If yesterday did not go as planned, how did it go? Did you learn something new about yourself? About someone else? Did you find some kind of meaning in how things unfolded? It’s in life’s unfoldment that the mysteries of life are revealed. It’s in the strange occurrences that happen, unasked for, that lessons are being taught and answers to questions are being given. Remain aware. That’s how to correctly track each day, each mystery, and each answer you receive. Remain aware.
There will always be challenges in Life School upon the planet Earth. That’s what you are there for, to encounter challenges, to conquer them and grow beyond them. Wouldn’t life just be pretty boring if everything was easy every day, if everything was the same every day? Accept that you are in human form for the duration of your lifetime and that you are bound to a certain intention. For most people that intention is to learn how to become more loving, kind and compassionate, and they are charged with learning those things through the challenges they face. You might ask yourself the following questions as you face the challenges that arise in your life: “How is this teaching me kindness?” “How is this showing me what it means to be loving?” “Is this event teaching me what compassion means?” “Am I getting the lesson of this challenge?” “What am I supposed to be learning today?” Keep in mind that if life on Earth is indeed a school of learning, then all of those questions are perfectly applicable to understanding the process you are undergoing, every day of your life. May you find your way.
In contrast to how loving you can teach yourself to be toward yourself, it can be much harder to feel love for someone else who irks you or does not hold you in high regard, no matter how you try to please them. Sometimes a relationship is over, and facing that truth can be one of the biggest challenges in a lifetime, for when a relationship is over, what comes next? The future can look empty and bleak when viewed from a place of lack. But when viewed from a place of opportunity and luck, the sky’s the limit. Is it time to look at your situation from a new perspective? Where lies the luck? Where lies the opportunity? Where lies the next big adventure? Where lies the bright future? It’s all in the next positive step, the next right choice, the next self-affirming decision you make.
Once upon a time, you had a dream and perhaps you followed that dream but it was not really what you wanted, but you only discovered that much later. At another time, you might have had another dream that you didn’t follow and for the rest of your life you regretted that. Both of these scenarios can make you feel bad about yourself, but that is not what they are meant to do, they are actually meant to teach you to know yourself better. Through choices and decisions that are made throughout life you are given the opportunity to know yourself at a deeper level and to use those past dream scenarios and outcomes as examples of how to make better choices in the future. Where are you being asked to make a new choice today? And how will you decide what to do so that you have the best and most meaningful outcome that will move you forward in a positive way?
The shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage place a high value on people and circumstances that cause us to be offended, what they call the petty tyrants in our lives.
Being offended identifies areas of self-importance, the greatest tax on our energy while living in human form.
Self-importance is not self-worth. We can have a strong knowing of our worth and still not be offended by the inconsiderate actions of others. Self-importance is an ego defense of its inherent worth that becomes incensed when it is not appropriated the respect it feels is due. We all suffer this to some extent at various times in life.
Spiritual growth requires that we retrieve our vital energy from the petty tyrants in our lives to be able to more fully actualize our spiritual potential. When we free up our energy from being offended, we can experience a vastly broader reality than victimhood.
Shamans view petty tyrants as gifts to our evolution, if we can use encounters with them as opportunities to lose our self-importance. The first step in losing self-importance is to identify the petty tyrants in our life.
These days, the world is filled with petty tyrants, especially in governance. Every day, vast amounts of offended energy is spent through emotions of rage and defeat, emotions that can largely define the mood and flow of our entire lives. Releasing ourselves from being offended by truly offensive behaviors is a tremendous boon to our energy stores.
If we can acknowledge to ourselves that someone’s behavior and attitudes are inappropriate, but that perseverating about them is overwhelming our lives, we can simply choose to detach our attention from fixating upon them. As we withdraw our attention from them they disappear from our purview and thus our energy stores are preserved.
Sometimes, however, we may be held in check by someone’s deviousness. This might require that we take some constructive action to protect ourselves, although often we must accept the limitation imposed upon us, until things can change. The trick is not to be offended but, in a detached way, to minimize the energy spent managing the situation.
We can tell ourselves that a circumstance isn’t personal, but the truth is it may be quite personally directed at us. We can tell ourselves to be compassionate toward a flawed human being, but the truth is we might feel no compassion for the ruthless tyrant.
The gift of the petty tyrant is that, in order to successfully surmount it, we must fully lose our self-importance, without feeling bad about it.
To be able to say to the self, “I am being treated like I am a nothing,” without spending any energy feeling insulted by it, enables a clarity on how to respond, which might include not doing anything but simply allowing the karma of the behavior to resolve the issue in its own time. It’s not about retribution; it’s about energetic efficiency.
Of course, on an inner level, taking command of the suggestions we affirmatively deliver to our subconscious mind raises our vibration toward the highest vibration of love.
Regardless of what strategy we follow to navigate the petty tyrant, with positive intent we remain inwardly bathed in love and appreciation for life. At some level, such gratitude will extend to the petty tyrant, who has offered us the opportunity to hone and refine our energy, opening up worlds of possibility.
Ironically, we will eventually discover that the greatest petty tyrant of all resides within the self. Just notice the continual stream of judgments delivered from the habit of internal dialogue. The judgments are about everything and everyone, but most substantially, they are about every aspect of our own not-good-enough, entitled self!
Sometimes the petty tyrant within is experienced in habits that hold us hostage and keep us defeated in life. The opportunity presented to us in this instance is to assume responsibility for the habit, a kink we have consciously colluded with in order to remain fixated at a familiar feeling of being.
Don’t fight with a petty tyrant; to do so is to attach. Feel gratitude for the depth of challenge and consciousness it has brought to you, to truly know thyself.
Finally, achieve untetheredhood, the freedom to journey beyond, because the tethered grounding of self-importance has served its purpose. Get ready to launch now.
