Learning
A door is both an entrance and an exit. Entrance for opportunity and exit for our resistance.
For us:
Opportunity rarely knocks on your door. Knock rather on opportunity’s door if you ardently wish to enter.
Challenge brings integrity; otherwise a person remains hollow, empty. If all facilities are provided for you and there is no danger in your life, you will remain hollow and empty. God gives life with all its dangers. God created the world as an opportunity to grow.
Growth needs many many opportunities, challenges.
The impermanence of life makes it impossible to find lasting sense of satisfaction in the external world. When life does not unfold as we think it should, we experience pain; it is challenging. No matter how enlightened we may be, the challenge remains.
Things do not always go precisely as we plan. When things “go wrong,” we resist our circumstances, telling ourselves the painful story that this should not be happening. Resistance increases.
Instead of labeling what is happening with the word “shouldn’t”, we need to see, that the challenges have an important function to play in our lives. Challenges can work for us, if we allow them to fulfill their function. They exist to enable us to open to a deeper level of consciousness.
Of course we have to navigate the practical realities of life with common sense. But every situation offers a deeper opportunity beyond just coping or actively resisting what is.
We can rail against difficulties. We can whine about the people we have to deal with every day. Or, we can understand that the friction-points of life offer the opportunity for spiritual practice.
Wood shines when rubbed smooth by sandpaper. The beauty of the sculpture emerges from the drab slab of granite as the sculptor knocks off the rough edges with hammer and chisel. In the absence of pain, we lose the opportunity for our true beauty to emerge. A life with no pain, if such a thing were possible, would be a life with no growth.
Instead of resisting circumstances that are not as we wish, view them as opportunities to stop being controlled by challenges and instead choose “non-reaction”.
Life is fundamentally an inner journey. The responses we choose in the face of the challenges we face help create the world in which we live. The more we face the things in life we feel are wrong, without allowing those circumstances to control our feelings, the more we are able to live in the freedom of our true and deepest nature.
Learning from Door: Embrace Challenges
