I was pondering the other day what life is teaching me right now.
I think it’s ‘surrender’, and staying in the present moment (because the future is even more uncertain than usual).
What do you think life is teaching you right now?
Life isn’t the kind of teacher who has a cane and a difficult exam at the end – she’s more a ‘try this, do this, experience this, how does that feel, what would work better in that situation’ kind of teacher.
If you actively participate in the learning, in the experiment of life, you will see that if you learn the lessons of life, life gets easier.
In that way, it’s less of a lesson, and more of a path you choose – smooth or bumpy.
For example, last year, life was teaching me acceptance. It went like this for me:
Step 1: Ignore the lesson (symptoms of lowering energy) completely. Didn’t work.
Step 2: Fight it. Try and carry on regardless. Didn’t work.
Step 3: RAGE against it. Seriously, I was livid. How DARE life try to slow me down. Didn’t work.
Step 4: Resistance with less rage (honestly I didn’t have the energy for rage!). I just didn’t want to feel that way, to go through that, to accept it. Didn’t work.
Step 5: I GIVE UP. But this was not actual acceptance or surrender – more like a tantrumy sulk that life was forcing me in to this situation and THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO. Didn’t work.
Step 6: Grudging acceptance (it took me about 2 months to get to this point). It wasn’t really acceptance, it was just a slightly less grumpy version of I GIVE UP. Didn’t work.
For all these things that didn’t work – here’s what I mean: They didn’t help me heal, they didn’t feel good, and they weren’t what I knew all along life was trying to teach me – acceptance.
Step 7 (and it took 4 months to get here) was acceptance. That worked.
Because when I accepted my reality, I could work with it instead of fighting it.
“When you fight reality, you lose. But only 100% of the time” – Byron Katie.
Think about that for a second – when you fight what is, you lose. It hurts. There’s anger and fear and resistance and hurt.
When you work with reality, you can more easily change it. And, it feels so much better.
In my case here’s how that looked:
- I rested a lot more instead of pretending I was OK and wiping myself out;
- I stopped resisting the need to rest, and therefore was able to replenish my energy more quickly;
- I accepted the reality of slow improvement rather than fighting against that reality with impatience and frustration (fun as they are);
- I stopped giving myself a timeline (I’ll be better in a week/a month/by Christmas/Spring) and accepted that recovery would take as long as it took (still going).
Once I reached true acceptance, life got lots easier.
There was still the odd bit of resistance, and the occasional fed up day or 3, but generally, it felt 100 times better than ignoring it, fighting it, raging against it, resisting it, giving up or grudgingly pretending to accept it.
It can take a long time to learn the lessons life is teaching you. And that’s OK – you get to live this life however you like.
But every time I’ve recognised the lesson, and got to learning it, life got better.
Over the years I’ve learned:
- I can create the life I want
- The life-changing impact of self-care
- Listening to my body means less illness and stress
- To accept that I am creative and access the infinite creative well.
- To follow my dreams
- To uncover buried dreams
- How to become a writer (after I’d been writing for 10 years!)
- How to make joy my compass
- How to connect to my inner wisdom
Every one of those lessons has taken time. In some cases, years.
But each one, when I finally learned it, was a game-changer for my life.
Life doesn’t teach you lessons that are no use to you, it doesn’t teach lessons that make life worse (like when we learn to harden our heart after heartbreak…that wasn’t the lesson life wanted to teach), there is no grading and there is no deadline.
Also, the lessons are usually fairly clear – we intuitively know what life is trying to teach us, even if we are resolutely ignoring that lesson.
Life isn’t judging you or getting annoyed that you’re not learning.
You just learn…or not.
So what is life trying to teach you right now? And where are you in the learning? I’d love to hear what life is trying to teach you – send me a message and let me know.
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