I re-aggravated my old ankle injury recently and talk about pain, restriction and obstacles to my goals!
In 16 years of life coaching I have come to appreciate one thing: shit happens to all of us, routinely, but for good reasons! So I am going to get a scan on my ankle – time to get intimate with the problem and expand my understanding of the very body that allows me to engage this wonderful life.
Yes, we may have a purple patch every now and then, and a small percentage may snag an extended vacation in bliss land, but the bottom line is, without contrast, the sweetness of life would have no meaning.
In your contemplations, you’ve likely pondered the philosophy that yin and yang must co-exist because they give meaning to each other.
But look at us! We act shocked, whinge and whine every time something goes wrong or isn’t working out as planned like it’s not normal and has no purpose.
Yet in our contemplations we do know it has a purpose, right? If everything we ever did was easy and worked out straight away (meaning we knew all that there was to know, saw everything that we needed to see and understood everything), what would that life be like? Perfection – no challenges, no achievements that expanded us: it would mean we’d stopped growing. What we do presents experiences to us that are not new, because we already knew what to expect – it was why we were mistake-free.
This is not how anyone has ever lived because there is no purpose to achieving perfection and resting in the golden seat of knowing. We are insulting life if we think we are meant to master all of it and retire into something, um something that my mind truly cannot fathom.
The alternative is what we live every day. What would happen if we embraced it as a journey of learning, growing and adventure combined with courage, humility, resilience and exhilaration for the triumphs, making the impossible possible, against all odds?
So if you’re okay with shit happening because you understand it is an invitation to learn, grow and continue to have experiences beyond that barrier, it’s game on for you!
It means you are allowed to take healthy risks so you discover more of your potential and achieve more than your wildest dreams. All because you decided the journey of working it out is perfectly normal.
Is this the way you would like to embrace 2017 and beyond? . . . Me too! 🙂
I may have hobbled into 2017, but I am reasonably confident my stride will be clean and wide by the end of this year only because I intend to eat obstacles like apples.