Voice of the Spirit

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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