Growing through struggle...or not

   

      The past couple weeks have been exciting, curious and startling. 2014 was a year of magnificent chaos and outgrowing me. In surrendering to the chaos, I got different. I feel different and as situations in my life mirror that different back to me, I get see the different.

    A couple weeks ago, after attend my first 5Rhythms workshop, I had a little “ah-hah.”   I realized part of my resistance to dancing as a practice is how much fun I’m having doing it. The wise woman part of me knows there is more going on than just dancing. Another part of me is suspicious of how deep or evocative this path can be because it’s too much fun. Hmm…

     At first that awareness seemed like an entirely new thing. Then I realized nope, this is another layer of something I’ve been working with for few years; a belief that when something is hard, it’s valuable.

     Until my early twenties, I was heavily invested in avoiding myself. My addiction was a great way to do that….until it stopped working. When I got clean I realized I had to deal with me. So I rolled up my sleeves and started doing the hard stuff.

    That was exactly what I needed to do. Somewhere along the way my willingness to do the hard stuff grew into a belief that when it comes to spiritual and personal growth, hard is better. I caught that pattern in myself a few years ago when I noticed I often felt pulled to doing things that were difficult simply because they are hard. Okay, time to be mindful and consider saying “no.”

     Having run with the hard preset for a couple decades, I’m starting to see middle ground.  When we humans change we tend to move from one extreme to other to find the middle.

     My wariness of 5Rhythms because it’s fun reminded me of a friend who used to talk about how she didn’t understand why she and other humans had to learn from pain rather than joy. I didn’t have an answer at the time, but growth from pain did seem to be the way life worked. But maybe that’s not the way it has to work.

     If I’d jumped in 5Rhythms three or four years ago, it would’ve felt hard. The difference between then and now isn’t the practice, it’s me.

     A few years ago the awkwardness I feel on and while dancing would’ve captured my attention. I’d have focused more on the awkwardness, my resistance and even my sore muscles than on how much dancing was. What I focus on, I feed.

    Somehow I’ve been able to hold the fun and the challenges with equal attention. While I’m experiencing that as something that suddenly happened, I’m aware this is an instance of “it takes a long time for something to suddenly happen.”

   In all the difficult things I’ve done over the years, most of the hard was about me. Regardless of the external circumstances, I struggled more with myself than the situation. I got in my own way. I got in the Universes way. It was hard work to get myself out of the way. It was hard to keep tripping over myself over and over.

    When I started down this road in my twenties, it all took twice as much work as it does now. I had little awareness of my own wounding and triggers. In every situation I had to stop and figure out where I was coming from and what was going on with me before I could deal with my reactions…and that seemed to take forever. Often when I got that far, I still didn’t know how to be with what was happening because I didn’t have the tools.

     I didn’t know how to be still and listen. I had little self-acceptance. I didn’t know how to question the stories my mind told me. I’d been disconnected from my emotions for so long that every feeling I had seemed bigger than I was. I was just beginning to consciously befriend my shadow. Any faith I had in the bigger picture was blind. I took myself and everything that happened way too seriously. What I wanted most was an operating manual for me.

    Fast forward a couple decades and I still haven’t found the owner’s manual. But I trust my soul knows where it’s going even if my personality hasn’t got a clue. I know myself much better now than I did then. I trust me. I have tools, most of which I gained through struggle.

     I still fall over myself repeatedly. After a couple decades of negotiating those roadblocks, running into me is sometimes more like hitting a speed bump than a wall. Some of the shift is just experience. I’m more familiar with my stumbling blocks. I have some practice in moving with my wounding rather than resisting and denying.

     Working with my wounding over and over for years opened me to a big “ah-hah” about my shadow, my struggles and my relationship to my life. I’ve lived most of my life giving a lot of power to circumstances, situations and other external things I have no control over. I’ve allowed those externals to rearrange my internal landscape and dictate how I feel.

     I am learning how to take that power back. No matter what’s happening, my relationship to all the stuff out there begins inside me. I don’t live in the externals. I live in my relationship to those things. That relationship is mine to create, change and recreate.

     All that brought to me to this place where I “suddenly” have an opportunity to learn from having fun. Yes, we humans seem predisposed to learning through pain and struggle. But that’s not inevitable. It’s not hard wired into us. We are just a capable of learning and growing from joy and fun. It just takes a while to open that place in ourselves.