Tag: mentalhealthawareness

  • Rocks don’t bleed

    Rocks don’t bleed

    Sometimes your tears are a mourning of what was, and at other times it’s a yearning for what could have been.

    More than this, it’s a path to the gentleness of your soul that is oppressed by the trials of life.

    When your heart stops yearning for what was, or what you wish could be different, your tears begin to forge a new path. A path towards the hope that you struggle to subdue.

    Just like rocks do not bleed, a hardened heart cannot cry. Beloved, take joy from the gentleness that you still possess despite the horrors of your past.

    Any bitterness that we court denies us the joy that we deserve, and any joy that we court denies them the bitterness that they hoped to share.

    Their bitterness is their heritage of a trial that is not yours to bear.

    Breathe, beloved. Breathe. And know that your tears, if shed for them, holds no value for a hardened heart.

    If tears must flow, let it flow to forge new paths of joy to replace the failed hopes of the past. But celebrate your tears as testament to the beauty of your soul, and not as regrets for having invested in a heart that was closed to joy.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • Uniquely you

    Uniquely you

    When trying to fit in feels burdensome or overwhelming, it may be time to consider that you were created for a purpose greater than just imitating the behaviour of others.

    Recognising the uniqueness of who we are becomes difficult if we spend our lives focused on meeting the expectations of others in the hope that we will be accepted.

    When we withhold our uniqueness from fear of being ridiculed or rejected, we also deny others the opportunity to experience what is unique about us.

    Striking a balance between being true to ourselves and finding a space for ourselves in this world is therefore important.

    Claiming our space without consideration for how it is received undermines the value that we hope to create in the lives of others.

    It’s through sharing our uniqueness with that of others that we are able to create a new beautiful whole, whereas fitting in with everyone else only maintains the status quo.

    Joy is found in striking a balance between being true to your uniqueness, while creating space in your life for the uniqueness of another.

    Be true to yourself, but always be purposeful, and authentic.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • The broken cup

    The broken cup

    Too often, our focus is on how empty is our own cup.

    Sometimes it takes a while before we realise that we’re not taking care of ourselves as we lose ourselves in our concern for others.

    So we begin to focus on filling our cup so that the emotional fatigue can finally be overcome.

    Sadly, we don’t stop to consider if we’re capable of filling our cup because we don’t realise that it may be broken.

    Wounds from the past leave cracks and breaks in spaces that we hope others will mend, not realising that only we hold the key towards mending those cracks.

    Sometimes, we don’t realise that someone we love may have a broken cup, and we exhaust ourselves in trying to fill their cup, believing ourselves to be inadequate in our efforts to make them feel loved enough to want to love us in return.

    That’s why it’s important to heal before you try to find a home for your heart.

    And equally important is the realisation that sometimes it’s not your inadequacy that makes it difficult for them to love you back, but rather their belief in not being worthy of your love that prevents them from embracing you.

    Breathe, beloved…slow, rhythmic, deep breaths that fill those spaces left by the calloused hands that handled the most fragile parts of you.

    Breathe. Be whole. And then return to love.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • The struggle of faith

    The struggle of faith

    It is our belief in the value of something that drives us towards fighting to protect it.

    We cherish that which we appreciate, and we appreciate that which we value.

    Call it conviction in the value of the outcome, or belief in the beauty of its truth. Whatever it is, it is that unwavering faith in what we cherish as a truth that spawns the trials that we face when protecting or defending that truth.

    As is often said, when you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. What isn’t said often enough is that when you stand for something, you’ll be plagued by everything that is threatened by what you stand for.

    Such is the burden of faith.

    Whether it is faith in the divine, or faith in the beauty of creation, faith compels us to protect and nurture that which we hold dear.

    For those who lack such faith, destroying or abusing what we cherish goes unnoticed, leaving us to contend with the destruction they leave in the path of their obliviousness.

    We contend with their destruction because of our faith in the value of what they threaten to destroy.

    Thus, holding on to that faith becomes the trial itself, when letting go holds the promise of ease from those struggles.

    But ease itself holds no value if it leaves a gaping hole where we once had fulfilment or joy.

    That’s why we hold on to faith. Not because we are afraid of letting go, but because we are afraid of feeling empty, or unfulfilled, after having felt, even for a brief moment, complete.



  • Peace is not the absence of battles

    Peace is not the absence of battles

    When life feels overwhelming, the most effective way to slow things down is to choose our battles.

    Prioritising what’s important over what’s urgent usually sets the tone for what we tolerate or invest our time in, versus what we ignore or postpone.

    However, this only creates capacity to deal with new battles that may arise, it doesn’t create space for peace.

    Peace often remains elusive because we’re still responding to what comes our way rather than shaping what we want from life.

    More importantly, peace begins to feel like the absence of battles. It’s not.

    The absence of battles is just a breather. A break from the struggle. But as long as we know the struggle is waiting for us the moment we finished taking our breather, we won’t experience peace.

    Peace only becomes possible when we break the cycles that keeps inviting battles into our space.

    Breaking that cycle means knowing what we’re doing to feed that cycle of struggles that keep weighing us down.

    This demands emotional mindfulness, because it’s how we feel about what we’re facing that determines how we respond. As long as we focus only on the effectiveness of our response, we won’t be able to consciously choose to stop feeding the cycle that makes that response necessary.

    It’s not as complicated as it sounds. And peace is very achievable, despite having had a lifetime of pain or hardship.

    For more info, check out my website at zaidismail.com or reach out on WhatsApp at +27836599183 for affordable coaching that will bring the change that you so desperately want in your life.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • It’s not always about you

    It’s not always about you

    With due to respect to the author of this quote, I totally disagree with this view. This is why.

    It’s one thing to let someone know that you were hurt by something that they did or said. But it’s something totally different to blame them for hurting you.

    When you make them aware of how you feel about what they did, that’s owning your response and creating an opportunity for them to understand the impact that they have on you.

    When you insist that they hurt you, and deny them the right to say that they didn’t, you impose your belief on their intention behind what they did.

    Why is this important? Simple. The moment you blame someone else for your emotional response, you don’t own your response and instead, you give up your power to own your life. In other words, you become a victim of everyone else’s actions.

    Worse than this, you become the oppressor after feeling oppressed. Or the hurtful one after feeling hurt, because something completely innocent done by someone else becomes tainted with your trigger to that event. Or your bitterness about something that they are not responsible for.

    The same way that you want your emotions to be honoured by others, you need to honour their emotions as well. And you do this by trying to understand why they may do something that is hurtful to you without making it about you.

    Seek to understand. Like someone once told me, not all who claim to love, seek to understand. So just because you claim to love someone doesn’t give you the right to blame them for your hurt. That’s not love. That’s abuse. Abuse of the trust that they place in you.

    You can do better than that.

  • Don’t wait for justice

    Don’t wait for justice

    This world was created for respite, not for justice. Stop waiting for it to be OK before you move on with your life. It will never truly be OK.

    And when you eventually do move on, it’s because you stopped waiting for it to be OK, not because it suddenly was OK.

    Life is most often wasted waiting for retribution or reciprocation after we’ve been treated poorly or betrayed.

    When we wait for such justice to come to pass, it means that we’re more invested in our past than we are in our future.

    The irony is that we convince ourselves that we can’t have a future until we get justice for our past.

    The truth is, the future only becomes available to us when we have reconciled our contribution towards the outcomes of our lives.

    We’ll never be able to get into the heads of those who oppressed us or treated us badly.

    Waiting for them to step up and do the right thing is simply perpetuating the very reason why that relationship may have failed in the first place.

    The moment you reclaim your voice in your life, you reclaim your future, and you discard the shackles of the past.

    This doesn’t mean that by reclaiming your voice the issues from the past that continue to plague you will disappear.

    No. What it means is that your response to it will be defined by how much power you want it to have in your future, so that you’ll be able to choose your battles and your conditions for peace more wisely.

    Breathe, beloved…don’t forget to breathe. And between each breath, consider if your last breath was invested in your future, or your past…and choose more wisely the purpose of your next breath.

  • It’s not always about you

    It’s not always about you

    The truth is, if you want to matter that much to someone else, shouldn’t they matter equally as much to you?

    If they do, and you find that they don’t have as much time for you as they used to, or are behaving differently to what you know them to be about, do you claim your privilege to be treated better than that, or do you show sincere concern for what they may be dealing with?

    Busting mental health myths is essential to break the cycle that feeds toxic victim mindsets.

    The problem with this meme is that is encourages self-centered perspectives and denies the struggles that someone else may be going through.

    Sometimes the ones we love may be so overwhelmed by what they’re going through that withdrawal from the world is the only way that they believe they can cope.

    It’s not about how much you may want them to lean on you, or take comfort from you. Sometimes, their battle with themselves drives them to want to protect others from the impact that it is having on them.

    Don’t be so quick to write people off. When you do that, you lose the right to ask others to give you the benefit of the doubt when you’re going through a struggle that no one else understands.

    Sacrificing what you need in favour of understanding someone you love, is sometimes the greatest gift of love you could give anyone. Even if they don’t realise it at the time.

    It’s about what you want to gift to them, not what you need from them that matters.