It doesn't even occur to us that there actually is a beautiful purpose behind whatever it is that happens to us, always inviting us to discover within ourselves a higher self, a truer self. But we must choose our path as each moment unfolds, because to live by the default state of letting darkness define us when things don't go as we wish, is to slowly lose the chance of ever transforming our lives... and we know what happens to people who cling to their suffering, who become professional martyrs, because we have seen their destitute fate.
Even in the most devastating moments, taken rightly, is a secret invitation asking us to let go of and transcend the self we've been. Such moments are there to bring us the opportunity of allowing something completely new to work its way within us, to change us in a way we cannot do for ourselves.
But to do that, we need to release ourselves from this body of experience by which we presently know ourselves. We must learn to let go... to go consciously silent in the face of our suffering and what it tells us we must do with it. Then we become willing to let a Greater Life work upon us through the light of our awareness of it.
A lot of this inner work must be done with a kind of inner silence towards what then unfolds within us -- which is a real relationship with Life itself. We watch. We learn. We grow. We are changed not by trying to change what has happened, but by not letting our reactions to it define us. We allow the whole thing -- whatever the nature of the event -- to come as it naturally comes, go through what it goes through naturally, and then we find ourselves on the other side, seeing it depart.
As the event goes naturally, so goes with it the self that was resisting, and a new "me" is there that isn't afraid anymore the way it used to be, that doesn't suffer the same way over the same things. Gradually we find ourselves having become part of a much greater, more beautiful process of life; we enter a real spiritual paradox, which is to be a part of Perfection perfecting itself.
This article is an excerpt from www.GuyFinleyNow.org, Life of Learning's Online Wisdom Center directed by Guy Finley.