If you are on a path of self growth, there will be a time – if you haven’t gotten there already – when you may believe you have reached the heights of your evolution. Where you feel like your work has been done. That eventually we may figure out this whole being human thing. Where life will get easier, where we will have less conflict and where we will be graced with feel good events, people and opportunities.
Have you had those thoughts or beliefs? Do you ever think that if you show up and do some inner ‘work’, one day you will be free from outer struggles and conflict?
When I started choosing to do my ‘work’, I thought that would be the case. I thought I would reach some nirvana, and my life would be filled with ease and the discomfort would perish.
Unfortunately, choosing to do this inner work doesn’t mean that we will figure it all out one day or that the world will work with us and create a fairy tale life for us. It does mean that when we are challenged, we will have developed the skills that will allow for choice, curiosity and resilience.
When I get cocky and think I have it all figured out, I am often met with more moments of getting my ‘butt’ handed to me. My arrogance sometimes catches me off guard and sends me tumbling into more of my struggles and into the stuff I thought I had already figured out. I have learned that when I believe I have it all ‘figured out’ my struggles become more pronounced.
I have begun to understand that my world is not one that I can micro-manage and systematically design as I want. I have had to learn to let go of my attachment to getting it right and allow my work to help me find agility in times when I am being provoked by life.
We do not do our conscious work so that eventually we’ll never have to deal with difficult times. We do it so that when those times arrive we have the tools to navigate them and use our support systems (inner and social) to help us through, possibility with a little more grace.
One of my teachers, Ally Bogard wrote that “(t)he commitment and discipline it takes to stay interested when it becomes boring; to continue when things get worse before they get better; to find order in states of chaos; to stay engaged amidst discomfort; and to stay steady when our entire inner and outer worlds are churning, is astounding”.
You will be challenged repeatedly in this lifetime. We will all have immense heartache over the delusion that we should have it figured out. But when we choose to reset our expectations and certainties about outcomes, we develop curiosity. With curiosity comes a massive opportunity to go with the flow during life’s massive upheavals.
I hope this is not a disappointing sentiment, but I believe we will never figure it all out. I am steady in my belief that we are given this life to work on our stuff. To be challenged enough (if we are lucky) to shake us out of our dreams of control and fairy tales, and to find ways to be more nimble when life feels unrelentless.
May you be blessed enough to consistently evolve and grow into who you are meant to become until the day we all leave this earth.
With love
Noelle
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