Life does not work in favor of your plans, goals, and dreams. It works in favor of showing you what limitations you have built against yourself.
One of the big pains in life is feeling that our destiny is based on our history. We tend to get into this feeling when we imagine a certain future or present situation having an outcome similar to a situation that has been repeated in the past.
This often provides us with a sensation that it is us that is something wrong with or that fear or a prediction we have towards something will come true. When we stay active in this mental state the tension within us only grows stronger and makes us less resilient.
At some point in this process, it may even cause us so much pain that we completely abstain from pursuing certain goals. This strong and painful identification with an experience can happen as a result of any type of event, such as a breakup, a loss of a loved one, a fear of failure.
The more negative experiences we have with life, the harder it can feel to move forward, and we become more easily triggered when something isn't seemingly going our way. If our identification with the past remains unquestioned, it will continue to hold power over us in both the present and future and will therefore dictate which paths we pursue and when we can be happy.
To become free, we need to take everything more lightly so we don't get too caught up in the content of life. Though pursuing our goals and dreams may still be something we want to do, we will have to make our happiness depend on more than being able to control outcomes.
Our happiness and peace aren't hard to attain in the way that we don't need certain things to happen first. They arise by themselves as we stop worrying. And this is in fact what frees us from our identification with the mind. Experiencing this while being aware of what is happening means that we are witnessing our own awakening. And this helps us better realize that we already carry everything we need inside. When we approach life unidentified with the content of the past, we no longer see life as working against us but as in our favor and this changes everything.
Trying to achieve ”greater” things in life from a place of neediness and scarcity will always eventually hurt. In this position, the foundation beneath us turns unstable. And only at times when we manage to juggle the content of life to our desires do we get to experience the beauty of it. But if the ground begins to shake too much, things begin to fall apart and this is why we can get the experience that our life has in some way become broken or damaged.
Life is not designed to make things easy for us. It is designed to teach us how to make life easy for ourselves. This is why we need to learn how to transform pain into growth.
When we don't understand life in a way that can help us reach for the light that is everpresent inside of ourselves, we will end up believing that life is a punishment when we aren't getting what we want. But all life is trying to do is direct us towards our own liberation and every time we walk in the opposite direction of this, it hurts.
Our liberation can simply be found by not being identified with the worrying mind but instead learning to regulate it back to its peaceful state whenever needed. This is what the inner voice is here to do help us with. But when our past has filled our minds with unhealthy expectations and false ideas about our true purpose, it becomes difficult to satisfy it completely.
The first step to becoming unidentified with the stories of the mind is to separate the feelings triggered, from the situation we perceive itself. It is when we mix these two together that we allow our past to make decisions for us and thereby keeping us stuck in a loop.
When we compulsively fixate over the outer world and try to fix it, it is simply because we instinctively associate the feeling we carry with perceived danger. It is in other words really the feeling we are trying to escape. But because we have become lost in the mind, we can only regulate indirectly by dealing with feeling through our senses in one way or another. This is something we have to become aware of, so we can begin to regulate from the right end instead of running in circles and prolonging the conflict going on inside us.
To break out of this pattern we must learn to calm the mind by ending the stream of thoughts setting our body and mind out of balance with reality. It can feel painful to abstain from coping with our usual distractions. But it is possible to normalize this response like with anything else, through continuous practice.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope it will help you to better recognize the traps of your own mind so that you can better choose how you want to experience the things happening in your life.
