Patterns of Difficult Experiences Are Not Failed Conditions. Quite the contrary.
Whenever a human being is confronted with repeated difficulty — (negative experiences or roadblocks that are thematic in their lives— they default to their prevailing ethos to:
Explain their situation to themselves in terms of cause and effect. For example: “I’m having a hard time finding a job because the economy is not great”, or, “There are just no good men/women out there and that’s why I’m lonely and single.” These are all wonderful and necessary functions of living in time and space. Without cause and effect we do not posses the correct feedback mechanism to manipulate material reality.
Decide what can be done next based on core beliefs of goodness, rightness, worth, and deserving. This is typically some form of dogma (family and societal rules) or external authority (e.g. god, spiritual teachers, bosses). Example: “You must have done something terrible and this is your Karma,” “God is testing you to see if you can endure the hardship before you will be rewarded,” or “Something is seriously wrong with me or I wouldn’t be experiencing this now.”
Select some course of action to achieve a better outcome. For example, working harder, joining the gym, starting meditation/breath-work, praying, charitable work, start dating, attend a concert etc. All of which are wonderful human privileges.
Generally speaking, our society has two main camps of ethos in which they use to achieve their idealized lives:
Get tougher, push difficult emotions way down, carry on and do something “useful.” Just keep going and grind it out. Be so useful to others perhaps that empty crushing feeling inside won’t matter anymore. Just make sure you never stop.
Accept what is, relinquish desires for more, better, and new things, and allow the world to do upon you as it wishes. Be at one with something greater and accept your insignificance. Just make sure you never want.
Both require an overcoming or suppressing of quite natural human urges — to rest and relax knowing we are perfect the way we are, and to want and explore knowing that your growth potential has no limit.
I would like to offer an alternate doorway. One that my peers (Transformational NLP practitioners) and I have explored for decades through must trial and learning:
Patterns of failure, pain, heartbreak, and other difficulties are extremely precious and valid experiences. In fact, they possess within them, solutions to an experience you no longer remember— this software continues to run simply because you haven’t updated it. It is doing its job to fulfill great value to you in another place in time and space. You experience it in your life as like a “bug” in your software — but in fact it was written with great love and hope. This programs tend to become gloriously recycled and repurposed once we see them properly for what they are and offer them better code.
However, to illuminate their constructs, one cannot continue to live above them with new layers of effort and strategies (ethos camp 1) — we must follow the emotion to its source (core beliefs). Furthermore, accepting it does not mean feeling it (ethos camp 2) — you are still building upon the same infrastructure.
It is human nature to want. It is a privilege that is powered by our innate desire to learn and grow. However, these movements often become blocked by old internal programs that are driven by fear, misplaced devotion, and displaced personal power.
To make a long-winded post shorter: repeatedly difficult experiences are not a failed condition. They are creations that have outlived their use in the present and future days to come. The fact that you have them is proof of your creative potential.
My partner is a big gardener. She has a wonderful garden space to grow vegetables. Plenty of sun, quality soil, and surrounded by apple trees, oak trees, berry bushes which cools the space and ensures that our vegetables don’t get overheated during the summer. However, after ten years of gardening, the branches of the oak tree have extended their canopies such as to block out more sun. As a result, we have been yielding less tomatoes over the recent years. Furthermore, the apple trees are drawing all sorts of plants and animals to the space due to their abundant fruit— so squirrels and the like have decided to take their pickings from what we grow too.
My partner has become cranky and dissatisfied about the situation. While we acknowledge that all this means is the space is full of life force— we have to adjust the way we grow our vegetables going forward if we want to achieve what we want — relocation of where we plant, how we water etc.
Our lives are like living gardens. We often forget what seeds we planted and their blossoming can be both wonderful and limiting in their own right. They are however, our creations.
So, there you are. Place your attention on a repeating experience you don’t want anymore — it could be about work, love, money, etc. Notice that this is not a failed condition. In fact, it is a proof of your excellence.