Practicing For Enlightenment

Life is about lessons and evolution. All the people around you, including you are little, future Buddhas in training. Sometimes we are on seemingly huge detours, but let’s just consider this, if we are practicing for enlightenment, what kind of skills do we need?

Well for starters our hearts will have to evolve to a place of unconditional love, forgiveness and compassion. If you translate that into a lesson plan we need to alchemize arrogance, judgment, discrimination, revenge etc. Here are some examples of how a soul might choose to do that:

1. If you were really rich one lifetime, feeling superior to poor people, your soul might sign you up for a few lifetimes of poverty in order for you to overcome that stigma, to train your heart to see the essence of people, instead of judging only their costumes.
2. If you were very racist in one lifetime, you might find yourself part of that race in the future, or you might be the 'victim' of racism in order to grow beyond those beliefs.
3. At times we sign up with souls to 'wrong' us for we want to test our ability to forgive.(Sometimes those lessons backfire and we end up in Centuries long revenge matches 'he had it coming'.)
4. I would never be a corrupt politician; those kind of superior statements are another good way to karmicly draw yourself into the exact position you despise in order to develop compassion for the souls around you.

It is not always comfortable or clear to the ego/personality why we ended up in the circumstances we did, my suggestion is to meditate on what your soul might be learning towards enlightenment, there is always a teaching and I find that I surrender a lot better, when I have a clue of what it is.

Don't Marry The Good-looking Guy

The other day while I surfed the net, I stumbled across one of the expert relationship advice articles that stated not to marry the good-looking guy, because he will cheat on you.

This was in response to one of the latest political cheating scandals. What really grinds my God-given-gears about this kind of stereotypical advice is, that it looks for stereotypical solutions to avoid pain/failure/disappointment etc. If you choose to listen to advice like that you might have to tell your soul mate, "Honey I am sorry, but I can't be with you this life because you are just too handsome, could you come in a more ugly package next time?"

My approach, as always, is discernment. Are there good-looking guys out there that will cheat on you? Yes, of course. But you could also find plenty of less attractive guys that will cheat and there are also many people male and female of all shapes and sizes that wouldn't betray you. Which brings me back to karma and spiritual contracts. If you were the playboy/girl in a past life maybe you'll attract people that will be unfaithful to you, teaching your cheating self to be more honorable in the future.

A lot of times people stay in relationships that have already died and the third party becomes the catalyst to move on.

As you can see there are many ways of how to examine relationships, please do yourself the favor and take responsibility for your karma, take an honest look at whom you have in front of you, beyond their external package a.k.a. looks, and have the courage to follow your heart. Love a lot, knowing the person might leave you, or die. If the love is genuine you can't lose, for we always gain by allowing ourselves to have an open heart.

Discernment - Every Contract Is Different

We live in a very result based society and there is no shortage of programs and methods that promise, if we follow their rules, we certainly can’t fail. How many times have you bought into such a promise and after a while have disappointedly given up, possibly feeling more like a failure than before?

The truth is that a lot of these programs will work for somebody, maybe even somebody that you know, so why not you? The conclusion I have come to, is that life is a treasure hunt, each of us volts with unique combinations according to our karmic contracts and individual lessons. It is therefore absolutely crucial to use discernment and allow yourself to find your next clue, even if that pathway looks boring or stupid to your friends and family (it would have to, if it’s not their path). Also keep in mind that certain symptoms/lessons need more than one clue to be resolved i.e. if you have chronic headaches, you might be dealing with a past-life trauma, a toxicity issue and a tendency to overuse your mental body. All three items would have to be addressed in order to rid yourself of the headaches. Therefore I encourage you to be creative, inquisitive and to have stamina and patience, knowing that the clue is somewhere around.

(Guilt from this or past life is a major saboteur in recognizing clues; if you feel like you have been stuck to long it might be time for some self-forgiveness work:)