One way to work out what our core issues and challenges are in this lifetime is to ask ourselves the following questions:-
What issues keep repeating regardless of the situation in your life?
What have been the repetitive themes in your life?
Which loops (ways of thinking, feeling and behaving) do you keep finding yourself getting stuck in?
What is your usual approach to life?
What do you always find to be most challenging and scary?
How do you usually respond to stress, pressure and challenge? What is your default response – Do you run? Fight? Hide/disappear? Freeze? Shut-down?
What dream scenarios and themes keep repeating? Often the same ones repeat throughout our life since childhood.
We can gather enormous amounts of useful information through these enquires, which when clarified and gathered together, can help us form a better picture of what our core themes are, and why and where we keep getting stuck.
Once we know our core complexes/patterns then we can commit to changing our approach; stop the stress response taking hold as frequently, and practice new ways of dealing with situations.
This makes it sound easy, but far from it.
It is a painstakingly slow and gradual process of gently excavating our life patterns to-date and lovingly granting ourselves the grace of self-awareness and empowerment to change.
Where we discover that we are NOT as helpless or as powerless as we’ve always believed.
And that in itself is hugely healing.
©Angela Dunning
Image by Twin Sails, licensed via Shutterstock.