Life tuition

I was trading readings with a fellow psychic the other day, and she did something that instantly sends me to 1,000, which is launch into some cocreation bullshit. What I mean by this is bring up the metaphysical idea that everything is happening in your life because you invited it or wanted it to be there somehow. It's a theory that mostly works in a fair-weather sense: if you meet the love of your life or land your dream job, you created that with all of your positive energy and good intentions. High fives all around, great job!

But what if you lose your job and the love of your life is cheating on you? Or worse: what if you're consoling someone who has front-page-headline level bad shit happen to them? How is it helpful to start up with the idea that that person created that experience for themselves? What about the Holocaust or the disaster that is the middle east right now? Would you EVER in your right mind start up with "well you cocreated that"?

I'll tell you what I do think: I do believe that everyone has a life plan and that our souls have made a little series of appointments for where we're supposed to be and when (if you've ever met someone at exactly the right time or gotten a key piece of information you needed that suddenly opened up a whole new world for you, this is what I am talking about). It's important to note that we are surrounded by other souls with their life plans and little series of appointments, too, and it can be quite beautiful to try to stand back and fathom all of this, but mostly it's difficult to try to comprehend. Sometimes when we get off track for our appointment series we have to be walloped back on it, which can suck. But your soul and your waking version of *you* are not quite the same thing. If you're in a body right now, you're a soul focusing through a human lens, and the human lens means you have human concerns, like that you have to pee. Additionally, you're tied to time. Does time really exist outside of the human realm? That's the type of question I attempt not to struggle with because I don't like feeling like my brain is melting, but my answer is "probably not." So, as a soul living through a human filter, I think it's the soul making the big-ticket decisions and the human filter attempting to make sense of it all, which is not always easy. THAT's cocreation, in my opinion, not you thinking pleasant thoughts to "manifest" something pleasant. That's oversimplified and usually a sales pitch, somehow.

So when I do readings for people, I'm bridging the gap between soul logic and human logic. Your spirit guides talk to you through soul logic and your life's intentions. They do NOT care about the contents of your bank account or whether your upcoming meeting with your boss goes well. They will sometimes take you through a problem the long, hard way so that you can see the merit of figuring things out for yourself. And since they're not tied to time, often, they have all day. So you might realize one of your life lessons but then sleep on it for 30 years and do the opposite of what you should be doing, going several more laps of failure around a well-worn track, so that you get to the point of 'never again' and finally adopt your life lesson. As a human, I find this ALARMING. 30 years?! Are you high?

Anyway, back to cocreation bullshit: I actually don't disagree with the main idea, which is that your soul has made some appointments you need to fulfill while here, but you know what humans love doing? Calling things good or bad or assigning blame so that they feel better about themselves and their choices. Sometimes people don't dodge bullets, and sometimes the ones who do dodge bullets attribute to wisdom and experience what was really dumb luck. So: mind your own business.

Now that I've been doing readings a while, I have people coming back to me saying that what their guides were telling them via me did not initially make sense, but now they can see more of the meaning behind the guidance, or they feel more connected to themselves and their life plan, which is heartening for me, because that is what I am trying to do: make you feel more connected. Usually in readings, people understand what I am trying to say in the moment, but sometimes people are hesitant because the guidance initially sounds weird (or is not what they were expecting). Occasionally, I ramble on about some topic that becomes relevant a year later, so it feels like a delay, but please remember that spirit guides aren't tied to time and you are.

The reading I referenced at the beginning was a reading trade, which meant she read for me and then I read for her. When it was my turn, she asked me a deeply personal question about something she had struggled with her entire life to date. In hindsight, I realize I could have fed her back her own cocreation bullshit, because a life theme is very obviously something your soul is here to work on, but I'm really not a petty person, especially not when I'm doing readings, because I'm here to help and not to make people feel bad or ashamed of their problems.

So instead, I could see the emotional weight of the question and the fact that every day she gets up and drags this emotional weight around and obsesses over it and can't solve it, because she's not only got her own feelings about it, but the catalogue of interactions she's had with others and the advice she's received and sought, and it runs through her head every day like a bad movie. What I said instead was this: "wouldn't it be nice to wake up one day and be free from all that?"

In case you're in a similar situation, here's how to get yourself free: you turn around and look at the damn weight. Stop trying to ignore the reality of the emotional equivalent of a boulder you're dragging around because it's tied to you (imagine a cartoon where there's a string tied around a boulder and tied around your waist). You don't have to be that person who does the daily cataloguing of how you're bad or wrong or deserving of your miserable boulder-fate. Are you even the same version of the person who adopted the boulder in the first place? Probably not. So you get a metaphorical chisel and start unpacking the whats and the whys, while looking directly at it. It's rough work, but it doesn't have to be lengthy work. You just have to be brave enough to face it and know you can prevail.

As a note, life lessons (the boulders) are expensive to deal with. I once read another take on them that I liked better that called them "life tuition." (I wish I could remember who said this so I could properly give them credit.) Sometimes you pay with money, but other times it's time or emotions or energy or effort (or even the respect of other people, which is a bigger-ticket item than you might think). Occasionally we pay with almost everything we have and it's punishing. There's no dancing around that, and there's also no dancing around the idea that if you want to make big change, you're going to need to pay something. (Usually people have an idea that they can facilitate perfect change free of charge. Sorry, no.) If you don't like where you are right now, though, and you know some actions you can take to make positive change in your life, ask yourself this: do I still want to be here in 6 months? A year? 5 years? Usually the situation is if you do nothing, you stay put, and people can stay paralyzed in that state for an entire lifetime. Occasionally, though, your life plan involves a walloping. Sorry if you're in that population, but I can empathize.

If you haven't read Man's Search for Meaning, I recommend it, though please note it's about the Holocaust. The author, Viktor Frankl, says the following in the book, which I think makes my point better than I could: What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. 

You're never going to not have problems, but you can choose what you do with them and make meaning for yourself out of them (hint, also from Frankl: the meaning usually has something to do with love, including love of yourself enough to take action). I'll tell you a secret: most people I read for have a pretty good idea of what they sincerely want to do, deep down, but they're worried about life tuition costs, or downright terrified of said costs. You don't need me to tell you what you want to do.

I hope this was somewhat profound, but I'll close with something as un-profound as it gets. I'm on a dental and orthodontic adventure right now, which I chose to do (freely, yet expensively). My dentist put it this way: you'll either do it now or in 20-30 years, and it'll suck more and hurt more in 20-30 years. Up to you.