Finding the Treasures Inside Our Challenges

Coming back to the living experience of life is about opening to the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows.

For the past five weeks I have been in the middle of a family crisis that wakes up fear, despair and heartache inside of me.  And yet I am not a victim to this process.  I know that this is not happening to me.  It is happening for me.  Or, as I said in my latest book What’s In the Way IS the Way:

Life is set up, to bring up, what has been bound, up so it can open, up to be freed up, so you can show up for life!

This is such a radical shift of perception. We have been conditioned to either identify with all of the deep feelings that the challenges of life bring or we try to get away from them, stuffing these feelings inside us with our compulsions.  And yet it is my experience that embedded in each and every one of the challenges that life gives us is a treasure and a doorway back into being fully open to life – all of it.

To remind myself that whatever I am experiencing is for me so that I can get curious about what is asking for my attention rather than resisting, I made what I call my “Yes! File.”  It is full of quotes from many different wise ones who, each in their own way, are inviting us to show up for what life is offering us rather than turning away.

Here are a few of the quotes.

“Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.”  Rumi

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”  Eckhart Tolle,

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”  Rilke

“It appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the Universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need to explanation or justification beyond what simply is.”  Alan Watts

“What happens when, even in the midst of apparent darkness, we know ourselves as unbreakable Light?”- Jeff Foster

So I leave you with an invitation: hold to the possibility that your challenges are not something that is wrong in your life.  Rather they are invitations to directly experience whatever you are experiencing so that all of the bound up energy you have been carrying can be set free.

Be light, Mary