“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.” ~ Mary Oliver

What if you knew, like really really knew, that nothing ever has or ever will go wrong in your life? While most people can look back at any past tragedy or catastrophe that has happened to them and find some silver lining that eventually showed itself through the clouds, it doesn’t stop our mind’s incessant need to judge situations in our present moment as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong.”

If something goes the way we wanted, or the way we had planned it to go, we label it as “right”, and when something doesn’t go the way we had planned it, we label it “wrong.”

However, if we transcend the judgments of the mind, and start operating from the perspective that nothing, in fact, EVER goes wrong, but is only showing up in our lives to further our evolution of consciousness and to help us grow, we come to a place where we can gain insight from ALL of our experiences.

It is when we gain insight from our experiences that we are able to flow with the natural changes and progressions of our lives more easily and readily.

Challenges and problems are no longer looked at as something to defend ourselves against or to resist, but rather something that we start to welcome with open arms because we realize it has only shown up in our experience to help make us a better person.

As soon as the lessons are learned and the experiences are accepted and surrendered to, we not only grow to higher levels of maturity and consciousness, but we also find that those types of “lessons” no longer pop up into our lives.

So how do we go about finding clarity and understanding in the face of adversity? How do we take ourselves out of the perceived negativity of our present moment circumstances to a place where we can start finding the deeper meaning behind our experiences?

“And when I looked back at my life, when I looked back at it all, I clearly saw how bad times really meant everything. And how every moment that led me to happiness revolved around some kind of terrible darkness. Sometimes the darkness was a beautiful thing and sometimes it took me to a place where I had no idea where it would all go, but I knew it was all meant to be okay.” ~ R.M. Drake

Understanding Why Things Happen

When a sudden change occurs the first question we often ask ourselves is, “why?” It seems the more we resonate with the belief that everything happens for a reason, the more insatiable the mind becomes in wanting to know the deeper reason behind all situations.

It seems we can blame anything from clearing karma from a past life to subconscious programming for bringing into our life things that we feel we do not want. However, as most of us know, the “why” something happens rarely reveals itself at the time of the occurrence. More often than not the “why” something has happened becomes besides the point.

It is just something that our ego mind can fixate on to take our attention off aligning ourselves with the solutions and moving forward. Eventually as time passes we most likely will see why things happened the way they did, but in order to gain true insight about our lives, we must come to terms with the fact that we rarely have complete control over our life’s circumstances.

And on top of that, why would you want to? What would our life be if we just knew every single thing that was going to happen, there were no challenges to face or adversities to overcome?

In theory it sounds great, but when we think of things that way, we see that knowing everything that is going to happen takes the fun out of life. Who wants to go to a movie where they already know the outcome?

What joy can we get from a book where we see exactly how the character will solve every problem before we even start reading? There comes a point in all of our lives that we will inevitably hit a wall.

Something major happens and we search and search for the hidden meaning and the deeper understanding but we just can’t quite come up with a definite answer. At this point, there is only one thing left to do.

Embrace Uncertainty

Accept that you are confused. Accept the uncertainty, embrace the mystery, and love the part of you that doesn’t understand.

If we come to a place where we find peace in not knowing why something has happened, yet we know that it inevitably is making us stronger, happier, clearer or raising us to new levels of understanding, we are able to navigate through situations with a much happier outlook.

We aren’t always meant to know exactly why something happens in our lives, and that’s okay.

If we switch our perspective from only searching for the hidden meaning behind something to instead just loving the person who is going through an unplanned change, we begin to align ourselves with our higher wisdom.

The wisdom that comes from the part of us that knows that not only does everything happen for a reason, but that everything happens to bring ourselves back to ourselves.

The more we love ourselves through these unexpected circumstances the more we start to live a life full of faith rather than thinking that we somehow need to exert complete control over everything and know exactly who, what, when, why and how for all of life’s situations.

“Adversity introduces a man to himself.” ~ Albert Einstein

Sometimes the deepest insight one can have is coming to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not know why something is happening. At the moment where we accept the fact that we are confused and don’t understand, two amazing things happen. First, we relinquish the need for complete control over to the higher intelligence of the universe.

This becomes a huge weight lifted off of our shoulders and allows us to trust that things are working out exactly as they are supposed to. The second thing that happens is we then allow ourselves to simply love the part of us that doesn’t know.

The minute we love this part of ourselves we shift into a level of understanding that says it’s okay to not understand. Soon our life begins to unfold in magical ways.

We start to see ourselves and our life’s circumstances from the vantage point of a higher level of wisdom. One that doesn’t need to know exactly why something is happening at the time that it happens, all it knows is that when something does happen that we didn’t plan for, the only assignment is to love the one going through the change.

From this vantage point, we find that circumstances not only begin to work themselves out on their own, but that we were only being led to bigger and better things.

If we remember just one little thing, that everything we are going through is preparing us for what we have asked for, we trust that the movie of life we are playing a part in will most certainly bring us to circumstances that may be surprising, but in actuality is shaping us into better and better versions of our former selves.

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Clarity

Adversity

Clarity

Lauren Withrow