Bring curiosity to your experiences

I heard this statement and it really resonated with me. “Experiences don’t happen to us, they happen for us.”

What an interesting way to view your situation, right? It takes you from victim mode to curiosity and gets your power back. 

Whether or not an experience in your life is good or bad, it allows you to step back and ask yourself some questions. I believe it’s a way for the universe to say, hey I’m with you, but you need to look at this. There is something you need to either appreciate, heal, look for what you need to learn or move on.

If we aren’t learning we aren’t growing. I will say this until the day I die. And it’s only from life experience that we learn. I find this a wonderful perspective to lighten the load a little. But there is a caveat - the learning has to be practiced in real life. Otherwise it’s just nice to know but doesn’t really help you. My B-School teacher Marie Forleo always says clarity comes from engagement, not thought.

So my suggestion is to take a not so great experience and look at why it might have showed up for you. Is this a situation you’ve been in before but maybe didn’t take the lesson from it and now it’s showing up again? Is your heart broken and you are wondering how the heck you can heal it without relying on an external party to fix it? 

I’m with you here, as always, just sorting through my own life experiences. I have found when I am curious about understanding why something uncomfortable showed up in my life, the following tools have helped me: 

Acceptance, surrender, prayer, meditation, learning, forgiveness, compassion, not taking it personally. 

Oftentimes we don’t fully understand what others are going through and why they do the things they do. Sometimes, it’s bigger than us, and we just have to accept where we are and do our very best from a loving place to own the hurt and learn what we need at this moment.

That’s why it’s so important to understand who you really are. What does your heart need? Do you have a spiritual practice to hold your heart? Or do you numb out and keep so busy so you don’t have to look at it and hope the pain just goes away? 

Unfortunately, pain doesn’t just go away, it accumulates and festers and becomes worse. And takes you further away from who you really are - which is love. We need to feel our pain. And it’s private. You don’t have to tell everyone everything. And you don’t need to act like everything is ok when you don’t feel good.

I recommend if you don’t have the tools to get you through tough times, it’s time to get some. I can help, therapists can help, books, podcasts - there are many paths. But do something so the next time it becomes easier to handle and one day nothing scares you because you know you have the tools to heal. 

Please reach out to me if you need a friend to help you move past something that’s been holding you back from being the bright light that you really are. 

All my love,

Kristi 💗