An especially beautiful sunrise over the mountains: snow, a fog bank, and sunlight in the trees
When you are in difficult situations, ask yourself what your life is trying to show you. Gregge Tiffen, Life in the World Hereafter: The Journey Continues (available from P-Systems - http://www.p-systemsinc.com/publications.htm and on amazon.com)
I wanted to title this post ‘The Most Important Question You Can Ask’, but I resist the temptation to shout what I understand to be mystical truth. I don’t know about you, but I learn best when something comes to me understated. I like to be surprised when some new piece of knowledge or an experience exceeds my expectations. My ‘critical eye/I’ kicks in when I experience something as less than I thought was promised.
What is true for me now however is that approaching all of life, especially difficult times, as learning opportunities is the most important shift that I have made in my 66 years of this life.
Sincerely asking the question ‘what does this event in my life want to teach me?’ with an open mind and an open heart is an elixir that helps me move from struggle and suffering to greater ease and peace. With an attitude of genuine curiosity, I can engage in necessary actions that step-by-step often lead to inspiration and deep insight. Hidden possibilities are revealed in holding the question lightly even in the darkest of situations.
Old habits and patterns stagnated some aspect of my growth can emerge with an invitation to be released to make way for new growth. Shedding skins and dropping leaves are two of nature’s many reminders that the way must be prepared for the new. Difficult times in our lives are like weather changes that signal the time for growth is nigh. New growth signals our resilience and our adaptability, and it builds these strengths.
Life’s events are meant to be our teachers. We are not meant to enter them knowing what to or what the outcome will be.
They exist FOR us, for our experimentation and our learning. They are opportunities to call forth our will. Though they may bring pain, sadness, angst, even fear, life’s events –each and every one- are gifts of an omnipotent universe. That universe knows what we need on our path of learning to navigate on this planet, in this life, and beyond.
Wherever you find yourself this week, whether easy or difficult times are upon you, give yourself the gift of tapping into that omnipotence with the question: what can this event teach me? Then, be willing to listen and to learn.
And equally beautiful in the west, a morning rainbow across the valley