Real life is revelation. There is no moment in which something isn't stirring us in a constant kind of disturbance for the purpose of revealing both what we are and what we can be. But, in moments we are brought alive by the sudden awareness of who and what we have been, our unconscious reaction is to either resist or try to control the revelation.
There is however another possibility for any who wish to be free of self-defeating patterns: we can come wide awake and realize that we are being given an opportunity to see something about ourselves we weren't aware of the moment before.

When we are present to the touch of this disturbance, we become aware of the old baggage -- the old thoughts and feelings we all carry in us -- that confine us to believing, "I'm this kind of person who went through this kind of event," "I was abused while I was growing up and it made me this way," "I never had a chance," "I'll never get ahead," or whatever recurring thought it may be. We meet life with reactions that are a compilation of all that we have learned and done, and that we continue to reconfigure in the hope that there will be a new outcome when we finally "get it right." Our present nature responds to a moment that feels painful from a body of pain, from resistance. No negative state appears in our life that is not preceded by some form of resistance on our part.

This understanding is extremely significant because when we resist a moment, we are secretly agreeing to be attached to it, to be identified with it. And the more we resist something, the more we're identified with it. When we don't want something, we think we're creating distance between ourselves and that pain, but the truth is, when we don't want something, we're strengthening the resistance in us, which produces more pain and validates the idea that we're trapped. Add to this understanding the fact that we can't know anything about what we don't want because resistance kills the opportunity for learning. Without learning there can be no integration, and without integration there is disintegration, which is what most of us experience when we fight with what we think life has dealt us.

As life continues to stir us -- which it must, because that's what it's intended to do for the purpose of revealing all of these old patterns -- instead of resisting the moment and blaming it for the pain we feel because we identify with the old pattern, we can come wide awake and realize that life is offering us a new moment, a new self. We can literally let go of who we've been by realizing that in this moment we're being shown these old qualities, along with the resistance that comes up whenever certain things happen, for our transformation. Instead of letting our response repeat or re-pattern itself (and punish us accordingly with no hope, and no new possibilities), our awareness of it allows us to be changed.

As a final note, a big part of the problem that we all face is that when the past is stirred up, when thoughts and feelings generate a host of emotions and negativity, we want to try to do something with the stirring by rejecting it, or trying to control the condition that revealed it. But, we are not the ones who are intended to heal our past. We are intended to wake up to the fact that we are not our past. If we let the light of the presence of real life -- a living intelligence -- touch us, then the part of us that generates the past over and over again is transfigured, and we stand as a new human being ready to proceed through the process of continual revelation.