In the self help/spirituality/personal growth sphere, there’s a LOT of talk about how *everything* that happens in your life happens for you/because of you.
These are concepts that have their place and time in our lives, in our personal growth and in the journey to discovering where our power lies in this life.
But.
Taking either or both of these concepts to an extreme - when we get into 'always' and 'never' territory - I believe we set ourselves up for stepping more into delusion and powerlessness than towards true freedom.
For the next few weeks I'd like to break down both concepts - where they're helpful, where they're harmful and how we can take the truth and leave the lies behind.
We are participating in our own lives and some of what happens to us is 100% due to us.
But we don't have ultimate control.
Let's dive into the nuance so that we can find actual reality - which is where we have the MOST power - even when that means letting go of the fantasy of ultimate control.
Is Life Set Up To Give Us Full Control?
Both of these vantage points come from the foundational idea that life is being orchestrated for a purpose or a reason, that there’s a plan to how everything is unfolding and that we have some sort of ultimate control over how this plan goes.
With the former, when we choose to believe that everything that happens in our lives is ‘for’ us in some way, we are saying that there’s an overarching theme to our lives, an arc of growth, expansion and becoming that we’re destined to walk through and that all circumstances we encounter, whether we like them or not, are a part of this grand hero’s journey.
The idea is that nothing happens by accident, that all things are set into motion for the express purpose of helping us awaken to our highest potential and that our power lies in GETTING this so that we can milk all experiences for the good that they have.
This belief system helps us to feel like there’s no chaos, no random occurrences and that all things that we go through are PURPOSEFUL in the grandest sense. That nothing is ultimately harmful so long as we are able to see it for what it REALLY is - a step on our path of development. Nothing happens by chance, it’s all for our growth and expansion and therefore no bad thing COULD ever happen. All we have to do as people is realize this and get on board with asking ourselves what our current circumstances are helping us wake up to, so we can grow into that idealized version of self. This belief system makes us feel like we’re living in a loving universe that sees us, knows us and has only the best intentions in mind for us.
With the latter, when we believe that all things happen BECAUSE of us on some level, there’s a little less mysticism and belief in a higher power and a little more practicality. This belief system tells us that everything in our life experience is either entirely or at least in part due to our individual choices - thus giving us the ultimate power to eventually create an ideal life, so long as we’re willing to continually make different and better choices.
This way of seeing the world puts us directly in the driver's seat.
It tells us that no matter what’s happening, the answer is to take complete responsibility for how we participated in whatever outcome we’re currently being faced with so that again, we can learn what we did ‘right’ in terms of creating the good that we want and what we did ‘wrong’ in terms of creating the negative that we don’t want - and adjusting our choices accordingly to elicit better and better experiences.
In this way of thinking we’re told that the best thing to do is to accept that we are the creators of our own reality - either through our thoughts/feelings/vibrations/spiritual nature, through our actions and intentions or a mix of both - and thus we must always do a check in to see what we did to ‘manifest’ our pain and our pleasure.
In this way of viewing the world the Universe is simply reflecting back to us what we ARE.
There’s an understanding of cause and effect - but this is taken to it’s most extreme with the idea that we are the SOLE cause of everything that happens to and around us - and if it wasn’t a direct action we took that created our current circumstances it was an energetic action. On some level, WE manifest what we’re living and thus WE have control to change anything we want if we can just discover the ROOT of how we created what we did. And that root is ALWAYS within ourselves.
As with so many other ideas in the New Age/Spirituality/Personal Growth worlds, we can see that fundamentally this is all about feeling like we have total control over our lives, and feeling like everything is ‘leading’ somewhere good.
This is all about giving ourselves a sense of power and control over our reality - that if we just do the right things, feel the right things, believe the right things and follow our path of highest growth, eventually we will arrive at lives where we have perfect peace.
This gives us a template for finding meaning in all things, which seems to be a pretty innate human desire.
Now, to have this as a general template for life isn’t a bad thing at all. Ultimately no one can prove any which way what the purpose of life is, why things do or don’t happen, if we’re being guided by forces outside of ourselves or not. We all have our own experience of spirituality and connection to something greater and I don’t feel it’s fair to tell anyone or anything what they should or shouldn’t believe.
Fundamentally, there are seeds of truth to the above mindsets.
To believe that we all have a potential we’re capable of growing into is something that makes total logical sense. All living things have a potential for growth in their genetic code and humans are no exception to this rule. We all have specific characteristics that we can’t ‘get rid of’ and we all have aspects of self we’re never going to develop because we simply don’t have the requisite foundations. We all have needs that when met, allow us to more fully step into whatever potential we have and when unmet hinder our capacity to fully grow.
At the same time, none of us come with a manual, and figuring out who we are and what we need, what kind of life best supports our growth and your joy isn’t as easy as it intuitively feels like it SHOULD be. Our world is filled with all sorts of rules, regulations, systems and conditions that block us from understanding ourselves or that encourage us to abandon ourselves in order to fit in, and at the same time as a human race we’re still pretty primitive when it comes to understanding the depth and breadth of what a human beings needs in order to thrive.
Using our life experiences as a tool for figuring out what does and doesn’t feel good, what does and doesn’t allow us to grow, what does and doesn’t support our expression and what expressions support life in general is really useful. Seeing how we react and respond to different environments, people and circumstances can give us continual insight into what works best for us and what doesn’t.
We can then use that awareness to make choices that give us more and more of a life filled with that which does serve us and a life where we’re eliminating as much as possible that which doesn’t.
Using our experiences as a tool for self awareness and thus tools for helping us create lives that feel good to the best of our ability is an AWESOME way to move through the world.
To believe that we have *some* say in the circumstances that are unfolding in our lives is also deeply logical. Of COURSE we have an effect on the outcomes we live on a day to day basis. Our choices, actions, words and even our mindsets and belief systems most certainly play a role in our lived reality. Becoming aware of how our repetitive actions create patterns in our lives is again super useful information.
A lot of the time people don’t notice the correlation between their choices and their outcomes. It’s true that many of us feel that we’re victim to life rather than seeing that we are playing a role in *some* of what is happening to and around us. For a lot of us when we first stop and begin paying attention to the REPETITIVE experiences in our bodies, relationships, finances and life satisfaction overall, that we are 100% contributing to these repeat patterns via OUR behavior patterns.
Many of us are going to come to realize that while we may not have been INTENTIONALLY creating our experiences - that we were unintentionally doing so. We will come to see that what we thought was a normal or healthy way of eating actually wasn’t. That how we were relating to the people around us was causing issues. That how we were PERCEIVING those around us was causing us to act in certain ways that then elicited repetitive undesired responses. We’re going to start to realize we have patterns that were set in place during our childhoods and early adulthoods that are skewing how we see ourselves and the world and that this skewed perception is messing with our ability to create what we want to create. We’re going to start to connect the dots between our behaviors and some of the outcomes we’re getting in life and again, this is an incredibly empowering process.
To see that we DO have SOME power and control over our circumstances and that we can become aware of how we’re contributing to the outcomes we’re experiencing so that we can alter our behavior to get new outcomes is again a really important skill to master when we want lives that feel good.
The problem is when we take any of these ideas to their most extreme end point.
The problem lies when we take what’s true SOMETIMES and try to make it true ALL THE TIME.
Because reality isn’t all or nothing. Reality isn’t black and white. Reality isn’t always and never.
Real reality is going to be sometimes. Contextual. A mix of factors.
When we take the above ideas and try to apply them to ALL things at ALL times, we’re going to find that we actually drive ourselves a little nuts. That we start to get into a position where we’re blaming ourselves for things that are not at all our fault, and where we’re not allowing ourselves to have true emotional catharsis as we experience painful things. The above mindsets will stop us from calling out injustice where it exists and it will stop us from creating the societal changes we need to be creating in order to make this planet safer for more of us.
Is EVERYTHING A Part Of 'The Plan' To Help Us Evolve?
The reality is, we *can* choose to see everything we go through as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and what we need - but this doesn’t always mean that everything we go through is going to HELP us grow and become stronger.
We have to make room for the idea that sometimes we do get degraded by circumstances.
Sometimes the outcome of what we experience is trauma that affects us deeply for either the rest of our lives or at least for a period of time.
Sometimes not getting what we needed means we are held back from what we could have/would have become.
Sometimes the ways we were traumatized and/or conditioned mean that we have a really hard time accessing what’s true for us, and we live in a state of coping/numbing/sabotaging in order to try to adapt to the unideal circumstances we find ourselves in.
All of us are born into families, countries, societies and systems that we neither created nor helped to develop. All of us were handed circumstances that have a major impact on the experiences we’re going to have as a human that are fully out of our control. And not all of those experiences are something we CAN use to become our ULTIMATE potential. Some of those circumstances are going to hold us back.
It isn’t actually helpful to deny this reality, because when we do we deny ourselves the ability to HEAL from those things that have harmed us, and we actually create the OPPOSITE experience from the one we’re attempting to create with the mindset that all things are for our good.
When we try to claim that all things are for our good, what we do is continually look for a lesson or a blessing in places where it may not exist, blocking us from seeing what we COULD get out of the experience AND keeping ourselves stuck in whatever actual pain and damage occurred due to what we went through.
When we try to assume that all things can make us stronger, we’re not going to be able to acknowledge where we were simply hurt by something. We’re not going to be able to do the requisite healing work to recover from any injury. We’re going to be in a position where we’re constantly trying to run on broken legs - wondering why the pain of our past keeps coming back over and over again - no matter how positively we try to frame what we went through.
The bottom line is, if we don’t acknowledge the actual damage done via what we went through, then we can’t heal from it. And if we can’t heal we aren’t being made stronger. We then live the rest of our lives with damage we keep trying to frame as positive.
Eventually what most of us will find, is that when we are given the time and space to process what we went through, when we’re allowed to fully embrace and look at the degradation and pain of our experiences, when we’re allowed to grieve the loss of life that occurred due to our past, when we’re allowed to blame people, systems and circumstances for harming us and when we’re allowed to fully embrace what we would have wanted instead - in THIS we find that we can better find a ‘positive’ in whatever we went through.
When we’re allowed to really witness what we need NOW as someone on the other side of or who’s still experiencing a painful life and when we’re allowed to MEET those very real needs, from there a re-strengthening and a recovery IS possible. When we can take this and use it to set up new boundaries, to create new ways of relating to ourselves and others, to create new patterns that work BETTER than the old patterns we were in, in THAT we can be made stronger from what we went through.
On the other side of THAT healing, we will have more self awareness, more awareness of what does and doesn’t serve to support us and our expression, more awareness of what we need to be happy and healthy and more capacity to be there for ourselves.
At the same time, we will also be able to acknowledge that in some areas we are simply limited due to what’s happened or is happening for us that we have no control over.
We may realize that we have chronic illness, chronic trauma or are in certain societal boxes that we can’t actually do anything about, that are not ideal for us and that cause ongoing damage.
We’re going to be able to confront the idea that not all things are strengthening us - and in that again we can learn how to support ourselves WITHIN the shit that we can’t change, vs. continually trying to make the shit we can’t change a ‘good’ thing.
Sometimes the best we can do is learn to manage and cope and seeing that for what it is is actually far more empowering than pretending something is life giving when it isn’t. When we acknowledge the damage that was done/is being done, in THAT we can figure out what we need in order to be less damaged/to heal where we can - THAT is where any strength that is possible will come from.
For instance, if we have a chronic illness, pretending that every flare up made us stronger is a denial of reality. Pretending that every trigger was a good thing means that we aren’t going to assess the very real damage that occurred because of that flair up and trigger, and it will mean we don’t then do the requisite work to try to rebuild what was lost. It means we won’t do what we need to do to protect ourselves from future flair ups and triggers in the ways that we can. This denial of degradation and damage will mean further and further degradation. We won’t be getting stronger. We will be getting weaker.
Also, if we don’t acknowledge the damage that we can’t heal from right now and possibly ever, again we continue to run on broken legs. If we have been deeply harmed, we MUST take time out to stop running. To stop moving so much. To stop trying to ‘progress further’ turning what we went through into a tool for momentum. We have to slow down and really HEAL before we move on. This means we stop looking for the blessing, for the bright side and for what good came of the situation and we start looking for what we need to recover the best we can. If we don’t take the time to recover, it doesn’t matter how positively we frame the event. A broken bone doesn’t heal on it’s own. It doesn’t heal while it’s still being used. It needs to be casted and given space. It is the same with us.
We aren’t ever going to be made stronger from something that’s degrading, if we don’t understand the damage it caused and if we don’t use that information to heal and or to protect ourselves moving forward.
It may seem counterintuitive to stop looking for how something ‘helped us’ for a period of time, but this is EXACTLY what we most of us NEED to do in order to heal. It may be that you will choose to take whatever you’ve been through/are going through and use it as a catalyst for growth. It may be that you really WILL become something greater than you would have been had you not gone through the challenge. Hard things have a way of shaping us in ways that easy things never could - and I never would want to take that away from anyone. But. We have to balance this perspective with realizing that this is going to be true only to the extent that we can actually HEAL from what we went through or are going through. The more we’re just being damaged and forcing a silver lining, the more we aren’t actually caring for ourselves and in that we are not becoming stronger.
When we are able to be THERE for ourselves through everything, when we can heal the damage that was done to us, when we can look for how we CAN grow from what we've been through - including allowing ourselves to go through phases of NOT looking for the good/growth so we can have our emotional catharsis - when we can learn from the pain of our lives in a way that helps us have more clarity on what works and what doesn't work for us, when we can be totally supportive of our own emotional journey - in THAT we can CHOOSE to see everything as a part of what WE are going to do to support ourselves.
We can choose to make meaning out of our experience, and we can choose to create the meaning that all things are there to HOLISTICALLY help us connect more with ourselves, reality and what is actually pertinent in each moment.
THAT is a powerful meaning.
All things can be something that teaches you more about yourself and reality - where you do and don't have control - and where you can support yourself the best within what's happening (which isn't always going to be ideal).
THAT is power.
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Let's take a break here, and come back next week to look at the next concept - believing that all of our life circumstances are due to our individual choices.
<3
Remember, you don't have to do this work alone!
This self love work can be really challenging.
It fly's in the face of everything culture teaches us.
Meaning, it can be really hard to remember to show up for ourselves, to learn how to validate our emotions, to stay in a state of self compassion and curiosity.
This is why I created the school - because when we do this TOGETHER, we usually find that we go a lot farther.
You don't have to do this alone, I and the other students are here to be supports for you along your path.
We're not here to be totally independent, and this path is about community just as much as it is about self empowerment.
So if you're feeling alone, remember there are people out there like you, who are doing this work too.
Come Join The Community Here!
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