Last year, if you had seen me kneeling in front of that small temple in the rain, clutching a stack of wet documents and crying in front of an old monk… you would have thought I’d lost my mind.

Honestly, I thought so too.

It started with those “unlucky weeks” we all joke about. Except mine didn’t end. Projects at work that used to be easy suddenly fell apart. Emails got misunderstood. My manager went from praising me to questioning everything I did. The promotion that was “basically yours” just quietly disappeared from the conversation.

At the same time, people I called friends began to fade. They replied slower, stopped inviting me out, cancelled plans with half-hearted excuses. There was no big fight, no betrayal, just this cold, invisible distance. It hurt more than if they had yelled at me.

Nights were the worst. I’d fall asleep, exhausted, and dream I was falling from a building with nothing to hold on to. Or wandering in some endless maze, every turn leading to another dead end. Sometimes, in the same dream, I’d suddenly find myself flying over my old neighborhood, feeling strangely light… and then wake up with tears on my pillow.

I tried to be “strong”. Put on makeup, answered “I’m fine”, went to work, scrolled my phone, pretended I didn’t notice my life quietly collapsing. But one afternoon, I got called into a meeting and was basically told, with polite corporate words, that I wasn’t “a good fit for the next phase of the company”.

I walked out with my termination papers, stepped into the street, and for the first time in years, I didn’t know where to go.

My feet took me to a small temple outside the city. I’d only been there once as a child. It was raining lightly, that kind of thin, cold rain that gets into your bones. The courtyard was empty. I stood there, in my beige trench coat and office badge, holding my stupid papers like they were proof that I had once mattered.

An old monk was sitting on a wooden stool by the doorway, next to the golden Buddha and a few flickering candles. He looked up at me, not surprised at all to see a soaked stranger suddenly appear.

And that’s when everything broke.

I dropped to my knees on the wet stone, papers falling everywhere, and I just… cried. Ugly, shaking, gasping kind of crying. I told him everything: the job, the friends, the breakup I never really healed from, the dreams, the feeling that the universe was punishing me for something I couldn’t even name.

He listened quietly, hands resting on his knees, eyes soft but sharp, like he was seeing more than what I was saying.

When I finally ran out of words, he asked me one simple question:
“Before a new seed can grow, what happens to the old plant?”

I stared at him, confused and sniffling. He smiled gently and said, “Sometimes life has to break your old shell so your real self can breathe. You think you are being destroyed. Maybe you are just being stripped of what can’t go with you to the next chapter.”

He told me about karma, about causes and conditions, about how nothing comes or goes without a reason. How old relationships fall away when their role in our story is done. How jobs, titles, even the people we love can become cages when our soul is ready to grow beyond them.

“Right now,” he said, “you are standing in the burning house of your old life. Of course it hurts. But don’t run back inside just because you are afraid of the rain.”

We sat there in silence for a long time: me on my knees, him on his stool, the Buddha glowing softly behind him, the rain washing the courtyard clean. For the first time in months, my chest loosened. The pain didn’t disappear, but it changed shape. It wasn’t a punishment anymore. It was… a process.

After that day, my life didn’t magically become perfect. I didn’t walk out and suddenly win the lottery or meet my soulmate at the bus stop. What changed first was inside.

I started giving myself time alone without calling it “being lonely”. I learned to sit with my sadness without scrolling it away. I tried meditating, chanting, reading about cause and effect instead of endlessly stalking people who had left my life. I slowly forgave people who had hurt me—not because they deserved it, but because I deserved peace.

And little by little, things outside began to shift too. A friend I hadn’t talked to in years recommended me for a new job that fits me better than the old one ever did. I met kinder people, people who didn’t need me to be “perfect” all the time. My nights became quieter. I still dream, but now I dream of walking, not falling.

Sometimes I look back at that image of myself on the temple steps: soaked, shaking, kneeling in front of a calm old monk. It feels like a scene from a movie where everything falls apart right before the main character finally wakes up.

Maybe that’s what it was.

If you’re going through a season where everything seems to be leaving you—jobs, people, plans, the version of yourself you thought you were—maybe it’s not the universe hating you. Maybe, just maybe, it’s life breaking the shell you’ve outgrown.

What do you think? Have you ever had a moment where you completely collapsed, only to realize later it was the first step toward a better you? 💭✨