Hardship and the Human Experience
Hardship craves you.
Its deep intimacy with life in the form of challenge eager to meet you exactly where you are, in ways so perfectly unique to you its unfathomable.
Hardship creates the conditions for deeper freedom to occur.
The radical truth of the matter is that we need painful circumstance.
It is the very space in which we crystallize two very critical aspects about ourselves.
1. How much we do not know about ourselves.
2. How far we have come.
Hardship always meets you in the highest volume you have capacity for.
The capacity you believe to have in order to deal with the struggles that life is presenting you is not your true capacity.
Life is not asking you what your ability to persevere is,
Life is telling you what your capacity to persevere is.
HUGE DIFFERENCE.
You will never be presented a circumstance that you cannot integrate.
No matter how deeply you may feel that you are in the hole,
you are met with the confidence of Life believing in you,
saying,
“You will make it through this, you just have to let go of what cannot pass through with you.”
Life is a constant series of new foundations.
Sometimes higher, sometimes lower.
But who is really keeping track?
I am constantly evolving in every season, and sometimes even down to the days. This week especially I’ve allowed myself to feel a spectrum of existential emotions that I have never felt safe enough to experience before.
The feeling of complete and utter purposelessness softens my soul to accept that how I think I am being of service to the world is far limited to how I truly am impacting the world.
Full bodied confusion lends its way to letting go of where I thought my story was leading me.
Frustration alchemizes into a deep inner fire that inspires me profoundly at the same time as it scares the shit out of me.
Everything I allow myself to feel in life has both building tension and corresponding release.
I am most in my power when I sit with the tension when Life is telling me to experience tension, and to breathe through the release when life is telling me to breathe through the release.
The dilemma is that we usually cross pollinate the two.
I try to artificially create release or resolve when life is saying,
“WE ARE JUST GETTING THIS FIRE STARTED.”
Or even, if you are accustomed to adversity and your nervous system is conditioned for fight or flight,
Life will tell you to soften, to breathe, and to rest while you believe to still be within the tension.
IT’s a damn tricky condition with our minds and nervous systems,
but that therein is the TRUE beauty of all of this.
Life reveals to you where you are not free.
Life’s revelatory tool of choice is often hardship because it’s extremely visceral in the way that it interacts with our minds and nervous system in unimaginably creative ways.
Life wants to show you where you are looping in stories of fear when its safe for you to just be.
Life wants to show to you where your default reaction is fight or flight when all that is actually happening is just your perception of a threat.
The nuance goes deep, but the truth stays the same.
Hardship craves to be intimate with you.
IT wants to collaborate with you for your highest becoming.
Hardship sees the next best version of you that often you can’t see or don’t believe in.
Life isn’t asking you if you see that version of you,
life is telling you to become that version of you.
