Facing Difficulties in our Every Day Lives

By Lori Lines

It is the human experience when life is fraught with difficulties. Perhaps even more so when we are on a focused and determined spiritual path of growth and enlightenment. It’s as if we bring in a manifold of problems in our lives to sit with us while we face the special challenges of awakening.

But, I believe we should do more than to just expect difficulties and sit with them, we should welcome them. The problems we all face, on this path, are precisely the means that will help us to progress along the way. Facing life’s difficulties, today, will give us practice in confronting the problems in the rest of our lives and beyond. In time, we see what we thought were problems turn out to be stepping stones to greater awareness.

The real key in facing our problems is the attitude we take toward them. Often our approach to life’s difficulties is avoidance of suffering. Rather than confront the deeper fears of our lives, we often attempt to mask or evade them in one way or another.

To accept suffering, rather than to flee from it requires courage. Courage requires determination to take a look at our inner and outer difficulties straight in the eye and to finally deal with how we have dealt with our difficulties. Courage is the fundamental attitude for facing problems. Although we sometimes equate courage and fearlessness, courage is not the absence of fear. In fact, fear is an essential component of courage. One cannot be truly courageous unless we can feel our fear fully. One can be trembling in fear and still be courageous.

If we are able to stand our ground, rather than averting our gaze or taking flight - THAT is courage.  

I often reflect on my QHHT clients’ experiences. When one chooses to undergo a full QHHT session, it appears that most, if not all, come to the session willing to look bravely into whatever their minds have churned up without implementing their usual exit strategy they have unconsciously used in the past. Most clients have come to understand (consciously or unconsciously), by the time they have arrived, that a session will help them keep their place when a difficulty arises, knowing that running away will ultimately cause more suffering than staying put and gazing deeply within to face challenges they innately hold. Courage, indeed.

It always helps me to know that fleeing from problems and facing them can both be fearful. But, experience has made me more afraid of the consequences of evasion. To me, courage has become the matter of choosing the thing I fear less, but it hasn’t served my growth in that moment.

Facing difficulties is made easier by viewing them as opportunities to grow in awareness, to deepen our self-knowledge and our skills of compassion. We progress farther by courageously meeting our difficulties than by not having them at all. 

For those of you who have bravely faced yourselves, I applaud your courage and your willingness to end certain patterns in your lives.

So, I invite you to reflect on the history of your lives. You can see that the things that have contributed most to your personal development have been the trials you have faced and passed through. If you have not had a QHHT session or a Past Life Regression session yet, and if you are interested, you may be in the process of marshaling your courage. And there’s always progress in that one thought. 

In love and truth,

Lori Lines

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