We’re taught to believe that the progression of life is something to be dreaded and feared – that if we’re past a certain age (probably around 30), our best days are behind us and that sickness, misery and disaster are all around the corner.

However, shouldn’t getting older really mean that we actually become more successful at mastering our lives and manifesting our dreams? Shouldn’t we progress positively through our experiences as opposed to moving backward? If we step outside of the fear that life gets worse as time goes on, don’t those questions make sense? Just like if we practiced the guitar daily, we’d assume that through time we’d improve versus becoming worse.

So why don’t we apply the same principle of getting better at something such as practicing the guitar to the positive progression and evolution of our lives?  It’s because we’re wounded, afflicted and crippled by the pain of the past, which means that our lives are continuously weighted down by what happened to us before.

This way, we can’t start each day with a clean slate. It’s like being a painter and starting every painting with a canvas full of an ever increasing collage of ugly, clashing images, colors and pictures already on the canvas. If that was the case, how could we paint anything new, wondrous and beautiful?

When we don’t know how to heal the pain of our past, or worse yet, refuse to do so because of our attachment to the hurts of before, our lives move into a downward spiral – sometimes slowly throughout time, while at other times, rapidly and dramatically. Yet, the pain of the past doesn’t weigh us down in only one way; it poisons and debilitates all aspects of our lives: psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

With the goal in mind of living ever productive, healthy and prosperous lives, let’s look at 5 winning steps that will truly help us to heal the pain of the past, so we can manifest the journey that we are divinely meant to experience.

1-Acknowledge

We often believe that to move forward, we just have to really be “positive:” visualizations, affirmations, meditation, increased self esteem and empowerment are all things that are supposed to turn things around for the better. On top of that, if we’re not successful yet, it just means that we haven’t visualized long and hard enough, or still don’t have enough self esteem. However, these assumptions are not true.

So why don’t these good things in and of themselves work? It’s because we must first acknowledge what we feel and what is bothering us about the past to begin the healing process. Without doing do, it’s like refusing to look at and fix the cracked foundation of your home, but thinking that by decorating the penthouse  with new, lovely furniture, everything will turn out just fine.

When we avoid what we feel and deny what is really going on within us from before, we can’t heal our lives. We get caught up in our own emotional denial and avoidance, because we don’t want to have to open that old can of worms regarding what is wounding us from before. It’s just not pleasant to deal with it all again as we feel re-victimized, out of control and helpless. So instead, we try to misguidedly take control of our lives by believing that we’re moving forward by being “positive.” However, in reality, we’re turning our backs on continuously negative emotions that spread like a cancer within us.

Without acknowledgment, we experience a tremendous internal pressure based on our denied emotions, just like water building up against a damn. After a certain period of time and pressure, our emotions overtake us and any number of negative things can happen. We act out, make the wrong choices seemingly out of the blue, display angry outbursts, experience depression, complete hopelessness, or make terribly self destructive choices.

Avoiding what you feel from before and being “positive” doesn’t mean that you’ve taken control of your life; but rather, that you’re a sitting duck regarding what these negative feelings can do to you. Would you rather be able to see what you’re dealing with, then have your eyes closed, which leaves you completely vulnerable.

When put this way, these questions seems quite obvious: How could you possibly fix a problem if you don’t know what it is? If you went to a doctor and they didn’t know what was wrong with you, how could they even begin to help you heal? With acknowledgment, we lay the foundation to be able to heal the pain of the past and we relieve the potentially debilitating internal pressure that can overtake our lives. By bringing the issues out in the open and into the light, we take away the mysterious, ominous and frightening power our past emotions have had over us. We see that the bullies we’ve been pushed around by for so long are just negative emotions that shouldn’t have any more power over our lives.

A great therapist once said, “Acknowledging your emotions will never kill you, but denying them will.” I’ve often said that if we put 10% of the effort into healing the pain of the past as we do into avoiding, denying, attaching to the old negative patterns, being defensive and refusing to acknowledge our feelings, we would heal our lives.

Start out by getting a notebook dedicated to healing the pain of the past and write down what you feel regarding what happened before. Don’t intellectualize your feelings, but ask yourself, “What do I feel and what is bothering me?” Believe me, sooner or later, these emotions will come forward and speak to you. By writing them down, you can now know what the real problems are, not run away from them and lay the foundation to truly heal your life.  

2-Release

Once you’ve acknowledged the pain of the past and know what you feel, it’s time to take the next step in the healing process, which is to begin releasing these old, negative emotions. We often didn’t know just how much wounding has been inside of us from such things as our upbringing, disappointments in former romantic relationships, and dreams in our career that didn’t come true.

We get used to suffering and being attached to the pain of the past as our hurt becomes a friend and companion. Often, we even take it to the point of wallowing in past negativity as an emotional security blanket. With that, our defenses and ego cling to old negative feelings because they protect us from moving forward and taking risks. We falsely think that our past hurt feelings keep us safe from getting wounded again, but in reality, they poison all aspects of our lives.

Sometimes people have said to me, “Jim, but I don’t know how to release these feelings. What do I do?” Keep in mind that releasing these old derelicts is not academic or complicated in essence.

It’s about “wanting to” – meaning that you have to really want to! You must feel the passionate commitment and desire to let these emotions go. It’s like a singer who sings the notes correctly, but without emotion – it means nothing…. However, with real feeling, everything comes alive and the song sings! Feel the desire to let it all go – every day.

One motivation that will help inspire you is that the well-being of your life is at stake here. Another is to try and think of those who have it so much worse. If you’ve been wounded in love, you can always find another and better lover. However, think of the mother whose child was raped and murdered. That mother can never bring back her child who is gone forever. Use someone else’s tragedy as a motivation to help put your situation in perspective by realizing that so many others have it worse than you do.

Then, with heartfelt passion as your daily guide, affirmations can really begin to aid the healing process, because they, too, are only effective when said with complete commitment. Here are two affirmatives that will assist you in achieving this:

Since it serves absolutely no purpose for me to hold on to the negative emotions from the past, I now release and completely let go of any and all attachment to the pain of the past and now go free to live a wondrous, magical and positive life today!

And: 

I ask God to take away the pain of the past and lift it out of me, releasing it into the endless divine white light where these old negative feelings now return to their native nothingness! I am now free of the pain of the past!

Here is a visualization technique that will also help: Picture the painful situation from your past surrounded in a bright pink bubble and see it all rising to the heavens into infinity!

As most people want quick and instantaneous results nowadays, release is one of the most overlooked aspects of the healing process. It takes a while, as you’re challenging old feelings, attitudes and patterns that have been there a long time. Remember that you can’t win this battle overnight, but CAN through consistency, commitment and passion. The actual energetic release is heartfelt and you will feel these burdens literally being released from within you and let go of. Don’t fight with the past, rationalize it, or try to hold on any longer. Just let go, and let God!

We must first remove what’s in the way in order to bring our divine good to us. If we haven’t released the pain of the past, it’s like us locking a door and then posing the question, “Why isn’t anyone walking through the door?” Just as in the Bible it is stated that when you come out of darkness, there is a wilderness that you pass through in order to reach your promised land. Releasing opens that space to transition between the darkness of the past and the continuous brightness of your blessings, soon to come!

3-Forgive

After releasing the pain of the past, forgiving is the next step in our healing process so we can receive our blessings and all that is for our highest good. Remember, the sunlight of God’s blessings is shining down on us perpetually – but not forgiving is like closing the curtains and drawing the blinds shut so it can’t get in.

Of course we don’t do this on purpose to ourselves. Who would? No one says, “I’m going to block my blessings now by refusing to forgive,” but whether it’s deliberate or not doesn’t matter. To heal the pain of the past, we must learn to forgive. How could we expect good things to come to us unless we become the open channel to receive the blessings we are asking for?

Forgiving is such a healing tool, as it allows us to once and for all stop replaying the same old “pain of the past tapes” of victimization where we have felt wounded, hurt, angry, resentful and justified. These old tapes kept bringing us right back to the original pain that started all of this suffering in the first place. Forgiving erases the negative tape loops of the past that have prevented us from moving forward with our lives all along.

Not knowing how to forgive or feeling unable to do so allows us to think that we have another choice. Instead of making the journey of forgiveness, we falsely think that we can take control of our lives by trying to manage our negative emotions — as if our lives may not reach the highs, but won’t hit rock bottom either. We erroneously believe that our lives are like us snapping a still photograph right now, as if things will continue to always be the same; not great, but not horrible, either.

Instead, by not forgiving, our lives progress like the dark plot line of a scary movie, as the negativity within us grows and spreads throughout our lives. As time goes on, it all becomes more etched into our subconscious and gains more of a stronghold in our being. 

Then there are those who just absolutely refuse to forgive, as their resentment, anger and rage forms an identity of self justified victimization. These people actually like not forgiving, as they receive an emotionally charged pay off of feeling wronged. However, they’ll never be happy staying this way. As I have yet to ever meet a happy victim, those who refuse to forgive always see their lives spin out of control – sooner or later.

With these different mindsets, we see how forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood parts of healing the pain of the past. In addition, when we think of forgiving others, we somehow think we’re going to end up being vulnerable to those who hurt us again — but it is exactly the opposite.

As painful emotions literally handcuff us to those who have wounded us, not forgiving keeps us attached to them in a negative way. This means that we’ll have to meet up with them in this lifetime or a later one to work this out. The spiritual conclusion of any situation is always one of peaceful resolution, so we must forgive them to help resolve whatever negativity exists from the past to brings things to a state of peace.

We fear that forgiving someone means that we’ll have to let them back into our life. However, forgiving and reconnecting with someone is not necessarily one and the same thing at all as there may be no higher purpose for them to re-enter our lives. 

By forgiving someone, are we condoning what they’ve done to us and somehow saying that their actions are right? Of course not, as forgiveness has nothing to do with condoning whatever hurt they’ve caused us.

If you have a hard time with forgiving, here are two tips that will help: First, remember that forgiveness is an act of self interest. By forgiving, you remove the ever increasing negative, poisonous, dark energy inside of you that debilitates your life. This energy contributes to depression, anxiety, rage, poverty, disconnection from people and life, as well as physical illness. A good question to ask is, “Am I willing to suffer, be poor, alone, miserable and sick in order to not forgive?” Put that way, it’s clearly in everyone’s self interest to forgive, as the pain of the past becomes healed! 

In addition, remember that we have all created negative karma in this lifetime and in prior incarnations, so all of us need to be forgiven. In the Bible it is stated, “Let the person without sin throw the first stone,” which means that none of us are free of negative karma.

Here is a useful affirmation to help with this process: I now release and forgive anyone who has ever caused me pain and harm including _______ and release him/her to his/her highest good now! There is complete peace, harmony and divine love between us!

 As we make the journey, this not only includes forgiving those who have wounded us, but also, ourselves. We must no longer hold ourselves in judgment for the hurtful things we’ve done and sometimes that is the hardest thing for us to do. Sometimes, we just can’t seem to forgive ourselves, as we feel that we’ve really harmed others and there’s nothing we can do now to “fix it.”

However, forgiveness of ourselves must also be done in order to heal the pain of the past. Here is an affirmation to assist with that goal: I now see myself as divine love has created me: innocent, blameless and a wondrous being of light and love. I now forgive myself for anyone I have ever hurt including___________.

As you make the journey of forgiveness, you will feel its transformative healing power fill your entire being and see it manifest in all areas of your life. You’ll feel lighter, colors will appear brighter and miracles will start to come your way. With the tremendously powerful process of forgiving the pain of the past, we are now ready to architect a new life – one that is filled with endless blessings!

4-Replace

Sometimes it’s hard to motivate ourselves to release and forgive, because we ask ourselves, “What do I end up with after that, then? Nothing…”  We believe that all we’ll have is merely an empty void of nothingness, like the feeling of walking through a seemingly endless desert. At least the pain of the past gave us something to hand onto, even though it has been a debilitating process.

However, once we have released and forgiven, the space within us is not an endless desert, but a wide open playing field. With that space, we can now replace the pain of the past with new goals, dreams and wondrous possibilities. Remember that there is no expiration date on dreams and now that we have removed what’s been in the way, we can really manifest so many more miracles than we ever had before.

If you look at the ways of nature, we can say that “God abhors a vacuum,” meaning that when there is a space, God will try and fill it up. As people, we tend to do the same. When something is removed or gone, it’s time to replace it with something new. Never forget the old mainstay, “When one door closes, another one immediately opens.”

Think of any number of people who have been seriously wounded by a former romantic relationship. When they replace the pain of the past with a new and wonderful relationship, I guarantee you that they’ll feel 100% better. It is the same in any area of our journeys, including our careers.

There is a great athlete who in his prime had won several competitions and was going to be in the Olympics. However, right before the Olympics, he suffered an injury that ended his competitive athletic career. All of his dreams seemed to be over. Only in his mid twenties, he fell into a deep depression because he couldn’t figure why God or whoever is up there would do this to him. As he built his entire life around the passionate and consistent pursuit of his dream, it was all finished in one fell swoop. He thought, “What could I possibly do with my life now, as I have nothing to live for?”

Instead of denying his emotions, he began to acknowledge what he felt, which was the tremendous sense of loss, sadness, rage and resentment for what had happened to him. Next, he worked on releasing these feelings as they were literally destroying him. He had to find it in himself to truly release it all as he could see that this negativity was poisoning him and ruining his life. Then, he worked on forgiveness of God, as he was so enraged that somehow this is what happened to him.

Within years of this injury, he began to replace the old dreams with new ones. He started training other athletes and preparing them for intense competitions. Some of the athletes he trained were garnering gold medals at the Olympics and winning in other competitions as well.

Through that success, he obtained his own fitness show on television, which led to him marketing and selling a line of fitness tapes and DVD’s which have turned out to not only help people get in shape, but also have been quite financially lucrative for him.

So as we see, this person replaced the pain of the past with new dreams – and it worked. It is a story of great inspiration, as all of us have felt that our dreams have been crushed and destroyed at one time or another. It is a call to action for us to do the same, as we no longer have to be victims of the pain of the past, but, rather, winners in the present tense.

5-Laugh

Now that we’ve reached our final step in healing the pain of the past, you might ask, “Why is #5 entitled, “laugh”? What could that have to do with my suffering and former hurt? I thought we were supposed to laugh at a joke, a funny movie, comedy routine, or when going out to see a stand-up comedian. How do I take a lighthearted view of all of the pain I’ve been through?”

When I was in my twenties, I remember a great spiritual master once told me that I needed to learn to laugh at the pain of my past. If I could do so, I would then know that I was resolved with what happened before. At first, I asked the same thing: “What does laughter have to do with it?”

However, I learned very quickly that laughter has everything to do with it because you know you’re healed regarding a former situation when you can laugh at it. Sounds crazy? Think of it this way: When you were in first grade, someone pushed you down and your knee got cut and bled. You cried, screamed and even thought the world was going to end. Do you feel the same about that experience today? Of course not. I’m sure that you can laugh heartily at that silly little incident back then which at the time seemed so completely traumatic. Therefore, at this time, you need to apply that same principle to what is still wounding you from before.

In spiritual terms, no matter what we’ve been through, regardless of how awful it has been and how we still may feel, we will come to peace with everything that has ever happened to us before. It’s just a question of whether we do it now or later. At some point, our spiritual growth will lead us into that healing journey regarding it all! The gage of how much we are healed now is laughter, because with it, there is no pain, remorse, guilt, anger, rage, depression or resentment, but only light-hearted joy!

As with all aspects of healing the pain of the past, take it in steps. Start by thinking of something that troubled you before that doesn’t matter much anymore – like a break up with someone you dated briefly in high school. Try laughing about it now and you’ll see how good you feel.

Then, work on something that is a bit more difficult and continue with that process till you feel that you can laugh at the pain of the past. It doesn’t have to be completed today, but in steps and degrees through time. Yet, always push yourself a little bit more each day, as your defense mechanisms could resist going through this process as you’re confronting former situations that have greatly wounded you.

It’s easy with our defenses to feel that this technique is unfair or disingenuous, as if to say, “I can’t laugh at what I’ve been through as it was so utterly horrible!” If you’re having that type of reaction, you’ve discovered where the problems are and that’s where the healing needs to occur. We all have things that still bother us from before, but do we choose to heal them or not?

If we really want to move forward with our lives, we must heal the pain of the past; not just make a little dent in it here and there. If that’s all we do, then the negativity comes back, like an uncured disease that keeps flaring up. Laughter is the final step in our healing process!

When we are free of what happened before within us, we are free externally. The freedom we so desperately seek outside of ourselves cannot be gotten in the external world as that world merely reflects our inner world. Freedom can only be first attained in our inner world, then what we experience externally will mirror what we have manifested within.

Let’s really reach for the freedom our souls desire and yearn for – freedom from the shackles, chains and prison of the pain of the past. It cripples up, debilitates us, and prevents us from manifesting our dreams. It is not airy-fairy, lofty and up in the clouds to heal this. It is real, tangible and attainable – right here, right now. This way, we don’t have to hobble through life, merely survive or just go through the motions….

By coming out of the dark through acknowledging what we feel, releasing the burdens of those old derelict emotions, forgiving those who have hurt us before, replacing the pain of the past with new dreams, and ultimately, laughing about it all, we have come full circle – and are ready to manifest a life of miracles, dreams, health well-being, prosperity and new people in our lives who truly care and love us.

You can have a private consultation with me,  personally tailored to fit your questions, needs and concerns. Just click the link to begin.

I am free of the pain of the past and I live joyously in the present every day!

If you are interested in custom affirmations to help you on your journey, or in having your own private consultation with me, click here.

When we haven’t yet learned a lesson, we keep wondering what’s wrong with us and why we can’t seem to learn what we’re supposed to. We’ve all been there: two steps forward – then two steps backward — and it creates the nagging feeling of reoccurring frustration. But it isn’t just a matter of hoping that we can somehow, someday gain control of the situation and learn what we’re supposed to; from a spiritual perspective, it is much deeper than that….

We come into this lifetime with a certain nature; a tendency to want and do certain things and on the surface, we may just think of these things as merely our personality likes/dislikes, preferences and a matter of our traits. However, these tendencies are quite spiritually profound, as they deeply tie into our karma and our dharma in this lifetime.

As we know, karma always deals with what we’ve done before and the repercussions (both good and bad) for our past choices. Dharma, on the other hand, has nothing to do with what we’ve done before, but rather, deals with what our soul has chosen (taken on for the first time) to learn in this lifetime for our spiritual development.

The reason our personality tendencies are so important, is because they set up the struggle that is so necessary to be able to learn our karmic and dharmic lessons. If there was no attraction, draw, desire or pull toward something, then there’s nothing to let go of, to work through or overcome. If we could just take it or leave it, what would it matter? There needs to be attachment within us to set the stage for these lessons.

Since these lessons are not learned quickly, the attraction and attachment to whatever the lesson is becomes necessary on a spiritual level. Engaging the situation then sets up the lesson to be learned.

Cigarettes are a perfect example: If you have a spiritual lesson involving smoking cigarettes, you would need to have a desire to smoke in order to be able to facilitate the lesson that you agreed to on a soul level. If you didn’t like the taste, or the smell, then why would you smoke? If you didn’t have a desire to smoke, there would be no struggle, therefore, no lesson.

Alcohol is another example. With family genetics where alcoholism exists, being born into that family provides the predisposition to alcoholism. That would be chosen on a spiritual level before incarnating which sets the stage to be an alcoholic.

Think of it this way: If you have a lesson to learn of humility, you would spiritually architect a personality that has the tendency to be arrogant and egotistical. That sets up the struggle to facilitate and eventually learn what we need to spiritually learn.

If your lesson was to gain self esteem, you would set up a personality with low self worth. You may go through feeling terrible about yourself, then try move forward, then slip backward again, as this movement indicates the struggle.

These, as well as other scenarios represent the many examples of what we all go through here on earth as part of our spiritual growth and learning our lessons; yet we hardly think of this as a spiritual process when we’re in the throes of emotions. We sometimes shriek in frustration, “Why do I keep going through this?”

However, these struggles absolutely occur for everyone and don’t represent that we’re failing, but that we just haven’t learned the lesson yet. It’s just like someone who’s learning a new piece of music on the piano; of course there’ll be mistakes as they’re trying to master the piece. 

In addition, we have to address the negativity within us, face it for what it is and heal those issues. Just being “positive” is not enough to learn the lesson as we must also understand the negative mechanisms within us and how they contribute to the various ways our struggles occur in the situations we experience.

Manifestations of the struggle  

 We just don’t know any better

While working through this process, we sometimes truly don’t know what our lesson is at the time or what is going on in our lives from that perspective. We’re unclear as to what we’re supposed to be learning from a given situation and don’t have a clue as to why things are unfolding in a certain way. We have all thrown our hands up in the air and asked, “Why is this happening to me?”

It’s very much like watching a movie we’ve never seen before: we’re not sure of where the plotline is taking us; there are surprises as it unfolds, and we don’t know what the ending will be. 

However, through time, just as in a movie where the story eventually becomes clear and reaches its conclusion, we will see our lesson unfold and eventually come into a state of clarity regarding the situation.

Things are going on in a person’s life and these things indicate a pattern, which shows us the lesson that needs to be learned. Whether the pattern is in relationships, difficulties in a job, or in any situation, certain issues keep coming up again and again. We need to recognize just what the pattern is saying to us, so we can identify the lesson and then move forward to learn it.

Even though Miguel worked for himself, he kept attracting clients who wouldn’t pay him for his services. He always completed the work excellently, but kept finding himself in situations where he wasn’t being paid. He couldn’t understand why this kept happening till he realized that he had always felt unworthy of receiving money – especially for his services. So he kept attracting these types of clients, till he realized what the pattern was and he learned what he was supposed to.

Like Miguel, it is of crucial important that we are committed to finding the spiritual truth of a given situation and through our diligence to ask “why,” we eventually find out. The truth we are seeking is also seeking us.

However, once we begin to grasp the spiritual truth and begin to “know,” it’s easy to not want to deal with our lessons with a real commitment to growth, but instead, just gloss over the situation and only do minor, insignificant changes. It’s like the old adage of throwing a cup of water in the ocean.

Thinking we can do just a vanity change

Often times, instead of us not knowing what’s going on, we do know what the lesson is and what we’re supposed to be doing to learn it. However, the personality doesn’t want to really emotionally change the situation and truly learn the lesson.

When people don’t really want to substantively change a situation, they make minuscule changes that don’t address the heart of the matter. It would be like thinking of modifying your hair style every once in a while as a profound and meaningful long term spiritual change.

What we need to is to make a legitimate commitment to change and take on the issue with diligence, tenacity and consistency. The truth of the matter is the sooner we make a real commitment to change, the more quickly we can pursue the things that really fulfill us and make us happy.  

The comfort of old patterns

When we’ve gotten use to old, unhealthy behavioral patterns, we receive a sense of comfort and familiarity which gives us a negative payoff. It is just like drinking too much. We know we shouldn’t do it but since we get something out of it like numbing our emotional pain, we continue to stay with it. How about overeating, where we use food as a source of comfort, all the while knowing that excessively indulging in food is not good for us?

There are those who stay in negative and destructive relationships instead of working toward learning the lesson, so they wallow in the “comfort” and payoff of the old patterns. It becomes like hangin’ out with an old friend – the kind that got you into trouble by keeping you out all night long so that you didn’t get to work the next day.

These old patterns are tricky, because what we may feel comfortable with is not always good for us. Even if these tendencies that created the “old patterns” were originally there to facilitate the lesson, we must work toward legitimate growth through breaking those old, unhealthy patterns and not have them be an end in and of themselves.

Stubborn attachment to the past

Sometimes when we’re in the process of learning a lesson, we just don’t stay in old patterns, but rigidly attach to them with a stubborn fervor and resistance that is defiant. This is the stage where our defense mechanisms put up a brick wall which is designed to keep out anything that challenges the perpetuation of these old, negative patterns.

Again, the lesson is to be learned, not wallowed in, yet all of us have struggled with whatever we’re here to learn. Think of it like concrete: when it is first poured; it is mushy and you can splash in it. (That is initially like having a tendency toward something in the beginning, which at the time, sets up the lesson. You’re not yet rigidly attached to the situation.) With concrete, as it sits there for a while, it hardens to a point where there is no flexibility in it at all and becomes as hard as a rock.

It is the same with being stubbornly attached to the past: Those old feelings may have been initially necessary to bring about the lesson, but holding on to them makes them become like rock hard concrete. That makes it more difficult for us to learn the lesson as there is more rigidity within us that we have to break through.

As they say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall; meaning, the more resistant you are to learning the lesson, the more challenging it is to work through the attachment to the past and rise above the old patterns.

Survival

We have all experienced passages in life where we literally feel that our survival depends on us getting or having something, yet what we “must have” is not good for us. Oftentimes, this sense of survival is there to help set up our lessons; but not something that we should cling to for dear life. When what we want is so strong that we feel our lives depend on it, the struggle is clearly present.

This can be the most difficult energy to work through in learning a lesson because we literally feel as if we’re in a life or death struggle. It’s like someone has pulled a gun on us and we’ll do whatever it takes to stay alive; but it is merely our emotionally driven situation that we’re reacting to.

These situations can manifest in any number of ways: destructive romantic relationships, negative habits such as alcohol, drugs and overeating, exercising inappropriate power games over others, lying, manipulating, and cheating on our spouses, etc. When we feel our survival depends on engaging in these types of things, we cling to these situations obsessively – yet, we’re supposed to be working through and rising above these habits to learn the lesson.

We especially see this with people who attach themselves to a destructive romantic relationship so intensely that even the notion of walking away from it feels as if they’re being suffocated to death. It is literally experienced in the same way one would feel if someone lunged at them with a knife.

At this point, it is hard for the person to see things clearly, as they’re reacting to the kill-or-be-killed adrenaline rush we used to feel in the jungles when our lives were threatened regularly. Except now, that same feeling comes to us when our attachment to a relationship is threatened, or to anything, for that matter that we feel that way about!

Yet, we can’t just try and suppress or “snuff out” these survival mechanisms. We need to clearly work on replacing the old negative survival mechanism with new positive ones. Alcohol, again, is a perfect example. We drink to relax, deal with life, cope with and get through the day. That needs to be replaced with a new, healthy sense of self, which is being clean and sober, living in physical health, being responsible for our actions, being present to make right decisions and not risking other people’s safety through driving while intoxicated.

The dramatic aspect of our survival process forces us to call attention to the nature of the lesson, (whether we know that there are underlying and fundamental spiritual reasons for these mechanisms or not). It brings the situation to a dramatic crisis that is too intense to be ignored – and that is necessary for us to not avoid the lesson, as it absolutely needs to be learned.

The lesson is always learned

If we have negative karma to work off and karmic lessons to learn, it has to be done. It is not as if karma just goes away. It must be taken care of.

It is the same thing with dharma. Even though a dhramic lesson is happening in our journey for the very first time once we take it on, our soul needs that lesson for its spiritual growth. In the same way you have to pass the 6^th grade before you can get to the 7^th grade, we must learn our dharmic lessons as well.

You shouldn’t feel bad about yourself because you’re struggling, as that’s a part of the process of growth. It’s normal to vacillate back and forth as we’re trying to learn the lesson and does not mean that we are a failure. It’s easy to look at everyone else and say, “They have their lives together and I don’t,” but that is not true. All of us are engaged in the struggle of learning our lesson, regardless of how it appears on the surface.

However, in reality, we will “get it.” It doesn’t matter how hard the lesson feels to us or how much difficulty we’ve had struggling to learn it. When you’ve been frustrated for such a long time, you might think, “That sounds too pie in the sky! People fail all the time and I’m one of them!” However, that is from an emotional point of view. Just like we label situations in life as good or bad (when our feelings may or may not represent the spiritual truth), it is the same thing with our lessons. Sooner or later, they are always learned.

As we look at our karmic and dharmic lessons, it is important to feel invigorated by what we can do now. With each step out of the denial of our negativity and into the awareness of what we need to do to let go of the past attachments, release and replace old unhealthy patterns with new and positive ones, we ultimately heal our lives and learn the lesson. With that, we move toward completion. It is with that completion of learning our lesson that gives us a real, truthful and great sense of satisfaction; that we’ve advanced and have truly moved forward from a spiritual perspective: irrevocably and eternally.

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I now learn the lessons I need to spiritually learn to move forward with my life!

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