There’s a prayer I recite almost every morning.
It begins with, “I choose to trust the great genius unfolding in my life.”
Learning how to trust has been one of my biggest spiritual practices in the last decade. Not thinking or believing that I trust, but feeling, in my body and in my bones, that I trust the great genius unfolding in my life — God, Source, Mother Nature, Universe.
And oh, that is the human experience! Learning how to have faith rather than collapse into fear of what we’ve created in our mind, in our 3D, mentally constructed paradigm.
It’s easier said than done. I am very much an apprentice of this work... And I find that the moments when my trust and my faith are most challenged are, surprise surprise, the moments when things are simply not going my way.
Those are the moments when my faith is tested. It’s easy to trust when everything is flowing just the way, or better than, you envisioned. But when life rears its ugly head and we’re met with a seemingly unfathomable challenge, those are the moments when we fall to our knees and go, “why God have you forsaken me? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this person? What’s wrong with everything?”
And then the shame kicks in. The guilt. The self-punishment, and the judgment of others.
There’s so much dysfunction in modern day society that we are taught, systematically, to treat challenge as something happening to us. To point fingers at whoever is the perpetrator of our pain. And when that doesn’t work, to turn all of that blame and anger back inside — because that doesn’t help either. It’s an inverse of the same problem.
My life started to drastically get better when I began to ask myself...
What if I trusted the great genius unfolding in my life, including this challenge? What if this is part of the great genius unfolding, and I simply can’t see it yet?
That’s hard to stomach when the human is in pain, shocked, confused, and wanting certainty. The practice is how do we take care of the human — sleep, water, food, the day off, the hug, the call to someone you love — and at the same time, zoom out and come back into divine neutrality.
This is where we get to take a more proactive role. Instead of staying in “why is this happening to me again?”, we get to ask: what is the lesson? What is being mirrored back to me right now?
What is it that I get to learn in the obstacle?
This is where it transitions from life as hard, to life as a game I get to play with life.
II had a client who used to come to me consistently manifesting a toxic masculine wound in her life, from her own unresolved issues with her father. She would attract both men and women who would mirror the same patterns of control, abuse, of making her feel small and like a bad little girl.
She was suffering — because everywhere she turned, in life and in work, she kept encountering those people. She kept reliving the grief, the sadness, the not-enoughness she had been living since she was a little girl, consistently repeating it on cycle.
When she became aware that this was exactly what she was doing — that this particular flavor of challenge was actually a lesson — everything started to shift. It was life saying to her: are you ready to grow from this yet? Are you ready to expand bigger than your trauma?
There are gifts here for you to collect, but you can’t see them because all you’re doing is looking at the pain. (This is the same thread I unpack in When Your Worst Enemy Becomes Your Greatest Teacher.)
It took a couple of rounds for her to really get it in her body. And when she did, it was like a switch flipped.
Instead of “why is this happening to me again?”, she began to spot it. “Oh, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” She started showing up differently — and the obstacle, with time, released itself from her life.
She graduated.
A few years in, she came to me and said, “oh, I found my avatar, there we go” — and now she’s stepping into higher octaves of the same lesson with a fraction of the pain.
You will be challenged. That doesn’t end. We live in a world of duality. (I’ve written before about what this posture looks like when the ground is really breaking open, in Faith Through Fire: Keeping Your Heart Open When Life Breaks It.)
IIt’s not about avoiding what we deem as bad. It’s about shifting our posture to know that what’s happening is happening for us rather than to us.
That shift changes everything downstream from it.
What I share in the full transmission
In the audio, I walk through the actual practice of holding both layers at once — how to take care of the human in the mess and zoom out into divine neutrality at the same time, without bypassing either one. I share the exact questions I ask myself when I catch myself in “why is this happening to me?” — and how to use them to locate the specific lesson inside the obstacle you’re standing in right now.
If you’ve been sitting inside a challenge that keeps repeating in a slightly different way... this is for you.
TAKEAWAY: The obstacle isn't proof something is wrong with your life. It's the next thing your life is asking you to grow through.
Read The Burning Ground — I walked away from my unfulfilling life, bought a one-way ticket, and spent almost a year on a soul journey that took me across 18 countries — staying in the homes of 70+ strangers — to discover the purpose I’d been outrunning. This is the story of what I found on the other side, and what I’ve spent the last decade teaching. Pre-order now and receive an exclusive guided meditation and reader’s companion to guide you from where you are to your next transformation. Order your copy.
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