opportunities and abundance to find you, rather than committing to limiting concepts, life is that much more likely to mirror such conditions back to you. It requires backbone more so than a wishbone, and a willingness to dig deep into the “…soil of your soul”. The changes that can take place in our state of being when we commit to such inner work can sometimes feel nothing short of a miracle, as our inner state changes in a flash with a profound change in perception.

At the heart of this teaching one may find an echo of Albert Einstein who famously stated that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” We must instead seek to expand, rather than adapt, when faced with situations that encourage us to contract with feelings like fear, anger, grief and anxiety. The power of perception, like a gatekeeper to our best life and highest hopes, belongs to us, and in that lies the real key to inner empowerment.

Tip #4 Let Go And Trust That Everything Will Fall Into Place

Dr. Joe Dispenza is hardly the first or the last person to suggest something of this nature, but he is perhaps the first to give us an actual road map to that state of mind where we can follow this sage advice in a meaningful way. While we all tend to look to outer circumstances to define our inner sense of being, it comes at a heavy price until we recognize the conditioning it imposes, a conditioning that all too often convinces us of our unworthiness and powerful limitations.

To break through this conditioning, Dispenza prescribes meditation. He speaks from experience, having spent his life proving the validity and extraordinary power of such a practice, on a personal level and as a student of the science of meditation. When an accident shattered his spine, Dispenza healed his body against all odds - and conventional thought - through an intensive commitment to daily meditation and visualization. His own experience led to a life devoted to the study of the power of meditation, and to some extraordinary discoveries that have begun to, as Dispenza says, ‘demystify the mystery’ through science.

In order to allow change to take a positive route rather than plunging headlong into a worst case scenario, Dispenza reminds us to be willing to be uncomfortable long enough for the reordering to begin. This applies both to the difficulty of keeping still long enough for the mind to settle into the meditative state, and the agony of being still while life rages on around us. To sit with the pain without immediately seeking to remedy it, instead allowing life to reorder and guide us to a solution, is perhaps one of the hardest things we can ever do.

The rewards, however, can be tremendous. When we allow our brain the chance to recalibrate, it also has a chance to leave behind the stress induced incoherence that have our brain circuits ‘…lighting up like lightning storms’. When our brains begin to find coherence during meditation, it alters our vibrational state and we can start to match the vibrational frequency of our desired outcome.

From there, says Dispenza, reality begins to transform as the future sends back signals in the way of synchronicity and opportunities that seem to fall into our lap from out of nowhere. To explain these ‘breadcrumbs’, Dispenza suggests that we are in effect affecting the quantum field in accordance with the inner state we are generating. Our thoughts produce an electrical charge and our feelings a magnetic one, thereby creating an electromagnetic signature that in turn affects how the field responds to us. In other words, says Dispenza, our thoughts send out the signal, and our feelings draws the event back to us.

The tricky part is, we can’t think greater than we feel, but nothing will change if we wait for it to happen in order to feel it. We must seek this brain and heart coherence, this state of surrender, in order to suspend our disbelief in an outcome better than our present state of mind allows, and the fastest, easiest way to do this is meditation.

If we are to allow for such a positive change in our lives, we have to be willing to forget our present set of circumstances, even our very selves, for even the briefest of instants. We have to get beyond it all so we can connect with the field of intelligent love that meets us as soon as we open ourselves to it. Then thinking greater than we feel becomes possible, says Dispenza, and the creative energy tied up in our pain and suffering becomes available to help us change our energetic state, so that state may in turn change our life.

Tip #5 – Choose the Least Sucky Option

Even having done all the heavy lifting described above, sometimes we find ourselves at a loss and with no clear sense of direction. If we find ourselves in a vacuum with no idea how to fill the space left by all we’ve lost and surrendered to God, (Source, The Universe, Divine Mind, whatever you prefer), remember that nature abhors a vacuum and you best fill it with something you will like better than what you just lost. Even if it just means reading the same wanted ads you read an hour ago rather than glumly staring at your empty bank account.

When clearly some action is necessary and it’s go time, it’s time to consider your options, says Mike Dooley, the mastermind behind Notes From The Universe,  and if they all suck, choose the least sucky one and get cracking. Focus on where you want to get to and then do something, anything, about it.

As the saying goes: “Trust in God and keep your powder dry.”

Dooley likens the concept to that of the GPS guidance system. Focus on where you want to go and then put the car in gear and go, go with all your heart and all of you, because until you set that car in motion, the GPS, or The Universe, cannot begin to guide your decisions to help you get where you want to go. God helps those who help themselves.

The Red Thread

By now, you’ll probably have noticed a red thread throughout this article. Every thought leader mentioned has in some way pointed out that the responsibility for change lies with us, starts with us. It’s up to us to overcome our fear and panic, to step outside ourselves and to not indulge in the pain, to choose to be the observer rather than dive in and suffer over our suffering.

It’s up to us to go within in order to ‘generate state’ and get out of our own way so miraculous solutions can find us. To accept that this isn’t just happening to us because life is cruel and people even more so, but because there is some important learning to be gained from this, that will help us become more whole, more grounded, more connected to a divine and intelligent love that is always reaching for us, always seeking our participation.

And it’s up to us to trust and surrender to the knowing that we don’t actually know it all, and that means, fortunately, that we don’t know for a fact that this apparent catastrophe couldn’t turn into a miracle, that we don’t know that there isn’t some amazing light at the end of the tunnel just waiting for us to get there. So get out of our own way and give it a chance to reach us. Do the work so we can at the very least meet this intelligence half way and rise to the frequency of its’ great works.

Last but not least, a commitment to following through with these tips, over and over again, is key to any real and lasting change. If you can continuously give it up and show up, then don’t be surprised if you start seeing synchronicity, serendipity and miracles show up in your life as your life takes on new and surprising meaning.

P.S. scroll down for videos and links to the teachers mentioned in this blog, or to leave a comment.

Mary Morrissey - Power of the Pause Button

Dr. Michael Beckwith - Your Potential Is Always Bigger Than Your Problem

Derek Rydall - https://derekrydall.com/7-reasons-why-things-arent-working/

Dr. Joe Espinoza – Everything Will Fall Into Place

Mike Dooley – https://addicted2success.com/podcasts/how-the-universe-will-help-you-achieve-success-mike-dooley/

Warwick Schiller 13 Rabbits story https://videos.warwickschiller.com/topic/a-few-stories/

Talk To Me!

Do you have a favorite equestrian principle you’d like me to talk about? Do you have a favorite saying you’d like me to look at through the eyes of an equestrian life coach? Or do you just have a great question or idea for a subject matter you’d like to see me write about? Then drop me a comment below and let me give it a go! Credit will be given for source of inspiration.