To Honor Life's Challenges

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.  Deuteronomy 30:19

What does it mean to choose life; to choose to live?  This has been a deeply personal question.  Perhaps it is the most personal question.  Every person's answer is different.   One answers by living.   This post is about one window on choosing life -- one way of saying one's own deep and powerful "yes!" to the full catastrophe of life.

Earlier this year, I asked my team of non-traditional "thesis advisers" for help in giving the gifts that come from this "World Prophet in Training" research program.   I sometimes get tongue-tied when I try to explain this research.   Much of the research takes place on inner levels; inner experiences are notoriously difficult to convey to others.  When one tries, one generally sounds both arrogant and flighty.  So, how can I be the benefits of researching what it is to be a World Prophet, in training, and give the gifts that come from there?

The team offered the following:

Challenge, Courage, Grace, and Will -- then Garden

Today's post is the first installment of this.   Let's start by honoring your challenges in life. 

This isn't a lecture, it is an exercise.

List all your challenges.   Go ahead.   You can do it right now.   It is not an infinite and unending list.   What are all the areas and circumstances in your life that you find challenging?  When I do this, I start by telling the truth to myself about what are all the circumstances that I don't like, that I am annoyed by, wish would go away, wish were already different than they are.   I sink into those challenging circumstances, looking past my reaction to the circumstances to see the challenge itself.  So you do that.  Look deeper into each one of your challenges.   Stay with it until you can see what about this challenge is calling on you to rise -- to become who you must become.  (It is in this sense that the challenge is something to honor -- your challenges can show you who you are.)

Let's try an example.   Today's annoying circumstance is that my lovely six-year-old dog (Dixie, a Golden Retriever Mix) is occasionally peeing on the floor.  Yecch.  I have an immediate reaction and annoyance to cleaning up the pee.  I have an annoyance that my "orderly routine" is ruined and that she seems to need a level of care and attention beyond what I am used to providing.  But what, specifically, is the challenge in that?   It is not all that challenging to stoop down and clean things up.  It is not even all that challenging to start a healing coning or to call the vet.   But the circumstance is not just annoying, it is indeed challenging.  So I sink down into that feeling of being challenged, and see and look and observe.   What is there?  

What arises is a question of, "Whom shall I trust and how far shall I trust them?"   Will I trust my Coning partners with this issue from the day-to-day world?  If it were my own health, I would not hesitate.  But now another being is involved.   And my daughter is involved as well, who cares for this dog as much or more than I do.   Am I willing to stake their health and their love on the same tools I use in my research?   Really?   That is today's challenge.  

There is no easy answer.   The challenge calls on me to rise to a new level.  It calls on me to take a stand about what really is the highest and best standard of care for this loving companion animal who calls my house her home.   The particular action I end up taking is less important than the question itself.  There is no "right" answer. The challenging question itself is what to honor.  It calls on me to choose.

Perhaps I will involve my daughter in the decision at a new level.    Perhaps I will invest several weeks or a month in exploring Nature Healing Conings at a new level, and only then involve the vet.  Perhaps I will involve the Coning partners in the decision about how and when to involve the vet.  It would of course be smart to involve Nature in this way. The Nature Intelligence side of the coning  are the masters of order, organization, and life vitality in any situation; the coning will generally be better than I am at determining the most appropriate means, once I have articulated the intention clearly.  But only I can (and must) set that intention.   That is my job and no one else can do it for me.

A challenge is not (just) something that is hard.  My daughter is now playing high-school field hockey; the practices are hard, uncomfortable, ugly, and long.   But what part of that is challenging?   Is it the sense of blowing past ones perceived limits?   Or is it learning to trust and work with coaches who are calling out the best in their athletes in a way that seems perhaps both supportive and also "mean" at the same time?   Or is it dealing with the grief of giving up other options for what to do this fall?  Only she can see.  Our challenges are as personal as our gifts and our joy.

What is there to honor about challenges?  As you might see from the example above, whatever it is that I find challenging shows me who I next need to become.   We normally think of courage as what helps us meet our challenges.   The challenge is there first, and then the courage helps us meet it.   But I suggest that is exactly backwards.   Instead, I suggest you imagine that your challenges are a direct window that shows you what your courage must be.   You have exactly the challenges that your courage makes room for.  But that is a lead-in to a future post.

So stick with it until you can list all of your challenges and find something to honor in each one.  This by itself is a worthwhile accomplishment.   Pat yourself on the back.  Then stay tuned for future installments.