When is your burden too great?

“Some people believe we are only given the burdens we can handle to build our character. I don’t buy that. Who can know who will break and who will empower themselves to come back for another round with fate?”
By Kari Fulmek

When I woke up the morning after my beloved horse died after bleeding out all over our acreage, I cannot honestly say that my spirit was filled with empowerment to jump up and rebuild my life and my business.

The truth is, I woke up numb. I was still wildly upset, still scared, and still broken hearted.

Being empowered doesn’t mean that you don’t have normal, human responses to trauma and tragedy in your life. It does mean that from somewhere deep within you, you find just one small shard of courage to take one little action and start putting your world right again.

Most people have that within their personal well of strength. If we don’t, we go down and don’t get back up unless we take a hand extended to help us. If there is no helping hand, we flounder and sometimes never recover.

For those with a little strength in their personal well, and that really is the majority of us, we have to take that single act to start back up. The longer we go without that, the more endangered we are of drowning in our own self-pity.

And self-pity is no way to live. It is an emotional quicksand and the longer you stand in it, the deeper you sink.

If you do too far in, even the hands extended by others can’t pull you out.

Of all the life skills we are taught over the years, the ability to come back after falling down is probably the one people avoid talking about, yet it is the most important.

Life does not go smoothly. When you start back up after a tragedy, you move two steps forward and then slide back one.

But just as nobody can breathe for you to keep your lungs alive, nobody can move you forward if you cannot help yourself.

At this early stage of recovery, it is about survival as much as it is about empowerment.

But life is an amazing teacher in its own way. Each time you do manage to get up and create the series of actions that allow you to rebuild, you get stronger. When you get knocked down again, you have a template to follow emotionally, and you recover a little faster.

You build that template for recovery from being personally empowered to take charge of your life and all that involves.

That is why it is such purposeful work to try to empower not just yourself, but others. Your investment in empowering people before they are in a crisis state prepares them to survive when it hits them.

What purpose can be better in life than to perform such a valuable service? Empower yourself and then reach out to empower others. That is the best possible work there is in life.

Kari Fulmek is the author of “Two Weeks to Empowerment: How to take charge of your life and find your true purpose” and the founder and owner of Equine Connection – The Academy of Equine Assisted Learning Inc. She is a Certified Master EAL Instructor and a Certified EAL Facilitator. From her base near Calgary, AB in the foothills of Canada’s Rocky Mountains, she travels the globe to empower clients. To learn more about Kari, visit her website at: https://equineconnection.ca.