3 Tools for Your Red Sea Moment

Sometimes you have to deal with it. Whatever it might be. Perhaps this is something that you have brushed under the rug for ages, or is a new obstacle that is lying in front of you.

Perhaps you have found strategies that allow you to burrow underneath the obstacle and construct a tunnel. Or perhaps you have found a way to build a fence around that obstacle and avoid the obstacle by taking a different route and keep going. But, then, a few miles down the track you come across the obstacle again, and again, and again.

For many of us, it takes a serious event – ill health or death of a loved one, for example, for us to sit up, take a look at the obstacle in a different way and start to deal with it. Other times, we start to notice or think of these obstacles differently when we start a contemplative practice, such as meditating or journaling which allows us to see these obstacles that we have been avoiding and start to tackle them differently.

What tools can we use to handle this?
1) View the Obstacle as the Path. In Buddhism, teachers talk about the obstacle as the path when they refer to our difficulties in meditating for example, our inner obstacles like how we manage emotions, or the outer ones, like how we keep overly busy, so we don’t have to work with our mind. I heard an Episcopalian Rector describe this as the “Red Sea Moment” – the moment in your life when you have to go through it, not around it.
2) Start a Meditation Practice. Meditation helps with emotion regulation, with learning to let go of the past and future and with the deep listening that is needed either to yourself or to those with whom you need to resolve issues.
3) Use the tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Marshall Rosenberg established NVC as “…a language of life in which compassion comes naturally… by allowing us to express what is alive in us and to see what is alive in other people.” NVC in a nutshell, requires us to: establish the needs of both sides, establish the resources of both sides, then ask “What can be done to meet these needs?” Most of us, he points out in his book Living Nonviolent Communication, do not have the right language to identify our needs (we talk about strategies, we intellectualize, we dehumanize, we criticize or pathologize the other side), rather than articulating our needs and hearing the needs of the other.