Trust Your Path
Worry & doubt are second nature for so many of us. Am I making the right choices in life? Do I have really bad habits & no self-control? Do other people spend as much time on social media as I did this Sunday morning? How can I say I have no time to clean the windows when I lay in bed for 30 minutes reading the news? Nothing new happened anyway. What a waste of time! Be better! These kinds of thoughts can be so familiar that we hardly notice them when they’re happening. They just happen! And we are carried away by them in our heads, almost unconsciously.
When we think momentarily about our job situations, how much time we spend with our families, our friends, it can be easy to wonder if we’re getting it right. Am I just a slob? Do I spend enough time with the people I care about? Am I too much of a party animal? Did I choose the right career path? Am I moving up the ladder too quickly or too slowly? Does my boss think I’m doing a good job? How is my diet? Is it good enough?
It seems no matter what we’ve decided to do, questioning whether we’ve gotten it right will STILL happen. —Right or not! It’s like the old IQ test of coming to the fork in the road where two brothers stand, one always a liar, the other always honest & you can only ask one question of one of the brothers to figure out which road to take. The question to ask? —"Which road would your brother tell me to take?” If he’s the liar, he’ll tell you the bad road. If he’s honest, he’ll tell you the bad road. Then you take the other one. And whether we’ve made a good decision or not, we can easily doubt ourselves or the situation. We made a great choice, but we’re asking ourselves, “Did I get it right?” We make a lousy choice, and we still ask, “Did I get it right?” It seems regardless of the circumstances, we ask the same question. How can we know anything if we’re full of doubt?
We doubt our choices from the past & we fuss about whether things will work out well in the future. There so much doom and gloom everywhere we look. We tell ourselves we’re not worried. But then sometimes we still are & we’re even lying to ourselves, telling ourselves we aren’t afraid when we really are apprehensive.
Maybe we’re not that worried, so we dismiss it, but then we get annoyed that there is still a tiny little bit of worry. And then we feel guilty that we are still harbouring worry instead of standing in courage like those we admire. Those of us who have decided not to read the news still seem to be bombarded with more stories every day about how the world is ending. The global terror seems inescapable. It’s no wonder we’re scared & anxious.
In my 20s & early 30s, I went through a series of failed love relationships. When in the thick of those journeys, it felt like my life was a string of disappointments & bad decisions. I put so much judgement on myself about how things turned out, instead of getting really curious about how my patterns related to the perceived unmet needs of my childhood. Instead of seeing my situations as the perfect opportunity to take full responsibility, reflect & heal, I just felt sorry for myself & tried to distract myself from the pain. At the time, all I could think about was how I didn’t seem to be able to end up with what I wanted, how all I could grasp at turned out to be sadness & broken dreams.
Of course, all this played out very slowly over time. It was hard to see where I was going wrong. I even thought I was changing and each time I thought things would be different. But the lesson of true self-love wasn’t sinking in, so over time I would end up recreating the same issues.
After many years however, when my pattern repeated itself enough, there was a long enough timeline to put two & two together. I finally got the message & started looking in the mirror! I finally started to realise that I was ALWAYS the common ingredient in these situations. I was the one who needed to learn & grow if I ever wanted to break free from repeatedly creating the same circumstances.
Looking back on every decision, even what could be considered mistakes—I don’t regret any of them. I see that those were the steps I had to take, to scale the Everest that would take me out of my valley of ignorance, to heights of understanding, depth & wisdom. There was a cost, but it was the only way out of the valley.
Looking back with love on the me of the past, holding the wisdom that came with time—this is what gives me faith for the future. It didn’t matter how rough things felt at the time, eventually, I gained a perspective where I at last understood the reason why all those things had to happen. Without the suffering and pain, I never could have woken up to the deep healing that my innermost-self needed.
This reflection assures me that my present moments & my future, no matter how difficult or uncertain will be part of the next set of lessons that I will need to continue to grow & evolve. In other spaces, this idea is referred to as Mindset. There are two ways to view the world…glass-half-empty-half-full-kind-of-deal…either it’s all hopeless, or its one big classroom & there is always something to be learned.
If you want to take it a step further, many people hold the truth that some kind of higher power or higher self is watching over every step of our journey, cheering us on, guiding us through each lesson that shows up in our reality by design. We may work hard to be in command of our situation, but every time something comes along that is unexpected, out of our control, maybe unwelcome by us, that situation has been brought in as a challenge, a lesson or an opportunity—and it is always offered to us in deep, wise, incomprehensible love.
When we remind ourselves by holding this lens over our life events, we can face our own demons, we can face our fickle disappointing human nature & that of others, we can face the chaos of modern living & we can face our uncertain future. No matter the madness of this jungle trek, we are on a path of training with a toolkit that grows over time. And I personally believe the Energy of Love is so strong that it watches over all of us and slowly guides us back to the Light of Oneness—Our true Home.
