—
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must completely come undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” — Cynthia Occelli
Oftentimes, we’re conditioned to believe that there is something wrong with us the moment we experience a painful emotion or an intense struggle of any kind. We throw our mind into a type of “spin-cycle,” frantically overthinking and mulling over countless theories for their occurrence. It’s like we’ve convinced ourselves that these events are happening to us (and not for us) because we believe we are faulty, broken, and something needing immediate fixing or changing in order to avoid these natural occurrences now falsely mislabeled as confrontational skirmishes, serving no real purpose other than to cause unnecessary suffering, but what we resist, always persists, then intensifies, and comes back harder and stronger.
Where attention flows, energy goes. By embracing fear rather than running from it, you’ll find the cave you resisted exploring contains all the solutions to your deepest needs, wants and desires.
Stop shaming yourself for bad moods and life challenges like you’re a burden for having difficulties. A prime example of bullshit positivity is finding it only acceptable to share good news, and then wonder why people are so depressed.
The pain you’re feeling isn’t a problem neither is your struggle, it’s your resistance to the experience, and by being resistant, you continually prolong these challenging circumstances, and thus cause suffering.
It’s about learning to trust life and where it’s going, and realizing whenever you feel like you’re struggling, you can consciously choose to trust the process.
This means you can no longer tolerate certain self-imposed behaviors that continue to diminish your value, make you feel stuck, or play it small. It’s reclaiming extreme ownership for life and honestly admitting the pity party has officially reached its end.
Bring anger, pride, and any other painful emotion or experience under your feet, make them your ladder, and decide to climb higher.
Excuses are just another reason to avoid facing your fear. Before taking another step, feel into where you are. Honor the journey you’ve been on so far. Be honest with yourself and how these painful experiences greatly assisted you in knowing where you stand in life. Now you can confidently make choices going forward which only align with where you want to go.
Three things preventing this, holding you back and to stop focusing on right now are:
1) anything out of your control or causes you to feel helpless.
2) what you don’t have now, causing you to compare yourself to others and triggers feelings of inadequacy.
3) On any painful and emotionally-charged past memories.
If it feels like everything is just short of working, it’s because it is, and it’s up to you to trust that life can and always WILL work itself out. Feeling stuck isn’t mandatory, it’s a choice. Same goes for making the decision to learn from what doesn’t work and then MOVE BEYOND your pitfalls.
This means making better-aligned choices that can get you in touch with your soul, and to do that you’ll need to sort through all your beliefs, and then discard what’s holding you back. Do it or watch the life you know you deserve fade away.
There are always going to be times in life when you feel misunderstood, but no matter what… Don’t give up and keep going.
It’s okay to look like total a fool sometimes. To get different results in your life you’ll have to leave what’s comfortable behind and take risks. The growth you seek requires you to abandon the familiar safety net just long enough to learn something new.
It’s easy to forget that simply by accepting whatever is happening in our lives and then making the choice to relax into the feelings we’re experiencing rather than incessantly worrying about them, the struggle we believed we were so deeply entrenched in begins to ease up and then almost miraculously transform life for the better.
So next time you feel you are struggling, pause and take a moment to recognize what you’re experiencing is a sure-fire sign you’ve entered into a new evolved phase of growth, and if permitted to flow without forcibly interfering, you’ll then gain the insight, lessons, and experiences you need for an expansive soul transformation.
A true manifestation of your deepest desires carries with it the requirement to push beyond fear, take risks & trust the process of letting go of what you have now in order to bring about what you truly desire in life later.
You needn’t run from the past in order to become something better. You cannot LOSE yourself. The truth of who you are lives within you, always. You feel lost only because you believe you’re supposed to know where you’re going, thus forgetting the truth of who YOU ARE: The Creator of Your Reality.
Life’s too short to be spent at war with yourself another day. Choose compassion. Be gentle. Give these neglected aspects of yourself the love they never had. You deserve the love you keep trying to give to everyone else.
If you believe you need to wait for the perfect moment to make a major life change, you’ll be waiting forever. It’s okay to change your mind: People change, situations change…YOU change. It’s okay to change your life!
Don’t be afraid, embrace the truth in the fact you have undergone an intense inner transformation, altering you in such ways preventing you from ever falling back into past patterns or the person you once were.
Caterpillar phase is over, it’s butterfly time baby, spread those wings and fly!
I’d be concerned if you’ve never tasted struggle in some way if I were you because that’s a pretty solid indication you haven’t significantly evolved, expanded or grown much either.
My opinion is that it just isn’t really living and more like slowly dying.
Once you release all the ideas of how you believe life “should be,” you actually begin to enjoy life as it is. Life doesn’t turn out the way it “should.” Life doesn’t turn out the way it “shouldn’t.” Life turns out the way it does.
Hiding is easy. Running is easy. But facing your issues, working through them and becoming change is what’s worthwhile and makes you strong.
Life is a path, its destination the journey, and what you are experiencing now is the ride.
Be patient.
Breathe.
The role of men is changing in the 21st century. Want to keep up?
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Pixabay