Trusting Life When Nothing Makes Sense: Real Healing Stories of Inner Peace

Having Faith in Life Even When It Does Not Make Sense

From the "From Fear to Flow" Series

There are times when life seems like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, with crucial pieces missing. Regardless of how hard you look or how carefully you put together what you have, the image is still fragmented. I've been there myself. Most of my clients have, too. Sometimes, there's nothing left to do but breathe deeply, let yourself cry, and just keep going. Along that hard journey, something starts to change—not in your outside situation but inside of you. That subtle inner change is the one I want to talk about today: the transformation from fear to flow, from frantic control to soft surrender, from confusing confusion to still trust.

I'd like to tell you two stories today: two individuals struggling with utterly different challenges, two hearts experiencing different types of pain. And yet, both of them are standing at the same fork in the road, where everything no longer adds up, and the only means of moving on is through believing.

Let me tell you Lakshit's story first.

I recall distinctly the day he initially came for our session. A sharp, articulate man in his late twenties, dressed in smart-casual clothes with an attitude that conveyed confidence and professionalism. "I've got everything covered," his body language seemed to add. But his eyes betrayed a different message. There was tension there, a quiet storm beneath the smooth exterior. He had started a successful digital marketing agency from scratch. He was the classic success story on paper—financial security, high-profile clients, increasing influence, and steady growth. But when he talked, his voice stumbled in places where it shouldn't have. That's when I understood—his brain was still playing the CEO role, but his heart had long ago quietly resigned.

"I don't feel anything anymore," he admitted.

A single sentence can sometimes bear the whole burden of a person's pain.

In the first few weeks, we didn't try to fix anything. We didn't make lofty goals or write performance improvement plans. We just talked. We worked on being present, breathing, and making space.

It was about our fourth week together when his well-built wall started to break down. We were in the middle of what I refer to as a 'Pause and Reflect' exercise when he made a comment that lingered with me.

"Abhisshek bhaiya, I really don't know whether I constructed this life out of fear or passion. What if all of this is just me fleeing something?"

I gave a soft smile. "Good. Now we're finally going somewhere."

That's when the actual journey starts, isn't it? Not when you know everything, but when you finally muster up the courage to ask the fundamental questions.

As we delved deeper into our work, we found that Lakshit had been running on survival mode since the age of seventeen. His father had died suddenly, and there was a gap that no one was ready for. Overnight, he took on the responsibility of becoming the pillar of the family. His sister was still studying, his mother was emotionally shattered, and there was no backup plan. He learned to hustle. To survive. To sustain. But in becoming the responsible caretaker, he had left behind essential pieces of himself—the introspective youth who adored writing, who could soothe himself through poetry, who could sit for hours by the water.

"Life didn't give me the luxury of sitting and feeling," he had said in one session. "I just had to keep moving."

And now, after almost a decade of endless movement, he had hit burnout.

"All I've constructed is for a reason," he mused one afternoon. "But it's without meaning. That's what really terrifies me."

We started working with his emotional memory—a technique I commonly use with clients who operate at high levels of function in their work but feel disconnected from themselves. Through a guided breath and journaling exercise, he penned a sentence that was to become life-changing: "If my father were here now, would he even recognise the man I've become?"

That one question devastated and started healing him.

In the next three months, Lakshit began to make new choices. They were minor adjustments but far-reaching in their effect. He cut back on his client load. He started teaching a Sunday creative writing class. He re-established contact with old school friends he'd lost touch with. He began phoning his mother not just to see if she'd had anything to eat, but to really talk with her, heart to heart. And perhaps most importantly, he came to trust the stillness. The emptiness. The not-knowing.

In his own words, "I used to be terrified of stillness. Now, I welcome it like an old friend."

Lakshit's life didn't suddenly turn into a fairy tale. But something changed at its core—he ceased to try to force clarity. He started believing in timing. He no longer felt the need to micromanage every step of his path. He learned to listen. Not to market trends or client needs—but to his own inner voice.

When I saw him last, he said something I'll always remember: "Sometimes, the best thing life can do is confuse you. Because in that confusion, you stop pretending. You drop the act. You become real."

That's the deep strength of trust. It doesn't necessarily fix our issues. But it allows us to hold them, kindly. Without shattering under their pressure.

Now, listen to me recount the story about someone I can refer to as "Aarohi" (not her actual name—she is so private, and I have anonymized it by changing her real name).

Aarohi approached me after a broken heart that shattered her whole perception of herself. She was involved in a seven-year committed relationship. Everyone expected marriage to result from it, including her. Family meetings had already taken place. Future festivals were scheduled. Ideals had come to be tangled. And then, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, it was over. Her boyfriend told her he couldn't go on. There was no adequate reason. No emotional resolution. Only a hasty text message and then nothing.

She didn't weep during our initial session. That disturbed me more than if she had.

"Would you like to discuss what went on?" I asked.

"No," she answered emphatically. "Because if I begin, I will lose it altogether."

So we did not speak of it head-on. Rather, we spoke of her favorite foods. Her dog. The last dance in which she had danced with abandon. The books she once loved before mourning took her inability to focus while reading.

Slowly, week by week, her defensive silence began to melt.

She explained how she had built her whole life around their relationship. It was her compass. Her professional decisions, the city she resided in, and even her social contacts had been tailored around this partnership. Now that it was lost, she was adrift, floating through space without gravity.

"I don't know who I am without him," she whispered in one session. "I don't even know how to exist in the world anymore."

That's when I introduced her to what I call the Breath Pause Practice—a simple technique of anchoring oneself in the present moment through conscious breathing. Not as an escape, but as a way to feel more fully. Not to fix anything, but simply to witness what is.

Initially, she resisted.

"What's the point of breathing if it doesn't change anything?" she challenged.

I smiled. "It does change something. It changes you."

The breakthrough was the fortieth day of being together. I had asked her to journal one question: If this pain has a purpose, what would that be?

The next week she came back crying and said, "Perhaps life didn't crush me. Perhaps it crushed the illusion I'd been living."

Her energy was different from that day on.

She took a pottery class. She started reading Rumi and Rabindranath Tagore. She started spending weekends with her niece and nephew. She stopped stalking her ex's social media profiles. And most importantly, she stopped asking "Why did this happen to me?" and started asking, "What is life trying to show me?"

It wasn't an easy ride. Recovery never runs on a straight line. But she stopped struggling with the mysterious. She started believing in her own soul's sense.

She told me something one day that left me stunned for a moment.

"Maybe we just wait for the whole picture to come into view before we're ready to trust. But trust doesn't work that way, does it? Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe we must trust first. and only then does the picture slowly come into focus."

I nodded, my heart touched by her wisdom.

That is the trick I've learned through years of consulting with clients and dealing with my own life problems. Life seldom gives us a complete map. Rather, it provides us with a flashlight and a road hidden in mist. We take our steps, one cautious step at a time, believing that the next rock will be under us. And step by step, mysteriously, it is.

I've seen this pattern in my own life as well. When my parents suddenly died back in 2017, nothing made sense. When I started down the road of becoming a holistic coach while still working in the corporate world, nothing made sense. When I chose to write from the heart, speak in public, and share my personal narrative, many people, including aspects of myself, doubted my sanity. But I continued walking, breathing, and trusting.

And now, when I sit across from clients such as Lakshit or Aarohi, I don't give them promises. I give them presence. A reflection. A hand to hold as they make their way through their own fog. Because I intimately know what it's like to walk in darkness. And I also know that indescribable sense when light comes back slowly.

Trusting Life When Nothing Makes Sense.

I remember my own dark night of the soul years ago. I had just moved to a new town for what I thought was my dream job at a high-end hotel. Within three months, because of internal politics and not because of anything I did, I had to make the painful choice to quit. Shortly after that, I learned my dear friend had been diagnosed with a serious illness. My apartment's pipes deprived me of hot water for nearly two weeks in the middle of winter. Everything that could go wrong appeared determined to do just that.

One evening, I was huddled on the floor of my flat, surrounded by still-unopened boxes, pondering what cosmic joke I was being dealt. I was thoroughly betrayed by the universe to which I had pledged my trust. The habits that I had instructed others to cultivate seemed vacuous then, and the wisdom that I had shared came across as trite slogans.

That night, I did something I hadn't done since childhood—I cried until no tears were left. Not elegant, dignified tears, but sloppy, ugly crying that started deep inside me. When at last I was exhausted, I felt a peculiar emptiness. Not the empty ache of hopelessness, but a strange emptiness. As if I'd been hollowed out to hold something new.

The next day, I still had no idea. My condition had not changed, but within, something was different. I made tea and watched the flat morning light by the window. I decided—not with melodramatic resolve but with plain trust—that I would believe this painful process. I would stop fighting what was happening and go with it, as a leaf on water floats carried by a stream.

Within two weeks, an old friend phoned to talk about some consulting work that eventually led to the coaching business I possess today. I found a superior flat with regular plumbing and morning sunlight. My friend's treatment began to show positive gains. None of these occurrences was instant or miraculous, yet they arrived in their own time, like flowers pushing through concrete.

In retrospect, I see that the collapse happened before the breakthrough. The emptying cleared a space to fill. The confusion brought clarity. Not because there is some kind of universal law that insists on pain as an introduction to happiness, but because sometimes we need to be lost entirely before we can be found again.

I share this because I want you to know that if you're reading these words and it feels like everything in your life is breaking apart, I get it. I've been there. Many of us have. And though I can't guarantee that everything will turn out exactly how you want, I can promise you with absolute certainty that meaning will come out of the wreckage. Not because life is scripted, but because we human beings are meaning-making beings. We seek meaning, even in pain. We establish the connection, even in loneliness. We find purpose, even in suffering.

There's a Japanese aesthetic concept known as "kintsugi"—the practice of mending broken pottery with gold. The philosophy is that breakage and repair are part of the object's history, and they make it more beautiful, not less. I think our lives work the same way. The breaks, the cracks, the areas where we've been shattered and lovingly pieced back together—these are the brightest parts of our narrative.

Trust does not imply knowing what the result is. Trust suggests being ready to move to the next step without viewing the entire path. It means grasping your own hand through the night. It implies believing—even without evidence—about the likelihood of life happening to you rather than for you.

I've spent years sitting across from hundreds of clients—men and women from all backgrounds and cultures, from various professions and walks of life. And what I've come to see is this: individuals who handle the uncertainties of life with the greatest ease aren't always those who have the fewest issues. They're the ones who have learned to partner with uncertainty itself. They know how to dance with it, not struggle against it.

Last month, I heard from Lakshit. He'd taken a two-week retreat in the mountains—something the old, always-hustling iteration of himself would never have permitted. He said, "For the first time in my adult life, I feel like I'm not running from or towards anything. I'm just here. And surprisingly, that's enough."

Aarohi recently began dating again—not in an attempt to replace what her past relationship had left empty, but because she truly feels prepared to connect. "The difference," she explained to me, "is that I'm no longer seeking someone to fill my life up. I'm seeking someone to share the life I'm already building."

They are not tales of flawless conclusions. They're stories of significant startings. Of individuals who permitted life to break them open in order to be remade into something more honest.

So if you're feeling lost at the moment, if the road ahead is uncertain or the weight too much to bear, recall this:

Confusion is not your foe. It's usually the threshold to a greater understanding.

Pain is not a penalty. It's often the trigger for significant growth. And uncertainty is not to be dreaded. It's the place where new possibilities arise.

Have faith in the process, even when it seems like chaos. Have faith in the silence, even when unanswered questions punctuate it. Have faith in life, even when it does not make sense.

Because one day—possibly when you least anticipate it—you will look back and realize that those moments which made least sense then were precisely the turning points. The breakdown was the breakthrough because. The end was only the beginning of something else.

A few years back, I came across a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke that has become a sort of personal mantra:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Living the questions. Loving the questions. Trusting the questions.

Maybe that's what this trip is all about: not hurrying to solutions or knowing, but becoming adept at staying well in the land of not-knowing. Discovering equanimity not in resolution but in process.

I invite you today to breathe deeply, feel whatever you're feeling without judgment, and trust that even if you can't see the whole picture yet, you are exactly where you need to be. The pieces will fall into place in time, the path will unfold step by step, and the light will come back, as it always does after darkness.

Trust life, even when—especially when—it doesn't make sense.

Because it will, one day, it will.

Trusting Life When Nothing Makes Sense.

Om poornamadah Poornamidam |

Poornaat Poornamudachyate |

Poornasya Poornamaadaya |

Poornamevaavashishyate |

Om shanti, shanti, shanti hi ||

Hari Om Tatsat!

Warm regards,

Abhisshek Om Chakravarty, (Coach Abhisshek)

Holistic Life Coach | Mindfulness Mentor | Family Mindset Coach 

"Within each soul lies infinite wisdom; I simply help others uncover their light."

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