Why So Hard?
The surprising reward is to discover that we are, in fact, more than we could ever have imagined, bigger than any idea of who we should be.
Why is this life so hard at times? A question I have asked and been asked time and time again.
My best attempt at an answer is education. And it so happens that life is the incorruptible face of education.
Like so many concepts in today's society the word education has become inverted. So much of what is described as education is in fact its polar opposite indoctrination. Life however is no slave to controlling agendas and has an unfaltering commitment to truth, and as such it is the purest form of education.
The word education has its roots in the Latin verb educare, meaning to draw out. A good teacher draws knowledge from the pupil, encouraging the student to question their own answers, and life is perhaps the greatest teacher of them all, drawing out as much of the human experience as possible from each and every one of us, forcing us to challenge what we take to be true.
A teacher with no experience of his subject is nothing more than a purveyor of speculation. So many of today's "teachers" are simply speculators, espousing knowledge based on concept rather than reality. Think of male doctors dictating the rules of child birth or politicians debating war. There is something VITAL missing from their opinions and ideas and that is they have no idea what it is actually like!
To teach well, with passion (compassion) requires direct experience of any given subject, all of its joy and all of its pain. We are all in this life together and all potential teachers, but to teach well we must first live fully and feel the effects of that living.
I remember one particularly tough episode in my life in. My teacher at that time sat lovingly as she witnessed my unwillingness to accept the reality of my situation and held space while I exhausted myself trying to cling to what I thought should be. I uttered those woeful words "why me?" to which she answered "so that you can help others through this in the future".
In short life was gifting me compassion which I could later share with others, but in order to do so I first had to find compassion for myself. I failed, and when events repeated themselves I found myself in a familiar place and my inevitable thoughts were that the life was cruel, I was stupid and patterns unbreakable.
In fact life is never cruel, its love is so unconditional it will teach whatever the circumstance demands. Life will lovingly present you with the aspects of yourself you find hardest to accept.
To break a pattern requires self-compassion. It requires that you love the very part of you which you resist the most, are most embarrassed about and dislike intensely. That part of you which, like a naughty schoolboy you have shut outside the classroom, excluded from the game, leaving disruption as its only means of receiving attention. The more you exclude that part of you the more it will, just like the excluded schoolboy, 'misbehave' in order to get noticed. This is why patterns repeat until we face the truth of a situation.
The part of you you reject has the same right to exist and express of those aspects you love about yourself, and as life loves all of you, not just the bits you decide are acceptable, it will give all of those parts a voice. Once acknowledged and accepted they can express in non-disruptive ways or even just sit quietly, seen but not heard.
But it begs the question, how many of our gifts are hidden in those unacceptable bits of us?
In a society with strict definitions around success or failure, a society obsessed with measurement and comparison, it is really tough to love ourselves fully, to own our unique brilliance and it is a natural defence to hide those bits of us which we have decided don't measure up.
Fortunately, life has little time or sentiment for such suppression and will work tirelessly to present us with the truth. It will give us opportunity after opportunity to shatter the illusion of who we think should be until we face up to the truth of who we are.
The surprising reward is to discover that we are in fact more than we could ever have imagined, bigger than any idea of who we should be.
Be fearless in your inquiry and listen when life speaks.
Much love
Bill