Moving Forward: Learning Life’s Lessons (Part 2)

So you’ve stepped back, looked at your life, and realized that you have been presented with the same life lesson again and again.  How do you move through it?

While there’s no one correct answer for every situation, here are some things that I’ve found have helped me:

• Pause and breathe: before responding to a situation or person, simply stop, take a couple deep breaths and allow yourself the opportunity to release any reactive emotions that may have come up.  This simple practice gives you the space you need to choose a different response than perhaps you normally would have.
• Connect with your heart and/or gut, rather than your mind: too often, our thought patterns override the truth that we know in our heart.  Focus your being on your heart or gut, and listen to what they are telling you.  This can provide some great insights about how to work through a life lesson.
• Step back and look at the situation from a different perspective: if your best friend came to you with the exact same situation, what would you recommend to him or her?  Or, ask your best friend – or two or three! – to help you brainstorm different ways you could approach the situation…and then try at least one.
• Make one small change: we tend to equate change with big steps, but the truth is that one small change can cause a ripple effect that we could never have imagined.  For example, choosing to consciously listen with the intention to understand someone that you have been having the same argument with again could cause a variety of changes: you might have an “aha” moment and realize that there is truth in the other person’s words that you need to act on, the other person may calm down and be more open to talking the situation through because he feels he has been heard, or you both might feel more inclined to compromise or work through a solution together.
• Journal and work with your helping guides: this is a great use of stream-of-consciousness writing.  Write down the life lesson that you have identified, and ask that your helping guides help you identify what you need to learn and how to work through that learning.  Then clear your mind, keep you pen to paper, and begin channeling the response from your guides.  Don’t worry about punctuation, grammar or spelling – just write.  I’ve found that sometimes the message comes so quickly that it is hard to keep up with the words!

What have you done to help you learn a life lesson?