The problem with obstacles or adversity is-

1. Change– Change happens suddenly and leaves a deep impact on us. We are left dumbfounded and feel lost and frustrated. The biggest challenge is losing our identity as someone- wife, employee, student etc. Now we have to find who we are once again. “Who am I” is the main question we wrestle with. Change also often comes with a loss of someone or something like a breakup or a job loss or even death. How do we pick up our life and start to walk again? With new realities there are also a lot of unknowns to deal with. Fear grips us and we can sometimes get caught up in worries or anxieties. All in all the situation looks bad. 
2. Social support– With new circumstances in life, old friends often leave us. Many relationships go sour. Those who are there may not understand us fully. Help comes with a cost. 
3. Speed– When stress comes up there can often be a loss of concentration. We can’t do things fast enough. There is a heaviness that affects our speed of accomplishing tasks. Sometimes we can achieve very little in a day. That can frustrate us a lot. 
4. Focus– Focus means being able to direct our thoughts or energy towards some task. In difficult times, concentration is surely affected. There are too many feelings to handle that affect us negatively leading to too many thoughts thus affecting the ability to direct thought. 
5. Conditioned thinking – Old conditioned thinking or beliefs come up and remind us of our views- like “success is good and failure is bad”. This conditioned mind sees that we are “failing” and thus generates more negative or unwholesome feelings. Then we start comparing ourselves with others and feel shame and frustration.
6. Limitations – The physical and mental limitations plague us since we can’t do the same things we were doing before anymore. This also affects our communication and social life. Everything we do has an element of struggle. Hence, we start feeling low and anxious. If you are feeling anxious, try this. Make a note of your thoughts when you are feeling anxious about something. Then do the thing that terrorized you the most. Come back and write a note again. Compare the two notes and see if what you gif was really that scary or was it just your imagination that made it so scary. Slowly you can keep a record of such notes and you might be able to see a shift in your thinking and behaviors. You will know that fear is only imagination and nothing is really that scary. Reality can be painful but never scary. If you have physical limitations you will have to accept them and find support and alternatives to live a different life. Sometimes we have to accept that life is tough and we have to live in a new or limited way. There may be some merits in that too. For example you may find that the new reality is not a place of scarcity. It may be abundant in something else. 

The good things about obstacles-

1. Unlocking a deeper intelligence – Once you lose concentration or memory you will find another intelligence will start working. This intelligence is slower, more whole or unbiased and multi dimensional, it is not about pursuing goals any more. It is about being in the present. An example can be- instead of earlier when you were focusing on only one task at hand, like coding a program – now you are sitting and observing everything – how the maid talks to your mom, the room looks clean, the color of the closet is a dull gray- some things you may not have noticed in months. This intelligence comes into play when the mind is not actively doing anything. It’s an observational intelligence. It just simply observes. This is true intelligence. According to Buddha’s teachings this type of intelligence comes from Right concentration which can be practiced by observing our incoming outgoing breath and not following the thoughts. It aids in developing objectivity. 

2. From hope to Wisdom– When we live our normal lives we are focused on our goals. Daily, weekly, monthly. Our mind is mostly more future focused. And there when difficulty arises we bank on hope. We hope things will get better. We believe in the positive. However when going through obstacles we know that we can’t cling to hope anymore. We can only depend upon our actions and our wisdom. Wisdom comes quickly in adversity because we are living with reality every moment. We have lost our grip on our future. And we are forced to be in the present suffering from our daily struggles. As we slowly observe the present  and retrospect the past, wisdom arises. We go through a paradigm shift. It’s a whole new world. Earlier we were living on a stage where success and performance was everything. The whole world was watching us. Now we are out of the stage, far away. Here we simply are. There is nothing to be. Now we can work with things that have a slow pace like knitting, painting, drawing or building a non profit or creating a YouTube channel- all the things we love doing but we don’t because we are in the stage and what the world thinks matters. But the truth is that everyone is doing that because everyone thinks it matters to everyone. But the truth is that it really doesn’t matter to anyone. We all are just trying to please others, afraid of being ourselves, afraid of judgment and abandonment. Here at the non-stage there is no judgment, no abandonment. Just pure being. 

3. More observations– Due to slowness the “what” we now observe also changes.. It’s like earlier we were only looking out through a window in our room, now we are inside and looking at the whole room. We see the doors, the windows, the color of the walls and the carpet.. We also see a little mouse in  the corner and that the tube flight is not straight. Now suddenly we find a solution to an old problem like fixing the lamp or the flashlight because earlier we were not able to observe as much. Now we know what the problem  our friend is facing when we are truly present and listening vs earlier when we were just “hearing” because we were in a hurry to finish our office tasks. Earlier everything that was not office work  was a problem. Now everything is a simple reality that we are deeply aware of. I now know why my parents keep this helper despite her coming late. She is very supportive and comes everyday despite her issues. I know there are three squirrels in my backyard that are always looking for food. Now I really eat my dinner and not just finish it. I am now truly present. This is more powerful than a one dimensionally focused mind which is strongly biased towards its objectives. An example- working with clients – now I really understand their problems because I am truly listening- earlier I was trying to “get a result”. New things will come up because they were getting suppressed before. All thoughts and ideas that were getting suppressed due to the present goals are now coming up. New ideas get generated easily because you are present and your mind can focus with ease on everything. Here you don’t want to achieve anything, you are simply observing.

4. Slow thinking – you will find that very little thought is necessary to really execute things – in fact thought is not even necessary – just the intention will do as long as we fuel it well. Keep filling the bucket with drops of water- put enough drops every time, the water will fill up eventually. As you have to keep just enough wood to keep the fire burning, just enough. Just make that much effort. Also it may be comforting to know that doing things too fast or quickly may actually not help you achieve the results. Speed can make mistakes. So slow is much better.
5. True to ourselves– We are true to ourselves because we are not proving ourselves to others or chasing others anymore. We start “being” instead of “pursuing”. Doing our daily tasks with as much vigor as possible. We may find that we are not able to do a lot. Then we accept our slow pace. Slowly new thoughts or ideas will start coming up in the mind due to diffuse thinking- a thinking that comes from a whole view and restful feeling. When we are not pursuing a goal our mind observes and generates ideas. If we want to change our work or do something we always wanted to do, this is an opportunity to start doing something around it. Again we have to be cautious to not go back to the original form of thinking of chasing an object or goal. We just start doing action and slowly we observe the results come naturally without us running after them. We can be slow and relaxed and still achieve something.
6. Negative thoughts– A mind that cannot pursue goals anymore focuses on the present and sees the simple and ordinary. This is pure observation. If we are having lots of negative thoughts for example, earlier we would run away from them by pursuing a craving, thus avoiding them. Now we stay put and just familiarize ourselves with their nature. We slowly know  that negative thoughts are just perspectives that we need to let go off. As we keep investigating we see that all our negative beliefs are mostly about our not being enough and arise due to fear of judgment or abandonment. When we are truly with ourselves, not identifying with our success and failures,  all negative beliefs can be broken. We are not afraid to lose anything anymore. 

How to deal with above-

1. Accept the change– it is not a change from positive to negative, it is a change from one reality to another reality. That was not good and this is not bad. It is just different. Observe the new things that are available to you for example- fresh grass, sunny mornings, the night sky, newspaper or even better a new outlook towards life, lessons from the past, new friendships, and complete attention towards yourself and your loved ones. Embrace the change. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. 
2. Get social support from people who have faced difficulty in life similar to you or those who have failed or gone through change- whether in an exam, or due to a life event or disease. Accept the inability of those who aren’t willing to support you. Get support from uncommon methods like- go online and create a social media channel, support someone like you on a forum or group etc. Find healthier ways to calm down. Retrospect your life and how you viewed connections before- what you looked for in people while making friends or relationships. See if that works out with you anymore. Is there anything that needs to change? For example, do you make friends for fun or good compatibility or people with the similar interests as you and then find that those turn out to be good weather friends who are not there with you in your difficult times? Time to make friendships for better reasons like care and helpfulness. 
3. Speed will become slow but there are advantages. You can observe more. And you are out of the stage. You have infinite time to finish what you started. Also when speed becomes less, slow processes in the brain become more active. There is less to do or achieve and more can be accomplished with less. Slow processes work on natural principles and give results slowly but the rewards are big. For example- if you cook daal in a wok instead of a pressure cooker the taste will be more wonderful. Or if you practice walking  or meditation daily for 15 mins it will start affecting you positively after a long time but the practice will give you many benefits. Slow processes don’t help us rise to fame or get success quickly but in fact keep us away from the illusion of it and give us true success and  happiness. Instead of focusing on formulas to win something or achieve a goal, we can use our hearts, faith and effort to achieve the same. Now we are working intentionally. And not working for someone else.
4. Focus is affected yet there are many ways to achieve some through various techniques and methods. Depending upon how much focus you currently have, you can try these. There are techniques like Pomodoro technique or meditations like transcendental meditation which is chanting some mantra repetitively or Anapana meditation- where you focus on your breath and observe your thoughts arise and pass away. You can also learn to write a thought diary to help or simply practice how to organize your days and thoughts.
5. Conditioned thinking– Now you have the opportunity to be out of it. Now you can look at yourself and your life in new ways. It is good that you are out of the positive and negative channels and into the “whole” new world where the old principles do not hold. Here you are your own master. There is no judgment or bias or evaluation by others. Now think of  things you have always wanted to do that  you couldn’t do due to your hesitation, shame or others’ judgment? Can you do those now? For example Mike always wanted to be a writer but was stuck in a software job for many years. Then finally he was laid off and he started figuring spending time on writing. He discovered that this gave him satisfaction and freedom he had never got in the job. 

Limitations– There will be physical or mental difficulty, restrictions. Find new ways or new things to do. If you have a walking disability for example you can do research about how other people are sailing through the same situation. What kind of options are available to you? For example In 2008, Mallory Weggeman went to the hospital to receive her third and final epidural injection that she was receiving to help treat back pain caused by postherpetic neuralgia. Tragically, the operation went wrong. The treatment that was supposed to ease her debilitating pain instead left Mallory a paraplegic with complete loss of movement from her abdomen down. She was 18 years old. Mallory had been an avid swimmer from her youth. She made the decision to not let her disability take her away from what she loved. Less than a year and a half after returning to the pool, Mallory broke her first set of world records at the 2009 Can-Am Speedo Para Swim Meet. Over the next four years, she broke thirty-four American Records and fifteen World Records. Mallory is a twelve-time World Champion and a two Paralympic Medalist from the London 2012 Games. She continues to travel the world competing in swim competitions and inspiring audiences in speaking appearances across the globe.