I have learned lately that life itself rarely gets easier.

But our ease with life’s hard times can.

When I was younger I had a fascination with comparative religion. I was just sure that the cure for it all (whatever “it” happened to be that day) would be found in a power higher and wiser than myself.

Later I had a crisis of faith and opted to go for a time without any and see how it felt. I was intrigued to notice that neither extreme felt particularly better nor worse than the other.

In fact, further analysis revealed that I felt equally dependent, powerless, and incompetent from either side.

Earlier this week I blogged about Dr. Marsha Linehan’s stunning (yet somehow not surprising) admission that she has had personal experience with the disease her professional reputation has been built around treating.

Today, as I continue to contemplate her remarkable disclosure, I am pondering the pivotal moment when she had the what some might term spiritual or religious experience that connected her for the first time ever to a personal sense of self.

To hear Dr. Linehan tell it, the moment in which she was first able to address herself in the first person as “I” and “myself” was also the moment in which her first real progress towards recovering from the symptoms of her borderline personality disorder and resulting suicidality was made.

All of which is to say that self-acknowledgment is powerful. It is hard to ignore what we have admitted exists.

I have discovered many things in my post-recovered years (that is, in the years since my dependence on my eating disordered thoughts and behaviors subsided for a sustained period of time).

For instance, I have discovered that sometimes we just hurt.

Sometimes we just feel sad.

Sometimes we just wake up on the wrong side of not just our own bed, but of the world as well.

As author Pema Chodron writes in her book, “When Things Fall Apart”, “We’re always in some kind of mood. It might be sadness, it might be anger, it might not be much of anything, just a kind of blur. It might be humor or contentment. In any case, whatever it is, that’s the path.”

It took me a long, long time to start seeing those shifting-sands moods as anything other than the dangerous possibility of relapse, the result of something I must still be doing wrong, or an indication that I am never going to get “there” – to that place of no more shifting sands.

In other words, I was confusing recovery with life.

In her book “When Things Fall Apart”, Pema Chodron likens sitting with our own loneliness to going into detox.

“Boy, that doesn’t sound like fun!” I thought when I first read her words.

But it sure made me curious.

Is it? Is the experience of my own loneliness really that uncomfortable – or transformative?

So I sat with it. I had a perfect opportunity the other night in my meditation class, so I marched right into that space where I often feel inexplicably lonely, and I sat down to wait.

It didn’t take long. Before five minutes had passed I started to squirm. To fidget. To THINK.

Oh god. The thinking. That’s the worst.

As I continue to grow and evolve in my own recovery journey, I am struck time and again by how freely and enthusiastically (whether invited to do so or not) others weigh in on what they think I should do here, where they think I should go there, what they think I should choose in this situation, why I am having a good day or a bad day or a blah day and how I could change that…..and everything in between.

The fact is, we feel at our confident best when we are dispensing advice….to others.

But how do we feel when we dispensing advice to ourselves?

How readily do we believe ourselves? How trusting are we of our motivations or our words?