Fourth of our 10 article series will explain why certain problems seem to repeat in our lives periodically. These might be a feeling of a constant lack of money no matter how much more you make compared to the past, always choosing a romantic partner that ends up being the same as the one before or just finding your shoe constantly stuck to a piece of chewed up chewing gum.
The first part of the series and the series index can be found here.
So, Why Do Certain Problems Plague Us? And Why Do We Struggle Sometimes?
It's because we’re all exploring different facets of existence.
- Think of these as assignments that have been doled out.
- None of these are problems per se.
- They’re experiences for us to have.
- We’re exploring existence together and learning about it.
- Some explorations are easy. Others are challenging. That’s the nature of exploration.
Whether some part of this exploration is a punishment or a reward is a matter of perspective. What one explorer resists, another may welcome.
Resisting the experience you are getting is an abuse of your power.
What bogs us down is when we resist the experiences that come to us. This is an abuse of our power.
You’re a powerful being, but when you resist what’s arising now, you’re focusing your energy on that which you resist, thereby perpetuating it. You’re making yourself powerless and constricting the flow.
You’re doing the spiritual equivalent of an isometric exercise, like pushing both of your hands together as hard as you can.
What’s the result? Lots of tension.
- Your power is directed by your attention.
- You have the ability to direct and focus your attention, and this is something you can improve with practice.
- You can withdraw your attention from that which bothers you and refocus your attention (through your imagination) on more desirable experiences.
You can be a victim of our collective exploration, or you can be a conscious, active participant
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The point of being here is to explore and learn. If you feel you’re getting the crappy assignments, perhaps you haven’t been consciously enrolling yourself in the better ones. Focus your attention on atracting what you want, not what you don't want.
Which explorations did you deliberately sign up for? If you don’t pick your assignments, the collective action of our energy field will still send assignments your way. Those assignments may not be to your liking though, so you may be slow to complete them.
Struggle provides a key lesson.
The point of struggle is to teach you to stop putting your attention on what you don’t want.
- The more you make this mistake of using your power against yourself, the more punishment you’ll receive.
- The more you generate resistance in your own energy, the more you’ll attract experiences to resist.
This punishment is largely self-inflicted though. When you’re ready to progress beyond this type of training, you’re free to move on and manifest that which you desire.
There is a bright side to this.
When you struggle, you’re still helping us explore. You just happen to be exploring struggle.
You don’t have to spend your whole life there though. Exploring struggle will eventually give you a stronger desire for flow. The more you struggle, the more you’ll crave and invite the experience of flow.
Are you ready to experience flow, or are you still keen to explore struggle?
Don’t assume that this question is so easy to answer.
- Struggle locks down and stabilizes many parts of your life.
- Struggle is slower than flow.
- If you invite flow, you’re inviting change, and not everyone is ready to experience a faster rate of change just yet.
- They’d rather stick with the stability of struggle for a while longer.
How do you move on? Stop resisting the struggle phase. Surrender to the struggle.
If you want to move through this phase even faster and more powerfully, then share the lessons you’re learning from struggle as you go through this phase.
Connect with other strugglers and compare notes. Execute your exploration of struggle like a true explorer would.
Written by Steve Pavlina. Steve Pavlina is a human alarm clock - he wakes up people who are sleeping through life. Steve has a personal development blog for smart people, which you can follow here: stevepavlina.com/blog/
