If you’ve missed the rest of the series, you can catch up here: part one, part two, and part three.
Radical Life Change Ingredient #4
View life as a wise teacher.
I’ve spent a lot of time wishing things were different–that my hair was shinier, my skin clearer, my grades better, my relationships more exciting, and so on and so forth.
What I wasn’t very interested in was seeing life as it is. I was so attached to my fantasies that reality seemed like a poor substitute. How wrong I was.
Gradually, this chronic dissatisfaction with my life started to feel, well, unsatisfying. I was sick of feeling like my life wasn’t enough, like I wasn’t enough. I was ready to be satisfied, and one of the most powerful shifts that allowed this transformation to take place was viewing life, not as some nemesis out to get me or a series of obstacles to be overcome, but as a wise teacher.
I shifted from seeing life as a series of potential pitfalls to seeing that the Universe has my back. And it has yours, too.
The key in making this shift is recognizing that you have the choice to learn from every single experience in your life. You make the decision to respond with, “Why is this happening to me? Can’t I ever get a break??” to “What lesson am I being presented with right now?”
Beyond making life infinitely more rewarding, this shift unlocks the door to your true purpose. Michelle Belanger writes in The Psychic Vampire Codex: A Manual of Magick and Energy Work:
Each of us has a path that spans our lifetimes. This is our dharma, our universal role. Within the context of our universal role, we both teach others and learn lessons of our own. Our dharma determines the nature of these lessons and how they must be learned. When we do not follow our dharma, we fail in our duty to the universe. This sets us back in the journey of our soul. Harsher versions of the same lessons will be presented repeatedly until we successfully forward our growth and fulfill that role.
This echoes the message of the last post in this series: stop complaining. When we view life experiences as trials to be complained about rather than lessons to be learned, we must go through them again and again, routinely generating more things to complain about, all of them remarkably similar in theme.
In The Witch’s Shield: Protection Magick and Psychic Self-Defense, author and teacher Christopher Penzcak writes:
When we frame trauma, conflict, illness, injury, and even psychic attack as potential teachers, suddenly the process takes a new focus in our mind. We no longer put our energy into fighting against something, but rather learning from it, with the thought in mind that once we learn from the experience, we will detach from it completely. Once it serves its purpose, we will release it and be that much stronger for having experienced it.
When you view life as a wise teacher, this opens up the door to you, as the eager student–learning, changing, and growing.
When you view life as a foe to be battled, you remain stuck, fighting the same fight day in and day out. It’s exhausting and disheartening.
If you’re ready to shift from chronic dissatisfaction to true empowerment and growth, accept life as your wise teacher who delivers precisely what you need, when you need it.
Make the choice to shift from downtrodden victim of circumstance to curious student, and watch as your dharma unfolds in powerful and exciting ways.
I’ll see you in class.