What Adversity Teaches us

By Heather Fraser

When I had eight cents left in my bank account, when my credit card was maxed out, when my wallet was empty, when my car had it's last drop of gas left in it, when my fridge was almost bare and I had a child to feed, and I still had weeks to go before any money started coming in, I learned to focus without emotion or judgment, and looked upon my situation merely as a set of facts. I knew that if I allowed myself to go into fear and wallow in self-pity and victim-hood, I would have simply perpetuated my generational wheel of lack, poverty and low self worth.

Instead of freaking out and falling apart (which had been my pattern in the past) I learned to calmly and maturely ask for help. Because I had found myself in a similar position before, and because it had always been my mother who I'd gone to and demanded help from in the past (because I always saw her as the source of all my problems) — talking to her this time took an immense amount of courage and humility.

Only this time, I was asking for her help as an adult, mending woman and not as an angry, needy and resentful child. I shared with her my recent insights and revelations about myself, and apologized to her for all the times I'd manipulated her and made her feel guilty in order to get what I wanted. My mother is 72 years old and I am 46. It's never too late to grow up.

This time I took responsibility to put some things in place to provide for myself and my daughter, and in order to do that, I had to let go of my pride and work through my feelings of shame and humiliation. I had to own the fact that in the past, I had deeply resented my mother, and wanted her to pay dearly for my pain by continuing to put myself in dire life situations that would cause her deep anguish and guilt, which would ultimately force her to save me. I had to admit my unconscious desire to make her suffer.

This is what it means to go deep, to become authentic and learn to love ourselves. It can be gut wrenchingly painful and difficult to look at our dark side, and it is why most people would rather remain numb instead. But the price for such avoidance and denial is a heart full of self-hatred and a deep sense of shame.

What adversity teaches us is to go inward. It teaches us to excavate everything within us that is false. Adversity takes us down into the dungeon of our most hidden secrets and shines the light of awareness into our dark corners. This is when our comfortable illusions about ourselves begin to crumble; as does the lie of our life and the way we are living it.

So many people are experiencing this crumbling now. And if I could offer any insight from one who is there, it is to know that this is meant to be happening. It is part of the evolution of our soul. We are being led out of the darkness and into the light. It's not just happening to you, and we must hold onto this comfort.

We are all at different stages of this evolutionary cleansing — some have gone ahead and have made it through their personal storms, some are just beginning to feel the rumblings of discomfort, some are smack in the thick of an internal war, and some are sadly choosing to remain numb. We do have that choice. Both those who have gone ahead and are living their authentic lives now, and those who, at present feel like they want to curl up and die, have made a soul level choice to expand, grow, and become all they can be.

This is a choice for love. Self love. There could be no greater gift to offer oneself. This is what adversity teaches us.

Everything that happens is for the evolution of our soul, and because of our deepest desire to grow and expand as souls, so it is that our world is continuing to grow and expand.

We are the mirrors of our world. What is going on inside of us is reflected in the outer world. When we have reached a place of inner peace, when we have stopped the internal war between dark and light and instead found blessed acceptance, we have offered the ultimate gift to ourselves and therefore the world.

As we individually heal the split within, we begin to create a world of Oneness. This is what is happening. It is such a good thing to be going through if we can only view it from a higher perspective.

During this time we must follow the art and practice of extreme self-care and compassion for ourselves. We must nourish and care for our souls with the gentle comfort of self-forgiveness and do all that we can to maintain a sense of balance and authenticity in our lives. And we must learn to have fun!

I don't know about you, but I want to get down and roll in the mud with my humanness and invite everyone in and join me. I want to celebrate my "all-ness and is-ness" and everyone else's and enjoy the realness of our faltering hearts, our innocence, our vulnerabilities, our common ache to feel accepted.

I want to have a big, messy food fight with life and taste it all — laughing hysterically till my sides split with pain. Crying with abandon till my heart empties out. I want to be left smothered with chocolate sauce, caked with flour, and a lemon meringue pie smacked onto my face, covered in the goo and sweetness of a life so openly lived!

I want to have tasted all of life at the end of life, and know that in my humanness, I finally got what it was all about. Acceptance of self and others while letting all of life in. This is what adversity teaches us.

Copyright 2009 Heather Fraser — www.heatherfraser.com Ontario, Canada

About Heather Fraser

Heather Fraser, born December 30, 1962 in Toronto, moved to Africa at the age of 9. It was here that Heather began to understand the connection to all living things and come to know the grace and wisdom of both the natural and esoteric world. Her healing, infinite journey of transformation has lead her to the richest, most sought after destination anywhere — home — to the soul. This place of deep awareness and self-acceptance of her special gifts of sensitivity, empathy, and intuition has given her all the passion and inspiration needed to write and teach what she has learned about honoring the Self and nurturing the soul — the true purpose of our existence. Heather specializes in counseling, re-educating, and profoundly validating those that are highly sensitive, intuitive, empaths, helping them to accept these traits as the gifts that they are and to express them proudly and shamelessly.

She is a gifted, prolific, successful published writer, poet, and speaker with a readership spanning the globe, as well as a Reconnective Healing Practitioner, a Level III Touch For Health Practitioner, and a former Holistic Nutritional Consultant, RNCP. Heather is the proud mother of a daughter she names Sage, who is also a highly intuitive, sensitive empath. They live together in Ontario, CANADA with their lazy cat and hilarious lovebird. For more information, or to contact Heather, please visit her website at www.heatherfraser.com