by Marilyn Muir, LPMAFA
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Spiritual Development is of interest to you if you are reading this article. That means you are in the process of spiritually awakening and are actively interested in growing and evolving your consciousness. Congratulations! Life is only too willing to teach you as many lessons as you need, as often as you need, repeating those lessons if necessary. Since there is no instruction manual and qualified teachers are at times hard to come by, you get to walk your path to consciousness mostly by participating in life and its lessons. To get the most out of your lessons, you must pay attention not only to the obvious but also to the subtleties or nuances of the lessons. Sometimes we need repetition to work our way through all those nuances. Perhaps we learned the obvious most visible part of the lesson, but missed some of the nuances. This is not an indication of failure. Instead, consider a repetition as an opportunity to work on the more subtle parts of the overall lesson.
Our spiritual development continues as long as we honor our commitment to ourselves to consciously aid in our own evolution. At times it is a two-step forward, one-step back process, what I call the dance of our consciousness. It is difficult at times to get past some process that did not work as well as we thought it should, or perhaps outright failure. Occasionally we get stuck. But if we remember our purpose and our commitment, we can shake off any feelings of inadequacy and move forward into new experience and development. It is important to commit to our growth and even more important to honor that commitment even in the face of adversity, whether self-inflicted or experiential. We can study anything and develop meaning and value from it.
Many years ago, I had a job that taught me a very interesting spiritual lesson about the number three and triangles. I did not catch on at first to the fact that it was a spiritual lesson because it happened in my work-a-day world. I worked for an international sail-making company as office manager. Does not sound particularly spiritual does it? I was amazed at how often I became embroiled in controversies that involved groups of three in that office. I had worked in offices all my life at that point and this was an unusual experience for me. The controversies involved office/sailmaker/salesman, office/customer/salesman, head office/ district office/local office, office/salesman/salesman’s wife – the list was endless. There were major contracts that had to be reworked, three times each. There were three hidden contracts with missing money and heads did roll. On top of that, everywhere I looked there were triangles in the form of huge sails for huge boats and ships. There were gigantic kites of all shapes and forms that we made for a kite designer. There were canvas products from our work with a canvas company. You cannot imagine how many triangular shapes were involved. If I looked around my work-a-day world, all I saw were groups of three and triangles.
I finally caught on to the possibility of this being a spiritual lesson and then tried to consciously cooperate with it. I looked at my part in the lesson and how the lesson affected or informed me. I began to study threes and triangles to help me understand this lesson. Shortly I was able to move on to another job with its own lessons that had nothing to do with threes and trines. Or did it?
If that lesson had not been over at the time I changed jobs, the lesson would have traveled with me because it was mine to learn. Our lessons stay with us, even when we make major changes in our lives. What I do not work out here, I will work out over there. You cannot run from a problem or lesson because it stays with you. Store that in your mental decision-making function. Make sure you learn what is being taught so you do not take unnecessary baggage with you as you move on. Predicate your decisions on moving “towards” something positive and not just “running away” from something uncomfortable. The problem is yours and the lesson is yours. The answer is always contained within the question – it is just not easy to identify sometimes. Why? We are looking at it from the inside of the problem. Location and people can change to accommodate any lesson, but the lesson continues until it is finished.
Life is willing to teach us. We are not always paying attention; even those of us who are trying to cooperate with the awakening process. Lessons are all around us. Your lessons are all around you. Life will continue to teach us, one experience after another until we either catch on that instruction is underway or we learn the inherent value to the lesson.
Published on EZine online June, 2010, republished with slight editing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.