by Ross Bishop
What I am about to tell you contradicts a good deal of what you have been taught about life. If you can get above the tumult and turmoil of daily events, you can see that life is about more than your everyday struggle. You are in a unique learning environment with a remarkable curriculum and an unconventional learning process. The knowledge gained comes through your experiences and the course material consists of the events of your life. Your pain is because you do not yet hold the truth and, as a result, cannot move in harmony with the rest of The Universe.
There is also nothing wrong with your life. You have things to learn, and irrespective of how you may feel about it, you are exactly where you need to be. If you were supposed to be someplace else, you would already be there. Your beliefs, fears, and anxieties have brought you exactly to the best place to deal with them, and yes, that is an uncomfortable place!
You are perfectly positioned to learn what you have come here for. The simple truth is that you cannot be what you believe about yourself. You are just as The Creator made you; you cannot be anything else. Now, you can believe things such as unworthiness and unlovability but your problems come from your beliefs, not from who you are. Your false beliefs are intended. They are part of your learning process. The explanation of their origins is too long for an article, but I explain that in my book Healing The Shadow.
In this process we call life, you are presented with opportunity after opportunity to surrender your fear-based beliefs and emotions and move to greater compassion.
Think about all the difficult situations in your life. Every one of them has offered you the chance to become more compassionate, especially toward yourself. You rarely take these opportunities, but they are offered to you all the time, just the same.
And what is our most powerful teacher? Our mistakes! Do something right and you hardly notice. But screw up, and all hell breaks loose, internally and sometimes externally, too! You are not likely to do that again. Thus, failure is our most powerful (and in the initial stages, our most painful) teacher.
This next point can be a little hard to swallow, but life has been designed to make you feel inadequate, at least initially. This is done so that when you act your feelings out, you will experience stress and pain and then eventually turn from them. And that will lead you to the truth. It had to be this way because you have free will. You have to come to this understanding on your own. And none of this could be explained beforehand. (If it were, it would have defeated the process.)
In an important sense, life is not about learning. It is about unlearning.
Your focus is on the events themselves: things like relationship breakups, a divorce, work problems, issues with friends, etc. But what drives these situations are the doubts and insecurities you hold about yourself. To keep these situations from reoccurring, you need to learn to unlearn the restricting beliefs and behaviors you place in the way of your natural self. Life is about teaching you to live in the truth. It means letting go of fear, doubt and anxiety so that you can live in peace.
The events that we focus so much time and energy on, have no lasting significance. But they do offer the means for the development of your consciousness. They set the stage for your journey to enlightenment.
Many people long for real intimacy in a relationship. Why? Because they (mistakenly) feel that it will heal their inner feelings of loneliness and incompleteness. Sad to say, that isn’t how things work. We can mask our feelings in the excitement of a new relationship for a time, but eventually, the truth dawns that he isn’t going to do it. Then we typically move on to the next partner.
One of the most important goals of life is to help you realize that you are worthy so that you do not have to live in fear, anxiety, and longing. When you feel worthy, you do not separate from others and, therefore limit your exposure to life. You are free to allow your natural self to emerge, instead of hiding because of the fear that who you are might not be acceptable.
Said another way, the purpose of life is to bring you to choose your natural state of compassion. And for that to happen, the part of you that is based in fear and false beliefs – even though you believe them to be true, will have to transform, so that you can be reborn into the Truth. And that means you must be willing to shed the old you. This is what Christ meant when he said, “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”
Copyright 2024@Blue Lotus Press
