We all experience challenging moments at times.

When something happens that feels difficult or undesirable, we often have a negative reaction toward it, a knee-jerk reaction to feel unhappy about it.

We may only see or feel the difficulties, the pain, the things we’re losing or can’t have or that won’t happen. We may only feel the loss, the hardship, see the obstacles.

This is a natural, even understandable reaction, but it’s not the only way to view the difficult or challenging moments in our lives.

This is only our perception, how we’re seeing what’s happening in the moment.

We all view the world through our own perceptions. We have thoughts and ideas and beliefs that color how we experience the things we experience. We see through our own lenses, experience each situation through our own, personalized filters.

But our perception is only our perception, and we always have an opportunity to shift it, to shift how we see something, how we experience something.

This shifting of our perception is known as reframing. Reframing is just changing how we view something, how we look at something. It’s being open to a new possibility for how we can perceive something.

It opens us up to the possibilities, the opportunities, the potential, a more expansive way of experiencing the things that we’re going through.

Maybe something positive could come from the challenging experience. Or maybe there is an opportunity there, something we can learn from it, a lesson we can work through. Maybe there’s something we could do now that we couldn’t have done before.

Or maybe we can use it to practice presence, to practice coming back to ourselves and the moment, to practice sitting with ourselves, tuning into ourselves, and connecting more deeply to ourselves. Maybe we can use it to connect more deeply to our hearts, to who we are, to what we want, to the things that are important to us.

In challenging moments, we can ask ourselves:

What is the opportunity here?

What can I learn?

How can I use this?

What can I do?

Is there another way of looking at what’s happening?

Yes, we might feel pain or some difficult feelings—and it’s important to let ourselves feel those feelings, be with them, allow them to move through us—but we might also see that there’s something we can learn from the situation, something we can take from it, something that could open our hearts or expand our minds. There might be something that is opening for us.

Reframing doesn’t mean clinging to blind positivity or forcing ourselves to feel thankful for things that are causing us pain—but it does mean that we understand there may be something positive, something beneficial, we can take from the situation, or that can arise out of it, if only a deeper, softer, gentler connection to ourselves. We could use it as an opportunity to come back—to the moment, to ourselves, to where we are.

We can learn to reframe how we view the things that happen in our lives. We can choose to open and expand our perceptions, to seek an alternative view, to potentially open up to something we hadn’t seen or considered.

When we can observe ourselves, when we can see how we’re viewing something, how we’re experiencing something, we can alter that experience, to shift it, to open to a new possibility, a new perception, a new way of viewing it.

We can change how we view the things we experience. We can change what we emphasize, what we focus on. We can open ourselves to new ways of thinking about and considering the things that we go through.

The power in reframing is that we get to shift how we look at things. We can look for the opportunity, the potential, the possibilities.

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