Is Life Truly Difficult?

In my experience what is happening in our life is one reality and our relationship with it is another "story". The difference between how we perceive and relate to events, people, situations, and circumstances and what is actually happening is what makes our lives difficult.

In being honest with ourselves and examining our experiences, we realize how we place our own perspectives onto life, which reveals our belief systems, not what is truly happening. This creates dissonance that we feel as internal resistance, communicating to us that we are not in harmony with life.

Imagine for a moment that all experiences are neutral. From that view point you can begin to see more clearly what beliefs and conditioning you hold around certain events, people, emotions and situations. If you find yourself blaming life for your challenges and tribulations or feel unable to assimilate or process life circumstances, you are in resistance. When you realize this, you awaken to the power of choice. You can choose to have a relationship of ease, flow, acceptance and grace with life, instead of resisting what is.

Your real power lies in choosing your perceptions wisely, by analyzing clearly your association and your relationship to whatever is occurring. Utilizing your focus and concentration like a sword helps bring light, truth, acceptance and well-being to whatever is happening, rather than being unconscious and repeating old patterns of thought that create harm and suffering.

No doubt in your lifetime you will experience many things that seem beyond your control. In many cases you will not have the capacity to change what is occurring. In those moments, I invite you to acknowledge your habitual perceptions and be fluid with them. Open to life and what is happening rather than resisting it with your thoughts and emotions. Resistance manifests as pain and suffering, a clear signal from your internal guidance system signaling you to change your approach. Remember you have the ability to accept and choose a new relationship with what is happening.

I am not encouraging you to be in denial, nor do I expect you to be without emotions. I am encouraging you to be clear how your misguided perspectives create suffering and resistance and generate feelings where you are you no longer in sync nor present with what is happening. You are, instead, in an artificial world made of old conceptions placed onto your life circumstances. This suffering is needless, and it is well within your power to control and alleviate it by eliminating the habits of thought that make your relationship with life difficult.

I feel it is all of our greatest challenge to be at one and at ease with what is happening in our life whether we like it or not. We usually kick and scream mentally and emotionally when we do not like something, creating pain and suffering for ourselves. When you bring awareness to your relationship with life and see your beliefs, thoughts and emotions as fluid, you experience agility and the power to choose. You learn to go with the flow of life rather than resisting and "rowing your boat upstream".

One powerful example of this was when I was in India. I observed the relationship the people there had with death. It floored me. It was such a contrast to my own view of death. In that awakening moment, I realized my relationship with death was not "how it is" rather it was what I saw and how I was taught. How liberating.

I know there are many such stories in your life. Dispel the illusions you believe in and see clearly the truth about your life. Like Sleeping Beauty, wake up to your power. The fearful reality that her wicked Step Mother created actually had no real power over her. The poison apple she ate that rendered her lifeless is a symbol of the programming we think of as “real”.

The kiss that woke Sleeping Beauty is a symbol of the magic and wonder of love that exists within our own mind, heart and being. The truth is that when we are absorbed in our false perspectives we are merely asleep, not dead. Through the power of love, of truly and passionately loving whatever comes, we awaken to the beauty of life and break the spell of our habitual thinking.

We have endless ways to be in relationship and harmony with what is. Open yourself. Let the doors of your perception open wide and reveal a new reality.