How do you like to learn your life lessons? The easy way or the hard way? Didn’t know you had a choice? That’s the beauty of the gift of free will we’re given—we always have a choice.

Welcoming, inviting, allowing, and embracing life lessons is certainly the easier way to go. Running away, ignoring, resisting and fighting the lessons that occur are going to ensure that we’re in for a rough ride.

We hold most of the cards (more on that later) that determine whether our path is one of joy or suffering. Now I’m not knocking suffering. It’s an incredible teacher, but we don’t have to get a degree in it.

The key is to volunteer or sign up for the lessons, rather than make them pursue us. A life lesson that has been avoided is no fun. By the time it has become painful, quite a bit of time has passed, and the intensity of the lesson has built up way beyond our comfort level, such that in order to get our attention, its approach is rather more akin to a two by four or bulldozer rather than a nicely paced challenge.

Far better to meet this thing halfway and invite it in for tea rather than wait until it breaks our door down. Whether we like it or not, these lessons are coming one way or another.

What the Soul needs, the Soul gets. Period. And if necessary, it will use the override button to circumvent whatever dalliance or detour or distraction that has led us astray from our path.

Typically, this avoidance occurs when we listen to the mind instead of to our intuition. The fact that the mind is often referred to affectionately as the drunk money is no accident—if left to its own devices, it behaves in a way that is clearly not sober or sane. In fact, following the path the mind takes is like following a raving lunatic without a map. After exhausting yourself going around in circles and endless dead ends, the only place you’ll end up is either back where you started or even worse, lost.

Better to stop moving and check in with a more reliable source: your intuition. We’ve all been given this incredible internal guidance system, but sadly, most of us don’t trust it enough to cultivate it or learn how to use it. This creates all kinds of problems because listening to our intuition is the only reliable way to hear what our Soul wants. It is an internal system of checks and balances that allows us to sort through the massive quantities of information presented to us at any given time and to discern what to put our attention on. Without that, we are walking around with no sense of direction or purpose, just wandering aimlessly in a state of constant reaction to what we encounter.

In order to significantly reduce suffering in our lives, we have to learn to establish clear boundaries around ourselves to eliminate lots of meaningless stimulation and distractions and then determine from that what our Soul needs for growth and expansion. This is a more proactive way of living, in which we move toward our lessons rather than away from them. It saves a lot of time and trouble and heartache.

I see the mind as a rebellious teenager that constantly tries to find clever ways to get into the driver’s seat of our lives. The only way to deal with it’s juvenile antics is to be firm, direct, and most importantly, consistent when you are reminding it that it’s place is in the backseat or even the passenger seat, but never in the driver’s seat. No, that seat is reserved for the Soul or as some people refer to it, the Higher Self, the part of us that has a map and can see the bigger picture and knows the best route to take us where we need to go.

So take a moment and scan your life right now. Do you have a vague awareness that there are some things that need your attention? Do yourself a favor and address them right now before what is a gentle easy lesson becomes a brutal difficult one.

If you’re in the middle of a painful lesson right now, don’t beat yourself up. We all have blind spots and issues we sweep under the rug. We all have lessons that have required varying degrees of pain before we were willing to learn them. Do what you can to finish the lesson, recover and restore balance into your life again, and then comfort yourself with the idea that this type of thing can be avoided in the future.

Because while life may very well be a game, one thing it’s not is a game of chance. As I said earlier, we hold most of the cards. The rest is influenced by other factors, including, but not limited to, other people’s free will, laws of physicality, past actions and intentions, subconscious scripts, not to mention the Almighty Dealer. However, with that said, we do have a say in how it goes. The first step is acknowledging that fact in the present moment, and then working from there to minimize future suffering and to evolve to a place where some of those other factors can be addressed, thereby increasing our odds not of winning, but rather enjoying the game.

Self-betrayal is an art, perfected over a number of decades of living. It is rooted in our early years, when our identity was branded by a well-trained team of branding specialists: beginning with our parents and extended family and expanding out to include teachers, neighbors, parents of friends, and sometimes even the occasional stranger. Add to that our exposure to books, movies, television, music, advertising, etc., by the time we reach adulthood, we are pretty much saturated with a dense package of pre-digested, socially approved, morally acceptable behavioral codes. Our thoughts and emotions and actions have been molded and formed to fit into the society and culture we live in – conformity being the norm, individuality essentially being snuffed out.

So is it any wonder that when we get to be adults, particularly in mid-life–when most of us discover we’ve been sold a bills of goods–we conclude that life doesn’t really make sense? For many of us, it’s as if we’re awakening from a long Rip Van Winkle nap, stirred by agitating feelings of restless discontent, in which we finally admit our disillusion with the course our lives have taken.

How did we get here? More importantly, how do we get ourselves out of the mess we’ve made? And why is it so difficult to change?

Habits. Of thinking. Of feeling. Of behaving. Deeply rooted, heavily ingrained, full blown habits keep us in a perpetual cycle from which we feel little hope of escape. Endless numbers of personal growth teachers and self-help books and seminars promise us relief from our misery, but ask anyone who has tried this form of transformation and they will more than likely tell you, that they are still, many years and thousands of dollars later, a victim of their own unhappiness. In spite of their best efforts, the emptiness persists, as do the longing and frustration with life.

Why? Because most of us still believe that our restlessness and unhappiness can be addressed from the outside. We think buying the right book, taking the right workshop, or spending time with the right teacher will fix our problem.

But we’ve got it all wrong. The answer isn’t outside of us. It’s inside of us. That’s where the whole thing began, and we will spin our wheels forever unless we shift our attention to where the problem lies.

Which brings me back to the subject of self-betrayal. In the midst of our very best intentions to improve or change or fix ourselves, we continually fail, and we do immeasurable harm to mind, body and spirit.

We are fine just the way we are. We don’t need to be improved or changed or fixed. That will only makes things worse. What we need is to stop the madness. We need to stop lying to ourselves. We need to step off the merry-go-round and take a good hard look at how things work. Think of your being as a toxic waste dump that needs to be cleaned up. All the people in your life that you have given permission to access your life and your thoughts and feelings and beliefs have dumped their stuff there, and now the only way to find out where you are in all that mess is to get rid of it. Piece by piece. It’s not yours. It’s not you. There is a genuine whole person in there somewhere, and the only way to get to it is to extract the lies and untruths until you hit something that feels real.

If this feels like too big a jump then test out what I’m saying by observing your thoughts and feelings for a few days. Notice how much your feelings are influenced heavily by other people’s opinions and behaviors….in fact, notice how you actually pin your well being onto whether or not you get approval or attention from others or not.

Another approach is to notice any thoughts that come up that make you feel bad about yourself. Watch them and then ask yourself where they came from. Are these opinions you imagine other people would think about you? If so, you will do yourself a tremendous favor by asking them to leave.

Consider your negative thoughts as you would unwanted house guests. Don’t ask them to move in. Acknowledge them and then tell them to be on their way. You have no room for them any longer.

Our minds have been contaminated by the thoughts, opinions, and beliefs of others. We let other people vote on our lives all the time. We ask them what they think we should say, do and even think. This gives them permission to enter into our heads and take up residence there. As soon as we invite voting in, we are no longer listening and following our own path. We are at the mercy of the contingency outside of us.

No wonder we feel so lost and confused and cut off from ourselves.

The way back is to reconnect with ourselves by getting quiet and learning to discern between the noise of the crowd and the voice of our soul. Intuition is our internal guidance system. It is the light that guides us through the darkness. Without it we are doomed to a life of random chaos. With it, we can begin to find our footing in an authentic world devoid of lies and betrayal.

Shakespeare said it well when he wrote, “To thine own self be true.” Christ, too, reminded us by telling us that the kingdom of God is within.

It’s up to you which path you want to take. The next time you feel depressed or without hope, take a good hard look at what thoughts are running through your mind at the time. Chances are they will be something that you picked up from someone else.

Negative thoughts are contagious and they spread. Treat them like juvenile delinquents that repeatedly jump into the driver’s seat of your car. Tell them in no uncertain terms, that you’re in charge. Then wait for them to get out, get behind the wheel and drive!

photo by Susan Saxe

Have you ever considered the possibility that the society and culture you live in are designed to and in fact, encourage you to betray yourself? That self-betrayal is considered the norm, it is what is considered acceptable and what most of us agree with and conform to? Self-betrayal is something you learned and adopted and borrowed from your parents, teachers and world around you, absorbed it like a sponge, identified with it at such a deep level, that to do anything different feels as foreign as learning a new language.

Sabotage folks. That’s what I’m talking about. While the self-help industry makes millions of dollars from your quest to find happiness, the society you live in does everything in its power to discourage you from finding it, living it, embodying it. For every step you move forward, the very nature of the world you live in is designed to pull you back.

Self-awareness, individuality, thinking for oneself, and real freedom are rare commodities in western society. It goes against the grain of the powers that be who expect our cooperation in maintaining the capitalist machine. What is particularly insidious about this is that we are led to believe that we are free to do as we please and so we doubt our soul’s cry for freedom, discount it as self-centered and complicated and impossible. We feel guilty for our discontent, our depression and unhappiness, and blame ourselves for wanting more than we have.

All the while, we hide our desperation and grieve about feeling out of place in the scheme of things; we wonder why our self-sacrifice for the good of the whole, rather than at the very least rewarding us with feeling connected to each other, instead, isolates us in our own private confusion. We know in our hearts that something is wrong, but we fear rejection and condemnation if we speak up about it. We fear that, we alone, carry this awareness around, that others somehow know some deep secret about how to make this self-sacrifice work, that, if we stuff our feelings and shame down far enough, we too, will eventually discover a way to fit in.

We recoil in horror when we see those who don’t fit in or we venture into envy or jealousy when we see those who have found a way to make not fitting in work, leaving us stuck in a kind of limbo or in between state. Both are extremes that feel foreign or inaccessible, but we wonder if living on the fringe might not be the only doorway out of this insanity.

There comes a critical point where this place of limbo no longer works. Once you decide you can’t take it anymore, something begins to shift, the bloom falls off the rose, and the life you were so entranced by, loses its shine.

The price of self-awareness is that you can no longer hold onto your illusions, nor do you feel that you have the courage to go forward. But forward you must go.

Luckily, life presents us with some powerful tools to guide us and to, in a sense keep us in line. One of those tools is our intuition. Another is our body wisdom or visceral wisdom. Ideally, over time, the two begin to work in sync, essentially giving us an infallible barometer to use to move through the world. When something goes against our intuition and we have a bad feeling about it, the body responds by reinforcing it with feelings of great discomfort and even illness. When something supports our intuition and we have a good feeling about it, the body responds by reinforcing it with feelings of ease and well being.

This can give us a clear way to be in the flow with life, to move through it without effort. Freedom’s not easy, but it is certainly preferable to feeling like a leaf in the wind and a victim of the world around us, especially a world that doesn’t support who we are, and is more than willing to continue to encourage us to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good.

The greater good is served far more by modeling self-awareness and freedom. For each time you do that, it gives others permission to do the same. The more of us who are free, the less resistance there is to being free, the less threatening it is, and then there is hope that soon we will all live in a world that is free. One at a time, we can change things. But it must start with us, having the courage to step to the beat of a different drummer and say no to the tyranny against the individual soul.

photo by Liz Labunski

In the movie, Minority Report, the pre-cogs (pre-cognitives) were kept in isolation and all outside stimuli was reduced so that their ability to perceive was intensified. Though it involved exploitation and corruption the message of the movie carried a grain of truth: reduce the external noise and the internal intuitive voice and visions get really strong, because when the intellectual and logical mind tries to figure out the intuitive information it can distort, interrupt, disrupt, and sabotage it.

The external race thoughts…the intellect have to be quieted significantly for us to be able to fully use our intuitive gifts and express who we are fully without sabotage.

We need our intellect. It is a necessary tool for moving through and relating to the world, but it also turns down the volume and reduces the inflow from the inner if we rely on it too much.

There is a need for isolation and quiet and reduced stimuli in order to listen to our inner voice. When there is too much noise, stimulation or interference, it blocks the flow, changes and distorts it.

There is so little support in the world for this. In other cultures and times, people who had strong intuitive gifts were respected, not judged. They were allowed to be eccentric and spend time in isolation nurturing themselves and their gifts.

In our culture, there is still so much resistance and judgment of people who feel called to use their intuitive gifts. Many choose one of two extremes. They either hide the fact that they “see and hear” things or they commercialize it. For those who spend time hiding it, the day to day can be excruciatingly painful because they are expected to keep their focus on the left-brained logical world. For those who commercialize it, there are innumerable challenges including getting caught up in ego inflation, creating dependence in others, and losing a sense of self and purpose.

Either way it is difficult to “fit in”.

Is there a middle way? Yes, this requires a life of balance. No one wants to spend all their time on the inner. But those willing to spend a significant time there, and who know how to navigate it, need support, not judgment and rejection.

I believe in time, those with these gifts will become valued members of our culture. They will shine like a guiding light through the darkness.

When an intuition about something comes in, it comes in as feelings, scattered energy, a knowing sense, making it very difficult to access what is coming through in the same way as remembering a dream. It’s fuzzy and vague, but in spite of this, there’s a strong feeling that something important is coming through. The combination of the feelings and the intensity of something coming through distinguish it from something that comes through the intellect. It is precisely the messiness, feeling sense that makes it clear that it’s coming from a higher place.

It may take hours or days for it to finally emerge with clarity. When it does, the fog of confusion around it completely lifts, and the light of illumination shines. Divine timing sets in and when the flow of insight comes through, it comes in crystal clear, as if there never was any confusion. All the disconnected pieces suddenly fit together perfectly. The intellect moves out of the way because it has no place when this comes through. In fact the intellect tends to get overwhelmed and blown by the energy of intuition. When it moves, there is no stopping it, it’s like a high speed train bound for a destination and it is unstoppable.

I don’t understand this process, I’ve just observed it as happens. It can be frustrating when the intuition first comes in because it is so strong, but without clarity. You have to be patient, wait and listen until the pathway opens up for the insights to flow. It cannot be forced or pushed, it simply won’t work and whatever comes through won’t be genuine. Trusting in divine timing is essential when using the gift of intuition.

Not easy, but absolutely necessary.

Perhaps over time, the gap between when something first comes in and when it becomes clear shortens, perhaps our resistance plays a role in the amount of time it takes, or perhaps it’s simply a matter of preparing ourselves experientially for what is coming through. Perhaps our experience has to align with the messages we receive so the two meet and clarity comes out of that.

Though sometimes, I wish I knew things before they came in. A lot of grief and pain might have been avoided. Who knows? There is perfection to way these things work, so it is probably best not to question the way it works. But it seems harder than it needs to be. I only hope this will change in time.