Why Struggle is a Gift
Through my near-death experience, the single most transformative reality that I awakened to can be summarized in one statement: It is all Love.
I literally mean everything is love; there isn’t anything else. The chair you’re sitting on, the air you’re breathing, the tree outside your window, the dog nestled beside you, the person who annoys the hell out of you, the person you love intensely, and every single other thing – is Love.
It is also the single most challenging concept for people to embrace. I get it. If it’s all Love, why are there so many school shootings, hate crimes, terrorists, genocide, institutional racism and other equally horrific crimes being committed on a regular basis? There are so many past and present atrocities that it is challenging for compassionate people to comprehend how this can all be love. I know.
From our human perspective, it is impossible to comprehend. Our brains are part of the physical form with which we experience this wild adventure and opportunity for expansion we call life. Our soul knows the truth of who we are and what is real, but our bodies do not. They weren’t designed to see past the illusion. My experience enables me to know for sure that we are safe, whether in physical form or not, and therefore have nothing to fear, ever.
The brain will always see a world of duality, but by allowing the eyes of our heart to see, we are capable of looking past duality to what is real. What appears to be black or white, right or wrong, shadow or light is in actuality all the same stuff, masquerading as opportunities for us to expand our loving in every moment.
We are souls having a human experience, and from a soul’s perspective pain is one of the reasons we took on human form, not the only one, but an important one. We need resistance in order to expand, just as our muscles do. The soul does not experience life the same way our human self does. This is a concept we’ll be returning to over and over again, because it is so very challenging.
“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
All of life is the Divine, slowing down its vibration enough to take on the density of physical form. Why would we want to leave the bliss of home to have the experience of life, when life is so hard? There is a propulsion within every form of life to grow and expand. Infants have an innate drive to explore, visible from the first time they roll over. Even a forgotten onion will sprout shoots in a darkened pantry. We take on human form to grow and expand.
Every life we live has a reason and purpose. We chose the challenges we face so that we can use them to help us wake up to the invisible, powerful Life Force within us and around us. We need to feel fear, resentment, rage, grief, and every other painful emotion, in order to master them. We left Home for life’s thrilling, arduous, challenging adventures.