Always The Same Lesson? (msgs for life)

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Always The Same Lesson?

 

Lessons will repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When

you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson. Have you ever

noticed that lessons tend to repeat themselves? Does it seem as if you married

or dated the same person several times in different bodies with different

names? Have you run into the same type of boss over and over again? Do you find

yourself having the same problem with many different coworkers?

Several years ago, Bill Murray starred in a movie called Groundhog Day, in which

he woke up in the same day over and over until he learned all the lessons he

needed to in that one day. The same events kept repeating themselves until he

finally "got" what it was he was supposed to do in each one.

Does this strike a funny but familiar chord with you?

Lessons will be repeated until learned. When I taught high school, I always told

my students, "If you don't deal well with authority figures at home, then you

will have an opportunity to deal with them out in the world. You will

continually draw into your life people who need to enforce authority, and you

will struggle with them until you learn the lesson of obedience."

Teenagers often perceive their parents as overly strict. At the age of fourteen,

one of my former students went away to boarding school. Much to her surprise,

she found teachers and staff with the same rules that her mother had laid down

at home and that I had at school. She finally understood.

You will continually attract the same lesson into your life. You will also draw

to you teachers to teach you that lesson until you get it right. The only way

you can free yourself of difficult patterns and issues you tend to repeat, is

by shifting your perspective so that you can recognise the patterns and learn

the lessons that they offer. You may try to avoid the situations, but they will

eventually catch up with you.

To face these challenges means you need to accept the fact that something within

you keeps drawing you to the same kind of person or issue, painful though that

situation or relationship may be. In the words of Carl Jung, "There is no

coming to consciousness without pain." And come to consciousness you must if

you are ever to stop repeating the same lessons and be able to move on to new

ones.

The challenge is to identify and release the patterns that you are repeating. As

we all know, this is no easy task, since it means you have to change, and change

is not always easy. Staying just as you are may not help you advance

spiritually, but it certainly is comfortable in its familiarity. You grooved

your patterns a long time ago as a way of protecting yourself. Moving into

unfamiliar new behavior can be uncomfortable not to mention at times

frightening.

Rising to the challenge of identifying and releasing your patterns forces you to

admit that the way you have been doing things isn't working. The good news is

that by identifying and releasing the pattern, you actually learn how to

change.

There are six basic steps to executing any change in your life. They are:

1. Awareness - becoming conscious of the pattern or issue

2. Acknowledgment - admitting that you need to release the pattern

3. Choice - actively selecting to release the pattern

4. Strategy - creating a realistic plan

5. Commitment - taking action, ideally aided by external accountability (eg.

friend, partner etc)

6. Celebration - rewarding yourself for succeeding

No lasting change can be made, nor any pattern released permanently, without

going through each one of these steps. In order to facilitate your process of

change, you will need to learn the lessons of awareness, willingness,

causality, and patience. Once you master these, you will most likely find the

challenge of identifying and releasing your patterns far less intimidating.

Sourced from:

"If Life is a Game, These are the Rules - Ten Rules for Being Human"