Sometimes the Struggle is Exactly What We Need

“Life shouldn’t be such a struggle,” we say to ourselves, a common belief for many of us.

And yet, when you really look at it, at how life works through us, some of our greatest teachings come from our largest failures, our deepest inner growth through moving through some emotional or physical trauma, and all the breakdowns along the way become teachers, gifts— ultimately forwarding our evolution as we move through life.

I know this so well…from moving through the emotional trauma of a divorce with my first husband when I was twenty-seven years old, to walking with my husband, Don, through the pilgrimage of his cancer experience with stage 4 lymphoma, to recovering from a grapefruit-sized brain tumor extraction over six months.  All of these experiences transformed me, strengthened me, and opened me to a new life, to transformation.

If you have worked with me in the past, you know that I am an ontological coach.  What does this mean? Ontology is the study of being. My whole life is devoted to creating a clearing in which people (including myself) can wake up — can awaken our consciousness, our self-awareness, and our hearts.

I tell people, when I work with them, that a coach sees what other people don’t see and can point out nails in other people’s feet when they don’t know they have a nail there.  That’s why they keep walking around in circles.  I see the nails.  If you had one foot nailed to the floor, you’d be going around in circles, too.  The past just keeps repeating itself.

I also tell people when they work with me that the nails will be revealed but I won’t take the nails out for them. They have to. Why? Because if I take the nail out, they will put it right back in!

“Sometimes the struggle is exactly what we need.”

We all, as humans, have common nails.  Some of the nails are:

• Living in a dis-empowering story about yourself or about another, or about life

• Not taking responsibility for your reactions but blaming others instead. I call this ‘pointing the finger in the wrong direction.”  Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline,  calls it “The enemy is out there syndrome.”

• Holding onto resentments rather than forgiving.

The process of transforming your life sometimes involves a struggle. Those struggles, often presented to us by life, are alarms, wake-up calls, to let us know it’s time to take a journey—often an inner journey.

The other day, my husband and I came upon a little plant making its way past a very tiny opening in a deck stair. Don chuckled and said,  “Such is the optimistic nature of nature.”

Then he said, “It reminds me of the story you tell people” in your courses.

Nature knows the pathway is to growth, to regeneration, to renewal.  That is the way of nature. And, “sometimes, the struggle is exactly what we need.”

Here’s the story.  It’s called “Struggle.”

A man found a cocoon of the emperor moth and took it home to watch it emerge. One day a small opening appeared, and for several hours the moth struggled but couldn't seem to force its body past a certain point.

Deciding something was wrong, the man took scissors and snipped the remaining bit of cocoon. The moth emerged easily, its body large and swollen, the wings small and shriveled.

He expected that in a few hours the wings would spread out in their natural beauty, but they did not. Instead of developing into a creature free to fly, the moth spent its life dragging around a swollen body and shriveled wings.

The constricting cocoon and the struggle necessary to pass through the tiny opening are God's way of forcing fluid from the body into the wings. The "merciful" snip was, in reality, cruel. Sometimes the struggle is exactly what we need.

(Source:  Leadership, shared by "Quote" Magazine.)

May we not snip ourselves too early or let others snip us too early.

May we be willing to move through those tight, tough spaces.

May we live our way thoroughly through our breakdowns in life.  That is our elemental way, the way life sends us through the obstacles as ways to grow, as ways to evolve, as ways to find our way. Some crises are not necessarily stops in our path at all. Rather, they are openings into the future, and new openings into our own growth, were we but to listen.

Here’s a blessing for us all:

May we live with an awakened heart as we navigate through life’s challenges, obstacles, and struggles, with each journey through an inner wilderness, through which we find our way, perhaps with the support of both visible and invisible friends,  imbuing us with Light, the Light of consciousness, the light of Presence, the Light of Life.

Here is the poem that came to me the next morning:

The Nature of Nature

Wow.

Look at this!

A beautiful plant, growing from the soil underneath our deck, 
willing itself to break free into the light.

Aren’t you and I just like that?

Open, available, to be born into the light, into the sunlight of our lives?

The green against the gray make a likely pair

They are married.

One wills itself to break through into the sun,
drinking in the light.
The other, stable, solid, earnest,
the grounding.

gives us a foundation to stand on.

A marriage.

Freedom
breaking through to light our way
from the roots which give us life. 

Optimistic.

This is the nature of nature.

“Sometimes, the struggle is exactly what we need.”

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I invite you to reflect upon whichever of these questions attracts you:

• In what ways does this touch you?

• Did you have any insights about your own nails in reading the essay?

• When was the last time you snipped off someone else’s struggle?

• When was the last time you snipped off your own?

• Think of a time when you moved through a struggle and your life transformed.

• Where in your life are you struggling right now?

• What lesson, what gift, are you being given by this struggle?

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If you like or intuit that this post would empower and/or inspire someone in your life, please feel free to share it with others. This will support others in living and navigating life’s challenges, awakening their hearts, and harvesting life’s gifts along the way.